How interviews gain star quality
In Los Angeles, homage is paid to the traditional holidays -- the West Hollywood Halloween Parade, the Thanksgiving traffic jam -- but really, we’ve got a more important calendar to follow.
It’s awards season and studios are jamming their Oscar nominees into theaters in the hope that academy members will vote for the one they saw last. (You’d think years of waiting at baggage claim would have cured them of this “last in, first out” philosophy, but oh, right, studio execs don’t wait at baggage claim.)
Like any holiday period, awards season has its hallmarks -- billboards and full-page advertisements in the trades; the sight of style assistants gunning lights in Beverly Hills, their back seats stacked with Armani and Jimmy Choo -- but none is more noticeable than the cascade of celebrity interviews filling pages of magazines and newspapers, including this one, as all those elusive stars who were on location, vacation or medication for so much of the year are now readyto talk.
It’s intoxicating, addictive and full of empty calories. And so, like the liquor companies, we recommend moderation. Just as publicists often produce lists of off-limit topics, we’d like to present our own.
Let them eat snake. Amazingly enough, not a whole lot happens during a celebrity interview. Stars rarely break out in song or random recitations of the monologues from “Mary Queen of Scots”; neither do they engage in gunplay with secret agents. Their actual agent or PR handler is usually 5 feet away to ensure that journalists don’t ask any untoward questions -- whom did you have sex with last, are your breasts real, do you still hate Woody Allen? -- and so the interviewer often finds little action to report. Hence the ubiquitous description of what the star is or is not eating.
But after years of trying to infuse meaning into the act of picking at a Chinese chicken salad or ordering a rib-eye and an egg-white omelet, everyone’s culinary taste has begun to blur together. Unless the celebrity is eating giraffe or a member of his own family, who really cares?
Please observe the no-smoking sign. Interviewers love to include their subjects’ smoking habits. Unfortunately, the only person who could make the act of smoking satisfying in a literary way was Raymond Chandler, and he’s dead. Let us then assume that all celebrities smoke -- that’s how they stay so slim -- and leave it at that. Call us with the spliff comes out.
The made-up makeup. Why is it that every lovely leading lady greets every interview without a smidge of makeup? Again, we have the writer’s desperate attempt to glean something significant from a 12-minute meeting at the Chateau Marmont. The absence of makeup is supposed to prove that this is a down-to-earth gal, not afraid to let a few blotches and fine lines show, although strangely enough there are rarely such things visible.
Now, anyone who has spent any time with the fourth estate will agree that makeup is not anyone’s forte. So there is a good possibility that these dames are wearing plenty of makeup, just the really expensive kind.
Mutual admiration. Any celebrity who wants to remain such spends a lot of time saying nice things about other people -- his director, his fellow actors, the studio. Invariably all of these people are “very giving on the set.” The meaning of this stock phrase is never made clear -- what is being given exactly? Baseball caps? Brownies? Let’s get specific or leave it alone.
Hatred of fame. With a few obvious exceptions -- Jennifer Lopez, Pauly Shore -- every celebrity really hates being famous. Which is of course why they became actors rather than kindergarten teachers and why they hire people called “publicists” and wear dresses with plunging necklines and trousers with plunging waistlines and get their faces on billboards. They don’t understand why anyone would want to talk to little ol’ them, which is why they said they wouldn’t do the interview unless they got the cover, and they hate that everyone feels like they deserve a piece of them -- even though, with movies costing $12 a pop, it really is the other way around. From now on, when a movie star starts complaining about how “they’re tearing at my clothes, Max,” let’s remind them how unhappier they would be if, like most of us, they lived lives devoid of applause.
OK, so no food, no smokes, no makeup, ... well, what on earth are we going to talk about? How about the work?
