Even the media don't know what to make of themselves these days. The walls between reality and TV keep collapsing, and even ordinary people find themselves in the spotlight. Some shows bare uncomfortably intimate details about otherwise unremarkable or even repugnant people most of us wouldn't have lunch with, let alone invite into our homes.
What is it about these private lives that can be so compelling? What merits "celebrity"? And to what does celebrity entitle one, anyway?
Director Ron Howard's comedy "EDtv" will tackle these questions and more when it hits theaters March 26.
During filming, after-hours on the set of "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," commandeered by Howard and his cast and crew for the evening, life was imitating art imitating life.
For even though these crew folks have been working weeks alongside people like Matthew McConaughey, Jenna Elfman, Elizabeth Hurley, Woody Harrelson, Ellen DeGeneres and Martin Landau, it is apparent that they can still be star-struck--by, of all things, Leno's set.
Between takes, an endless parade of crew members test-drive Leno's chair, shuffles his note cards, poses for snapshots--even Howard joins in.
The premise of "EDtv" is sort of "The Truman Show" in reverse--an amiable white-trash schlub named Ed (McConaughey) wins a "talent" search and becomes the star of his own, round-the-clock TV show, thrust before cameras his every waking hour. After initially embracing the rewards of fame, he discovers the brutal downside: fair-weather fans, friends who ride his coattails for profit and the creeping, creepy realization that he's given so much of himself away to his audience that there's nothing left for--or of--him.
At one point, Ed sulks, "They're gonna cancel me," as if he's developed a tumor; fame and life itself have become the same thing.
It's a canny piece of one-stop shopping: "EDtv" comments on the smorgasbord of mass-media concoctions about truth, refracted through a camera lens, insistently intruding on our nation's inner life. These range from PBS' 1970s documentary on the Loud family, to Albert Brooks' hilarious 1979 film "Real Life," to MTV's "Real World" and the spiteful spate of reality and trash-TV series that spring--a la Jerry Springer--onto the airwaves today.
"The producers [of Ed's tele-existence] are more interested in the circus that swirls around Ed than they are, really, in Ed," Howard explains. "There's a line, 'People can't look away from a traffic accident. For somebody, this is a traffic accident--we just don't have to tell them.' That's where they think the fun is."
"There's definitely the mentality where no intrusion is too much. It doesn't matter who just died or what happened, it's not about feelings, it's just 'Get the shot, get it,' " adds McConaughey. "They say, 'We need screw-ups, give us soap opera, embarrass yourself.' So then Ed's a laughingstock."
Screenwriter (with longtime collaborator Babaloo Mandel) Lowell Ganz says, "At what point does it switch from an observation of a person's supposedly normal life into an observation of how being on TV changes your life? People who are responsible for the show don't care. They're not in this for the science. They're not behaviorists. They're TV people. They don't care for what reason it becomes popular or remains popular, only that it does.
"America gets sucked into it, gets enraptured," says Elfman, who plays Shari, Ed's earthy, blue-collar girlfriend, the lone voice of reason amid the media madness. "If a guy down the street had problems with his girlfriend or his brother's a jerk, no one would care. She disagrees with this phenomenon when everyone else is in full acceptance. Shari cannot take the phenomenon."
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Certainly, several in the cast have been caught in the wake of Stupid Media Tricks. McConaughey was trumpeted from the cover of Vanity Fair no less as the Next Hot Thing before anyone had even seen him carry a movie. Harrelson, who plays Ed's scheming, scattered brother, has inspired profiles portraying him as a kook because of his earnest pro-hemp activism and individualistic lifestyle.
Hurley famously weathered a little tumult sparked by boyfriend Hugh Grant's extracurricular activities (and was chided by tabloids for wearing a revealing dress to a wedding).
And no doubt you've heard of DeGeneres, whom the media transformed in the course of one TV season from a courageous gay-issues advocate to a sorehead detecting homophobia in every network executive's power suit--in the film she plays a network executive. (DeGeneres declined to comment for this article; Harrelson was unavailable.)
As Howard's producer-partner Brian Grazer explains, "In our casting, we were sensitive to what was going on in their lives beyond their skills as artists. We were aware of it, we were sensitive to it, and we sort of enjoyed playing to it."
