Douchey MySpace Star-on-Star Interviews
Celebrity journalism changed forever the day the first issue of Interview magazine, Andy Warhol’s glossy brainchild that featured celebrities interviewing each other, hit the newsstands. The unique format allowed celebrities to be more at ease and to discuss Hollywood from an inside perspective. The formula worked so well, in fact, that it spawned countless imitators, including Dinner for Five, Jon Favreau’s roundtable dinner program where he would eat dinner with a bizarre mix of celebrities and let them talk about old times or controversial issues or whatever, sort of like Politically Incorrect with catering. Even the ever-informative entertainment ‘news’ programs like Extra and Access Hollywood fall back on this gimmick now and then, throwing a couple of dim-witted B-list Unemployment-collectors in a room together and letting them do all the work.
The latest incarnation of this laziest of interview production choices is a series of videos on MySpace given the title “Artist on Artist,” which sounds sexier than it is. In fact, these videos are not only unsexy, but downright confusing. When you read Interview, the stars usually have something in common, like they’ve worked together, or at least there seems to be some kind of thought put into the choice of pairings. But some of these MySpace duos are just befuddling. Iggy Pop and Bam Margera? Mike Patton and Danny DeVito? “Weird Al” Yankovic and Seth Green? And I’m not even going to talk about the interview between Al Gore and Mos Def.
What I wonder is, have we gone too far into the world of fantasy when actors are only expected to report to other actors? Shouldn’t we give them a reality check once and a while and let them talk to a normal person who can give them some perspective on the world? Reporters are often a celebrity’s only link to the common man; if we take that away, their egos will begin to grow uncontrollably, and soon we’ll be reading 20 page in-depth interviews between Lindsay Lohan and herself, full of all the fake self-deprecation followed by masturbatory self-congratulation that are already hallmarks of the celebrity co-interview as it is, but untethered now from any illusion of reciprocity. Mark my words!
