Transcript: Hollywood is Just Like Trump

Rob Long on our culture of score-settlers, braggarts and braying egomaniacs

This is Rob Long with Martini Shot for The Ankler.

The way show business is supposed to work is this: you work hard on a project for many months — or even years — and after putting together the footage and fixing the sound and adding music, you send it out into the world in as good a shape as you can.  

The writers and actors and directors and financiers don't really know how it's all going to turn out. They have to wait for the box office returns or the television ratings to tell them if the work product of many months was worth the time and treasure. That's just how show business works.

That’s sort of how life works, too, but that would be a longer podcast.

I mean, it’s mostly how things work, anyway. I once appeared on a live cable news show — and I've done a fair amount of this kind of thing before — you arrive at the studio about 20 minutes before you're scheduled, you sit in a chair while makeup is applied and your hair is anchored into place. A technician wires you with an almost-invisible earpiece, which is wrapped around the outside of your ear and then left dangling because it's your job to push the earpiece into your ear.  

When the show begins, you're supposed to lean forward in a highly engaged posture, to signal your all-consuming interest in whatever. You're encouraged to make decisive hand gestures, verbal lists ("There are three major forces at work here, Dianne"), and before you know it, the show is over and you either wipe the makeup off of your face before you head to dinner — which, in my case, makes you look like you've just rubbed your face with sandpaper, or you wear it out, which can also raise eyebrows from other people up close at the restaurant, but for people 20 or 30 feet away you look amazing.

Once, though, I was appearing live — that is, the show was broadcast everywhere and anywhere as we did it. I was on with several professional television journalists, and when the time came for an advertising break, they all instantly reached for their phones to see what the audience was saying about them on Twitter. It was still Twitter then. And I’m not going to call it X because I think X is a stupid name.