Sunday, December 10, 2006

A tale of two events


Los Angeles - All things Tinseltown have a veneer of fake. Premieres and award shows are on the top rung of fakery.

Friday, I went to Spike TV's annual Video Game Awards. Anyone can create an award show with the right mix of stars and sponsors. As the video game industry as grown to the size of the movie industry in dollars and cents, they too have to have an award show.

Gaming is not as mature as the movie industry, so the award show is a little on the early adopter cycle of viewership. They wrangled a few stars, Samuel L. Jackson was the host, and the f-bombs were flying all over the show, which of course will be bleeped out when aired.

Spike TV thought the mix of tough guys like Sam Jackson and 50 cent. With a sprinkling of eye candy of Eva Mendes and Tila Tequila, whose claim to fame is she has 1.4 million friends on her MySpace page, (http://www.myspace.com/tilatequila) would be the right mix for those fanboys of video games. They kinda missed the mark with comic Sarah Silverman who basically ended the show making fun of the target audience with jokes about how video games have lowered the STD count in America. She was funny but only in the press room, not in the Galen Center, where they held the event.

For a different take on Spike TV's VGA, click here.

Contrast that with the premiere of "Charlotte's Web" on Sunday morning at the Arclight Theatre on Sunset. Their were A-list stars like Julia Roberts, Dakota Fanning, Kathy Bates, Reba McEntire, Lauren Holly and Bridget Fonda.

The weekend premieres in Hollywood are for children's movies, the stars walk the red carpet with kids in tow. Christine Taylor, actor and wife of Ben Stiller brought her daughter along and stopped for a few photos until the little one had enough of the flashes and started to cry. She quickly scooped her up and ran to the theater, effectively ending the photo session at that point.

The snappers who awoke early to get to this premiere to make a few photos of Julia Roberts were disappointed. She committed the three cardinal sins to photographers. One, she wore black. Two, she had sunglasses on. Three, she had her hair up. The only thing worse is if she didn't show up at all.

The reason why photographers don't want a big star wearing black, is that the magazines don't want to have pages with celebs in black, especially if they are wearing a black coat, which Julia was. Black is boring. A coat that covers everything up is boring. Pants are boring.

The second is sunglasses. Okay, if your Stevie Wonder. But people want to know what stars look like. A shot of a celeb without sunglasses will make the magazines many more times than with.

The third is hair up. Hair up is when you go do errands. Not a premiere. We are not talking about hair up that took hours to do here, we are talking hair-up that took two seconds before she went out the door. Readers want glamour.

I know, its Julia Roberts, so its not like all the world isn't going to use the photos this week, its next week, or next month, those photos will be worthless.

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