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1 October 2004
Real Time with Bill Maher
Last evening, Chris, Yi, Nevin and I went to watch a live broadcast of Real Time with Bill Maher. Real Time with Bill Maher is a weekly talk show mainly focusing on political issues that airs on HBO at 11pm every Friday. Unlike talk shows that are taped like Jay Leno's Tonight Show or David Letterman's Late Show, Bill Maher's show goes live on the air for East Coast viewers. We were asked to be present at Studio 33, a CBS studio leased to HBO for the show at 6.30pm. We started off at 5pm from Caltech and made it with 30 minutes to spare. There was a good crowd of people, mainly white Caucasian couples spending a Friday evening with friends. Needless to say, this being an HBO show there was virtually nobody who could not legally drink that was present. We were lined up on long benches outside the main entrance into the studio for about an hour. Soon afterwards, we were led into the innards of the studio where the show was going to be aired.It was a good thing that we came in early, for as expected the rows got filled in the order of arrival. All four of us had reasonably good seats but there was griping from the others who could not see the stage beyond the elaborate production tools and camera equipment. The production set itself looked to be a touched up relic of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The light machines at the top were newly painted but still could not hide their proud and weary years.
At about twenty minutes into the show, the supervising producer appeared on stage to check if the satellite links were working perfectly. There were satellite links to Washington D.C. for Tucker Carlson and to Pittsburgh where the Dixie Chicks were going to appear on the show mid-concert. Soon after the producer, one of the writers for the show came on and he was a highly-strung and perky chap. He was understandably trying to get the crowd worked up giving us guidelines on responses and applause. He mentioned that this was the 37th recording of the show and amazingly all the previous 36 times Bill Maher had got a standing ovation from the audience. Actually, it was the 38th recording as I later found out on the show website. There was an obligatory poll of the political leanings of the audience and not surprisingly with the exception of three men, one of them with a Bush-Cheny T-shirt on, the rest of the audience were "Kerry people". The "Bush people" were profusely thanked for "their guy" making Kerry "look good". He also polled the crowd on swing states anybody came from. There was one from Ohio and one from Kentucky who feared it was going to "swing the wrong way". He warned the crowd that the show was not for the politically correct and urged those that took umbrage at comments being made to "get the fuck out of here". The show started off with a segment featuring Bill Maher and two others commenting on the fashion high-notes the previous day at the first debate. On Kerry's appearance -- "Orange is the new black" and on Bush's appearance -- "Bush weathered and won the first debate four years ago, and so has his suit". The man himself appeared immediately afterwards to a rousing and standing ovation from all of us with the exception of one elderly woman who remained seated with a copy of The Jewish Journal (The Greater Los Angeles edition). He looked quite the same as on television albeit with a greying crown of hair. He read out a prepared monologue that appeared on a teleprompter which was being regulated amongst other equipment by a neatly dressed bearded man just below the elevated stage. The monologue featured news from the debates and from elsewhere. The guests appearing on the show were announced -- George Carlin, Katty Kay - a journalist from the BBC Washington Bureau, and Steve Moore with the Club for Growth a somewhat well-balanced assortment if one were to think of BBC as being independent and unbiased towards the election.
The Dixie Chicks appeared live on a satin-white screen that lowered from the ceiling and Bill Maher went left of centrestage to a lectern directly in front of the screen. The Dixie Chicks were featuring in the Vote for Change concerts sponsored by MoveOn PAC that were playing in all the battleground states. Maher quizzed the group on the crowd responses and they were honest enough to admit that it had not been all that good exhorting people to buy tickets for their jig in St. Louis. After that was the actual round-table debate itself as the guests who were standing on the sidelines all this while came on stage. Steve Moore got a couple of boos, Katty Kay got some bemused applause but George Carlin got the biggest cheers and whistling. The discussion ranged from the debate to Iraq, which Steve Moore seemed to think was the centrepiece of the entire election -- people would vote depending on how convinced they were of the validity of action in Iraq and on to tax breaks. He also touted his organisation's policy by suggesting revocation of an income tax and the imposition of a flat tax. The draft became an issue too which was interesting from the point of view that George Bush deemed it necessary to mention "an all-volunteer army" in his closing statement. The three debated on why the draft might be inevitable on account of the overextension of forces with some from the U.S. National Guard and the reserves already seeing action in Iraq. Carlin kept returning with spite to the "ownership class" -- a group of 900 people that he claimed ran the country and suggested a "rich-kids draft" for a while. Katty Kay referred to how the British prime minister, perhaps out of political compulsions, apologised publicly for misleading intelligence on the weapons in Iraq and wondered if that would ever be repeated in the United States. The predominantly Democrat crowd was quite vocal and expressed anguish at the draft and contempt for Steve Moore's defence of the U.S president applauding and laughing loudly at Maher's jokes unmindful of drowning the panel out. Bill Maher cited a report that said that while previously pornography was the hottest genre in video rentals immediately after the war, now videos showing beheadings of kidnapped foreigners set to Arabic chantings have topped even pornography.
Subsequently, Tucker Carlson was invoked on the satellite link and was asked of his appraisal of the debate. Carlson admitted that Bush was "out of his game" and was promptly rounded off by Maher. Carlson however seemed to hold his own in comparison to Moore when asked about the war. He admitted that he disagreed with Bush on Iraq but felt puzzled about Kerry's stand on the war. Maher quizzed Carlson on a couple of issues to judge if the latter could fend off allegations that "Republicans stood by people and not principles". Carlson blundered on the question on the revealing of the identity of a CIA official on the issue of the weapons probe and avowed that "a journalist had the right to report the truth". Maher pounced on that and asked if a journalist could report the U.S. army positions in Iraq but offered Carlson a lifeline by way of a light reference that Carlson clutched onto. Of course, the crowd never forgave him and was shocked by his utterance. When Carlson was asked if the drug enforcement policy was being given the go-by, he played his cards better by stating unequivocally that a responsible individual had the right to use drugs and the state had no right to interfere with that which was indeed in accordance to his "Republican principles" but not of course meeting approval from his blue state focus group that evening. What followed after Carlson was mere meandering though there were some heated moments on tax breaks for the Church which Steve Moore sided with Maher in his disapproval of. Carlin however, known for his views on religion, was the person Maher intended the bait for which he took cleanly giving a rather clear and sharp account of his convictions. Carlin had not taken note of the nearly universal wedding band on each audience member's hand, and the only people urging him to give it as he got now were a man in a hat whistling and clapping wildly everytime Carlin derided the concept of a higher individual sitting in the clouds and reviewing the actions of his children and a few others in small pockets here and there in the gallery.
From then on, the show petered out and finally ended with another round of standing ovations after which Bill Maher taped a segment for AOL, the "parent company" as he called it although I should have thought it was Time Warner that bought AOL which is the parent company. On the whole, it was an exhilarating experience just to be in a live talk show and being part of television as it was made. At the end of it all though, the show primarily catered to the evening entertainment of a hundred thousand rich liberalists and a few others who would sample the forbidden fruit in their hotel rooms and move elsewhere probably finding the show too jarring or too rabidly opinionated. There did not seem to me to be enough material for an hour's worth even though the panel did touch on a few notable issues. As goes for the comedy, Maher was definitely in his element but clouded it with his role presumably as the anti-Bill O'Reilly. I returned to my insulated haunt within Caltech once again to think of myself as living in a time and place relevant to humanity.
