Mickey Cottrell, Beloved and Veteran Indie Film Publicist, Dies at 79

Mickey Cottrell, the beloved indie film publicist and producer who long championed independent cinema dating back to the early days of Sundance, has died at 79. He passed away Monday, January 1, 2024 at Motion Picture Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. The news was confirmed by his sister, Suzy Cottrell-Smith, who shared on Facebook, “My adorable, fun, critical, foodie, particular, brilliant, loving brother passed on to the next life early on New Year’s Day. He was smiling when he died. Mickey Cottrell will be missed by many.”

Many of Cottrell’s friends and colleagues shared memories of the veteran PR whiz — who also had many credits as an actor — on Facebook. Cottrell suffered a stroke in 2016, with friends and loved ones raising more than $57,000 to help with medical bills on GoFundMe. He relocated back to Los Angeles in 2019 after recovering from the stroke with his sister in Arkansas.

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Cottrell was never afraid to pick up the phone, and you were never afraid to answer knowing it was him. He long advocated for cinema’s underappreciated geniuses — early in my career, he hooked me up with one of my favorite interviews ever, a macabre chat with “Candyman” director Bernard Rose at Musso & Frank on Hollywood Boulevard. Cottrell knew a great deal about the secret and not-so-secret gay history of Hollywood and was keen to share it with curious cinephiles. He was, for one, an expert on Tab Hunter (another aspirational interview he secured for me), serving in 2015 as publicist on the documentary “Tab Hunter Confidential.”

Cottrell’s onscreen credits also showed a generosity to cinema’s queer and provocative, starring in a small role for Gus Van Sant in “My Own Private Idaho” as well as for John Cameron Mitchell in “Shortbus.” TV credits included “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in 1992 and “Star Trek: Voyager” in 1997, both as an alien.

As a publicist, he worked with the likes of Ira Sachs, Jeffrey Schwarz, Andrew Haigh, Richard Press, and Jonathan Caouette, and even on films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andrei Tarkovsky at the start of his career. Other acting credits included “Ed Wood,” “Apt Pupil,” and “Volcano.”

Cottrell was born in Springfield, Ill. on Sept. 4, 1944 before he went on to attend high school and college in Arkansas. After acting at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, he moved to California and worked as a projectionist at the Westchester-based Loyola Theatre before that closed in 1982. In the mid-1980s, he worked as a publicist for Landmark Theaters in LA, then joined Josh Baran & Associates before co-starting his own firm with Cottrell and Lindeman Associates in 1989. He later started Mickey Cottrell Film Publicity in 2002, followed by Inclusive PR in 2004.

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