A Sculptor of Fine Works

This is a public service announcement: It’s time to confront that dread reminder of all the recent fattening frolic you had--New Year’s tush. Here at Out & About, where we specialize in canape consumption, we know just how hard that can be. So we offer for your arsenal of incentives more than mere guilt--pure, unadulterated shame.

If Estelle Getty can do it, so can you.

Getty, who’s a mere 74, is doing her reps on the Hammer leg press under the eagle eye of His Buffness, Raphael Picaud. Picaud, proprietor of L.A.’s Body Maxx, earned a master’s degree in physical conditioning in Strasbourg, France, was a weightlifting champ in his home country and has coached athletes in judo and soccer. More to the point, the guy has biceps the size of Scarlett O’Hara’s waist.

OK, in a corset, but still.

In peak Picaud season--June through

August--Saudi princes pay $250 an hour to buff up with Picaud. When they’re here, two of them train with Picaud six days a week. Do the math yourself. His prices start at $125, but those nutty princes bid against each other for his scarce time.

“I’m not here to make a buck,” Picaud says as he guides Getty through 12 reps on each leg. “My clients just offered me more money.”

Getty: “I offered you sex, but you weren’t interested.”

Men.

Getty, of “The Golden Girls” fame, and Picaud got together five years ago to make an exercise video for seniors--”Young at Heart--Body Conditioning With Estelle Getty.” Shortly thereafter, Getty injured a shoulder, and she credits Picaud with helping her avoid surgery with three-day-a-week workouts.

Picaud also works with people who are young at everything else as well. His gym is an actors’ hang whose aficionados have included Ellen Degeneres and Christine Taylor of “The Brady Bunch Movie.” In her antique mid-20s, Taylor’s womanly body was transformed into a teenager’s after three months with Picaud.

Indeed, sculpting actors for roles is the type of challenge that makes Los Angeles Picaud’s kind of town.

“If I worked in Idaho, people would just change the body slightly to maintain health fitness, which is a good job but not as creative. L.A. is a town where you can really do a lot of transformation because of the movie industry. I think it’s the only town where people have the dedication for it.”

Not to mention the expense accounts.

*

Rolling on Empty: Jackson Browne.

There. We said it. Now we can talk about Danny Schechter, whom you may not have heard of. Schechter is a media critic, the executive producer of the New York-based television and film company Globalvision and former producer at ABC’s “20/20.” And what he has to say about the media isn’t pretty. He has said it in his new book, “The More You Watch, the Less You Know” (Seven Stories Press), and he said it again during a recent swing through Los Angeles, at a party sponsored by the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

Since we’re being watched, we want to be fair. So first we’ll have Schechter tell you in his own words what he’s worried about: “the mergers that have swept the mediascape of America, not only the corporate and business mergers, but another merger which is more insidious, which is the merger of show business and news business--the total infiltration of entertainment values and entertainment pacing and styles of presentation into news and information.”

That said, let’s talk about Browne. The singer-songwriter-activist, who’s a buddy of Schechter’s, wrote the foreword to his book. Way to go, Jackson!

Now that we’ve talked about Browne, we pause for a message from Schechter:

“I felt like I’ve had an uphill battle getting this book into the media. After all, one of the things the television media doesn’t like to talk about is the television media. We have ‘Siskel & Ebert’ up and down on the movies, but nobody’s on Channel 4 dumping on Channel 7, or critiquing what’s on television on television.”

Unless you mention old Jackson.

“Fortunately, CNN did do a story. Cable News Network, the network I describe in the book in a chapter called ‘The World’s Most Self-Important Network.’ They were interested in the book. Then I found out that actually the people who called were interested in the book because Jackson wrote the foreword. So the story attacking the bankruptcy of the news media appeared on CNN on ‘Show Biz Today.’ ” Jackson, Jackson, Jackson, Jackson. Are we happy now?

Anyway, Schechter came by his expertise, in part, during eight years at “20/20.” At the end, he’d had enough of the ABC-eye-view of stories like one about workers getting laid off in Massachusetts.

“Do you end the story with the guy who tells you, ‘Look, you may lose this battle, but we’re gonna continue to fight. Working people have to do something’? Or do you leave it with the person crying and saying, ‘My life is over. We’re finished’? Guess which ending ‘20/20’ ended with? And, of course, it ended with Barbara Walters in the studio saying, ‘Fascinating.’ Which is so insincere and stomach-wrenching that I decided to leave.”

Schechter told a story in the book about a guy named Bernie, and since we have Jackson Browne-name-dropping clearance, we’ll just let him tell it:

“Bernie was my editor--an editor on some of my pieces at ABC. Bernie got transferred into the pool of editors, and Barbara Walters decides that she’s going to do her story on the 10 most important personalities of the year. These stories are recycled, all ‘20/20’ profiles that are then gussied up for this prime-time outing. And so Bernie gets the luck of the draw, and he’s chosen to do the Barbara Walters profile of Rupert Murdoch.

“Fifty cassettes get wheeled into the edit room, and he looks through all of them. And he finds that it’s a totally fawning portrait of Rupert Murdoch. No critics, no hard questions, no challenges whatsoever. He’s being treated as a fascinating personality, not as a person who owns the most television stations in America and may have single-handedly done more to degrade the media and the newspaper business in England than any other single person. So Bernie decides, after looking at this stuff, he says, ‘I’m not going to edit it. It’s disgusting. It doesn’t belong on ABC. It’s not journalism.’

“He cites the case of the dramatist in England who did ‘Pennies From Heaven.’ Dennis Potter giving his final interview in England for the BBC. He’s drinking morphine in the studio and he’s asked what is his regret in his life. And the man says, ‘My one regret is that I didn’t shoot Rupert Murdoch. I named my cancer after Rupert Murdoch.’ That’s how personal he was with him.

“So Bernie had just seen this interview. Barbara Walters’ people say, ‘You’re not going to edit it? This is outrageous! This has never been done before!’ They wheel all 50 cassettes out. They go out of house to finish it.

“The phone rings--it’s the head of broadcast engineering, the guy who runs the editing operation. He says, ‘Bernie, Bernie, what are you doing?’ And the guy says, ‘Bernie, that sounds like religious objections.’

“And then Bernie gets it: Under the union contract, if he cites religious objections, he can refuse work. If he cites political objections, he’s out the door. So Bernie then gets transferred from the show on the basis of his religious objections, and he gets sentenced to a little room in the sub-basement of ABC, where his whole job now as a skilled editor is to take in feeds of the O.J. Simpson trial. For a year and a half, it’s a one-finger job, not much editing--push, play and record.

“Finally he couldn’t take it anymore, and he’s suing ABC for age discrimination. But these are the silent heroes of the news business, and there are very few of them. But what all of this is saying to me, powerfully, is that this is not just a problem of people working in the news, it’s really a problem for the American people to do something about this media system, to try to call more attention to it, to try to challenge it.”

*

From Rocky to Boulder: You’re not getting older. You’re getting better engagement rings.

Janice Dickinson of supermodel and Sylvester Stallone flame fame is the happy recipient of a 9-carat boulder from Page Jenkins, money manager for Barbra Streisand, Jon Peters, Michael Crichton and Melanie Griffith. The couple have been living together in Bel Air for two years, but Jenkins chose someone else’s driveway for his New Year’s Eve proposal--the festive one of director George Gallo and his wife, Julie.

“I’m going up the driveway,” Dickinson says. “He gets out of the car, down on his knees, and he shows me this rock. My eyes roll back in my head, the mascara runs down my face like ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show,’ and I walk into Julie’s house looking like ‘Village of the Damned.’

“It was the greatest night of my life.”

Dickinson says Stallone is “extremely happy with my delirious, well-deserved fourth engagement.” She and Jenkins haven’t picked a date, but she’s already suiting up for her trot down the aisle.

“I want all the designers to get together and design their version of what I should look like. We’ll sell the dress at auction and donate the money to Pediatric AIDS.”

What size?

“Six.”

Whew! Our bank account is safe.

“We’ll do it in Lycra. Anyone can get in it.”