This week: Newsmakers
By Ken MacQueen, Nicholas Kohler, Jason Kirby and Nancy MacDonald - Monday, July 4, 2011 - 0 Comments
Michelle Obama visits Soweto, the world’s richest divorcée goes broke, and tennis’s grunting gals get called out
Mike Hewitt/FIFA/Getty Images
Hollywood’s high rollers
His day job is playing such film roles as Spiderman and Nick Carraway, in the upcoming Great Gatsby adaptation. But incredible as it may seem, Tobey Maguire’s hobby—high-stakes poker—may be even more lucrative than the silver screen. Maguire’s winnings, which could amount to as much as $30 to $40 million over three years, came to light in a lawsuit filed against the 35-year-old actor by a group of investors attempting to recoup money lost to Brad Ruderman, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for operating a $5.2-million Ponzi scheme. Ruderman lost much of the money playing Texas Hold ’em, including over $300,000 to Maguire, in an exclusive poker ring that drew players like Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Now, Ruderman’s investors want some of that cash. DiCaprio, Affleck and Damon aren’t being sued, though. “Matt never won,” a whistle-blower said.
One for the lads
As contingencies go, this one was a doozy. David Hart, a 23-year-old Royal Marine killed by a bomb blast in Afghanistan last year, earmarked $160,000 from his life insurance policy for an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas for his best friends and their girlfriends—32 people in all. “In a letter, David said he had had a great life and had no regrets about anything,” one friend told a reporter. “He said, ‘Go and have a good time and spend all this money.’ ” He left a second portion to his family, and the rest to charity. Hart, who died a day short of his 24th birthday, had always dreamed of a Vegas weekend. When his pals return to England they will continue training for a 275-km bike ride to raise money for the Royal Marines Charitable Trust.
Stick with a bike
The 911 call to police in Caseville, Mich., went something like this: “Believe it or not, I just passed about a five-, six-year-old flying down the road with a red Pontiac Sunbird.” Actually, Chief Jamie Learman discovered that the driver, who stood on the floorboard of his stepfather’s car to see over the steering wheel, was a pyjama-clad seven-year-old. He hit speeds of 80 kph during a 32-km drive across Huron County, north of Detroit. Police gingerly boxed him in, stopping him without incident. “He was crying, and just kept saying he wanted to go to his dad’s,” Learman said. “That was pretty much it: he just wanted to go to his dad’s.”
Quit that racquet!
There are tasks where a grunt or two are justified. Piano moving or childbirth come to mind. But tennis? It’s all a bit much, says Ian Richie, head of the All England Lawn and Tennis Club. “Whether you are watching it on TV or here, people don’t particularly like it,” he told Britain’s Telegraph, with precisely the sort of understatement he’d like to see on Wimbledon’s grass courts. Jimmy Connors was a pioneering grunter back in the 1970s. Women then took it up with great enthusiasm. Maria Sharapova was recorded at 105 decibels in 2009—as loud as a car horn from three feet. Portugal’s Michelle Larcher de Brito and Serena Williams have also employed the tactic as a weapon of mass distraction. Richie has made his concerns known, but certain fans find the sound effects appealing. Former Wimbledon Champ Michael Stich accuses the women of trying to “sell sex.”
#DMFail
Think a weakness for sexy social networking, à la Anthony Weiner, is a purely American failing? Turns out the language of <3 knows no borders. Xie Zhiqiang, a health bureau official in the Chinese city of Liyang, set up an account with Weibo, a Twitter-like service in China, early this year believing it was a private chat tool. “Please marry me if there is a second life, so that we can live in romance until we are 100 years old,” he wrote to a married woman on the site before the pair were able to follow through on a planned tryst. Xie learned of the mistake after a reporter called about the exchange. “How can you view our messages on Weibo? It is impossible, isn’t it?” He has since been suspended from his job.
Captain courageous
For more than a half-decade, she has been the face of Canadian women’s soccer—though perhaps never more so than now. Christine Sinclair wrote herself into the country’s sports lore for refusing to leave the field after her nose was broken in the opening game of the women’s World Cup at Berlin’s Olympiastadion. “You can’t play on,” Canada’s team doctor, Pietro Braina told her, trying to corral her onto the bench. But the Canadian captain turned, teary-eyed to Italian-born coach Carolina Morace who shrugged, palms up, and nodded to the field. Sinclair, of course, went on to score Canada’s lone goal, on a beautifully executed free kick in the dying minutes of the gutsy 2-1 loss—the first goal the two-time defending champion Germans have allowed since 2003. Sinclair, after having her nose resculpted by a German doctor, took to Twitter to opine on the new appendage: “amazing,” she wrote—joking, of course.
How to lose a billion dollars
It takes a lot to go from “the wealthiest divorcée in history” to bust in two decades—a lot of waste, that is. Patricia Kluge landed a $1-billion settlement when she split from media mogul John Kluge in 1990, only to blow the lot on parties for royalty, a 120-hectare estate in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains and a private winery. Kluge and her third husband, William Moses, have racked up $46 million in debt and filed for bankruptcy last week. Her antiques, and her personal jewellery collection have already been auctioned off, and the Kluge winery was sold at auction—to none other than Donald Trump, her old friend, for $6.2 million. But Kluge isn’t the only one exiting the billionaire club. Research in Motion’s co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis lost their status after a sharp drop in RIM’s share price cut their personal net worth to around $800 million each, down from $1.8 billion in March.
The Doc returns
After 12 years on the mound for the Toronto Blue Jays before he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, star pitcher Roy Halladay is set, this week, to make his long-awaited return to the mound at Rogers Centre, where he earned both a reputation and a nickname. The two-time Cy Young winner, Toronto’s first pick at the ’95 draft, was set to pitch against the Jays last year, but security concerns around the G20 summit forced the series to be shifted to Philadelphia instead. “Doc,” as he’s known around the league, was calm before the game: “I feel like it’s any other start.”
Tears of joy
“Alec! Now we can get married!” Steve Martin tweeted to his Oscar co-host, after New York legalized gay marriage in the state. “Ok,” Alec Baldwin responded, “but if you play that effing banjo after eleven o’clock…” Lady Gaga, meanwhile, was a bit more emotional: “I can’t stop crying,” said the staunch gay-rights activist. “We did it kids. The revolution is ours to fight.”
Life out of office
It was a good week for Gordon Campbell, who is off to London as Canada’s high commissioner to the U.K.; the plum posting comes with a chauffeur, a chef and an official residence in swank Mayfair. In London, the former B.C. premier, who always resisted the temptation to bash the feds, will further hone his diplomatic skills among royals and the global elite. Gilles Duceppe, an Ottawa basher par excellence, had a big week too, granting his first televised interview since the Bloc’s stunning collapse in the last federal election. Unless Quebecers choose sovereignty, they’ll be “eating gumbo” in 50 years, he told Radio-Canada. He went on to hint at a return to politics, likely at the helm of the PQ, which appears to be imploding, a mere two months after the Bloc. He may well return to helm a sovereignist party, but the better question may be whether anyone will still be interested in the idea.
No medal for the penguin?
Dozer, a three-year-old goldendoodle from Fulton, Md., now merits his own runner’s page on the Maryland Half Marathon website, after escaping his masters Sunday and running the race. He crossed the finish line at the 2:12:24 mark, limping and exhausted, and received a medal from organizers after they discovered he was running solo. Truth is, Dozer probably slipped into the run several miles into the event. Far more impressive is the emperor penguin who swam an astonishing 4,000 km from Antarctica to New Zealand. Happy Feet, as he was nicknamed, was operated on at the Wellington Zoo to remove the stick and pebbles he’d eaten on Peka Peka beach. A committee has been struck to decide whether he should be returned home.
Building ships, and political futures
After a week in Ottawa spent championing the province’s bid for part of an estimated $35 billion in federal shipbuilding contracts, B.C. premier Christy Clark returned home to announce a major investment in a new marine trade training facility on Vancouver Island, sweetening the pot. If successful, the contract, which could create thousands of new jobs and raise millions in spinoffs, could also help Clark in a possible fall election, which could come as early as September.
Returning the warm embrace
Michelle Obama was hailed as a queen in her first solo trip to Africa this week. There, the U.S. First Lady spoke passionately to students, danced with African youth, met with Nelson Mandela and even squeezed in a dinner with her gal-pal Oprah Winfrey, a queen in her own right.
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Women's afternoon TV: RIP
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 23 Comments
The game shows went, then the soaps, and now even Oprah has left the building
REUTERS/Keith Bedford
“When you think of daytime TV,” says Wesley Hyatt, author of The Encyclopedia of Daytime Television, “do you think of anything else besides talk shows, soaps and game shows?” Well, you might have to. The big hit shows that defined afternoon viewing will soon be gone forever. Most game shows bit the dust years ago, and now the other pillars are falling: The Oprah Winfrey Show is airing its final episode on May 25, and soon after, ABC will cancel two of the last soap operas, All My Children and One Life To Live. Hyatt told Maclean’s that shows like these “were dirt cheap to produce and generated enormous profits” in their heyday, but that heyday “ended around 20 years ago.” The afternoon show—providing emotional conversations or soap antics, aimed largely at stay-at-home women—has been huge since the beginning of TV, and on radio before that. Now it may be going the way of variety shows, VCRs and the Liberal party.
Of all the things threatening to tear the daytime world apart, the end of The Oprah Winfrey Show is arguably the most damaging. It means not only the end of a successful show but the end of what Hyatt calls “a pop culture phenomenon, one of the biggest events not just of TV but mass media.” Advertisers on her finale are being charged $1 million per 30-second commercial, the highest rate for a series finale since Everybody Loves Raymond in 2005. And Oprah has the kind of worshipful fan base that’s usually more associated with pop stars than TV celebrities. Tanya Lee, a Toronto woman, got into the news last December by starting an unsuccessful Facebook campaign to bring Oprah to Canada, even trying to get in touch with President Barack Obama: “Canadian Oprah fans,” she says, “I worked very hard on your behalf. Even though it did not work out, at least you know that I failed miserably.”
The only person left who has that kind of power is Judy Sheindlin of Judge Judy, who recently beat Oprah for the title of most-watched daytime personality, and who just signed a new contract to continue through 2015. But Judge Judy was launched in 1996, and no one else has come along who can step in once she leaves. As Hyatt points out, “there have been people proclaimed to be ‘the next Oprah’ going back to the 1990s, such as Ricki Lake. They never turned out that way. As much as I admire Katie Couric,” who is considering doing a daytime talk show after stepping down from CBS News, “she’s not going to be that person.”
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Oprah's so-called experts
By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 47 Comments
A spate of new books reveals many of the talk-show queen’s ‘authorities’ are pretty screwed up
Getty Images; Cp; Photo Illustration by Bradley Reinhardt
Just as the queen of daytime network TV is winding down her 25-year reign, an odd publishing trend is heating up: a slew of memoirs by Oprah-anointed “authorities” confessing that they weren’t quite as advertised or couldn’t fix their own screwed-up lives. Last week, Winfrey devoted not one but two shows to the plight of Iyanla Vanzant, a “spiritual life counsellor” and Oprah Winfrey Show regular in the late 1990s. The Mighty O loved Vanzant’s sassy life truths; she was even grooming the self-proclaimed “Yorùbá priestess” for her own program. Then, in what appears an act of cosmic suicide, Vanzant signed with Barbara Walters’ production company and fell out with Winfrey.
After one season, Vanzant’s show was axed and her life imploded: her marriage broke up; she squandered millions; she lost her house and filed for bankruptcy. Now, harnessing the moxy that fuelled her rise as a self-help guru, Vanzant is flogging a new memoir: Peace From Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You’re Going Through.
Also offering tips on finding inner peace—again—is Sarah Ban Breathnach, who catapulted to fame in 1996 after Winfrey named Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy her favourite book of the year. Ban Breathnach’s bite-sized nuggets extolling non-material pleasures like smelling fresh laundry sold millions of copies. In her new memoir, Peace and Plenty: Finding Your Path to Financial Serenity, the author reveals she ditched her “all you have is all you need” bromides and frittered everything away living a life that involved little sheet-sniffing: she snapped up posh New York real estate and Sir Isaac Newton’s “chapel” in England, and hired nine assistants on either side of the Atlantic. Divorced from husband No. 3, a cad who showed undue fondness for her wealth, Ban Breathnach is now left with her elderly cat, big debts and the prospect of yet another New York Times bestseller.
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The busy woman's anti-book club
By Sarah Lazarovic - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 5 Comments
Who has time to read 500 pages? Welcome to the Ladies Short-Form Media Auxiliary.
Photograph by Cole Garside
It began as a joke. I resented my husband’s book club and its ability to work through doorstoppers like Matterhorn (597 pages) with surprising alacrity, parsing narrative threads while making wild-game chili. Attempting to fashion a rival club, I found my girlfriends fell into two camps: the book-club-fatigued and the time-crunched. Whereas my mom can juggle two book clubs and seven novels on her Kindle, I can barely get through the ingredients list on my jar of peanut butter, with work, a baby and a Twitter feed all clamouring for my attention. And so I convened the Ladies Short-Form Media Auxiliary. We would drink buttery whites, eat cake and discuss magazine articles, YouTube clips and clever tweets. We’d all be on the same page, but that page wouldn’t be in a book.
Book clubs have seen their popularity rise and taper over the past decade. In the early part of the 20th century they enabled women, relegated to the home and often denied formal education, the chance to broaden their minds. Instead of reading the same book, women would read whatever they could get their hands on and then deliver detailed reports to their literature groups, writes Elizabeth Long in Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life.
If the role of the book club as a tool for female empowerment and education has waned over the century, its promise as a place for spirited discussion and intellectual engagement hasn’t, especially as women’s time has grown increasingly fractured. “If you don’t have a lot of leisure time, don’t have time to think interesting thoughts and talk about interesting things with people, then you really miss that,” says Long.
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Obama deserves "respect": Oprah
By macleans.ca - Friday, February 11, 2011 at 12:19 PM - 15 Comments
Talk show host tells critics to ease off the president
Oprah is asking some of Barack Obama’s fiercest critics to “show some level of respect” and try to put themselves in the presidents shoes. “I feel that everybody has a learning curve, and I feel that the reason why I was willing to step out for him was because I believed in his integrity and I believed in his heart,” Oprah said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show in Chicago. The television mogul added that, “even if you’re not in support of his policies, there needs to be a certain level of respect.”
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This week: Newsmakers
By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments
The Pope’s surprise move, Russia’s Mata Hari makes her prime-time debut, and the queen of all TV revels
The greatest skate
To say Patrick Chan blew away the competition as he skated to his fourth straight national men’s title is a gross understatement. It was, according to the Vancouver Sun, “inarguably the greatest skate ever by a Canadian.” Chan didn’t so much as wobble as he laid out two back-to-back quads—the calling card of the sport’s greats—and went on to shatter the world record score for a male skater. “Brian Orser? Kurt Browning? Elvis Stojko? All great on any number of days,” wrote Cam Cole. “None as great as Chan was, on this one.” The spellbound crowd in Victoria brought down the house as Chan, finally, slowed to a stop. “That was the reaction I wanted at the Olympics,” said the Toronto native. “That’s what I dreamed about every night when I went to bed. And I finally got it.”Attack of the former presidents
The dust has barely settled after former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier’s arrival in Haiti, and another name from the country’s past is attempting a return to the homeland. Former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who’s been living in exile in South Africa since being forced from office in a 2004 coup, is eager to return, he said this week, to serve his “Haitian sisters and brothers as a simple citizen in the field of education.” “Baby Doc” Duvalier, meanwhile, whose lavish life in exile in France was abruptly halted by a pricey divorce, says he’s returned “to help”—not, as is widely suspected, to lay claim to a frozen Swiss bank account. Now that he’s there, investigators are building a fresh case against him over the alleged theft of $120 million—what they describe as a “gigantic fraud . . . from one of the poorest populations on Earth.”Alas, poor Andy
British PM David Cameron’s embattled communications chief Andy Coulson stepped down on Friday amid continued questions about his possible involvement in the illegal hacking of celebrity voice messages when he was editor of the News of the World—making him, as Britain’s Independent cheekily reported, “the first person in history to resign twice for something of which he knew nothing.” In lesser political disgraces, a British MP was interrupted mid-speech by his own musical tie, whose tinny tune was picked up by his mike. Baffled MPs hunted for the source, until Tory backbencher Nadhim Zahawi realized who was to blame. “I apologize,” he said. “It is my tie to support the campaign against bowel cancer.” “Perhaps next time the honourable gentleman will be more selective in the ties he wears in the chamber,” said deputy speaker Dawn Primarolo. -
Mozhdah: The Oprah of Afghanistan
By Nancy Macdonald - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 9 Comments
Vancouver-raised Mozhdah is revolutionizing her society one fearless talk show at a time
For her safety, Mozhdah seldom leaves her house. When she does, she’s mobbed by fans. | Andrea Bruce/Getty Images
On the face of it, the taping of the The Mozhdah Show looks like that of any other U.S. talk show. Green lights dim as the house band—Afghanistan’s only known rock group—starts up. A white spotlight sweeps the audience. Whistles and cheers erupt as the host, Mozhdah Jamalzadah, emerges, hopping gracefully onto the bright-pink set. “Salaam!” says the charismatic, Canadian-raised star, whose nine-month-old TV program has taken Afghanistan by storm. “Salaam!” she says again, smiling, her adoring crowd refusing to return to their seats.
Mozhdah, who like Beyoncé is known by her first name, and is mobbed whenever she leaves her Kabul home, has been labelled the Oprah of Afghanistan. The comparison is of course imperfect. Oprah doesn’t sleep with a gun. She doesn’t ride in bulletproof cars or travel with guards armed with AK-47s. Death threats don’t flood her inbox. Mozhdah, whose first thought on entering a new building is how she might escape, is gutsy in a way Oprah doesn’t need to be. Her black leather leggings, six-inch heels and silver hoop earrings wouldn’t get a second glance in Vancouver, where she’s spent all but five of her 26 years, but this is Afghanistan. Until a few years ago, the bare ankles alone could have earned her a public whipping.
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Newsmakers
By macleans.ca - Friday, November 5, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments
Margaret Thatcher beats out Oprah, Ozzy Osbourne’s Neanderthal roots, and a very special seeing-eye dog
It just isn’t Brett Favre’s year
Despite being hobbled by two fractures in his foot, the Minnesota Vikings quarterback started in his 292nd consecutive NFL game. It was a bittersweet affair for fans, who saw Favre throw a costly interception, draw two penalties and leave the game with an eight-stitch cut to his chin in a loss to the New England Patriots. Then there are his alleged follies off the field: the married QB reportedly sent texts and lewd photos to TV personality Jenn Sterger.
The Parti is hungry
There are a few constants in life in Quebec: good food, cold winters, and infighting within the Parti Québécois. But knowing this can’t allay the worries of Pauline Marois, who after three years at the helm of the sovereignist party is facing restive ranks. A group of 50 young sovereignists recently signed an open letter criticizing her. That came on the heels of a Radio-Canada interview in which Jacques Parizeau chided Marois and complimented Bloc leader (and one-time PQ leadership hopeful) Gilles Duceppe for his “remarkable clarity” on the sovereignty issue. It seems the party that eats its leaders—Marois is the sixth in 10 years—is licking its chops once again. -
The trick to loving how you look
By Julia McKinnell - Friday, October 22, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments
It starts with knowing your type. Are you a 3, like Laureen Harper?
CP; Getty Images; Photo Illustration: Taylor Shute; Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
When Valerie Monroe, beauty director for O magazine, revealed her top tip for an article asking “Do You Love the Way You Look?”, Carol Tuttle, a psychotherapist turned beauty adviser, took issue, calling the advice ridiculous. Munroe told O readers that, in order to love her own face, she lowers the bar. “I picture a face with little piggy eyes, a drooping, fleshy nose, a wet slash of a mouth, the whole thing sallow and sagging, really something awful. I prepare myself for this unpleasantness right before I look in the mirror.”
Tuttle took her Oprah outrage to YouTube. “I’m shocked. Oprah, come on! I’m going to think of the most horrible, awful-looking ugly face I can imagine and then look at myself and think, I’m not so bad? You basically should’ve written, ‘Honey, you’re just not attractive.’ You’re basically telling women, ‘You can’t be beautiful, so think of the ugliest face you can imagine, and then you’re not going to look so dang awful to yourself.’ This pisses me off, people.” As Tuttle told Maclean’s, “It’s disconcerting how many women have put themselves in the category of, ‘I’m not a beautiful woman. I have other talents.’ ”
For the last seven years, Tuttle has been teaching women how to “capture” their beauty with her course, “Dressing Your Truth.” “Most women do not know how truly beautiful they are,” she writes in her book of the same name. The problem for most women, she believes, is that they don’t know what “type” they are and are therefore “misunderstood.”
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Justin Bieber on Oprah, Kobe Bryant and his own fame
By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments
What’s really going on under all that hair (plus PHOTOS)
Dana Romanoff/GETTY IMAGES/ KC Armstrong/ Lucas Jackson/Reuters
The sign on the door says “Mozart,” but it’s a safe bet that Wolfgang Amadeus never had a dressing room equipped with leather recliners, a super-sized flat-screen TV and an Xbox console. Nor, presumably, did his tour rider call for loaves of Wonder Bread, Cool Ranch Doritos, Fruit Roll-Ups and candy Swedish Fish.
Still, something is missing. Justin Bieber’s mom, Pattie Mallette, looks at the choice of Pop Tarts—strawberry and apple strudel—and clucks, “Where are the grape ones?” before scurrying off down the hall. The day has enough complications already. Pop’s reigning prodigy is suffering greatly from Denver’s thin mountain air. Dizzy with a splitting headache, the Stratford, Ont., teen has been snarling at anyone brave enough to enter his darkened tour bus, pull back the Spider-Man bedsheets, and try to wake him for a scheduled 2:30 p.m. interview.
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Newsmakers
By macleans.ca - Friday, May 14, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 2 Comments
Prince Harry takes flight, Very enterprising and Will we see less of Oprah’s fans?
Prince Harry takes flight
The Apache attack helicopter is a nasty piece of weaponry, bristling with rockets, a 30-mm machine gun and 16 Hellfire missiles. It may soon be in the hands of a member of the British Royal Family. Last week, Prince Harry got his wings from the colonel in chief of the Army Air Corps, who happens to be his father, Prince Charles. Harry also received the Peter Adams Trophy for the student showing the best tactical ability. That, and the decision of Air Corps brass to train him on the challenging Apache—an assignment awarded the top two per cent of the class—show the army has considerable faith in the 25-year-old prince. Next up, eight months of intense training and perhaps a ticket back to Afghanistan. “There is still a huge mountain for me to climb if I am to pass the Apache training course,” he said.Will we see less of Oprah’s fans?
The latest issue of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, O, has Victoria dermatologist Dr. Mark Lupin’s phone ringing off the hook. Lupin is one of a handful of Canadian doctors offering the UltraShape treatment, a “non-invasive” technique that uses ultrasound waves to break up fat cells beneath the skin. UltraShape is cleared for use in 57 countries, but it has yet to receive FDA approval in the U.S. Patients feel “just a slight tingly sensation,” Lupin told O magazine. The treated fat cells are burned as calories or eliminated from the body as waste. -
Week in Pictures: May 7th – 13th 2010
By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 12:32 PM - 0 Comments
The week’s best photography
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Late-night is for frat boys only
By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 1:00 AM - 11 Comments
Women are a big part of the audience, so why don’t hosts like Jay Leno hire any as writers?
Jay Leno is back on The Tonight Show, Conan O’Brien is gone, and fans are arguing over which version of the show is better. But no matter how often the host changes, one thing never seems to change: Leno currently has no women on his writing staff—when Sarah Palin performed a stand-up routine for him, her jokes were written by men—and neither did O’Brien during his Tonight Show tenure. In late-night comedy, shows can go years without a woman in the writers’ room, and things have gotten worse in recent years: David Letterman’s first head writer was a woman (Merrill Markoe), but he didn’t have any female writers last year. Markoe told Maclean’s that when she started in the business, “everyone made fun of ‘tokenism.’ Every show had its token one to two women.” In today’s late-night world, she’s starting to “look back at tokenism fondly as a time of enlightenment.”
Why don’t late-night shows hire women to write for them? The simplest reason is that most of the writers who apply for the job are men: “When I started the show with Dave in the early ’80s, very few women submitted work,” Markoe says. But even today, when there are more female stand-up comics and other women who Markoe describes as “very familiar with the general sensibility” of late-night comedy, things haven’t been any better. “Women are equal watchers of those shows,” fumes Melissa Silverstein, blogger and founder of womenandhollywood.com, “yet are somehow not thought of as capable of contributing behind the scenes.”
If hosts do hire a woman, it’s often because they knew her already. Craig Ferguson, who hosts The Late Late Show, has one female staff writer: his sister Lynn, a respected comedian in her own right. Markoe was romantically involved with Letterman at one point, and when Jimmy Kimmel broke up with Sarah Silverman, tabloids reported that he was dating his writer Molly McNearney. Without a prior relationship, it can take a long time for a woman to win the trust of the people who do the hiring; Jill Goodwin, who got a job last month as Letterman’s first female writer in years, was an assistant on the show for almost a decade. “People hire people they’re comfortable with,” says Silverstein, and in practice, it seems like hosts aren’t comfortable with women they haven’t met repeatedly.
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The meaning of Ellen (on American Idol)
By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 19, 2010 at 9:49 PM - 9 Comments
She combines the best elements of Woody Allen and Oprah
Herein, the fifth in a semi-regular series chronicling the ninth season of American Idol. You can read the first installment here, the second installment here, the third installment here and the fourth installment here.America in 2010 is a confused place. Americans are of deeply held, but divergent and often contradictory, opinions. On some disagreements they are even unsure as to what they’re disagreeing about. In a recent poll, prompted by renewed debate over the so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, 1,084 Americans adults were asked whether they favoured or opposed “homosexuals” being allowed to serve openly in the armed forces. Forty-four per cent of respondents were in favour, 42% were opposed. When the same 1,084 American adults were asked whether they favoured or opposed “gay men and lesbians” being allowed to serve openly in the armed forces, 58% were in favour, 28% opposed.
And now here, at this particularly peculiar moment in American history, is Ellen DeGeneres, an openly gay woman taking her seat to the left of Simon Cowell, appearing in prime time television on the Fox network to judge a wildly popular, nation-defining talent show.
What to make of this?
It is tempting to make something of the fact that, while openly gay men and women cannot yet officially fight to protect and preserve the American Dream, they can sit in judgment of those who pursue it. But that would be glib. And it would probably exaggerate the significance of Ellen’s arrival on American Idol. It is probably more accurate to conclude that however confusing America can be, it is also easily underestimated.
Ellen is at once the most subversive and the least objectionable person in American public life and maybe the best current demonstration of the American Dream. Thirteen years ago, she announced she was gay in big red letters on the cover of Time magazine. Two sitcoms of hers subsequently flopped, but she has since hosted the Oscars, the Grammys and the Emmys, become the star of a popular daytime talk show, been paid to represent American Express and Cover Girl, and married a beautiful TV actress with an exotic-sounding name. Last year, Forbes deemed her the 40th most powerful celebrity in America, slightly less powerful than Tom Hanks, but slightly more powerful than Eddie Murphy, Jay Leno and Barack Obama. Out magazine currently ranks her the second most powerful homosexual, behind only Senator Barney Frank.
She combines the best elements of Woody Allen and Oprah, somehow cerebral and heartfelt, self-effacing and generous. She’s uncompromising, but never more than she needs to be. The defining three minutes of her career to date might be her shrugging dismissal in May 2008 of John McCain’s position on same-sex marriage—possibly the nicest, but most efficient, deconstruction of a politician and a political position in the history of television.
She debuted last week as a judge on Idol, kissing Ryan Seacrest as she arrived and quickly settling into the role with relative ease. Without dominating the proceedings, she has already established herself as the über-judge: empathetic, but mischievous; blunt and biting, but also encouraging. She watches with deep concern in her eyes and beams when contestants succeed, but will quickly scold the off-key. She prizes confidence. She arrived in time for the final round of auditions—dubbed Hollywood Week, it is essentially a televised social experiment meant to see how many desperate young singers can be made to cry on camera—and seemed determined to impose some degree of humanity on the affair.
On paper, it might not make sense that a populist, explicitly Middle-American television show pitched to a nation openly grappling with the perceived ramifications of homosexuality could, with reasonable success, put a quirky, openly gay woman in a position of prominence. But she fits. If there is anything remarkable about her inclusion on Idol, it’s how relatively unremarkable it seems.
On paper, America is a confusing and messy place. But it is almost always better than it seems.
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If Oprah says so
By Cathy Gulli - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 3 Comments
A Chicago woman followed the queen of talk’s advice religiously. For a year.
While preparing for her role in a satirical performance about self-help gurus, actor Robyn Okrant kept bumping up against one name: Oprah Winfrey. Her mother, friends, students, all the women she knew, were continually citing the queen of talk’s advice. “I just felt like Oprah was setting this bar for women to live up to and I was a little, I don’t know, defensive,” Okrant told Maclean’s from her home in Chicago, where she also teaches yoga. “I thought, how come she gets to do this? Does her advice really work? And why are we putting ourselves under so much duress to live up to that model?”And what would happen if a woman did everything Oprah said she must for one whole year? Two weeks before the start of 2008, Okrant decided she would find out: her new book, Living Oprah, recounts the experiment, which was originally documented on a “Living Oprah” blog. For 12 months, every time Oprah implored her TV audience, magazine readers or website visitors to do something, Okrant obliged. Vote for Obama. Stop drinking diet pop.
Take 10 deep breaths every morning and night. Get a mammogram. Dump toxic people. Consider: what can I live without? Forgive.
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Newsmakers '09: At last . . .
By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 2:50 PM - 0 Comments
Oprah Winfrey, Apple and others.
Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb
The founders of Livent Inc. were convicted of fraud in Ontario Superior Court. The conviction came 11 years after Livent collapsed and the partners were accused of cooking the books. Their sentencing in August brought an end to a saga that seemed as long as Livent’s Ragtime, though less boring.
Roman Polanski
More than 30 years after he fled the U.S. to escape sentencing for sexual abuse of a 13-year-old girl, Polanski was arrested in Zurich. Many of the director’s industry friends signed a petition protesting the arrest, saying if Polanski is extradited and sentenced, it will “take away his freedom.” Well, yeah, that’s the idea.
Pete Seeger
When the singer-songwriter (Turn, Turn, Turn) performed at a San Diego school in 1960, the school board tried unsuccessfully to cancel the concert after he wouldn’t sign an anti-Communist loyalty oath. This year, the board sent a letter of apology to Seeger for its past Red-baiting. He replied that the controversy helped his career. Even left-wing folk singers need publicity.
Oprah Winfrey
America’s sympathizer-in-chief announced she’s leaving her syndicated daytime show at the end of next year’s season, her 25th. The billionaire isn’t abandoning her millions of loyal followers to the harsh world of cable news. She hopes to take them to her own network, where they can watch Oprah-approved shows around the clock.
Section 13
The so-called hate speech section of the Canadian Human Rights Act allows government to regulate messages of “hatred or contempt.” After many challenges, a tribunal ruled it violates constitutional rights. The ruling doesn’t actually overturn the law, but it’s the thought that counts.
‘Burke’s Peerage’
For 173 years, the venerable volume has told us who’s who in the families of British aristocrats. This year it included out-of-wedlock children for the first time ever. Editor William Bortrick ordered the change to reflect the reality that “many people, even from titled families, do not marry.” This may be the biggest blow to the sanctity of aristocratic marriage since Charles and Diana broke up.
Kelly Marie Ellard
Part of a group that murdered Vancouver teen Reena Virk in 1997, Ellard has been keeping lawyers busy since her 2000 conviction was overturned. (It was followed by a mistrial and another conviction.) This year, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that her last conviction would stand, with no more do-overs.Philadelphia, Miss.
The confusingly named town, best known as the site of the murder of three civil-rights workers in 1964, elected its first African-American mayor this year. James Young defeated the white incumbent by 46 votes. As with Obama’s election, this presumably proves that racism no longer exists.Apple Inc.
The U.S.’s biggest music retailer (thanks to iTunes) sold most files with “digital locks” that prevented them from being copied to non-Apple devices. In January Apple announced it would remove the locks. This may be bad news for music producers, since it will encourage piracy. But it’s good news for that pathetic PC from those commercials, who can finally get access to some of the Mac’s tunes on his Zune. -
Eckhart Tolle vs. God
By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 58 Comments
The spiritual leader that evangelicals rail against has a new book—on the divinity of pets
Eckhart Tolle—one of the greatest spiritual teachers of our age, or perhaps the anti-Christ in a beige sweater vest—has left the door ajar. He greets you in the foyer of his Vancouver condominium with a quick smile and a soft handshake, and leads you inside. He is trim and compact, and—thanks, he says, to near total absence of stress—he looks younger than his 61 years. With his sandy fringe of beard, and aura of inviting calm, he seems, let’s be frank, as threatening as a garden gnome.But his spiritual teachings are another matter: they are seismic. He has a global audience numbering in the tens of millions. They read his books, absorb his musings via DVDs and the Internet. They flock by the thousands to his lectures. He sits at the right hand of Oprah. He is a heretic. He is God, if only in his sense that the divine rests in all things. “I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away,” he will later explain. “But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that,” he says, “I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.” As for the world’s established religions, he feels they have all lost their way—the purity of their message long since twisted into rigid ideology and buried under edifice, ritual and ego. All he has really done, he says, is rediscover their essence. “I have great respect for the truth that is, one could almost say, hiding, concealed, in the great religions.” Continue…
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Chris Rock's Good Hair day
By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 7:04 PM - 4 Comments
Comedian Chris Rock has ventured into Michael Moore territory with a comic documentary that exposes the strange and secret world of black women’s coiffure. As host and co-writer of ‘Good Hair,’ he conducts a funny, fascinating excursion into tricks and taboos surrounding the billion-dollar industry of African American perms, weaves and wigs. Above is a video of my interview with Rock, conducted when his movie premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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'Precious' wins Oscar's Toronto primary
By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 1:19 PM - 0 Comments
'Precious' star Gabourey 'Gabby' Sidibe
It was wrap yesterday for the Toronto International Film Festival, as it staged its awards ceremony at a hotel brunch. This is always a low-key affair. Unlike the othe major festivals—Cannes, Berlin, Venice and Sundance—Toronto prides itself on being a non-competitive event. Which is why a lot of filmmakers feel comfortable unveiling their work here. There are no losers. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t winners. Although there’s no formal competition, awards are given out, and this year there were more than ever. Juries honoured three categories of Canadian films with cash prizes—Ruba Nadda’s lush and delicate romance, Cairo Time, won $30,000 for best Canadian feature, Alexandre Franchi’s The Wild Hunt, about role-playing games, won $15,000 for best Canadian first feature, and Pedro Pires’s Dance Macabre, a dark ballet conceived by Robert Lepage, won $10,000 for best Canadian short. But the prize that has taken on more and more significance over the years is the People’s Choice Award, which is voted by audiences—and has come to serve as a bell-weather for Oscar success. Past winners have included Chariots of Fire, American Beauty, Crash and Slumdog Millionaire. To no one’s surprise, at least not mine, the 2009 winner was Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. By turns harrowing and inspirational, this tale of an abused, obese, illiterate Harlem teen is this year’s Slumdog. Continue…
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Making history with Oprah and Atom
By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, September 14, 2009 at 6:11 PM - 0 Comments
What a wild and crazy Sunday we had yesterday. It started at 9:30 a.m. with a royal visit from Oprah Winfrey, holding court at a press conference for Precious with a remarkable phalanx of African-American talent—including Mariah Carrey, Tyler Perry, the novelist Sapphire, singer Mary J. Blige, directror Lee Daniels, and super-sized ingenue Gabourey ‘Gabby’ Sidibe, who’s living out a Star is Born fantasy making her film debut in the title role. Cameron Bailey, TIFF’s dashing African-Canadian co-director—who looked as much like a movie star as anyone on the podium—called it a historic event. And he was right. Black stars and black directors have made their individual marks in Hollywood. But I can’t recall another film that has united such an inspired, and inspiring, powerhouse of black talent. At the press conference, Oprah set the tone for an outpouring of emotion that turned the session into a media love-in. The movie, she said, “is so raw that it will suck the air out of the room. When I finished watching this film the first thing I did was call Tyler so I could get Lee’s number and tell him how I was gasping for air.” Precious—the story of an abused woman pregnant with a second child by own father—premiered at Sundance last winter, but could have languished in indie obscurity without the support of Oprah. It’s not an easy film to watch or sell. But she hopped on board as executive producer and at TIFF she’s launching a juggernaut campaign that seems destined to end in Oscar glory. One voice after another made the case that for such a sad and harrowing story, Precious is not a downer. And some did it by drawing on their own experience of childhood abuse, including Blige and Perry. “For anyone who has endured that kind of situation,” said Perry, “me being one of those people, it left me with hope. I don’t think it’s dark. I think it leaves you with hope. . . No matter what your situation, you can walk away from it feeling hope.” Continue…
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Newsmakers: Odd couples
By Patricia Treble - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 12:30 PM - 1 Comment
From the Summer ’09 Newsmakers family edition
Sophie Dahl & Jamie Cullum
The six-foot model and the five-foot-four-inch singer shrugged off the double-entendre headlines—“love scales new heights” and “does size matter?”—and got engaged in May. As Dahl put it, very sensibly, “What’s lost is that we happen to be two people who fell madly in love and will probably produce fairly average-sized children.”Nathalie Normandeau & François Bonnardel
She’s Quebec’s deputy premier, he’s an opposition MNA. They may be political enemies in the national assembly, but in private they are just two people trying to build a relationship while, at the same time, avoiding major political and ethical landmines. Bonne chance but beware: inter-party romances tend to implode. Just ask Tory Peter MacKay and Liberal Belinda Stronach. Continue… -
The genius of Justin Timberlake
By John Intini - Friday, May 8, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 10 Comments
How an ex-boy band Britney survivor dodged all the punchlines and got the last laugh
Justin Timberlake was a global brand when he showed up on Saturday Night Live in December 2006 with a cheap suit, cheesy beard and a strategically placed cardboard box. But in two minutes and 37 seconds, the pop star reached a whole other level. In addition to an Emmy and more than 35 million downloads, the skit, a holiday music video parody, in which Timberlake advises dudes on the perfect gift to give your lady—a “d–k in a box”—was crude, but earned the former Mouseketeer a lot of cred. He also proved that night to be one of SNL’s best hosts in years by appearing in . . . no, by being the funniest part of nearly every skit. Fast-forward to November 2008: Timberlake shows up on SNL again, this time in heels and a leotard, dancing with Beyoncé to Single Ladies—another instant Web sensation. After that turn, some New York media types pleaded with Lorne Michaels, SNL’s producer, to hire the pop star full-time. Timberlake, who now has a standing invite whenever he’s in NYC, is hosting SNL on May 9. Chances are, by the time you read this, his latest skit has already gone viral.The fact that anyone is even talking about Timberlake is remarkable. This is, after all, a guy who spent seven years with ’N Sync and dated Britney Spears, the kind of credentials that might guarantee someone a spot on the The Surreal Life. And yet, several years since his band broke up (and 14 since he and Mickey Mouse parted ways), Timberlake has positioned himself atop a respected pop culture empire that spans music, film, TV, even fashion (his latest collection earned industry nods at New York Fashion Week in February). He’s a boyfriend to beautiful women—the latest, Jessica Biel—and in crowning him America’s most stylish man, GQ credited him with single-handedly bringing back fedoras, sweater vests, three-piece suits and beards. He’s the modern-day equivalent of the Rat Pack, all rolled into one skinny-jean-wearing guy from Memphis who used to have frosted tips.
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Oprah’s octuplets coup
By Anne Kingston - Friday, February 20, 2009 at 3:17 PM - 1 Comment
Winfrey’s brilliant manipulation of the octuplets’ circus suggests her mojo is back
Oprah has endured her share of knocks lately—first there was the flap over her endorsing yet another memoirist who fabricated facts, then there was the fracas about her gaining weight even though she employs a legion of people to keep her trim. But her brilliant manipulation of the octuplets’ circus suggests her mojo is back. Winfrey cannily sidestepped a face-to-face with the much-reviled, fame-seeking mother of 14, Nadya Suleman, who had expressed desire to tell her story on the show. Instead, she sat down with Suleman’s father, Ed Doud, today to tape an interview that will air Feb. 24. In the snippets released, Doud echoes public sentiment about his daughter, calling her and her fertility doctor “absolutely irresponsible.” He also expressed doubt about her sanity: “Now I’m no psychiatrist, but I question her mental situation,” he said. Yet he also used the powerful Oprah platform to ask for financial assistance for the family—not for his troubled daughter, but rather her vulnerable children: “I say to everybody now: People, we do need help. Do not punish my daughter for what she had done and do not punish the babies, because they were given by God.” All in all, brilliantly played.
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I’m Linda and I’m a self-help junkie
By Julia McKinnell - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment
A 40-year-old mother neglects her kids in order to read about how to be a better parent
Forty-year-old Linda Pruce confesses that her problem started in September 1998. “I was sitting on my bed, breastfeeding my newborn, and wondering whether it would be wrong to smoke a cigarette while nursing,” she writes in a new book. “As I was figuring out the logistics of this dilemma—could I reach my cigarettes without breaking the baby’s seal on my breast? Could I blow the smoke toward the window rather than up the nostrils of my daughter?—I caught the start of Oprah’s fall season.”
Oprah “was speaking to me,” writes the Maryland holistic healer in Confessions of a Self-Help Junkie. “I was a fat, tired, chain-smoking mother of two with a travelling, ‘I’m only home on weekends’ husband.” Pruce wanted change, and the plan at the time seemed simple. She’d watch Oprah every afternoon and the “experts and published authors would tell me exactly what I needed to do.”
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Further reading (II)
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 1, 2008 at 9:56 PM - 2 Comments
One way or another, it would seem our present predicament will be left for Michaelle Jean to sort out. Lucky her. (As of 6:07pm today, her plans had not changed. She remains due back in Canada on December 6.)
Time then to read-up on the Vice Regal.
To my knowledge, Maclean’s has published two major features on Madame Jean. In Oct. 2005, Shanda Deziel wrote about her and we compared the Governor General to Angelina Jolie. Earlier this year, I wrote about her and we compared the Governor General to Oprah.
Furthermore, shortly after her appointment was announced, John Geddes looked into the much-discussed political leanings of her and her husband.
Even furthermore, two years ago Michael Petrou wrote about Lafond and his book, Conversations in Tehran.
