Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images“I shouldn’t say this, but there’s so much empty space here. I don’t really see why a pipeline couldn’t be built in this state,” Tavis Smiley tells me as we are driving on a snowy two- lane road through the vast nothingness of the North Dakota plains toward the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock. We were on our way to tape a special for The. Tavis Smiley Show directed by Academy Award–winner Jonathan Demme.“The owner of the pipeline, Kelcy Warren, was a contributor to the Trump campaign, and Trump himself had invested in Energy Transfer Partnership,” I tell him, “so this whole occupy reservation camping thing is pointless anyway regardless of what razzmatazz the Army Corps of Engineers comes up with.”“I’m writing this piece for Time magazine right now,” he answers, “I want you to work on it. I’ve just heard how my former boss at BET, Robert Johnson, is already trying to appease Trump and be his best friend. He is saying that we should give Trump a chance. He’s trying to be all righteous now, but the guy made his money selling musicians short by not paying royalties and by promoting videos about pimps and hoes, what a joke.”Tavis’ misogyny is always creeping around, barely camouflaged by Midwestern good manners. I look back in the car and see Blanca, a young woman that Tavis had picked up at the Orlando airport and brought along as a fuck buddy. I specifically told her to wait for us,” he tells me angrily. Tavis’ misogyny is always creeping around, barely camouflaged by Midwestern good manners in line with the most duplicitous guys who always open doors, buy flowers and carry luggage until their girlfriends end up scrambling for some hotline 8. You have to call Johnson a Booker T. Washington in your Time piece,” I tell him after reading his first draft. Du. Bois and less Booker T. Although big cities like London, which had just elected a Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, overwhelmingly voted for Remain, Brexit happened in England because provincial blue collars voted for it, people who had voted Labour all their lives. I told him Brexit was a dress rehearsal for what was about to happen here on November 8 with a long list of shocking doppelg. More shocking than Brexit was to see Tavis the next weekend on Face the Nation repeat to John Dickerson word for word what I had told him.“If anyone back in L. A. Don’t say anything about her to Kim in particular.” The question of my relationship status and if saying I was with Blanca would put me in a very difficult situation with people at the show who knew about my private life never even crossed his mind. The Kim in question would be Kimberly Logan, the supervising producer on the show and, according to the word around town, Tavis’ alleged occasional love interest. Kim runs that show like a Carmelite mother superior, a Wal- Mart micromanager fermenting idiotic secrecy out of the most asinine decision, a narc with Southern charms, an all- smiles viper with reserve, steely poise and a relentless vindictiveness masking her crippling insecurities thanks to her Rasputin- like grip on Tavis. Appropriately, Wal- Mart is sponsoring the liberal PBS show that Tavis owns. Kimberly Logan’s IMBD Screenshot“I hate the people who run PBS. I hate Beth Hoppe, Mary Nelson, Mishi . I don’t take their calls, I don’t return their emails. I’m the only black guy on PBS, all these white people are waiting for me to tumble. My show is very fragile, like a Faberg. Most of the time we tend to ignore and block out the obvious signs of the imbecile, knowing very well that we might end up for various reasons being stuck with that person and overly confident in our ability to prevail. If you have a sugar daddy or mommy, you might be inclined to disregard their immense self- portrait in the foyer—we all do it, suck it up and move on, not realizing that later down the line we will pay a heavy price for such self- suppression, whether with pills, booze, sex or greasy food. We could always walk but who would pay the monthly Audi Q5 bill? Capitalism is a very Mephistophelian proposal, a numbing prophylactic that will enable you to forget, usually while shopping, that you are not decrepitating by the day. It nonetheless takes only one word to bring to the court of intelligence the discovery of evidence to a screeching halt and get a jumpstart to an always terrifying verdict.“We should have David Boies and Ted Olson on the show,” I once told Kim as we were discussing potential guests to discuss the even number imposed by Congress on the Supreme Court.“Who?” she answered. In a capitalistic society, it is not as is often suggested that every single one of our interactions is reduced to the sad binomial buy and sell, even our most intimate and definitive ones like courtship or marriage, but more likely that these interactions are determined by our resumes, however invented these might be. You are not what you do but what you have done. By this benchmark, prior to joining The Tavis Smiley Show as a producer, Kim had been Cedric the Entertainer’s assistant and a location scout on the bikini masterpiece Out of the Blue. A producer on a major network TV talk show finds guests, pre- interviews them and writes down talking points on these ubiquitous blue cards we see these vacuous hosts smacking on their high school principal desks. The bits leading the way to the talent part of these perennially stale shows using the same lame tropes (with the exception of Seth Meyers who at least tried a reset) are nothing more than embarrassing recess hijinks, frat pranks really, that Jimmy Kimmel for instance, always dependable for heralding his stupidity, excels at reviving. When Bill Maher flips these cards around on Friday nights it is clear to anyone who has attended one of his vapid one- man shows that there is one thing he is good at: hiring the best writers and producers. The only difference here is that The Tavis Smiley Show is not supposed to be funny.“My main problem,” Tavis once told me in a rare moment of self- examination, “is that I don’t read.”It shows and Hollywood started to take notice. When I invited Oliver Stone on the show to discuss Edward Snowden, the petulant director prefaced one of his statements on the “improved” Patriot Act by saying to Tavis, “I don’t know if you know this but,” Tavis later explained to me, “I don’t have time to read or do my research on the guests because of my movie deals with Warner Bros., and that’s why I need very good producers.“One of the very good producers on the show, Devin Maverick Robins, had just proposed in a pitch meeting to invite Oliver Sacks, who had passed a few months prior. There were excellent producers on the show, but as often the case with petty, sketchy, vapid people like Kim at the helm, they were relegated to the sidelines. According to the Wal- Mart Machiavelli handbook that Kim knows by heart, first you eliminate the weak, then the strong, and mercifully you end up with the mediocre. Christabel Nsiah- Buadi and Lauren Castaneda were the most intelligent producers on the show, but they were kept at bay, on the periphery. Not surprisingly the majority of producers working on Tavis Smiley are white, while the crew is mainly black. On taping days the crew eats in its self- segregating corner, and I would on occasion sit with them and taunt the producers walking by craft service into joining us. I made it my duty to have Hockney on the show. He invited me to his house and studio in the Hills, and walking around his adjacent studio, I instantly thought that Tavis should tape the show there. Seeing on the walls the original portraits he had just finished for London’s Royal Academy of the Arts exhibit . It became very apparent to me that no one at the show knew or cared that one of the most important artists alive lived only a few miles from the set. Wal- Mart handsomely sponsors the show, but as a producer I soon realized that there was no money left to actually produce the show. I tried right before the elections to get a remote for the editor of The Economist in London and Glenn Greenwald in Rio de Janeiro but was told that we had no money. The feed from London would have cost $5. Brazil $1,5. 00. So frustrated I became I even proposed to pay for the feeds with my salary.“Wal- Mart is the best,” Tavis told me, “they give me a check each year and never ask a single question. They are the least intrusive.” Maybe they should. Why were we running that show on such a shoestring budget? Where does the annual budget of more than $7 million go? Since a good chunk of it comes from PBS, code for donors like you suckers, is there any accountability? All the guests have to be present in L. A. Since nobody watches the show you need an ego the size of Louie Anderson to be booked. After I booked Harper. Many celebrities are surrounded by these pilot fishes, who at first are put in charge of social media and emails before they can graduate to access control. If you really like a song or a movie or a TV show, no matter how cheesy the conventional. Inside Film Online is a website dedicated to the worldwide industry of film festivals. Browse our film fest directory by geographic location or by month; get the. The following is a list of events affecting American television in 2015. Events listed include television show debuts, finales, and cancellations; channel launches. By the time they carry the cash, the celebs are done, neutralized. They say, “Power is not carrying your own luggage,” but what they never mention is what comes right after: not paying for anything because your minions or what they call in Hollywood “accountant” or “manager” (and every schmuck has one) carries the cash or controls the flow, making you ultimately lost and helpless. Celebrities don’t go on Priceline to book a flight or Bumble to find a date, they don’t drive to Whole Foods (unless their publicist calls In Touch first) to get that Persian endive essential oil. They all have their “guy” or assistant do that. Hockney’s main gripe seems to be that the world has become a smoke- free zone, and his main loves are Walt Disney’s Snow White and Pinocchio. His main intellectual preoccupation is, fittingly, perspective, and he showed me this amazing projection of an animated rendition of the vanishing point- free masterpiece Wang Hui’s The Kangxi Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Seven. It's been a historic season for 'SNL' as the show has seen its highest ratings in decades. For the latest THR cover story, 20 'SNL' insiders gave a behind-the-scenes. Get up to the minute entertainment news, celebrity interviews, celeb videos, photos, movies, TV, music news and pop culture on ABCNews.com. The Hollywood Reporter is your source for breaking news about Hollywood and entertainment, including movies, TV, reviews and industry blogs.
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