The Palin family fishbowl
By Jaime Weinman - Monday, July 18, 2011 - 3 Comments
For someone who hates the ‘lamestream media,’ the rogue politician sure invites them in a lot
iStock; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute
“You know, she definitely knows,” Bristol Palin said when asked if her mother had made up her mind about running for the highest office in the U.S. “We’ve talked about it before. Some things just need to stay in the family.” The daughter of Sarah Palin, former Alaska governor and possible U.S. presidential candidate, said this on Fox News, as part of a countrywide media tour to promote her book, Not Afraid of Life. It seemed appropriate somehow that she would say that only the decision to run for president was private and off-limits. Everything else with the Palin family is open to the public in a way we haven’t seen since English aristocratic families allowed tours of their houses. We’ve seen the Palins on reality shows, and in tabloids fluffy and ferocious alike, and soon they’ll be starring in the upcoming documentary The Undefeated, a film director Stephen K. Bannon created to defend Palin against her enemies. The Palin blitz even involves a case of duelling books: Bristol’s just-published memoir, in which she trashes her child’s father, Levi Johnston, will be followed in September by Johnston’s own book, Deer In the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs. Sarah Palin is famous for her dislike of what she calls the “lamestream media,” meaning every news outlet except Fox News. But when it comes to other types of media, she and her whole family have built up an empire that most political families can’t compete with.
No one knows if this kind of media attention will translate into a presidential campaign, particularly with recent polls showing President Barack Obama beating Palin even in her home state. It might not even matter. Sarah Palin is considered popular enough with ordinary Republican voters that she can still be a formidable presence in the nomination race if she chooses to enter. Still, some of her thunder has recently been stolen by Michele Bachmann, another former beauty contestant with ties to the Christian right. Though the Palin family seems to consider her an upstart (“I think she dresses a lot like my mom,” Bristol told Popeater.com), Bachmann is more popular with journalists, holds a full-time political job, and can recite political talking points more fluently. That loss of the spotlight may have made it harder for the Palins to sell books, the tool a political dynasty uses to promote itself. Jessica Lussenhop of Minneapolis City Pages reported that when Sarah and Bristol showed up in the heart of Bachmann’s native Minnesota to promote Bristol’s book, “one estimate put the number of autograph seekers at about 300 people,” and the autograph signing session ended “at least a half-hour early.”
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The Palin Kid
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 27 Comments
(Update: The original subject heading was “And you can’t get rid of the Palin kid,” and I should just explain that it was a self-referential callback to a post I wrote in September, where that was one of the lines in a proposed Dancing With the Stars theme song. (“Get rid of” means “vote off” in that context.) Probably goes to show why I shouldn’t do self-referential callbacks.)
Here are my very brief thoughts on tonight’s Dancing With the Stars apocalypse (I think Bristol is likely to win, but if she doesn’t, it’ll certainly be a great TV moment): I’m not being coy or condescending when I say I don’t care a lo
t about who will win. I understand the appeal of DWtS, which has taken the place of two mostly-defunct types of television, variety shows and celebrity panel shows. But I don’t have a personal commitment to the integrity of the show or the need for the best dancers to win. Palin has gotten this far because her family has a lot of fans who are willing to vote for her, and if there’s some gaming of the voting system going on, that’s because TV shows have voting systems that are really, really easy to game. It’s like that All-Star game when Cincinnati voters stuffed the ballot box and got Reds players elected to nearly every starting position. It’s not a real election, and these things happen.The real question is why people are getting so upset about Bristol’s success, even to the point of exercising their Second Amendment rights on the television set. And my answer is that I think people are genuinely worried that this, along with the Palin family reality show, is sort of a stalking-horse for 2012. It’s not just Palin either, since Fox News has most of the potential Republican presidential candidates under contract, and is therefore basically paying them to campaign in front of a large audience. But Palin is the potential candidate whose family, life and persona fit in perfectly with modern reality TV and gossip magazines, and she has (sensibly, I guess) embraced it, turning to reality shows and cable TV as the place where she can build her popularity. It’s too early to know if she can get nominated or win in 2012, but the reality show and the cable news contract are part of an overall strategy to use modern media to grow her fanbase and improve her image. This delights her fans and terrifies non-fans.
The terror of non-fans is based on the assumption that TV has the power to pull the wool over people’s eyes. (This is a bipartisan assumption, since a frequent conservative argument about Obama is that the media covered for him and fooled people into thinking he was not a one-world redistributionist.) The fear is that the TV versions of the Palin family will convince people to like her and vote for her. When they see Palin family fans voting for Bristol in spite of the plain fact that she’s not the best dancer, they see an early version of what they fear will play out in 2012: the Palin wins, not because her fans think she’s the best at the job, but just because they want to vote for her to stick it to the elites.
I don’t think DWtS or even “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” is exactly a trial run for 2012 (the Fox News stuff is another story). But I do think the controversy over Bristol shows us, in miniature, how things might happen in 2012 — I don’t mean the voting, which can’t be known at this time, but the reaction of fans and non-fans alike to a Palin candidacy. It ain’t gonna be pretty.
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Newsmakers
By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments
Emma Watson’s really big moment, the Dog Whisperer’s disappointing day, Pamela Anderson’s good deed’s too dirty
Doggone it
Cesar Millan, TV’s “Dog Whisperer,” was a hit with the crowd at sold-out Scotiabank Place in Ottawa last week, even though Ontario law deprived him of a key cast mate—Junior, the two-year-old American pit bull that recently took over from the dearly departed Daddy as Millan’s “right-hand man.” Millan, halfway through a tour of Canada, demonstrated training techniques on local dogs and expounded on his philosophy of calm assertiveness, but took time to criticize Ontario’s 2005 ban on pit bulls. “In the ’70s, the breed that people were afraid of was the Doberman,” he told the audience. “In the 2000s, it’s the pit bull. It’s not the breed, it’s the human behind the dog.”Absolute powers of persuasion
Chinese authorities may not have much success persuading European governments to boycott the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony honouring jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo, but they’re having better luck at home. Author Yu Jie, a friend of Liu’s, said he and his wife have been stopped from leaving their Beijing home by security officers, for fear they plan to go to Oslo. Meanwhile, Guo Xianliang, an engineer from Yunnan province, disappeared while on a business trip in Guangzhou. He’d been detained for distributing flyers about Liu, according to fellow activist Ye Du. Police have also reportedly detained a young woman, Mou Yanxi, who tweeted her support for Liu. “If such behaviour goes on,” her friend Zhang Shijie tweeted last week, “it will eventually happen to all of us.” -
You'll be seeing Gilles Marini, Eurogod, everywhere you turn
By Heidi Staseson - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 11:27 AM - 6 Comments
The shower scene guy from ‘Sex and the City’ is boosting the ratings on ‘Brothers & Sisters’
ABC’s Brothers & Sisters’ lacklustre ratings just got a boost. Producers have injected some sizzle into the snooze-worthy story plots in the form of French eye candy Gilles Marini. According to Nielsen Media Research, in the last week of October, the show had the series’ highest ratings since March in the adult 18-49 category, with a total of 9.5 million American viewers, beating out its CBS competition. Marini, who plays Luc Laurent, the European love interest for no-nonsense food executive Sarah (Rachel Griffiths), has so far signed on for nine episodes. It’s the first major role for the 33-year-old L.A.-based actor since his breakout performance in last summer’s Sex and the City movie—his sideways “close-up” in that film became celluloid’s most infamous shower scene since Psycho.Still revelling in his runner-up spot on last season’s Dancing With the Stars—his moves had even the judges swooning—Marini says he’s humbled by his sudden stardom. On a recent trip to Alberta for an appearance, he thought at first he was being “punked” after obliging a star-struck local woman and agreeing to join her and a throng of equally ebullient friends for dinner at Edmonton’s Japanese Village restaurant. Marini told Maclean’s he was astonished by the fan fervour, even tweeting about the event on his way to Toronto the next day. “Canadians are the nicest people I’ve ever met!” he exclaimed.
So what is it about this man that’s got women mesmerized? For starters, he’s one of the few Eurogods to crack Hollywood since Jean-Claude Van Damme kick-boxed his way into theatres back in the early 1990s, joining French thespians Jean Reno (La Femme Nikita) and Gérard Depardieu (Green Card), who got popular around the same time. Sure there are Antonio Banderas and Javier Bardem, but let’s face it, they didn’t doff it all in their breakout big-screen appearances.
These days, it seems, Marini is everywhere. At the 36th Daytime Entertainment Emmys, he and Vanessa Williams wowed the audience with a bang-up sultry dance number. And in mid-October, he wooed The View talk show ladies with accounts of his on-the-home-front chivalry. In the same vein, he described for Maclean’s his recent surprise house-buying birthday excursion for his wife of 11 years, Carole. “I gave her a letter and in it was a little poem with the picture of a house and an inscription saying, ‘It’s yours.’ ”
Marini worked in his father’s bakery in Cannes from the time he was seven until he did his military service as a 20-year-old firefighter. The following year he moved to Miami where he worked as a waiter. One of his customers was lawyer Philip Glatzer. Marini says he presented Glatzer with a piece of paper that read: “Hi. My name is Gilles Marini. I’m from France. I’m sorry I do not speak English. Can you please put your finger to the menu?” Recalls Marini: “He said, ‘Where are you from in France?’ And he spoke French! He thought it was the most beautiful story and he’s helped me since.”
Marini soon started a successful modelling career. For a while, he felt guilty raking in the catwalk dough for such scanty hours of work. His late father, who died when Marini was 19, had instilled in him a strict work ethic—“I was always thinking, ‘Oh my God, if my father saw me in that lifestyle he would kick my ass!’ ” The industry kept him flush for eight years until he was cast in the role of the aptly named Dante in the Sex and the City movie.
As for the Brothers & Sisters role, he says executive producer Ken Olin (Thirtysomething) took a big risk hiring him. “He had never really seen me act; he saw me perform on Dancing With the Stars and he took a chance. Some people like that in Hollywood still exist; they will look you in the eyes and say, ‘I’m going to give [you] a shot.’ ”
In his second episode on the show, Marini reprised his Dancing role and performed a heartwarming poolside waltz with a blushing Sally Field, the matriarch of Brothers & Sisters. “We had this very emotional scene where she explained to me she was very scared about her daughter’s health, about losing her. She’s a mom and I’m a father—how utterly natural the emotion would come to us.”Currently donning suits in the November issue of Playboy and doing a two-spot guest appearance beginning Nov. 18 on Nip/Tuck, Marini also has a CD coming out. He eschews the notion that he’s maybe taking the Renaissance man shtick too far: “I never leave anything to the unknown and when I do something with my heart, with passion, trust me, it’s going to be unbelievable.”
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All the right moves
By John Intini - Monday, September 21, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 1 Comment
It’s no fluke that gridiron greats perform like pros on ‘Dancing with the Stars’
Toronto Argonaut slotback Andre Durie spiced up his off-season workout routine this year. Instead of hitting the weights on Thursdays, the five-foot-nine-inch 192-lb. athlete took salsa lessons at Toronto’s Spanish Centre. “It’s a lot of hip work, a lot of foot work, and it helps with coordination,” says Durie, who was also looking to get a bit of his “rhythm” back after being sidelined by a serious knee injury. Turns out, the dance lessons connected more to his day job than expected. For one thing, Durie found that the signals sent between him and his dance partner—there are certain cues to let her know which way he was going to spin her, for instance—were much like those shared between a couple of receivers working together on a passing route. Durie also credits his gridiron training for making it easier to pick up some of the quicker, complicated footwork in the studio. “We’re always doing different drills with our feet [at football practice],” says Durie, 28. “So it’s almost second nature.”Maybe that’s why no other sport has been as well represented on Dancing with the Stars as football. Over the years, the show has featured a basketball player, a handful of Olympians, and a couple of boxers, but when season nine debuts on ABC and CTV on Sept. 21, former Dallas Cowboy Michael Irvin will be the sixth pro football player to trade his cleats for a pair of dancing shoes. But the hall-of-fame receiver better have his game face on if he hopes to leave a bigger mark than the gridiron greats who have preceded him. Running back Emmitt Smith, Irvin’s former teammate and Durie’s boyhood hero, was the big winner of season three. And San Francisco 49ers receiver Jerry Rice (season two) and Miami Dolphins linebacker Jason Taylor (season six) waltzed and cha-chaed their way to second-place finishes. So did Warren Sapp, a 300-lb. all-pro lineman, who earned the respect of the judges (one said the long-time Tampa Bay Buccaneer moved like a “Lamborghini taking on the freeway”) and the voting audience by exhibiting the grace of a man literally half his size. Continue…
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Crossovers Work For Reality Shows, Too
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 5:37 PM - 2 Comments
I didn’t see the season premiere of Dancing With the Stars last night — more specifically, I didn’t want to see it, because this year’s lineup of celebrities doesn’t interest me much — but it had its best-rated premiere in several years. The reason was the power of cross-promotion, which works for reality even better than it does for something like Grey’s Anatomy:
The show’s producers had to scramble after dancing celebs Nancy O’Dell and Jewel dropped out last week. But the eleventh-hour casting of scorned “Bachelor” contestant Melissa Rycroft was a stroke-of-genius move that not only capitalized on the dating competition’s success this season, but also managed to extend ABC’s Monday night reality show “story” from one series to another. Complete with a judge praising Rycroft’s performance and dissing her ex-fiance Jason Mesnick, last night’s “Dancing” debut played like a feel-good “Bachelor” finale do-over with Cinderella finally going to the ball.
The use of reality contestants as “stars” is something I’ve never really liked about shows like Dancing With the Stars. It seems to detract from their main source of appeal, which is a return to the Hollywood Squares/Match Game type of show. (It’s like that time someone tried to revive Battle of the Network Stars with reality stars. Reality contestants aren’t supposed to be generic “celebrities,” they’re supposed to be real people who happened to be on television. Putting them forward as celebrities just confuses the whole issue.) But the reality contestants are probably better known to much of the audience than a lot of the actors, athletes and other professional celebrities in any given lineup, and when one reality show has a chance to set right what another one got wrong, that does provide for some interesting synergy. You can’t really get that effect with a crossover on a scripted show.
