In a moment of moral weakness I paused in my surfing from the end of the Twins game last night to Letterman to The Colbert Report. What caught my eye was Harvey Levin, the guru of TMZ.com, being fed “story ideas” by his, uh, staff of twenty-something “news” hounds.
With journalism winding down in print and starting over on-line and elsewhere, the idea of a story meeting for TMZ.com, the ultra-popular , celebrities-as-people-and-usually-at-their-worst paparazzi website was irresistible. Okay, so what’s a story, kids?
Well, there was one with video of a drunk starlet being tailed out of a New York club being asked if she ate ice cream and her replying, “No. Milk makes me fart.” Cool! Harvey loved it. Then there was a still of Madonna leading her hub, Guy Ritchie, the movie director, through the door of a swank London restaurant carrying a box with a new “strap-on” in … a transparent bag. (Of course the poor career provocateur had NO IDEA the awaiting paparazzi would be able to see through the bag. None.)
“Strap-on”, you ask? Please. Haven’t you ever been in a newsroom?
Eventually I realized this was the much-awaited (by others) TV debut week of TMZ: The TV Show, with local air provided by Fox9 (big shock) KMSP-TV. (Fox 9 by the way, has hands down the worst voice mail set-up of any local media operation. I dare you to sit through the two or three levels of anchor-promo introductions and/or connect with anyone in the building. I tried “Programming” — which is about 11 levels down the voice-mail command chain — and still got a recording, and no one call back. That’s good business.)
Anyway, TMZ (i.e. “Thirty Mile Zone”, an inside-LA reference implying that nothing really matters outside that tight perimeter — unless you’ve got video of Madonna or a drunken starlet), is now a 10:30 pm option for all of you suffering celebrity information deprivation here in the Twin Cities.
Having … very … limited tolerance for anymore anything involving Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Madonna or whatever wildly dysfunctional, self-aggrandizing blonde is currently being chased around LA, I don’t know that I’ll be missing too much Colbert over this. But I have to give Levin — who busted his move for shameless, exploitative prominence during the OJ Simpson trial — credit for moving well-past the $20 whoring of the “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood” shticks.
The brilliance of TMZ: The Business Model — and Joel Kramer’s editor/filters should keep this in mind as they produce the front pages of MinnPost.com — is in having their cake and eating it too.
Levin is shameless (that word, again) about exploiting every bimbette and arrogant hunk-du jour for all they’re worth AND blowing past the publicity machinery protecting them on “Entertainment Tonight” for the mundane encounters out of make-up at airport baggage carousels and as they’re puking up their Hennessey on a TriBeCa sidewalk. Never mind if some of this stuff looks like it was shot with a cellphone, TMZ sees their mission in reducing the vain and nit-witted to their rightful states of cultural scorn. I like that.
On the other hand, they’ve got time for George Clooney to wander out of a Manhattan restaurant and chat up their “correspondent” and even talk tech about the guy’s camera. Clooney — talk about smooth.
Best though, was a “Jay-Walking” bit TMZ did last night, on the anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. The man/party twit-on-the-street question was pretty simple: What year did the 9-11 attacks take place?
Thankfully for TMZ’s cameras, the 5-watt party bulbs they put the question to were pretty simple, too. WAY … pretty simple. Ditz after ditz after ditz couldn’t quite place what year that thingie thing happened. They COULD however, right off the tops of their boney little heads, instantly recite the names of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s children. (The 75% blonde factor didn’t exactly help defuse that cruel stereotype.)
I’m not going to go so far as to say Harvey Levin is bravely holding a mirror up to modern vanity and stupidity … but he’ll make another fortune by slapping it on TV.
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