'Heated Rivalry' and The Oldest Trick in Showbiz

Making a hit is hard. Showing more skin isn’t

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

I got an email a few weeks ago and I made the mistake of answering it. “Would you,” the emailer who turned out to be a journalist from Europe asked, “be interested in talking to us in a Zoom conversation about how Hollywood can regain some of its economic momentum?” Like an idiot, I said yes, though I was smart enough to tell them they couldn’t put it online, because what I knew — though they did not — was that anything specific that I suggested would sound instantly wrong, because the only answer to that question is, keep trying to make the hits. Which nobody wants to hear.

I once sat next to someone who was part of a team that had just acquired a big television network, and he politely asked me if I had any advice for the new managers of the enterprise, and I said, “Yeah, make some hits,” and he chuckled indulgently and said, “Well, I think it’s a little more complicated than that,” at which point I said, “No, actually it’s not. That’s the whole thing. That’s the whole thing.”

So I knew I was in trouble with the European journalists, because they were actually paying me for my appearance, not just coincidentally sitting next to me at a fundraising dinner, so if I actually told them the truth — more hits and problem solved — they’d want their money back and I have already spent it, so I did what I truly hate to do, and that’s, I did some thinking.

So what I did was a classic evasion maneuver. Instead of providing answers, I framed and reframed the question. Here’s a version of what I said.

At the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, there are two large swimming pools. Both are ringed by colorful cabanas and festooned with fountains and amoeba-shaped nooks. But only one of them — a little more secluded than the other — allows something called, with mysterious glamour, “European-style bathing.”

Meaning: topless. The hotel’s management took the idea of topless girls lounging around the pool and made it classy-sounding. As we say in show business, they walked it upstairs.