Ask A Genius 1028: Maybe, interview celebrities?
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/27
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Rick Rosner: You can call people up and you get a hundred, if not a thousand, of different people in high positions to talk to you. Now, Lance never wants to take anybody else’s advice about what to paint, but here’s a suggestion for you to take or not take. You should interview celebrities, and your specialty could be you’ll plug their stuff, but you want to talk to them about serious issues. That could be your jam because you love talking about serious issues. I would think that celebrities would like to be taken seriously and not just talk about the stuff they’re in. Seriousness doesn’t just belong to George Clooney or Matt Damon.
Because I bet you, if you contact them properly with some credentials, I don’t think you have to go through agents when you’re contacting other people about interviews, but this time you have to go through their agents. They are gonna be, I assume, very cautious and very quick to say, “No,” because the celebrities are, to a certain extent, babies who, if they encounter an interview that they don’t like, they’ll blame the agent. Now, we had this problem in the beginning of Kimmel, which is 21 years ago now. The show didn’t initially stick to the pre-interview.
Pre-interview is where a guest coordinator, a producer who specializes in talking to guests, finds out what they want to talk about, gets some good stories out of them, and then runs that stuff by the host of the show. This is standard procedure for most, if not all, mainstream late-night shows. There’s a show called “Ziwe” that specializes in uncomfortable questions, but every mainstream ABC, NBC, CBS talk show sticks to the pre-interview. At the beginning of Kimmel in 2003, Jimmy wouldn’t do that. He thought it was more fun to ask whatever. This made some guests uneasy, and they reported back to their reps, and their reps quit supplying guests to the show because they didn’t want their clients to feel awkward. So for a while, the show had trouble booking guests until they learned how to play ball.
So I assume when you’re trying to talk to agents, you need to tell them that you’re gonna make the guests, the interview subjects, shine, that you’re not gonna make them look stupid, that you’re gonna make them look like people of heft, serious people who have serious thoughts about the world. You’re not interested in playing some game of gotcha. So, comments?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The key would probably be to look into something they’re interested in outside of their acting and then talk to them about that. Clooney, obviously, he’s married to Amal. He has adjacent information about serious human rights abuse.
Rosner: So you could ask him about that.
Jacobsen: Yes.
Rosner: And others. If they also want to be interviewed. You’re never interested in making your guests look bad. That’s one of your specialties—meeting your interview subjects where they are, where their interests are, where their expertise is, and talking to them about that. So you’d be kind of perfect for this. So there you go.
Jacobsen: It’s a great idea. No, I cannot take credit for this idea. You’ve mentioned this before. This is your idea originally. This is a more formal pitch.
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