In 1976, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky concocted an insane nightmare of TV greed called Network. Faye Dunaway won an Oscar as a ruthless TV executive who would literally kill for a 50 share.
Fast forward nearly 30 years. The WB launches The Starlet, a "wish fulfillment" reality series featuring 10 Paris Hilton clones lusting after their own 15 minutes of fame.
Who is there to judge them? Faye Dunaway, reduced to the kind of tacky role Chayefsky skewered in his dark, satiric vision.
The series, which also features Vivica A. Fox and casting director Joseph Middleton (Legally Blonde) as judges and Katie Wagner (daughter of R.J.) as host, premieres tomorrow night at 8 p.m. on Toronto 1/The WB.
Dunaway admitted last January in Los Angeles that she did see the irony of playing a Network-like reality show judge. "Paddy Chayefsky did what any great artist does," she told TV critics. "They predict reality. And then suddenly you think, 'Oh my God. It's all come true.'"
Like American Idol, the series sets out to find the "next great star." Contestants, who are forced to live together in a Big Brother-like house (once owned by Marilyn Monroe, a woman destroyed by Hollywood), are put through a Tinsel Town boot camp. "Screen tests" take place in a variety of Hollywood locations, including the park where the Bat Cave segments of the campy '60s series Batman were once shot. Holy stupid idea!
The kids also get Hollywood make-overs, a power dinner with a top director and a chance to sleep with Simon Cowell (optional and, well, made up).
One by one the babes are brought before Dunaway who utters the Trump-like dismissal, "Don't call us, we'll call you."
The one who finally does get called lands a part on One Tree Hill, a middling WB soap that could possibly be cancelled before this prize is even awarded.
Is this any crazier than Network's fictional Mao-Tse-Tung Hour? Or how about Dunaway's character's idea for a homosexual soap opera -- The Dykes -- "the heart-rending saga of a woman helplessly in love with her husband's mistress?"
As Max Schumacher (Bill Holden) said to Diana Christensen (Dunaway):
"You are television incarnate, Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. The daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split-seconds and instant replays. You are madness, Diana, virulent madness, and everything you touch dies with you. Well, not me. Not while I can still feel pleasure and pain and love."
Not while I can skip The Starlet and watch Oprah Winfrey Presents: Their Eyes Were Watching God (tomorrow night at 9 p.m. on CITY-TV and ABC). Based on a novel by Zora Neale Hurston, the movie, which is set in the 1920s, stars Halle Berry as a woman from the American South who seeks love through the course of three stormy marriages.
Winfrey told critics last January that she's wanted to bring this book to the screen for years. "Other than The Color Purple, I've never loved a book as much," she said.
She waited until just the right moment to ask Berry to play the part -- the day after she won the Best Actress Oscar for Monster's Ball.
"Who can say no to Oprah?" said Berry.
The film includes a smooch between Berry and co-star Michael Ealy that's a scorcher. "I'm going to show that tape to Stedman," said Oprah, "because I have an open chequebook and some beachfront property if I ever get kissed like that."
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