I am Romina Puga

For the record, I am firmly with Jesse Eisenberg with respect this ridiculous dustup, and I don't think what he did to the fluffy little Romina Puga falls under the category of "berating" at all. I also think Puga's response to it was repellently opportunistic. My advice to any self-described entertainment journalist who does "schtick" is, when in the cattle call situation of the movie-promoting video junket, to give a little heads-up to the publicist or the talent before you start rolling, so the talent at least has the benefit of some knowledge and hence the opportunity to play along if he or she wishes. Eisenberg is clearly caught off-guard by Puga's arguably ostentatiously breezy style right off the bat, and registers more trying-to-regain-balance bemusement than actual hostility for the rest of the encounter. For Puga to try and turn this around and act as if Eisenberg maliciously ripped her a new one is utter bullshit.

And yet. I understand, in a sense, her pain. In spring of last year, I was assigned by my MSN editors to do a round of video junket interviews for 21 Jump Street. I don't consider myself particularly telegenic, and the video junket format isn't my favorite way to conduct interviews. But as Hyman Roth says in The Godfather Part 2, this is the business we've chosen, and as an aging white male ostensible film critic in the twilight of print and all that my feeling is that maybe I ought to take every available opportunity to diversify my skill set and earn income. Although, like I said, in my gut I pretty much know I'll never be an entirely acceptable on-camera presence until I at least get my horribly dingy teeth replaced. And maybe grow some fucking hair.

I enjoyed the movie version of 21 Jump Street, and I was particularly amused by the way it toggled between coarse homoerotic male bonding jokes and relatively sophisticated meta humor. This suggested, in my mind, a question, that I mentally filed away prior to the day of the junket. The actual day of said junket was not an auspicious one, generally speaking. It was a gray and chilly and rainy day in early March, a Saturday at that, and my call to show up at the swanky hotel where the interviews were being staged was nine in the morning. To top all that off, I was starting to get a cold.

Arguably, 21 Jump Street costars Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum might have had it a little worse. For their interviews, they dressed in costumes they wear to comic effect in the film, that is, the black shorts worn by police officers who patrol on bicycles. The joke in the movie being, they go through all this training and think they're gonna be totally badass and their first gig out of the academy is bike patrol in a local park. Ar ar ar. So here these two guys are at nine in the morning on a Saturday in silly outfits. Maybe it was their idea. I don't know. I choose, for some reason, to believe that it was not.

Perhaps that reason is their demeanor as I was brought in to begin my interview. In addition to the shorts and clingy shirts, Hill and Tatum wore dark wraparound sunglasses. We exchanged greetings that struck me as extra-perfunctory before I sat down.

As it happens, I'm friendly with both a director and an actor who've worked with Hill in kind of notable contexts, and I'm also on terms with a director with whom Tatum has profitably collaborated. My relations with these other people are arguably not intimate, but they're also on a level higher than that of cordial acquaintance. So I thought about dropping a name or two, if it could get things off on the right foot. And then I thought better of it. Because I didn't want to be that guy. (Even now, I worry that I'm being that guy just by mentioning it. God, no wonder I drank.)

Would that I had. Maybe it would have been worse. Anyway, as we began rolling I asked Hill, "As both a star and producer on this movie, did you keep tabs on the ratio of homoerotic male-bonding jokes to self-reflexive ones?" Or something along those lines. Delivered in what I hoped was my best hail-fellow-well-met jocular tones. And even from behind the shades, I could see Hill's genuinely withering contempt as he answered, "I assume that was some kind of attempt at humor, and I'm going to ignore it and just say I had a great time making the movie."

Now what the viewer is not privy to while watching these manufactured snippets is that each journalist doing these interviews is allotted a very specific time limit, and that time limit doesn't allow for reshoots. And when I say specific, I mean very—two minutes to the second, in some instances. So when my admitedly silly—but then again I mean what the hell, THEY were the guys sitting down in biking shorts—question got that response, my strong burning sense of humiliation mingled with a kind of panic. I had unwittingly wasted maybe thirty seconds of time, which means I had to scramble to get anything usable in my remaining minute and a half with the fellows. Even in the best of situations with these things, in which the talent is genuinely enjoying the exchange and you're actually able to get good stuff, there's a publicist off to the side giving you the throat-cutting sign. And yes, the talent has to sit there for the better part of an entire working day doing the same thing in two-to-five minute patches. How badly do you want to be famous? Badly enough to be cool with doing that? Because maybe you should try it some time.

I couldn't call to restart the session so I just switched to automatic inane innocuous pilot, and salvaged the encounter, but as anyone who looks at the footage will note, nobody involved in the exchange is particularly interested in simulating even a simulation of chumminess. 

Was I angry? Fuck yeah. I was furious. I got up and showered and shaved and dressed and schlepped to Manhattan on a rainy miserable Saturday morning when I could have been sleeping in with My Lovely Wife so I could be insulted by Jonah Hill? Seriously? When the video posted, I put up a blog post here and I alluded to the shutting-down and I remember feeling as if I was being incredibly restrained while so doing. One of the professional associates of Hill with whom I am friendly sent me an e-mail which in effect said, that's too bad. Which it was. And the point is: that's all it was. Too bad. It wasn't the end of the world, it wasn't cause for me to nurse a grudge against Jonah Hill (for all the good that would do). It's just a minor anecdote concerning an interaction that took place in a context that in most respects has very little to do with what constitutes the real world for either Hill and myself. Puga's reaction to the Eisenberg incident only has validity if one accepts the idea that she and Eisenberg have some sort of gnuine relationship to each other. They do not. Similarly, my day-to-day life has nothing to do with Jonah Hill's. All any of this means is that if one wants respect within the context of one's profession, one ought to conduct oneself professionally. That's not a guarantee that respect will be given, but at least it gives you a leg to stand on. Be an entertainmnent journalist, or be Rupert Pupkin. You can't have it both ways. 

And finally, as "Freeman" put it in Bonfire of the Vanities, "be decent to each other." And Romina Puga, buy a goddamn paper notebook or something. 

Comments

[James Rocchi]

Nothing is worse than the sight of one's self on-camera, so I feel your pain ... and feel it on a regular basis, several times a month.

J.

[Anon]

Fluff piece celebrity interviews can be terrible for everyone involved. A friend of mine had to do a red carpet interview once and was told by her editor to ask a fairly dumb question that, as she expected, got a disdainful look and no printable answer.

I had to do one myself in school during the brief time I worked in radio. It was a public concert in Washington, and I was getting my recorder and mic ready when the event's celebrity host blew up while talking with a group of TV reporters about twenty yards from me. I looked at the PR rep, thinking "this isn't happening, is it?" To my surprise, the host walked over, spotted me, and basically aired all his grievances to me about the inane questions he was being asked while the other reporters watched quietly from their original spot.

[Robert Cashill]

You aren't the only one to have incurred the wrath of Hill: http://www.vulture.com/2013/06/hill-rogen-franco-on-weed-farts-masturbating.html?mid=vulture_newsletter&utm_source=cheetah&utm_medium=email

[bill]

I deal with lots of very rude people every day. Jonah Hill has no excuse. That story has always made me dislike him just a little bit more, even though I don't dislike him on screen.

Now, the weed/masturbating/farts thing...in that case I think he went to easy on the guy.

[mw]

I watched the clip and gotta say I sided entirely with Puga. To me, Eisenberg came off as the most irritating kind of douche. Given that performance, I'd guess he has a few years, at best, playing irritating guys who one way or another end up getting pantsed and then before long he'll turn up on one of those former celebrity losers shows. I can't recall ever seeing any Hollywood star act with less class than he did in the Carrot Top exchange. Thinking... thinking... no, I honestly can't recall seeing worse.

[bill]

Finally watched the Eisehberg thing. He was trying to be a charming smartass, and she played along
Then later on she thought about it and decided there was brief fame to he extracted froj this.

And on her blog, her transcription of her own interview is inaccurate.

[bill]

Okay, double checked, I misread her blog. But she was still playing along with Eisenberg, until she saw an opportunity.

PS - sorry about the typos in the previous comment. I dislike modern day devices.

[Brandon Irvine]

First: I think we need some sort of non-telegenic pride movement. I mean, we're just average looking people. Are we to be shamed by the mere fact we aren't in the 10% of the telegenic population?

Second: As dull as these interviews are, anybody promoting a movie about bank-robbing magicians needs to have a sense of humor about it.

Third: I skimmed as much of the Rolling Stone article on Hill/Rogen/Franco as I could stand. It really is so bad that maybe I'd give Hill a pass for being douchey to the writer.

[TVMCCA]

And here's Rhys Ifans expressing discomfort with an interviewer:
http://www.eonline.com/news/427038/rhys-ifans-gives-interview-from-hell-blames-antibiotics-for-slurred-ranting?cmpid=tweol-manual

[Jeff McMahon]

It's an awkward situation from the get-go, but your question seems (a) entirely reasonable and (b) more interesting than usual for the context. So Hill was the one being unprofessional.

But yeah, not ultimately a big deal. It could have been worse. It could have been Tommy Lee Jones.

[Cadavra]

Puga is just another of those twerps with zero skills who gets hired because she's cute and skinny; no actual ability or intelligence required. She's just lucky she's never interviewed Tommy Lee Jones.

As for Hill: he was, is and always will be a dick. That he has a career at all is cosmic retribution upon the world for some unknown sin.

[TVMCCA]

Sort of a greatest-hits compilation of celeb interviews gone wrong:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2013/jun/07/rhys-ifans-worst-celebrity-interviews?CMP=twt_fd

[Oliver_C]

TVMCCA beat me to posting the above link, but Google 'Meg Ryan Michael Parkinson' if you want to see the antagonism of Hill and Eisenberg look like amateur hour.

[Stefan]

Entitlement. These actors make more per day of sitting there answering that schlock than a lot of the editors make in a year - so guess what - they can cope. Part of the job. Don't like it? Go work in a call center, or any kind of marketing/sales.

I think Eisenberg was being a smug bastard. He clearly felt he had the intellectual upper hand on the interviewer, and made no beans about absolutely skewering her throughout the interview. This from the dude who went after zombies and voiced a blue CG bird. Is he good at his craft? Sure. Probably quite intelligent too. This is not Revenge of the Nerds though - not the time to exact your ire on a hapless interviewer. And so she had stick - roll with it. I have to reckon Robert Downey would have been much more charming about the whole thing, whether he took her seriously or not.

And you - you sound like sour grapes. The upper classman who won't help. You got toasted once, didn't like it, and got glib response to the whole thing - which is a shame, and frankly an abuse of their (actors) station. However, you instead seem to project it on her as if she - indeed all of you "deserve" this somehow. Really? 'Coz these actors have it so, so bad?

[Glenn Kenny]

I do enjoy a good "fuck all y'all" comment every now and then. I must say.

[Robert Cashill]

Oscar nominee Jonah Hill doesn't have time for your nonsense: http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/jonah_hill_doesn_answer_dumb_questions_eS72PrDqP9lmxDo8OlJDJP

[Don]

I thought Hill came across as kind of a self-important dick in the RS interview (althought the interviewer certainly didn't help himself by greeting Hill as "Seth"!), and Glenn's anecdote only reinforces that opinion.

[jbryant]

I finally watched the Puga/Eisenberg encounter, and it seems rather clear to me that he was going along with her shtick quite well until her reaction to the "Carrot Top" comment. But I thought he was simply referring to her bringing out the deck of cards (Carrot Top is a prop comic), not making some sort of qualitative judgment about her interviewing. After that, sure, he makes some snarkier remarks, but she's the one who changes the tone of the interview.

Also, it's a good thing she's an on-camera personality rather than a writer. The quote from her blog features such gems as "When the five-minute interview...were over..." and "I peaked around the curtain..."

[preston]

Would love to see a Ginger Baker/Romina Puga interview. Doubt she could even get him to speak in her allotted 5 mins. Or Ginger on 'The View', or Ginger anywhere...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2013/may/15/beware-mr-baker-qa-ginger-baker-video