Emmys Hoping for Dignified Celebrity in a Post-Sept. 11 World

The call time is an hour earlier for security purposes. There’s been a last-minute wardrobe change. And the red carpet, traditionally a glamorous runway, is shaping up to be a receiving line at a national wake.

At Sunday’s Emmy Awards, fawning will give way to restraint. This is the first ritualized celebrity event since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks made show-biz gossip and Hollywood icons seem contemptibly trivial. The Everyman dwarfed the A-lister, and real tragedy eclipsed fictional scenarios.

At least temporarily, celebrities don’t want to be famous, not at a time when their pampered lives suddenly seem in poor taste. The image makers are questioning, for instance, whether showing up in a limousine sends the wrong message.

But there’s an entire cottage industry that thrives on mega-celebrity events like the Emmys, where red-carpet entrances spike ratings, fill video archives and perpetuate the need for publications such as People and InStyle and more television shows like “Extra” and “Entertainment Tonight.” Some of those TV shows are produced by companies that also produce prime-time programs and have an interest in the promotion of their stars.

This idolatry industry is confronting the impossible: How to feast on celebrity culture at an event that organizers have commanded be dignified.

But even with Walter Cronkite set to strike a sober note at the top of the telecast, some in the industry still find the concept of a dignified and restrained awards show to be laughable. A top producer underscored a sentiment in Hollywood that the Emmys are being held to serve business interests.

Indeed, CBS, which is broadcasting the awards ceremony, will draw big ratings and a captive audience for promotion at a time of year when all the broadcast networks are trying to hook viewers on new and returning situation comedies and dramas.

The payoff is even more significant for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, which presents the event. The academy’s annual report shows the 2000 Emmys generated $8.8 million in revenue, including the license fee from the network, ticket sales and proceeds from the governors ball, which this year has been renamed the “Unity Dinner.”

Bryce Zabel, the academy’s chairman-elect, acknowledged earlier this week that canceling the Emmys would have represented a “devastating loss for the academy.” But in news conferences, he and Jim Chabin, the academy’s president, downplayed the financial implications. Instead, they banged the drum of patriotism, casting the Emmys as nothing less than a retort to the global terrorist community.

“Nothing would make the terrorists happier than if we canceled the Emmys, Halloween, Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year’s,” Chabin said Friday, standing on the red carpet outside the Shrine Auditorium.

But some see this attitude as misguided.

“I certainly am not watching any celebrity telethons or award shows,” cultural critic Camille Paglia told The Times in an e-mail on Friday. Paglia, a professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, added: “The chic socialite liberalism of the Hollywood establishment and major media, with their myopic focus on PC domestic issues, is partly responsible for the way Americans were buffered in ignorance of the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world for the past 20 years.”

For a celebrity machine whose engines churn on hype and self-importance, this year’s march down the red carpet is fraught with questions about post-Sept. 11 etiquette--both for the actors contemplating the proper displays of solemnity and a celebrity press corps that knows how to place the microphone at their mouths but wants to avoid uncouth topics.

“We won’t ask ridiculous questions,” promised Rob Silverstein, executive producer of NBC’s “Access Hollywood,” who added that for the first time in eight years the show will not have a fashion critic evaluating stars as they come down the red carpet.

But Leeza Gibbons, host of Time Telepictures Television syndicated show “Extra,” feels that celebrities will want to be heard.

“The telethon was magnificent, but we didn’t have a chance to hear the extemporaneous heartfelt thoughts of people we look to find ourselves,” she said.

But already, some stars, including the cast of NBC’s Emmy Award-winning drama “West Wing” and “Frasier’s” three-time Emmy winner Kelsey Grammer have indicated they will skip the red carpet and quietly slip into the auditorium, an option organizers extended to actors this year.

For Grammer “a lot of it has to do with the fact that most of the questions addressed to him would be related to David,” said his publicist, Stan Rosenfield, referring to “Frasier” co-creator and executive producer David Angell, who along with his wife, Lynn, was killed aboard one of the hijacked flights and whom Grammer eulogized at a memorial on the Paramount Studios lot.

“What I am hearing is that the vast majority of [nominees] are going to avoid doing pre-press,” Rosenfield said.

A contingent of New York-based writers and actors, including the cast of HBO’s “The Sopranos,” will watch the show in private from a studio there, insulated from the prying eyes of the entertainment press. This year the number of paparazzi was curbed and the hiatus represents a one-year respite from the rampant commercialization that has come to define the red carpet. Stars serve as quick cash for freelance reporters trolling the scene for celebrity quotes. Over the past few years, they’ve become exfoliated, bronzed billboards for clothing designers.

Right now, that seems gauche.

“I think we’re going to see a lot of red, white and blue,” said Linda Bell Blue, executive producer of Paramount’s “Entertainment Tonight.” “I think we’re going to see a lot of flag jewelry--I’m getting some information on that.”

As they think about coordinating the critical red-carpet queries during the live telecast, show producers like Bell are determined to avoid suddenly frivolous references to fashion or gossip.

Partly in deference to the newly chaste mood, cable network E! Entertainment Television is scaling back its pre-Emmy Awards coverage from 10 to seven hours and eliminating Joan Rivers (whose trademark question to celebrities is, “Who are you wearing?”) from the red-carpet coverage.

Still, for a network whose existence can be traced to the global interest in Hollywood, pre-show coverage is too valuable to give up.

“These pre-shows are the equivalent of our Super Bowls,” said Mindy Herman, president and chief executive of E! Networks, which is 80% owned by a joint venture between Comcast Communications Corp. and Walt Disney Co., and 20% by AT&T.;

E! is among the few TV outlets doing continuous live coverage of the arrivals scene, and Herman suggested that her reporters would keep questions to relatively safe subjects--asking TV stars, for instance, about the atmosphere on the sets of their shows.

But among all such outlets, the operative buzz phrase for the Emmys is “news event.” To that end, “Entertainment Tonight’s” Blue said the show’s hosts, Mary Hart and Bob Goen, have been briefed on the situation in Afghanistan, in case an actor engaged them in a conversation about U.S. military retaliation.

“Mary and Bob are reporters and correspondents, and they are very well-rehearsed about what’s going on,” Blue said.