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Tabloid nation | page 1, 2
Disney is one of many who may not be pleased at how they are depicted in "Tabloid Baby." Her stated desire to class up "A Current Affair" clashed with some of the excesses that occurred on her watch -- most notably Steve Dunleavy's payment to a witness in the William Kennedy Smith trial. (The $40,000 he paid to Anne Mercer, who drove Smith's alleged victim from the Kennedy mansion that night, caused Mercer's testimony to be discredited. "I have to thank Steve Dunleavy for what he did with Anne Mercer," Smith's attorney said when his client went free.) Kearns is not above floating a few old rumors about Disney's marital problems and personal life in his book, and says that she tried to keep it from getting published. "She was running Harper-Collins at the time," he says. "She'd seen the book. It went to her company. She didn't want it published. I don't hold that against her." (Disney, who is now vice president of content at News Corp., could not be reached for comment.) The Kennedy Smith saga was a "Hard Copy" exclusive at first; "A Current Affair" and "Inside Edition" tried to take the high road. "And the network guys didn't understand that it was news," says Kearns. "Shows how wrong they were. And it showed how little sleazy tabloid stories can turn into news. It ignited the whole debate on date rape, naming the victims in rape trials." (It's worth noting that the New York Times was one of the first papers to identify Smith's accuser by name.) "And then, months later, when Clarence Thomas was up for the Supreme Court judgeship, and he got involved in the thing with Anita Hill, Teddy Kennedy, the great voice of liberalism, couldn't open his mouth because he'd been shamed in this case." One could argue that almost any Kennedy story can be made into tabloid fodder without turning the dial too far, what with that big back story of family tragedy and misadventure. The first real crossover tabloid story of the '90s broke on May 10, 1992, when Amy Fisher shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco in Massapequa, N.Y. It had all the elements of a true-life soap -- the clueless wife, the loutish Lothario, the mystery vixen -- save one. "There was no one in the story you could feel sorry for," says Kearns, "no one that you could identify with. In every tabloid story there is one character -- you see [the story] through that person's eyes, you identify with that person. In the Buttafuoco story you couldn't identify with the victim." As the story morphed and grew, with new revelations every week and more and more perfidy captured on tape, the nation reached saturation. Even People magazine now seemed to subsist on the "Long Island Lolita." We had become a tabloid nation. O.J. Simpson, of course, gave us victims we could identify with and a slow train wreck of a trial that was virtually inescapable. The "tabloid babies" of Kearns' narrative had crossed over to the networks (even as some network people went in the other direction). The first time "Nightline" covered the murders, five days after Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were killed, Ted Koppel apologized; when the ratings went through the roof, he quit saying he was sorry. Soon it was all O.J., all the time, from Regis and Kathie Lee in the morning to Jay Leno jokes at night. The trial itself took center stage and tabloid TV as practiced by Kearns and company seemed downright quaint. "When the world was watching from their offices live," he says, "we were repackaging it with alliteration and music -- who needs that shit?" Today, in place of "Hard Copy" and "A Current Affair," we have "Dateline," "60 Minutes II," "20/20" and "48 Hours" -- and that's just on the networks. Kearns wrote some pilots and cast about for a new project. His collected notes came together in "Tabloid Baby," which he is promoting now with the help of his wife, Allison Holloway, another veteran of the scene. He doesn't come out and say that he couldn't get arrested after a career in tabloid television, though he admits his prospects looked dim. His last project was for Fox: "When Pets Go Bad II." I ask him how people come up with ideas like that. "You walk into a room, it's like the monkeys with the typewriters," he says. "It's full of video monitors and people are transcribing every piece of video in the world. And they might find they have 10 great pieces of video of animals attacking people -- 'When Pets Go Bad!'" Voila. A lot of it is in the packaging -- like that film of a donkey sexually assaulting a man whom the beast had found defecating in his pasture. "Fox has always wanted to air it but never could," Kearns claims. "Every time someone presented it to them they would put on ragtime music and sound effects -- 'Boing!' I saw it and was horrified. This makes 'Oz' look like 'Touched by an Angel.' It was horrific. So I played it very straight and put some scary music behind it -- 'This man is invading the territory of an animal ...'" For the holidays they had footage of a Santa being attacked by one of his reindeer. It was a reenactment, actually. The injured Santa was demonstrating how he'd been attacked, but things went badly. "He was screaming, 'Help!'" Kearns recalls, nursing the last of his beer. "We thought he was doing it for the camera but, no, he was bloody. It rated very well."
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