Elliot Mintz
| Elliot Mintz | |
|---|---|
Photo by Jimmy Steinfeldt
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| Born |
February 16, 1945 Bronx, New York |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Publicist |
| Known for | Radio interviewer in the 1960s and 1970s; and as spokesperson for John Lennon and Yoko Ono |
| Website | www |
Elliot Mintz (born February 16, 1945) is an American media consultant and publicist. In the 1960s and early 1970s Mintz was an underground radio DJ and host. In the 1970s he became a spokesperson for John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and took on other musicians and actors as clients as a publicist. He later became the publicist for Paris Hilton.
Mintz was born in the Bronx borough of New York City on February 16, 1945. In 1963 he moved to California to attend Los Angeles City College, partially inspired by the film The Misfits, where he studied broadcasting and began to do radio interviews. Early interviews by Mintz included Jayne Mansfield and Jack Lemmon. His career was launched after the death of John F. Kennedy, when he discovered a classmate of his, Roland Bynum, had known Lee Harvey Oswald while in the US Marines together. The interview was the first character and background interview done about Oswald in the US, and was picked up by the national and international radio broadcast networks. The New York Times wrote about Mintz that he soon became "a well-known ... underground radio D.J. in the 1960s".
Mintz said of his time at City College that, "I studied everything having to do with broadcasting. I wanted to know how to broadcast. I wanted to learn how to do the weather, how to operate a camera, how to be an engineer, how to do news, how to do everything having to do with broadcast, to work on losing the New York accent, to work on losing the stutter and I gravitated to a particular area in broadcasting which was interviewing. I found myself all-consumed with the study of how to conduct a meaningful interview."
From 1966 to 1968, Elliot Mintz had two shows on KPFK in Los Angeles, California, Looking In and Looking Out. The shows provided a platform for community conversation as well as for interviews Mintz would do with public figures. Each show would begin with a series of rhetorical questions, which listeners could call in to respond to. When he started with KPFK, Mintz was the youngest talkshow host in the US, at the age of 21, broadcasting a nightly radio show on the station. In 1971 he hosted a Kaiser Broadcasting syndicated television show called Headshop that integrated musical guests with film clips shot in and around Southern California.
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