Saturday 26 January 2002

Fifteen minutes with Mariah

It was an offer I couldn't refuse: 15 minutes of face time with Mariah Carey, together with her co-stars in the mob comedy "Wise Girls", Mira Sorvino and Melora Walters, which was having its world premiere at the just-ended Sundance Film Festival. My first warning that it was too good to be true came the afternoon before my 15 minutes of fame, when the movie's publicists told me they couldn't guarantee me a ticket for the film's premiere showing at the festival's biggest venue, the 1,200-seat Eccles Auditorium.

When I told them to forget about the interview, they agreed to give me a ticket - but they didn't actually produce one until after more than an hour of waiting in a huge crowd drawn by Mariah's glittering presence, which didn't come until nearly a half hour after the scheduled starting time.

The movie itself turned out to be a fairly generic comic thriller - punctuated by Scorsese-like outbursts of violence - about three feisty waitresses in a Staten Island restaurant run by a mobster. Mariah is a lot more relaxed and natural in this movie than she was in "Glitter", where she had to carry the entire misbegotten production on her slender shoulders.

I arrived early for the interview the next afternoon, even though interviews typically take place anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes after their scheduled time in festival setting. The venue was Motorola House, one of several corporate-sponsored celebrity "retreats" way up in the hills of Deer Valley, when the glitterati can scarf up freebies like cell phones and sunglasses. There were a gaggle of writers and TV crews sitting around, wearing expressions of varying exasperation and munching on lukewarm lasagna.

I was told the three divas were running "a little late" because Mira Sorvino had broken down when a TV crew asked her about the death of Ted Demme, who had directed her in the 1996 film "Beautiful Girls". Sorvino looked perfectly composed when I watch her being interviewed for an MTV segment later.

That's more than I could say for Mariah, who wore a black cowboy hat, a black cat suit, boots and a deer-caught-in-the-headlights expression with a frozen smile. From a distance of 10 feet, it looked as if Sorvino were doing almost all of the talking for the three of them. That was the closest I ever got to Mariah. Fed-up reporters starting leaving, and I bailed out after being told for an hour and a half that I would be seeing the stars in 15 minutes or so. No apologies were forthcoming from the L.A.-based publicists, who won't be getting much attention from these quarters in the future.

(The New York Times)

Many thanks to Mariah Land.



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