Transcript: Botox and Fillers

Rob Long on how Hollywood plays with history

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember, but show business is an American business. I don’t think we invented it, really, but pretty much all around the world, they do it more or less our way, the way it was invented by a handful of guys — and they were all guys — who moved out to Southern California for the sunshine and also because they were trying to escape Thomas Edison’s patent police. And then how it was developed over the next few decades by the next generation who gave us our jargon and production process and those tall director’s chairs which are not as comfortable as the shorter ones but if they give you a short one instead of a tall one you’re going to complain. 

So there’s a lot of America in show business, and vice versa, even though we’re not so great, mostly, on the topic of American history. 

Lyndon Johnson, for instance, who was President of the United States from 1963 to 1968, was a stalwart champion of the civil rights movement of the time. He crafted and enacted — not without a lot of bullying and bribery and threats and begging — some of the most important civil rights laws in the history of the United States, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

All of that, of course, is according to the history books. None of that is according to the Oprah Winfrey-produced movie Selma.