TV critic writes about his vacation
wcra...@lycos.com
famous
By Scott D. Pierce
Deseret Morning News
A few years ago, I happened to be walking by the front desk at a
Los Angeles-area hotel as a TV critic pal of mine was checking in.
Craig Holyoak, Deseret Morning News "Hey, guys!" he said. "How's
TV critics summer camp going?"
That's not an entirely inaccurate characterization of the
twice-a-year Television Critics Association press tours, which yours
truly has been attending since 1990.
As you read this, I am attending my 32nd such event, which kicked
off Tuesday in Pasadena, Calif. (About to become the father of twins, I
skipped the January 1991 tour. But I've been to all the rest. If you
figure an average of 20 days in July and 13 in January, I've spent
about a year and a half of my life on press tour.)
TCA was designed to give those of us who aren't based in L.A. or
New York access to stars, producers, directors and network executives
we wouldn't otherwise get.
And it does just that. If you've starred in or produced a TV
series, if you've run a network or cable channel in the past 16 years,
I've probably interviewed you.
There's little (OK, zero) chance that the president of ABC, CBS,
NBC or Fox would take my call if I have a question.
But, on press tour, I can ask them anything I want at formal
press conferences and in more informal settings.
And my chances of running into people like Gerald Ford, Al Gore,
John McCain, Prince Edward and Sarah Ferguson (the duchess of York) -
all press-tour attendees - would be less than zero, probably.
A TYPICAL DAY on press tour (if there is such a thing) doesn't
officially start until 9 a.m. with the first press conference. (It's a
TCA no-no to schedule anything earlier, but some networks - do the
initials N-B-C mean anything to you? - try to skirt that with
"informal" breakfast sessions.)
You've got breakfast at 8, several press conferences in the
morning, lunch (often with people to interview at your table) and
several press conferences in the afternoon.
Craig Holyoak, Deseret Morning News The interviewees include
actors, producers, network executives, writers, directors, reality-show
contestants, real-life people who've had their lives turned into TV
shows and so on and so on.
Basically, we sit in a big ballroom with all the other critics,
trying to get the attention of pages with microphones if we have
questions for the panelists. And a lot of us complain a lot about our
lots in life.
Comedian Paula Poundstone, after hearing a publicist refer to the
press tour as grueling, said, "Let me get this straight - you stay at
the Ritz-Carlton and listen to people talk about TV all day. That's
grueling?"
She changed her tune a bit when the format was further explained
to her. "Oh, you have to talk to network executives. Now I get the
'grueling' thing."
FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, Valerie Bertinelli described it like this:
"It's such a weird, stupid thing that we're doing here. I mean, here I
am sitting here and y'all are sitting there listening. And then you're
going to have to write an article about it.
"I mean, think about it. Isn't it a little stupid?"
Sure.
And, believe it or not, Bertinelli said this to a small group
interviewing her at one side of a large room, while a smaller group at
the other end of the room interviewed a celebrity considered less
important at the time, Jerry Seinfeld.
AFTER THE PRESS CONFERENCES come the "scrums" - crowds of
critics rushing the stage or following the stars/producers/executives
into the foyer, surrounding them with tape recorders in hand and asking
follow-up questions.
There are unfortunate similarities to rugby scrums, complete with
pushing and shoving at times. There's also camaraderie, like holding a
friend's tape recorder if he/she is in the back of the pack.
Deseret Morning News archivesGerald Ford, Valerie Bertinelli and Jerry
Seinfeld have all been interviewed by our intrepid critic. Tour
etiquette more or less requires us to ask our specific, local-angle
questions in the scrums, so as not to waste everyone else's time. (Not
everyone does this, which ticks the rest of us off.)
You never quite know what you're going to get during a scrum. You
might get the exact quote you're hoping for - or you might be stuck
listening to Jenna Elfman, unprompted by any question, promoting
Scientology.
MOST EVENINGS ARE RESERVED for the parties. Which are essentially
an excuse for more interviews.
These are the events you often see on infotainment shows that
tell you, "Only 'Entertainment Tonight' was there." Yeah, only "ET" and
a couple hundred TV critics. TV mostly shows you red-carpet arrivals
and flashbulbs, which is an annoying, but fortunately a tiny,
percentage of what happens. Once you get inside, it's catered food,
free booze and interviews, interviews, interviews.
Sometimes I'm looking for somebody specific. I once spent hours
looking for Maureen McCormack to get a quote for a story, but I kept
missing her because I didn't realize she's teeny. Other times, it's
what I like to call "trolling for stars" - wandering around looking
for somebody worth interviewing. And dodging aggressive publicists
pushing clients I don't have any interest in talking to.
You never know who you might run into, though. One time Valerie
Bertinelli and I were exchanging pictures of our children when she
called, "Edward! Edward!" And her then-husband, Eddie Van Halen, came
over and checked out the photos.
NOT ALL THE STARS understand how this works, however. There are
times when certain stars who are attending a PRESS PARTY will inform
members of THE PRESS that they AREN'T DOING INTERVIEWS.
Bob Evans Huh?
Go home. Or, better yet, don't come.
I don't want to mention any names, so I won't tell you I've seen
behavior like this from the likes of Eric Close, Dean Cain, Tom
Cavanagh and Richard Hatch, the winner of the first "Survivor." (You
know, the one now in prison on tax-evasion charges.)
TV CRITICS AREN'T MEAN - at least not all the time. At one UPN
party, one of my pals and I noticed "Star Trek: Enterprise" co-star
Linda Park standing with only her publicist, and we felt sorry for her.
On our way out we decided to stop and interview her.
When we approached her, however, Park gave us a pained look, and
her publicist told us she wasn't doing interviews.
"Fine. Whatever," we said, chuckling to ourselves.
Have any of you seen Park since "Enterprise" was canceled?
AFTER A WHILE, the parties become a blur. Which is why the
networks try to make them memorable by holding them at trendy
restaurants and clubs, from Spago to the Abbey. Or they rent fabulous
mansions, like those once occupied by Batman or "The Beverly
Hillbillies."
Or they rent out the Hollywood Cemetery for the evening.
I am not making that up.
Or, like AMC once did to promote a baseball-in-movies
documentary, you fill the ballroom at the Century Plaza with sod. Real,
green grass.
I STOLE A COUPLE of cigarettes from Oscar-winning movie producer
Bob Evans' screening room when he hosted a party at his home a couple
of years ago. (OK, they were there for the taking. So I took them. Even
though I don't smoke.)
But I had absolutely nothing to do with the fire that destroyed
his pool-house/screening room a few days later.
Adam Carolla THE DISNEY CHANNEL once had a party on one of its
Burbank soundstages, complete with fireworks and people dressed up as
Mickey, Minnie, Donald and so on. I wondered aloud if you can actually
making a living playing an animal.
"Oh yes," a colleague came back quickly. "They have a very strong
union - the EIEIO."
NETWORKS SOMETIMES SEEK ATTENTION with weird gifts. The big
cow-shaped raft, complete with udder, that I got from the Cartoon
Network was odd; the chocolate in the shape of a horse's head left on
our pillows to promote "The Last Don" was clever.
When ABC remade "The Shining" and had someone come into our rooms
and write "Redrum" on our bathroom mirrors with lipstick, it was
creepy. When AMC left a cardboard stand-up of Marilyn Monroe in my
room, I almost had a heart attack.
TCA IS ALSO A GREAT TIME to visit the sets of various shows -
either visits organized by the TCA or on our own. Some visits are
highly productive, others less so.
After a visit/interview to the set of "Two Guys and a Girl," one
colleague commented, "The best acting done on that soundstage was 35
critics feigning interest in that show."
And the time that a friend and I were extras on the "Babylon 5"
spinoff "Crusade" remains equally the coolest and most humiliating
thing I've ever done during press tour.
WE ALSO HAVE TO write our columns, which is why there have been
times when I've been doing that at 6 a.m. or 1 a.m., depending on what
was happening that day.
I'm not asking for sympathy. I could have a real job.
And there's a definite advantage to being an elevator's ride away
from work five weeks a year.
PRESS TOUR HAS as many agendas as there are critics. Some are
essentially gossip columnists, while others are there to gather
personality pieces, still others write about business, and some fancy
themselves the TV critic-equivalents of Woodward and Bernstein,
determined to hold network execs' feet to the fire.
It's also a lot like high school - there are cliques and
rivalries and egos run amuck. Some fancy themselves the cool kids;
others are the nerds and geeks.
To think there's some sort of critic monolith is silly. There are
a lot of very different people who seemingly can't agree on anything.
(You should see our TCA business meetings - sometimes it's downright
ugly.)
Sometimes you can predict where questioning will go. Some tours
have been loaded with questions about violence on TV, the FCC,
corporate takeovers or technology. But you never know when,
collectively, we're going to be obsessed with the death of Michigan J.
Frog, Keri Russell's haircut or the "scandal" over the results of
"Dancing With the Stars."
YES, WE OFTEN ROLL our eyes at some of the stupid questions our
colleagues ask, but sometimes the questions leave us gasping in horror.
Like when one critic asked Summer Phoenix (the younger sister of
the late River Phoenix) if she had known "anybody that ever died from
an overdose."
During one "scrum," a persistent if sadly out-of-date colleague
kept asking Sarah Jessica Parker about comments she had made in the
press about wanting to have a baby with boyfriend Robert Downey Jr. She
tried to deflect the questions - having rather publicly broken up
with Downey some months earlier - but this guy was persistent. Parker
eventually pointed to me, said to the persistent critic, "Ask him.
He'll explain it to you," and turned on her heels.
AFTER VICTORIA GOTTI'S appearance on the 2004 summer press tour,
I wrote a snippy, snotty column about how awful she was and how awful
"Growing Up Gotti" was. Several months later, the "celebrity
journalist" who works for the tabloid Star magazine left a long,
rambling, vaguely threatening voice mail in which she lectured me on
journalism (apparently unaware that critics aren't reporters) and
promised to get me fired.
I still have a recording of the voice mail, which I keep as
evidence in case I get whacked.
At the January 2005 press tour, a colleague and I were
interviewing Adam Brody of "The O.C." when a third person interrupted
with this important, journalistic question: "What are your male beauty
tips?"
I looked at the guy's badge and - you guessed it! - he worked
for Star magazine.
SOMETIMES THINGS GO AWRY because the interviewees are
unnecessarily defensive.
Years ago, Whoopi Goldberg got in a shouting match with a critic
who was trying to compliment her.
And then there was yours truly, who got yelled at and cursed at
by Adam Carolla when I was trying to toss him a softball question.
(There is some solidarity among critics, however. I know Discovery had
some trouble placing stories about the show Carolla was promoting after
that incident.)
And years before she went to prison, Martha Stewart yelled at us
for not paying enough attention during breakfast when she was doing a
cooking demonstration. (Note to Martha - we're TV critics, not food
writers.)
THERE ARE STORIES - some apocryphal, no doubt - of the good
ol' (or bad ol') days when press tours were entirely financed by the
networks. They'd pay to bring critics to Los Angeles (or New York or
Phoenix or Honolulu), pay to put them up and maybe pay for other
things, too, depending on which stories you believe.
Press tours long ago stopped being junkets; our papers pay for
travel, hotel rooms and assorted other costs. The TCA negotiates room
rates with the hotels - we bring them a lot of business - but we're
no different than any other convention group.
Well, a little different. Few conventions plop down in hotels for
two or three weeks at a stretch.
THERE IS A CERTAIN element of cooperation between the networks
and the TV critics. They're trying to get us to write good things about
their shows, they're promoting certain shows, and they're spinning us
like crazy when it comes to things like ratings.
But nobody has ever once told me what to write. I've written
glowing, complimentary columns, and I've written harsh, snotty columns.
The harsh, snotty columns don't make publicists happy - even
though I'm writing for a newspaper in the No. 36 TV market. But they're
almost universally smart enough to know that any publicity is good
publicity.
And the fact is that television is one of the few American
industries that puts its top executives in front of reporters twice a
year and allows us to ask anything we want.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN critics and network execs range from
warm and genial to frigid antagonism.
The late Brandon Tartikoff of NBC was beloved by critics. We once
greeted him wearing Bart Simpson masks after he had publicly criticized
his Fox rivals.
Ted Turner was a hoot - he said what he thought and was always
quotable. (Like when he compared his company's plight to that of the
Jews in 1940s Europe and told us he wanted to own a nuclear weapon.)
Current CBS chieftain Leslie Moonves is also a fave. A former
actor, he seems to enjoy meeting the press almost as much as we enjoy
quoting him.
At the other end of the spectrum, there was NBC's Don Ohlmeyer,
who hated us with a passion, which infected most of the network staff.
There's continuing antipathy with current NBC Universal president Jeff
Zucker. And I once described UPN's Dean Valentine as "the most sincere
network chief in Hollywood - he doesn't bother to try to hide his
contempt for the critics." And that was before he started drinking at
one infamous UPN party.
FORMER ABC EXECUTIVE Jamie Tarses spent quite a bit of her
network's portion of the 1997 summer press tour almost running through
the halls of the Ritz Carlton with a cell phone glued to her ear,
trying to avoid answering the race-walking TV critics energetic enough
to chase her and ask questions about her job security.
The first woman ever to head a programming department at one of
the Big Three networks, she was rumored to be on thin ice from the day
she was hired. (And, by the way, there were widespread reports that she
obtained a release from her contract at NBC because she threatened a
sexual-harassment suit against Ohlmeyer.)
Tarses actually held on for three years - long enough to be
seen making out with a (much-younger) star of the sitcom "Two Guys and
a Girl" at a network party.
TV CRITICS FILTER a lot of what is said through our own reality
checks. Everyone is going to tell us their show is great, even if we've
seen the pilot and it stinks.
It's not exactly like we're lying in wait. Quite.
Although it remains true (as I once wrote) that "TV critics live
for the moments when interviewees say unintentionally hilarious things.
And there are few things more amusing than listening to people trying
to tell us that a piece of garbage is a precious gem."
AFTER EVERY PRESS TOUR, people will ask, "What stars did you
meet?" It's a bit harder to answer than it seems, because "meet" is a
nebulous term.
I'm there to do a job. So are they. I'm there to get information
to write stories. They're there to promote their projects. Even the
parties aren't social events.
And, quite frankly, after 16 years, a lot of the stars tend to
blend together. My greatest personal thrills have to do with getting to
interview icons like Maureen O'Hara, Roy Rogers, Mary Tyler Moore, Tom
Hanks, Carroll O'Connor, Lauren Bacall, Dick Van Dyke, Bette Midler,
Bob Newhart, Carol Burnett, Bob Hope, Cher and David Letterman.
I once sat next to Lana Turner's daughter, Cheryl Crane - who
was convicted of killing her mother's gangster boyfriend, Johnny
Stompanato - and we chatted through lunch, something I still think is
incredibly cool.
Not much of anybody other than my boss, Chris Hicks (the man who
knows everything about movies), would agree with me on that.
ONE TOUR WE PLAYED press-tour bingo, thought up by critics and
implemented by a network publicist: big bingo cards with words and
phrases that are repeated ad nauseam on press tour. For example:
· "We decided to go in a different direction."
· "Pushing the envelope."
· "It's about relationships."
· "We're like family."
· "It was our best development season ever."
· "Only network I took the show to."
· "Unlike anything else on television."
· "Total creative freedom."
Most of the time, of course, those phrases are total lies.
CRITICS HAVE A GAME called six bullets. The concept is simple -
pretend you have a loaded gun and you're allowed to use it to kill six
people in the hotel ballroom where interviews take place. And you're
not allowed to use it on yourself. (Believe me, that can be a tempting
thought.)
The problem is not coming up with six people to kill; the problem
is limiting it to six. And we're not talking about killing stars or
producers - we're taking aim at each other.
BUT I CAN HONESTLY say that many of my closest friends in the
world are critics from other parts of the country. The fact is that I
spend more time with them than with most of the people at the Deseret
Morning News.
I don't eat breakfast, lunch and dinner with my co-workers for
five or six weeks out of the year, I don't go to dozens of parties
(working or not) with them and they're not obsessed with TV the way I
am.
My critic friends and I laugh with each other, we help each
other, we argue and fight, but it's a supportive bunch, and we've seen
each other through a variety of personal crises.
Which is hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it.
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E-mail: pie...@desnews.com