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October 18, 2002
...But He Plays One on TV: Ron Silver to Guest-Host "Crossfire"
Washington Post
AOL Time Warner-owned CNN has asked Ron Silver, who plays a presidential election strategist on "The West Wing," produced by AOL Time Warner-owned Warner Bros., to guest-host "Crossfire" tonight.
Silver, a political activist and one of the founders of the Creative Coalition, will do battle with Bow Tie Boy on the Right.
Poor Bow Tie Boy.
Silver's filling in for real-life presidential election strategists James Carville and Paul Begala, neither of whom could make tonight's live show, said senior executive producer Sam Feist.
Feist insisted that the whole AOL Time Warner you-scratch-my-back-I'll- scratch-yours thing never entered into the conversation when he was deciding to ask Silver to guest.
"It never was a factor," Feist told The TV Column. "He has done 'Crossfire' plenty of times in the past. . . . We love having him on" as guest host.
Actually, the last time Silver was on "Crossfire," according to CNN, was way back in 1992 when the show was debating the merits of Vice President Quayle's attack on the fictitious unmarried woman Murphy Brown, about the fictitious baby she fictitiously conceived in the course of the CBS scripted fiction sitcom "Murphy Brown."
But the "Crossfire" discussion that night quickly devolved into a skirmish between Silver and Charlton Heston, repping the right, over whether Heston should have played Michelangelo in the 1965 film "The Agony and the Ecstasy," since the artist was gay:
Silver: Mr. Heston had a very distinguished career and still does. He starred in a movie called "Michelangelo." Now, I don't know, Chuck, you can tell me. Were you gay in that movie? Because Michelangelo was a gay person. He was serving gay popes, Julius. There was a lot of gay artists in the Renaissance --
Heston: It seems a curious point to be raising in our current debate, Ron, but I --
Silver: Well, Pat Buchanan raises the debate.
Heston: . . . I've studied Michelangelo and I perhaps know more about his life than most people do. The least important thing in his whole life was his sexual orientation. He had no relations with either men or women except on two separate occasions . . . The only thing in the world he cared about was carving marble.
We can only hope that tonight's "Crossfire" is as entertaining.
Asked if "Crossfire" has had any other celebrity guest hosts since it was revamped in April, Feist cited Dee Dee Myers and Ann Coulter. Yes, in Washington, D.C., Myers and Coulter are considered celebrities. Sigh.
Actually, when we later mentioned Feist's comment in a conversation with CNN's Washington publicist, she got back with us to clarify that Feist had thought we'd asked him about guest hosts, not celebrity guest hosts, and that he certainly didn't think that Dee Dee Myers was a celebrity.
On the other hand, the rep noted that when she moved to Washington recently, she had lunch with a bunch of youngish women who pronounced Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld handsome. So there you go.
Posted by MorganG at October 18, 2002 03:48 PM