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February 26, 2004 #
 Chris Gage gets caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Here is his official statement to the authorities: Esquire treads the high and low ground rather nicely most of the time, and though I couldn't afford any of the suits in the "Ten Best (and Worst) Dressed Men in America" article even if I sold a kidney and a liver, the rag's not entirely bad. (Though the complete headline of the article is "Ten Best (and Worst) Dressed Men in America, Are You One?", which is frankly confusing. The day I open Esquire to find myself on its best dressed list is the day I'm deep-dipping with Johnny Depp's girlfriend in France and wondering how Esquire tastes when eaten off her stomach with French vanilla ice cream.) Regardless, the thing bats .500, which means I don't use it to kill roaches but I do only read it on the can. The March 2004 interview with Mark Ruffalo contained so few sentences of interest to anyone (and I include the interviewer here as well) that it was pathetic. A puff piece is fine (Ruffalo has barely entered his own family's lexicon, let alone the general public's, so the quip on the opening page that says "[Ruffalo] could be the best actor in Hollywood right now" is a little premature, unless it's Cannes season and all of Hollywood has emptied out like my bowels after a 3 a.m. stop at Poquitos.) but if you're going to give these people a hand job, have a heart and at least finish a brother off. This interview's sole purpose appears to have been to placate whichever PR wonk dangled the actor in front of the editors and said, "Yeah, I hadn't heard of him either but the fat cats over in L.A. are riding me to get him some press like I was a sluttier Tara Reid." Maybe the good questions were asked and the subject responded in kind, but there wouldn't even be enough room to even use them if they were. A whole wasted page with stars proclaims "American Ruffalo," and the subsequent one and a half pages contains nothing more interesting than idiot-proof questions like "What's it like being married to a French lady?" and "So, do any of the eight hundred auctions stand out in your mind?" Good stuff. There's no reason to assume the Esquire staff is incapable of conducting a decent interview. One can only blame whatever suck-up to the marketing department is at the helm of the features section. I assume it's not a college graduate but I suppose online courses with the University of Arizona do contain more than surfing for porn while the "instructor" "teaches" so I won't be too quick to judge.
C'mon, these things are not hard. They're interviews
not Times' Op Ed pieces or even French
Vogue fashion spreads, for crying out
loud. These things are done on a daily basis by college
journalists with C-minus GPAs and one-room
apartments in square states. Ask a few
questions, don't reinvent the wheel, and let
the interviewee speak. True, Ruffalo is an actor and
probably not the most eloquent of speakers but I'm
sure he has better things to do with his time than
yuck it up with a hamstrung interviewer. |
