Mr. Media Interviews by Bob Andelman
Friday, September 14, 2007
Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New Media Professor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1
I don’t know about you, but I could spend hours on end doing stuff on the Internet, some of it productive, some of it, well, not.
And some days, it’s hard separating the two because one is generally just as distracting as the other.
I’m hoping that today’s guest, Sree Sreenivasan, can help all of us sort out the time-wasters from the time-benefitters. And no, I don’t think that’s a real word.
Sree is one of journalism’s last great multi-taskers. He’s a New Media professor and dean of students in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. But he’s also a technology reporter for WNBC television in New York City and a regular columnist for Poynter Online. Oh, and he is, naturally, a blogger too at sreetips.com.
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Sree, Facebook was recently featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine, basically alerting the general public that there was a new cultural phenomenon upon us or there had been for a while for college kids, I guess. I know you use Facebook, and I wondered if you could start by talking a little bit about how you use it and what the pros and cons of the service might be.
SREE SREENIVASAN: Facebook is one of the sites that you think you don’t need it until you start using it and then you get so addicted very fast. I got a note the other day from a friend I’ve been trying to get on Facebook for a while, and he said, “I have no use for this, I have no use for this.” And then the other day, he wrote me a note saying, “Oh my God, I love this site.”
The way I look at Facebook is, it’s an example of how you can use technology as a great way to reconnect with friends and family and make some new friends. But also it shows you how much of a time thing it can be if you let it get to be that way. And we’re seeing people, including me, who can go on and an hour later, you’re emerging from it, sometimes two hours later from it.
What you do is you go on to Facebook, you create an account, and you start by finding your friends. And you say, “I already have email, why do I need this? I might even be using instant messaging and a cell phone and text messages. Isn’t it just one more thing?” And, in fact, it is one more thing, but it has its own kind of style and its own attractiveness about it that is sort of hard to explain. But it’s very easy to use, and I’ve been reconnecting with friends who I have an email relationship with, but now I see them and talk to them more often on my computer screen than when I just did with email itself.
SREENIVASAN: I think that’s a great way to do it. And whenever you write to someone, make sure you put in a little note explaining why you’re writing and why you’re using this because there are also some other services, including Friendster and Plaxo and all these things, that are just sending out, using your email contacts and connecting you to people sometimes even when you didn’t mean to connect with them. So indicate in some fashion that this is something you are serious about as opposed to some of the other services that you accidentally tried once or just tested out. But, if you’re really into this, let them know, and then your friends will follow you there.
ANDELMAN: Do you have any personal stories of people you’ve reconnected with through Facebook, in particular?
SREENIVASAN: Yes. I reconnected with some of my younger cousins through Facebook. Sometimes -- and this is also an example of how you can be careful about it -- there’s one particular cousin who I connected with, and we’re now emailing a lot more than I did before or Facebooking a lot more than we did before. But I also noticed that, as everyone in her generation, she’s putting up photographs and putting up details of her life that no older cousin should know about, mainly so that I have a kind of plausible deniability from my uncle and aunt. If they ever ask me, “So how is so and so doing, what is she up to?” I can say I don’t know. So I have often gone into people’s photographs which they’ve put and then I suddenly back out and try to erase it from mind’s hard drive.
That’s just one of the ways I’ve been using it, but I’ve also been using it as a great way to communicate with former classmates and also my current students. You can form what are called groups on Facebook, and then you can set up a group, and people will find you, and they’ll populate your pages. And it’s sort of connecting with friends of friends and sharing photographs, and you wonder what did people do before they had this. Well, the answer is they had something else and before that, something else, and before that, something else. And we’ll see if Facebook becomes something that lingers on for a long time or is just a momentary thing the way some other websites were.
Another one I like is linkedin.com. I used to call it “Facebook for Adults,” but that sounds too weird so I call it “Facebook for Professionals.” But like Facebook, which itself has now opened itself out, it was only for college students, but in the last year, it has opened itself out. LinkedIn is very good for business contacts.
SREENIVASAN: I think that is a fair assessment. It isn’t as Web 2.0, if you will. It doesn’t feel as kind of new and constantly being updated, and there aren’t photographs. And that’s one of the things I like about LinkedIn is it’s kind of more professional compared to Facebook.
ANDELMAN: Now, your starting point is the same for both of them. As a matter of fact, for a lot of these services is that, if you want to really get into it, you upload your email contacts from your email program. And then once you get in there, it’s fascinating the way these programs do this. They can actually tell you who know who’s already in their network so you can instantly have a network.
SREENIVASAN: Exactly. And that makes a big difference so that you’re not having to start from scratch every time.
ANDELMAN: The thing that I get asked a lot by, like I’ve got 4,000 contacts in my address book, and I’m kinda working my way through them, inviting them on or seeing if they’re already on. But the people who aren’t on, they worry about a couple things. They worry about, “If I upload my address book is that public knowledge?” They wonder, “Am I giving out private information?” And then what they really want to know is, “How on earth can this benefit me?” How can just having a bunch of people in my network be of benefit? And that’s the question. I guess that’s the first one that I really wanted to ask you about that.
SREENIVASAN: Well, I guess there’s sort of two separate questions there. The first, about whether these services will have access to your email or anything else like that. I wouldn’t use the uploads or contacts feature on some brand new site that I know nothing about, but LinkedIn and Facebook are now two real companies and have business models and have privacy policies in terms of service where they promise not to do things like that. And you kind of end up trusting those people in a way you may not trust someone else.
The other thing is that it’s very hard to explain exactly how it’ll benefit, but being in a network is always helpful. And many of us are already in networks, and we just don’t realize it. We’re okay, well, I’m not a social networker online, but we use it for all kinds of things. You’re part of your high school alumni network, you’re part of your college alumni network. If you’re a season ticket holder and you go to the same seats, you’re in a network of people who sit next to you at every game for whatever team you follow. And being part of networks like that has tremendous benefits offline, and those benefits are amplified and some of the problems are amplified online. So you still have to have a good way of using it, a systematic way of using it, but the easiest way is just to try and keep in touch with your friends and family and your closest friends first. Many people say to me, “I don’t want this because I can barely deal with the friends I already have. I don’t want to make any new friends.” And I tell people, “You don’t have to look at it that way. Look at keeping better touch with the friends you already have.”
My wife and I are an example of this. She and I talk on the cell phone a couple of times a day. We text message each other. We email each other. But we’ve now worked Facebook into our routine. And they have this funny little feature called “Poke Somebody,” and what she’ll do is, instead of sending me an email, she’ll go on Facebook and she’ll poke me. What that does is it’s kind of a nudge or an alert. If I’m available and online, I’ll respond, and then we’ll either have an email, phone, or Facebook conversation. If I’m not there, it’ll alert me that she was looking for me. So it’s a very subtle way of using Facebook. It’s not for everybody. But, as we’ve seen, young people are on this and also older people are on. There are Facebook groups for people over fifty, and it’s not an age thing at all.
SREENIVASAN: Yes, and that’s one of the best things about LinkedIn. I have now taken to using LinkedIn exactly in that fashion. In the old days, that is before a couple years ago, if someone said to me, “I’d like to talk to Bob Andelman,” I would just email you and that person, cc: you and say, “Bob, meet Jim.” You’re stuck because, you’re a decent guy, you will feel some kind of obligation to respond to Jim and partly Jim also has your email address now. So now you’re in this kind of loop with Jim even if you didn’t want to be. So instead Jim says, “I’d like to meet Bob.” What I tell him is go to LinkedIn, find Bob on there, and then connect through me. Jim goes home, sets up a LinkedIn account, and then he emails, using the system, he emails a note to you, but it stops at my desk first. I then decide whether it’s worth connecting Jim to you, and I forward it to you. You then see this note, and you have the option of whether you want to respond or not. And if you decide not to respond, no problem. Jim never got your address. And that’s one of the most basic ways in which this works, and that’s what makes it so useful because your email address has not been compromised by me. You are choosing to respond to him or not. And I know many, many cases where I’ve done this with very busy, very important people, and many of them have appreciated this kind of new way of connecting. And it’s different from yet another email in your inbox so that’s why people are looking into things like this.
ANDELMAN: Now, the way we’re talking about these, people might think that we’re thinking of MySpace as yesterday’s news. Personally, to me, it is yesterday’s news. I find it to be very sloppy, very messy, just way too wild for my taste professionally and personally. Is there a backlash going on for MySpace, or am I just too particular about my friends?
SREENIVASAN: Well, MySpace was bought for $800 million, I believe, by Murdoch and the folks over at News Corp, something in that range. And that was because it was one of the biggest sites on the planet at that time, and it’s still very, very big. But I do find it kind of yesterday’s news, partly because it was never meant for people in my age group. It was aimed at much younger folks even though there are people older than me on it. It didn’t have a sense of aesthetics, design, or a kind of welcoming environment.
When I teach technology to my students, I tell them that I can teach you two of the three T’s, the letter T, T for tools, T for technology. I cannot teach you the third T, which is taste. And when you go to a lot of MySpace pages, they look like they’ve been made in fingerpainting class. And so I never felt comfortable. You go to Facebook, there’s a certain, what we call user interface. It’s got a good user interface. The information architecture is nice. But mainly, it’s intuitive and easy to understand.
One other point I’ll make is when we talk about money and the hundreds of millions of dollars that were offered for MySpace. One of the first of these social networking websites was Friendster. And the founder of Friendster turned down a billion dollar buyout a few years ago, and I believe he’s come to regret it since. And Friendster is nowhere near where Facebook is, but in recent weeks, Facebook has turned down or reportedly turned down a $6 billion buyout offer itself. So it will be interesting to see if Facebook ends up like Friendster or ends up like Google. No one knows where it’s gonna go.
I’d also say that we in America tend to be very eccentric about these things. And something like Friendster is very popular outside of America but not used as much in America. Even Google has a product which has not done well in America called Orkut, which almost no American I know of is on but is huge in Brazil. Literally, if you were trying to have the equivalent of a Super Bowl ad in Brazil, you would get it on Orkut, not on Facebook or Friendster or MySpace. So culturally and for other reasons, some other groups are on other services and not necessarily the ones we’re on today. And that might change again in a couple years.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
I don’t know about you, but I could spend hours on end doing stuff on the Internet, some of it productive, some of it, well, not.
And some days, it’s hard separating the two because one is generally just as distracting as the other.
I’m hoping that today’s guest, Sree Sreenivasan, can help all of us sort out the time-wasters from the time-benefitters. And no, I don’t think that’s a real word.
Sree is one of journalism’s last great multi-taskers. He’s a New Media professor and dean of students in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. But he’s also a technology reporter for WNBC television in New York City and a regular columnist for Poynter Online. Oh, and he is, naturally, a blogger too at sreetips.com.
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BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Sree, Facebook was recently featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine, basically alerting the general public that there was a new cultural phenomenon upon us or there had been for a while for college kids, I guess. I know you use Facebook, and I wondered if you could start by talking a little bit about how you use it and what the pros and cons of the service might be.
SREE SREENIVASAN: Facebook is one of the sites that you think you don’t need it until you start using it and then you get so addicted very fast. I got a note the other day from a friend I’ve been trying to get on Facebook for a while, and he said, “I have no use for this, I have no use for this.” And then the other day, he wrote me a note saying, “Oh my God, I love this site.”
The way I look at Facebook is, it’s an example of how you can use technology as a great way to reconnect with friends and family and make some new friends. But also it shows you how much of a time thing it can be if you let it get to be that way. And we’re seeing people, including me, who can go on and an hour later, you’re emerging from it, sometimes two hours later from it.
What you do is you go on to Facebook, you create an account, and you start by finding your friends. And you say, “I already have email, why do I need this? I might even be using instant messaging and a cell phone and text messages. Isn’t it just one more thing?” And, in fact, it is one more thing, but it has its own kind of style and its own attractiveness about it that is sort of hard to explain. But it’s very easy to use, and I’ve been reconnecting with friends who I have an email relationship with, but now I see them and talk to them more often on my computer screen than when I just did with email itself.
SREENIVASAN: I think that’s a great way to do it. And whenever you write to someone, make sure you put in a little note explaining why you’re writing and why you’re using this because there are also some other services, including Friendster and Plaxo and all these things, that are just sending out, using your email contacts and connecting you to people sometimes even when you didn’t mean to connect with them. So indicate in some fashion that this is something you are serious about as opposed to some of the other services that you accidentally tried once or just tested out. But, if you’re really into this, let them know, and then your friends will follow you there.
ANDELMAN: Do you have any personal stories of people you’ve reconnected with through Facebook, in particular?
SREENIVASAN: Yes. I reconnected with some of my younger cousins through Facebook. Sometimes -- and this is also an example of how you can be careful about it -- there’s one particular cousin who I connected with, and we’re now emailing a lot more than I did before or Facebooking a lot more than we did before. But I also noticed that, as everyone in her generation, she’s putting up photographs and putting up details of her life that no older cousin should know about, mainly so that I have a kind of plausible deniability from my uncle and aunt. If they ever ask me, “So how is so and so doing, what is she up to?” I can say I don’t know. So I have often gone into people’s photographs which they’ve put and then I suddenly back out and try to erase it from mind’s hard drive.
That’s just one of the ways I’ve been using it, but I’ve also been using it as a great way to communicate with former classmates and also my current students. You can form what are called groups on Facebook, and then you can set up a group, and people will find you, and they’ll populate your pages. And it’s sort of connecting with friends of friends and sharing photographs, and you wonder what did people do before they had this. Well, the answer is they had something else and before that, something else, and before that, something else. And we’ll see if Facebook becomes something that lingers on for a long time or is just a momentary thing the way some other websites were.
Another one I like is linkedin.com. I used to call it “Facebook for Adults,” but that sounds too weird so I call it “Facebook for Professionals.” But like Facebook, which itself has now opened itself out, it was only for college students, but in the last year, it has opened itself out. LinkedIn is very good for business contacts.
SREENIVASAN: I think that is a fair assessment. It isn’t as Web 2.0, if you will. It doesn’t feel as kind of new and constantly being updated, and there aren’t photographs. And that’s one of the things I like about LinkedIn is it’s kind of more professional compared to Facebook.
ANDELMAN: Now, your starting point is the same for both of them. As a matter of fact, for a lot of these services is that, if you want to really get into it, you upload your email contacts from your email program. And then once you get in there, it’s fascinating the way these programs do this. They can actually tell you who know who’s already in their network so you can instantly have a network.
SREENIVASAN: Exactly. And that makes a big difference so that you’re not having to start from scratch every time.
ANDELMAN: The thing that I get asked a lot by, like I’ve got 4,000 contacts in my address book, and I’m kinda working my way through them, inviting them on or seeing if they’re already on. But the people who aren’t on, they worry about a couple things. They worry about, “If I upload my address book is that public knowledge?” They wonder, “Am I giving out private information?” And then what they really want to know is, “How on earth can this benefit me?” How can just having a bunch of people in my network be of benefit? And that’s the question. I guess that’s the first one that I really wanted to ask you about that.
SREENIVASAN: Well, I guess there’s sort of two separate questions there. The first, about whether these services will have access to your email or anything else like that. I wouldn’t use the uploads or contacts feature on some brand new site that I know nothing about, but LinkedIn and Facebook are now two real companies and have business models and have privacy policies in terms of service where they promise not to do things like that. And you kind of end up trusting those people in a way you may not trust someone else.
The other thing is that it’s very hard to explain exactly how it’ll benefit, but being in a network is always helpful. And many of us are already in networks, and we just don’t realize it. We’re okay, well, I’m not a social networker online, but we use it for all kinds of things. You’re part of your high school alumni network, you’re part of your college alumni network. If you’re a season ticket holder and you go to the same seats, you’re in a network of people who sit next to you at every game for whatever team you follow. And being part of networks like that has tremendous benefits offline, and those benefits are amplified and some of the problems are amplified online. So you still have to have a good way of using it, a systematic way of using it, but the easiest way is just to try and keep in touch with your friends and family and your closest friends first. Many people say to me, “I don’t want this because I can barely deal with the friends I already have. I don’t want to make any new friends.” And I tell people, “You don’t have to look at it that way. Look at keeping better touch with the friends you already have.”
My wife and I are an example of this. She and I talk on the cell phone a couple of times a day. We text message each other. We email each other. But we’ve now worked Facebook into our routine. And they have this funny little feature called “Poke Somebody,” and what she’ll do is, instead of sending me an email, she’ll go on Facebook and she’ll poke me. What that does is it’s kind of a nudge or an alert. If I’m available and online, I’ll respond, and then we’ll either have an email, phone, or Facebook conversation. If I’m not there, it’ll alert me that she was looking for me. So it’s a very subtle way of using Facebook. It’s not for everybody. But, as we’ve seen, young people are on this and also older people are on. There are Facebook groups for people over fifty, and it’s not an age thing at all.
SREENIVASAN: Yes, and that’s one of the best things about LinkedIn. I have now taken to using LinkedIn exactly in that fashion. In the old days, that is before a couple years ago, if someone said to me, “I’d like to talk to Bob Andelman,” I would just email you and that person, cc: you and say, “Bob, meet Jim.” You’re stuck because, you’re a decent guy, you will feel some kind of obligation to respond to Jim and partly Jim also has your email address now. So now you’re in this kind of loop with Jim even if you didn’t want to be. So instead Jim says, “I’d like to meet Bob.” What I tell him is go to LinkedIn, find Bob on there, and then connect through me. Jim goes home, sets up a LinkedIn account, and then he emails, using the system, he emails a note to you, but it stops at my desk first. I then decide whether it’s worth connecting Jim to you, and I forward it to you. You then see this note, and you have the option of whether you want to respond or not. And if you decide not to respond, no problem. Jim never got your address. And that’s one of the most basic ways in which this works, and that’s what makes it so useful because your email address has not been compromised by me. You are choosing to respond to him or not. And I know many, many cases where I’ve done this with very busy, very important people, and many of them have appreciated this kind of new way of connecting. And it’s different from yet another email in your inbox so that’s why people are looking into things like this.
ANDELMAN: Now, the way we’re talking about these, people might think that we’re thinking of MySpace as yesterday’s news. Personally, to me, it is yesterday’s news. I find it to be very sloppy, very messy, just way too wild for my taste professionally and personally. Is there a backlash going on for MySpace, or am I just too particular about my friends?
SREENIVASAN: Well, MySpace was bought for $800 million, I believe, by Murdoch and the folks over at News Corp, something in that range. And that was because it was one of the biggest sites on the planet at that time, and it’s still very, very big. But I do find it kind of yesterday’s news, partly because it was never meant for people in my age group. It was aimed at much younger folks even though there are people older than me on it. It didn’t have a sense of aesthetics, design, or a kind of welcoming environment.
When I teach technology to my students, I tell them that I can teach you two of the three T’s, the letter T, T for tools, T for technology. I cannot teach you the third T, which is taste. And when you go to a lot of MySpace pages, they look like they’ve been made in fingerpainting class. And so I never felt comfortable. You go to Facebook, there’s a certain, what we call user interface. It’s got a good user interface. The information architecture is nice. But mainly, it’s intuitive and easy to understand.
One other point I’ll make is when we talk about money and the hundreds of millions of dollars that were offered for MySpace. One of the first of these social networking websites was Friendster. And the founder of Friendster turned down a billion dollar buyout a few years ago, and I believe he’s come to regret it since. And Friendster is nowhere near where Facebook is, but in recent weeks, Facebook has turned down or reportedly turned down a $6 billion buyout offer itself. So it will be interesting to see if Facebook ends up like Friendster or ends up like Google. No one knows where it’s gonna go.
I’d also say that we in America tend to be very eccentric about these things. And something like Friendster is very popular outside of America but not used as much in America. Even Google has a product which has not done well in America called Orkut, which almost no American I know of is on but is huge in Brazil. Literally, if you were trying to have the equivalent of a Super Bowl ad in Brazil, you would get it on Orkut, not on Facebook or Friendster or MySpace. So culturally and for other reasons, some other groups are on other services and not necessarily the ones we’re on today. And that might change again in a couple years.
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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Facebook, Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Plaxo, Poynter Online, Sree Sreenivasan, WNBC
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Sree Sreenivasan 002, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New Media Professor: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN: One of the things that most of these sites we talked about have in common is that they kind of originated out of college campuses or, at the least, they were popularized there. LinkedIn, of course, was more developed out of Palo Alto and the Silicon Valley area, but MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook all really grew out of college just as before them, Napster was a big college phenomenon. You’re on campus, Sree. I hate to say it, but what are the kids buzzing about these days? What’s coming up ahead of us?
SREE SREENIVASAN: Well, my students, I hate to call them “kids” because their average age is 27, and some of them are amazed how much we are using Facebook because, when they were in college, Facebook wasn’t there, or they just missed Facebook if they’re 23, 24. Like I said, it’s not necessarily a function of age as much as what your friends were using or if they were using anything at all. And I think on campus it would be fair to say that Facebook is a big thing. But I was at a dinner party where a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old with their father. The 14-year-old is complaining to the father that, “Dad, all you oldies are ruining Facebook. We’re looking for something else. We’re trying to find our own new Facebook where all these old people aren’t hanging out,” so that if he’s searching for Mary Jane, who he saw across the college campus the other day, rather than Mary Jane who is in her 50s. So that’s what he meant by that. There’re too many adults on there.
SREENIVASAN: What has excited the world, of course, is the iPhone. I myself don’t have one because I can’t afford one. And I see that one of the things that is also happening is we’re all in kind of back-to-school mode, and we’re seeing prices on all the computers are falling. Prices are falling, but more importantly, they’re getting faster and better and more horsepower.
I haven’t actually seen any new gadget that I can talk about except one. One just occurred to me. There’s something that I’ve been using, and I like very much called Flip Video, there’s a website, theflip.com. It’s a very cheap digital camera that has a built-in USB connector so that you shoot your video, and you upload it to YouTube right away or share it via email. And it works very well so I’ve been excited about that. You can get it at theflip.com. It shows you how the technology is changing, that the cell phones and cell phone cameras are going to get better and at the same time, these other gadgets that allow you to take decent quality video and audio in something that used to be a brick a few years ago are now becoming right in the palm of your hand.
ANDELMAN: Now, you bridged two worlds. I want to make sure we talk a little bit about journalism as well. I’m curious, how do you balance the twin demands on your life? That is, how do you split your time between teaching journalism and practicing it?
SREENIVASAN: Well, you used a key word in there that you didn’t realize. The word twin. I have four-year-old twins.
ANDELMAN: I know that, yeah.
SREENIVASAN: And the two of them are a very big demand on my time. I like to say that my day starts when I go home. The other stuff is all very easy. As dean of students at the J school, I have 400 babies, and having toddler twins trains you well to deal with adult students because some of them, it’d be fair to say, are needy also. But, quite frankly, how I’m able to do this is because I have a great support system at home. My wife is very generous with her time and allowing me to do things, but I also find that I have had to turn around my body clock in a way to deal with the newer demands. For example, I get up early because I have television work I do a couple of days a week on the air, but as a life-long all-nighter puller and someone who would not go to bed before one o’clock and two o’clock, I now go to bed at 10:30 and wake up at five just in order for me to do a couple of hours of work before my kids get up. It’s amazing how much work you can get done between five and seven. But it took decades of my body clock going in one direction, and having to turn it was not easy. The other thing I’d say is also making use of as many technology tools as possible to make your life more productive, and maybe we can talk about a couple of examples.
ANDELMAN: Sure.
ANDELMAN: I think we both know the answer to that question.
SREENIVASAN: And the answer is “No.” So I read lifehacker.com and irritatingly, one with a similar name called lifehack.org, and both have very good tips.
A couple of other ideas that I use to kind of keep track of things electronically: My wife and I are now on what’s called Google Docs. Have you seen Google Docs & Spreadsheets? These are kind of online versions of Office of both Excel and Word. And it’s a simple thing. How we use it is we put our expenses online, but only the two of us can see it. We have passwords. In the old days, if we had to reconcile our checkbooks or keep track of expenses, it would be on one computer at home, and you’d have to get on the computer and put it in. Now, during the day whenever there’s a lull, we’ll go online, and we’ll just put in our expenses, and we’re sharing and working off of one document rather than working off of one computer at home. That’s one of the ways in which I’m using that. It’s been very, very helpful.
Another quick tip, which I’m sure your listeners know, is to use both Yahoo’s and Google’s alert systems, which will alert you every time something you’re interested in is added to their index. So google.com/alerts and yahoo.com/alerts will let you know when something you’re interested in is added because, as you know, when things are added to Google or Yahoo, they’re added kind of to the back of the line, and most of us don’t go past the first three or four links on the results page, let alone the fifth page or the 50th page or the 500th page. Those are ways I use to keep track of things.
One funny story about Google Alerts: One of my good friends moved to D.C. and was writing for the Washington Post, and I would drop her a note every time she had a piece in the paper. And she was so touched that here I was taking the time to track down her story on B17 or C12 or whatever and dropping her a note. Of course, when she found out I was using Google Alerts to alert me every time she had a byline, she was not amused.
ANDELMAN: You know what, I use Plaxo that way for birthdays. My friends and family have become so impressed that I’m suddenly keeping up on that stuff, but what you have to understand is that I have a Mac and I have Address Book, and Plaxo automatically reads my address book and updates birthdays from that so I don’t miss birthdays or anniversaries anymore, either. I guess I just let the cat out of the bag. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.
SREENIVASAN: Yeah, I know. But you can edit this, right?
SREENIVASAN: Well, we could have a whole hour-long conversation on this. I’m someone who gets two daily newspapers delivered to his house and five magazines that we pay for by subscription. I would say that yes, it is an issue I think reporters of all ages need to understand, that the business has changed. It isn’t just changing, it has changed, and you have to pick up as many new media skills as you can. It isn’t just the skill set, however. It’s also the mindset, and there are ways in which you can pick up some of these things without actually going to college and taking a class. Just reading up more on these changes and keeping up with them is important.
I also find that, at our school as with a lot of journalism schools, when the economy is in trouble, we kind of benefit, unfortunately, in the sense that when people are being laid off, and the journalism economy is tough, people go back to journalism school or look to re-train themselves. So we benefit a little bit from that. And this year, we have the largest starting class ever at the journalism school because, with so many people that are coming this fall, the school is already kind of bursting at the seams. Now that doesn’t mean that we ourselves aren’t trying to re-tool the curriculum, adjust, because we cannot sit on our laurels, either. One of the examples I give is that, last year, the Washington Post won an Emmy Award for video. That tells you two things have changed. One is that the Washington Post has changed and is doing video and is doing it very well. And the second is that the Emmy awards have changed, that they realize that some of the most compelling and interesting video is on newspaper websites. So if those two institutions can change, everyone and every institution can change.
ANDELMAN: So what would be the best single advice you would give someone thinking about a career in journalism?
SREENIVASAN: I would say that journalism is still a viable, important career. You will have a wonderful time. You will be able to do a lot for society. Almost no other career will give you the kind of wide canvas that journalism does. But you have to go into it with your eyes open and know that we’ve seen layoffs, we’re seeing market forces putting great pressure on traditional journalism. But I believe that there will always be a market for reporting and writing and production, and good writing, in the end, is the key to all of this, whether it’s on the web or whether it’s on the radio or audio or video. It will always be part of what we’re doing.
I remain bullish. Otherwise, I wouldn’t work in a business and at a university where we’re charging people money to come and learn the stuff. So I remain optimistic.
ANDELMAN: I guess the journalism skill sets will probably always be in demand, but that the application that the students use it for might be different from the day they start as a student; by the time that they graduate, it will be something completely different.
SREENIVASAN: And that, of course, happens all the time. That change is happening right before us.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN: One of the things that most of these sites we talked about have in common is that they kind of originated out of college campuses or, at the least, they were popularized there. LinkedIn, of course, was more developed out of Palo Alto and the Silicon Valley area, but MySpace, Friendster, and Facebook all really grew out of college just as before them, Napster was a big college phenomenon. You’re on campus, Sree. I hate to say it, but what are the kids buzzing about these days? What’s coming up ahead of us?
SREE SREENIVASAN: Well, my students, I hate to call them “kids” because their average age is 27, and some of them are amazed how much we are using Facebook because, when they were in college, Facebook wasn’t there, or they just missed Facebook if they’re 23, 24. Like I said, it’s not necessarily a function of age as much as what your friends were using or if they were using anything at all. And I think on campus it would be fair to say that Facebook is a big thing. But I was at a dinner party where a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old with their father. The 14-year-old is complaining to the father that, “Dad, all you oldies are ruining Facebook. We’re looking for something else. We’re trying to find our own new Facebook where all these old people aren’t hanging out,” so that if he’s searching for Mary Jane, who he saw across the college campus the other day, rather than Mary Jane who is in her 50s. So that’s what he meant by that. There’re too many adults on there.
SREENIVASAN: What has excited the world, of course, is the iPhone. I myself don’t have one because I can’t afford one. And I see that one of the things that is also happening is we’re all in kind of back-to-school mode, and we’re seeing prices on all the computers are falling. Prices are falling, but more importantly, they’re getting faster and better and more horsepower.
I haven’t actually seen any new gadget that I can talk about except one. One just occurred to me. There’s something that I’ve been using, and I like very much called Flip Video, there’s a website, theflip.com. It’s a very cheap digital camera that has a built-in USB connector so that you shoot your video, and you upload it to YouTube right away or share it via email. And it works very well so I’ve been excited about that. You can get it at theflip.com. It shows you how the technology is changing, that the cell phones and cell phone cameras are going to get better and at the same time, these other gadgets that allow you to take decent quality video and audio in something that used to be a brick a few years ago are now becoming right in the palm of your hand.
ANDELMAN: Now, you bridged two worlds. I want to make sure we talk a little bit about journalism as well. I’m curious, how do you balance the twin demands on your life? That is, how do you split your time between teaching journalism and practicing it?
SREENIVASAN: Well, you used a key word in there that you didn’t realize. The word twin. I have four-year-old twins.
ANDELMAN: I know that, yeah.
SREENIVASAN: And the two of them are a very big demand on my time. I like to say that my day starts when I go home. The other stuff is all very easy. As dean of students at the J school, I have 400 babies, and having toddler twins trains you well to deal with adult students because some of them, it’d be fair to say, are needy also. But, quite frankly, how I’m able to do this is because I have a great support system at home. My wife is very generous with her time and allowing me to do things, but I also find that I have had to turn around my body clock in a way to deal with the newer demands. For example, I get up early because I have television work I do a couple of days a week on the air, but as a life-long all-nighter puller and someone who would not go to bed before one o’clock and two o’clock, I now go to bed at 10:30 and wake up at five just in order for me to do a couple of hours of work before my kids get up. It’s amazing how much work you can get done between five and seven. But it took decades of my body clock going in one direction, and having to turn it was not easy. The other thing I’d say is also making use of as many technology tools as possible to make your life more productive, and maybe we can talk about a couple of examples.
ANDELMAN: Sure.
ANDELMAN: I think we both know the answer to that question.
SREENIVASAN: And the answer is “No.” So I read lifehacker.com and irritatingly, one with a similar name called lifehack.org, and both have very good tips.
A couple of other ideas that I use to kind of keep track of things electronically: My wife and I are now on what’s called Google Docs. Have you seen Google Docs & Spreadsheets? These are kind of online versions of Office of both Excel and Word. And it’s a simple thing. How we use it is we put our expenses online, but only the two of us can see it. We have passwords. In the old days, if we had to reconcile our checkbooks or keep track of expenses, it would be on one computer at home, and you’d have to get on the computer and put it in. Now, during the day whenever there’s a lull, we’ll go online, and we’ll just put in our expenses, and we’re sharing and working off of one document rather than working off of one computer at home. That’s one of the ways in which I’m using that. It’s been very, very helpful.
Another quick tip, which I’m sure your listeners know, is to use both Yahoo’s and Google’s alert systems, which will alert you every time something you’re interested in is added to their index. So google.com/alerts and yahoo.com/alerts will let you know when something you’re interested in is added because, as you know, when things are added to Google or Yahoo, they’re added kind of to the back of the line, and most of us don’t go past the first three or four links on the results page, let alone the fifth page or the 50th page or the 500th page. Those are ways I use to keep track of things.
One funny story about Google Alerts: One of my good friends moved to D.C. and was writing for the Washington Post, and I would drop her a note every time she had a piece in the paper. And she was so touched that here I was taking the time to track down her story on B17 or C12 or whatever and dropping her a note. Of course, when she found out I was using Google Alerts to alert me every time she had a byline, she was not amused.
ANDELMAN: You know what, I use Plaxo that way for birthdays. My friends and family have become so impressed that I’m suddenly keeping up on that stuff, but what you have to understand is that I have a Mac and I have Address Book, and Plaxo automatically reads my address book and updates birthdays from that so I don’t miss birthdays or anniversaries anymore, either. I guess I just let the cat out of the bag. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that.
SREENIVASAN: Yeah, I know. But you can edit this, right?
SREENIVASAN: Well, we could have a whole hour-long conversation on this. I’m someone who gets two daily newspapers delivered to his house and five magazines that we pay for by subscription. I would say that yes, it is an issue I think reporters of all ages need to understand, that the business has changed. It isn’t just changing, it has changed, and you have to pick up as many new media skills as you can. It isn’t just the skill set, however. It’s also the mindset, and there are ways in which you can pick up some of these things without actually going to college and taking a class. Just reading up more on these changes and keeping up with them is important.
I also find that, at our school as with a lot of journalism schools, when the economy is in trouble, we kind of benefit, unfortunately, in the sense that when people are being laid off, and the journalism economy is tough, people go back to journalism school or look to re-train themselves. So we benefit a little bit from that. And this year, we have the largest starting class ever at the journalism school because, with so many people that are coming this fall, the school is already kind of bursting at the seams. Now that doesn’t mean that we ourselves aren’t trying to re-tool the curriculum, adjust, because we cannot sit on our laurels, either. One of the examples I give is that, last year, the Washington Post won an Emmy Award for video. That tells you two things have changed. One is that the Washington Post has changed and is doing video and is doing it very well. And the second is that the Emmy awards have changed, that they realize that some of the most compelling and interesting video is on newspaper websites. So if those two institutions can change, everyone and every institution can change.
ANDELMAN: So what would be the best single advice you would give someone thinking about a career in journalism?
SREENIVASAN: I would say that journalism is still a viable, important career. You will have a wonderful time. You will be able to do a lot for society. Almost no other career will give you the kind of wide canvas that journalism does. But you have to go into it with your eyes open and know that we’ve seen layoffs, we’re seeing market forces putting great pressure on traditional journalism. But I believe that there will always be a market for reporting and writing and production, and good writing, in the end, is the key to all of this, whether it’s on the web or whether it’s on the radio or audio or video. It will always be part of what we’re doing.
I remain bullish. Otherwise, I wouldn’t work in a business and at a university where we’re charging people money to come and learn the stuff. So I remain optimistic.
ANDELMAN: I guess the journalism skill sets will probably always be in demand, but that the application that the students use it for might be different from the day they start as a student; by the time that they graduate, it will be something completely different.
SREENIVASAN: And that, of course, happens all the time. That change is happening right before us.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Facebook, Flip Video, Friendster, Google Docs, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Sree Sreenivasan
¶ 7:11 PM 1 Comments Links to this post
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Michelle Borth, "Tell Me You Love Me" actress: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 1
The ironic thing about Michelle Borth’s role as Jamie, a woman whose fiancé won’t commit to monogamy in the new HBO series "Tell Me You Love Me," is that she is the kind of sexy, intoxicating woman that could probably drive the best-intentioned married man to cheat on his wife.
MICHELLE BORTH: Well, that’s a huge compliment. Thank you.
ANDELMAN: How was this show pitched to you, and what was your first reaction to it?
BORTH: It was pitched to me about three years ago, during pilot season, and it was very much what you would think. It was proposed to me as this really graphic show, and that that was something I should know before going into it. And I was like, “Okay, well, let me read it.” And I read the pilot, and I was floored. I was really floored by it because I personally really connected with the character Jamie on a personal level that I was like, “Someone is following me around and writing my life because this is my life.” So I went into the audition for this project with wanting it moreso than I think anything I’ve ever auditioned for in the past before that.
ANDELMAN: It seemed like, looking over your resume, that it was quite different from anything you had done before.
BORTH: It is. It absolutely is. I haven’t actually done much TV work. I’ve worked quite a bit and have been in the low-budget indie/horror/sci-fi genres, which are great. But this is actually more along my speed and what I really would like to do. This kind of show, on this kind of network, specifically, is a dream come true for me and I think for any actor, but for me, specifically, it was a dream come true.
ANDELMAN: Well, you mention right at the top there that it was presented to you as a very graphic, sexual show.
BORTH: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: Did you have any hesitation with that?
BORTH: Of course. Initially, I did when I had the first conversation with my agent. The way that it was presented I was like, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know how I feel about that.” Because, even in the films that I’d done, I’ve done one topless scene prior to any of this, and I was like that’s it, I did my one, I’m not doing anything more. So I was like oh, no, but after reading the pilot, it was just so smart and so beautifully written. Something, like you said, I’d never read anything like that. I haven’t read a movie script or a pilot or anything even close to what I read. It automatically then didn’t become an issue. And that’s the truth. It honestly was not an issue to me from that point on.
ANDELMAN: It’s funny. Ten years ago, I probably wouldn’t have even thought to ask you this, but here I am. I’ve got a daughter going on 11. My view of some of these things, I notice, has changed, and I think, my goodness, how would I feel if my daughter was portraying a character like that on screen? You said you did one topless scene. This is, for people who haven’t seen it yet, this is way beyond a topless scene.
BORTH: Absolutely. It’s absolutely difficult. It’s not a show that I am pushing my father or my brothers to watch because I think it might be awkward for them as family members. But, in general, I think that it’s a big deal because there hasn’t been anything that’s been this true to life on TV at all, especially primetime TV, and HBO is known for raising the bar and setting a new precedent. And I think that this goes along the lines of anything else that they’ve done. “The Sopranos” was an extremely violent show and showed things that you wouldn’t be able to show on basic cable and stuff like that. And we’re just doing the same thing with a different context. We’re now dealing with sex which, in America, I’m realizing now that we’re a little sexually repressed. So I think it rubs people the wrong way.
ANDELMAN: How do you think America will be after a season of “Tell Me You Love Me”? Will we be less repressed, or will the people who are repressed want to be more repressed and the people who aren’t want to be more exposed?
BORTH: How do I feel? Well, first off, I think people are gonna be, I hope not, but I think people might be a little disappointed when they initially watch the show and realize that it’s not a big porn fest. That it is actually a really smart, intelligent show, and sex is a part of it because we’re dealing with intimacy of relationships and all of that. So I think that the HBO audience is a smart audience, and the show is slow-paced, and there’re no bells and whistles. There’re no big booms or music or fast cuts that it’s gonna take a certain audience to watch it, but once they do, the storylines will pick up where maybe the sex drew people in. I think the storylines are gonna draw people in, and so the people who watch it just for the sex I think will be disappointed because it’s not just about that. And the people who I think maybe will get offended, just don’t watch it. Don’t watch it.
ANDELMAN: I have to say, in defense of the sex scenes, that, if you like to watch a movie or TV and check out the sex scenes, the ones in the first two episodes are pretty intense.
BORTH: We come in with a bang. We’re coming in with a bang. I would say probably the two most graphic episodes of the entire season are the first two. Absolutely. So, yes, we’re coming in with a big bang.
ANDELMAN: You mentioned other HBO shows. It kind of reminded me of the opposite of an older HBO show, “The Mind of a Married Man.” It’s not a comedy. It’s a drama, and it’s more like, except for your character, “The Mind of a Married Woman,” although when we meet you, you’re on your way to becoming a married woman.
BORTH: Right. I actually just got HBO. I needed to get HBO. So I haven’t seen that show, but viewing the lives is really voyeuristic. You feel like you’re there going through these problems with these couples. And what I think is great about the show is that it’s so universal, and it hits every demographic that pretty much, if you’ve been in a relationship and you’re an adult, you’re gonna be able to relate to one of them. There’s gonna be one of the relationships that’s gonna draw you in and say, “Ah, I know that, I know that and I have said that before.”
ANDELMAN: Are you or have you ever been married?
BORTH: No, I am not married, and I have never been married. I have not been in a relationship in four years.
ANDELMAN: So you’re even a little separated from where Jamie is.
BORTH: I am. The thing about Jamie, though, that was difficult for me and what initially drew me in, what I said earlier about the pilot, was just a lot of the pain and heartache that she has in her relationship with Hugo and the breakup with Hugo and all of that is something that I have experienced. So, for me, as an actress, what was difficult was all that baggage that you dealt with and put away, I had to pull out and open up and live it for six months so that wasn’t fun. That wasn’t great. I’m like I spent a lot of time and hard work getting over all those issues, let’s go on back out and play in it again.
ANDELMAN: Michelle, I have to ask, maybe you’ll tell me, maybe you won’t, how old are you?
BORTH: I just turned 29.
ANDELMAN: Oh, that’s amazing. I would’ve guessed 22, 23.
BORTH: Thank you very much. You know what though, I will say this much. I auditioned for this show on my birthday, on my 26th birthday. So this has been a very long process filming the show. It’s been about a year since I shot it, and it’s been two years since I shot the pilot. So the first episode you actually watch is the pilot. We shot that over two and a half years ago. So I am younger.
ANDELMAN: And do you guys know yet if you’ll be picked up for another season?
BORTH: We don’t know because the show hasn’t aired yet. So we don’t even know what the response or the ratings are gonna be like, and they haven’t told me anything specific. They can’t because there’s no guarantee.
ANDELMAN: Usually, they have a sense of this.
BORTH: Yeah, but HBO’s track record because they can, they have the ability to, they give shows a chance. I can only think of one show in the past that didn’t get past the first season, but they usually give them two or three seasons for people to start to settle into it.
ANDELMAN: Right.
BORTH: I would be really surprised if we didn’t have a second season, honestly.
ANDELMAN: Well, let me come back to the characters for a minute. Most of the married couples in the show seem likely, at this point, to stay true to one another, although perhaps, tempted by other fruit. And that kind of allows the actors in those relationships to build intimacy with one another. But Jamie and Hugo, they seem doomed from the start, leading me to think that you’ll be getting physical with, perhaps, a series of actors or, for all we know, actresses, in search of the right mate. And so I wondered, does that make the role and your job tougher than maybe some of the other actors on the show?
BORTH: Oh my God, absolutely, absolutely! The one thing that was difficult, specifically, is that throughout the entire shooting of the episodes, everyone’s got their partner. As an actor, you’re working with the same person over and over and over again. You build that trust. You build that stability. You build that chemistry with that other actor. And little things like right now, like interviews, when you do interviews, a lot of the couples get interviewed together, and so they bounce off one another. And what’s been difficult for me is that because of my storyline and Jamie going in and out of relationships to try to find what she’s looking for, I’ve had to do this journey on my own, not only as the character but as Michelle Borth. And it’s a little frightening because number one, this is my first big anything, especially my first TV show, so having to go through all of this by myself and figuring it out all myself is ironic to me because it parallels my character on screen. But it is, it’s difficult. I would like to have had Luke, say, go through all of that with me and do it as a team like the other couples and the other actors got to do. But that wasn’t the case. But it’s been a great learning experience. Had to do it trial by fire.
ANDELMAN: I have to ask you so I guess this is a man’s question, I don’t know. There’s a scene with you and the actor who plays Hugo in the car, which is pretty intense and pretty graphic. How do you start and stop where the acting and the human being begins and ends in a scene like that?
BORTH: That’s actually a really good question because I thought about it, and I don’t really know how to answer it. You have to distinguish your work from personal, absolutely, and although Luke and I did develop quite a strong relationship, and it made those scenes a lot easier to do because we had this really great chemistry in real life. So I think that just shows even more on screen. But it’s acting, and I feel like in whatever technique or however people work, I substitute people. So in that scene, I’m thinking of someone else. I’m bringing someone else into that scene in my mind.
ANDELMAN: And thank you for thinking of Mr. Media in that scene. I appreciated that. I could see that.
BORTH: I was! I was thinking about you in that scene, which is why it was so intense. But you have to. You have to distinguish, otherwise you’re gonna find yourself in really awkward, weird situations which happens a lot on sets. I kind of understand now why people who work together tend to date afterwards. Just reading magazines and watching “Extra” and stuff like that, I get it because you spend a significant amount of time with that person and, especially with what we’re dealing with on this show and that close and that intimate, you do develop that relationship off-screen. I think you have to in order to bring it on-screen, but it is all for the sake of the work and for the job, and that’s it. And then you come home and let it go.
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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
The ironic thing about Michelle Borth’s role as Jamie, a woman whose fiancé won’t commit to monogamy in the new HBO series "Tell Me You Love Me," is that she is the kind of sexy, intoxicating woman that could probably drive the best-intentioned married man to cheat on his wife.
ALSO AVAILABLE AS A PODCAST ON iTUNES.
MICHELLE BORTH: Well, that’s a huge compliment. Thank you.
ANDELMAN: How was this show pitched to you, and what was your first reaction to it?
BORTH: It was pitched to me about three years ago, during pilot season, and it was very much what you would think. It was proposed to me as this really graphic show, and that that was something I should know before going into it. And I was like, “Okay, well, let me read it.” And I read the pilot, and I was floored. I was really floored by it because I personally really connected with the character Jamie on a personal level that I was like, “Someone is following me around and writing my life because this is my life.” So I went into the audition for this project with wanting it moreso than I think anything I’ve ever auditioned for in the past before that.
ANDELMAN: It seemed like, looking over your resume, that it was quite different from anything you had done before.
BORTH: It is. It absolutely is. I haven’t actually done much TV work. I’ve worked quite a bit and have been in the low-budget indie/horror/sci-fi genres, which are great. But this is actually more along my speed and what I really would like to do. This kind of show, on this kind of network, specifically, is a dream come true for me and I think for any actor, but for me, specifically, it was a dream come true.
ANDELMAN: Well, you mention right at the top there that it was presented to you as a very graphic, sexual show.
BORTH: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: Did you have any hesitation with that?
BORTH: Of course. Initially, I did when I had the first conversation with my agent. The way that it was presented I was like, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know how I feel about that.” Because, even in the films that I’d done, I’ve done one topless scene prior to any of this, and I was like that’s it, I did my one, I’m not doing anything more. So I was like oh, no, but after reading the pilot, it was just so smart and so beautifully written. Something, like you said, I’d never read anything like that. I haven’t read a movie script or a pilot or anything even close to what I read. It automatically then didn’t become an issue. And that’s the truth. It honestly was not an issue to me from that point on.
ANDELMAN: It’s funny. Ten years ago, I probably wouldn’t have even thought to ask you this, but here I am. I’ve got a daughter going on 11. My view of some of these things, I notice, has changed, and I think, my goodness, how would I feel if my daughter was portraying a character like that on screen? You said you did one topless scene. This is, for people who haven’t seen it yet, this is way beyond a topless scene.
BORTH: Absolutely. It’s absolutely difficult. It’s not a show that I am pushing my father or my brothers to watch because I think it might be awkward for them as family members. But, in general, I think that it’s a big deal because there hasn’t been anything that’s been this true to life on TV at all, especially primetime TV, and HBO is known for raising the bar and setting a new precedent. And I think that this goes along the lines of anything else that they’ve done. “The Sopranos” was an extremely violent show and showed things that you wouldn’t be able to show on basic cable and stuff like that. And we’re just doing the same thing with a different context. We’re now dealing with sex which, in America, I’m realizing now that we’re a little sexually repressed. So I think it rubs people the wrong way.
ANDELMAN: How do you think America will be after a season of “Tell Me You Love Me”? Will we be less repressed, or will the people who are repressed want to be more repressed and the people who aren’t want to be more exposed?
BORTH: How do I feel? Well, first off, I think people are gonna be, I hope not, but I think people might be a little disappointed when they initially watch the show and realize that it’s not a big porn fest. That it is actually a really smart, intelligent show, and sex is a part of it because we’re dealing with intimacy of relationships and all of that. So I think that the HBO audience is a smart audience, and the show is slow-paced, and there’re no bells and whistles. There’re no big booms or music or fast cuts that it’s gonna take a certain audience to watch it, but once they do, the storylines will pick up where maybe the sex drew people in. I think the storylines are gonna draw people in, and so the people who watch it just for the sex I think will be disappointed because it’s not just about that. And the people who I think maybe will get offended, just don’t watch it. Don’t watch it.
ANDELMAN: I have to say, in defense of the sex scenes, that, if you like to watch a movie or TV and check out the sex scenes, the ones in the first two episodes are pretty intense.
BORTH: We come in with a bang. We’re coming in with a bang. I would say probably the two most graphic episodes of the entire season are the first two. Absolutely. So, yes, we’re coming in with a big bang.
ANDELMAN: You mentioned other HBO shows. It kind of reminded me of the opposite of an older HBO show, “The Mind of a Married Man.” It’s not a comedy. It’s a drama, and it’s more like, except for your character, “The Mind of a Married Woman,” although when we meet you, you’re on your way to becoming a married woman.
BORTH: Right. I actually just got HBO. I needed to get HBO. So I haven’t seen that show, but viewing the lives is really voyeuristic. You feel like you’re there going through these problems with these couples. And what I think is great about the show is that it’s so universal, and it hits every demographic that pretty much, if you’ve been in a relationship and you’re an adult, you’re gonna be able to relate to one of them. There’s gonna be one of the relationships that’s gonna draw you in and say, “Ah, I know that, I know that and I have said that before.”
ANDELMAN: Are you or have you ever been married?
BORTH: No, I am not married, and I have never been married. I have not been in a relationship in four years.
ANDELMAN: So you’re even a little separated from where Jamie is.
BORTH: I am. The thing about Jamie, though, that was difficult for me and what initially drew me in, what I said earlier about the pilot, was just a lot of the pain and heartache that she has in her relationship with Hugo and the breakup with Hugo and all of that is something that I have experienced. So, for me, as an actress, what was difficult was all that baggage that you dealt with and put away, I had to pull out and open up and live it for six months so that wasn’t fun. That wasn’t great. I’m like I spent a lot of time and hard work getting over all those issues, let’s go on back out and play in it again.
ANDELMAN: Michelle, I have to ask, maybe you’ll tell me, maybe you won’t, how old are you?
BORTH: I just turned 29.
ANDELMAN: Oh, that’s amazing. I would’ve guessed 22, 23.
BORTH: Thank you very much. You know what though, I will say this much. I auditioned for this show on my birthday, on my 26th birthday. So this has been a very long process filming the show. It’s been about a year since I shot it, and it’s been two years since I shot the pilot. So the first episode you actually watch is the pilot. We shot that over two and a half years ago. So I am younger.
ANDELMAN: And do you guys know yet if you’ll be picked up for another season?
BORTH: We don’t know because the show hasn’t aired yet. So we don’t even know what the response or the ratings are gonna be like, and they haven’t told me anything specific. They can’t because there’s no guarantee.
ANDELMAN: Usually, they have a sense of this.
BORTH: Yeah, but HBO’s track record because they can, they have the ability to, they give shows a chance. I can only think of one show in the past that didn’t get past the first season, but they usually give them two or three seasons for people to start to settle into it.
ANDELMAN: Right.
BORTH: I would be really surprised if we didn’t have a second season, honestly.
ANDELMAN: Well, let me come back to the characters for a minute. Most of the married couples in the show seem likely, at this point, to stay true to one another, although perhaps, tempted by other fruit. And that kind of allows the actors in those relationships to build intimacy with one another. But Jamie and Hugo, they seem doomed from the start, leading me to think that you’ll be getting physical with, perhaps, a series of actors or, for all we know, actresses, in search of the right mate. And so I wondered, does that make the role and your job tougher than maybe some of the other actors on the show?
BORTH: Oh my God, absolutely, absolutely! The one thing that was difficult, specifically, is that throughout the entire shooting of the episodes, everyone’s got their partner. As an actor, you’re working with the same person over and over and over again. You build that trust. You build that stability. You build that chemistry with that other actor. And little things like right now, like interviews, when you do interviews, a lot of the couples get interviewed together, and so they bounce off one another. And what’s been difficult for me is that because of my storyline and Jamie going in and out of relationships to try to find what she’s looking for, I’ve had to do this journey on my own, not only as the character but as Michelle Borth. And it’s a little frightening because number one, this is my first big anything, especially my first TV show, so having to go through all of this by myself and figuring it out all myself is ironic to me because it parallels my character on screen. But it is, it’s difficult. I would like to have had Luke, say, go through all of that with me and do it as a team like the other couples and the other actors got to do. But that wasn’t the case. But it’s been a great learning experience. Had to do it trial by fire.
ANDELMAN: I have to ask you so I guess this is a man’s question, I don’t know. There’s a scene with you and the actor who plays Hugo in the car, which is pretty intense and pretty graphic. How do you start and stop where the acting and the human being begins and ends in a scene like that?
BORTH: That’s actually a really good question because I thought about it, and I don’t really know how to answer it. You have to distinguish your work from personal, absolutely, and although Luke and I did develop quite a strong relationship, and it made those scenes a lot easier to do because we had this really great chemistry in real life. So I think that just shows even more on screen. But it’s acting, and I feel like in whatever technique or however people work, I substitute people. So in that scene, I’m thinking of someone else. I’m bringing someone else into that scene in my mind.
ANDELMAN: And thank you for thinking of Mr. Media in that scene. I appreciated that. I could see that.
BORTH: I was! I was thinking about you in that scene, which is why it was so intense. But you have to. You have to distinguish, otherwise you’re gonna find yourself in really awkward, weird situations which happens a lot on sets. I kind of understand now why people who work together tend to date afterwards. Just reading magazines and watching “Extra” and stuff like that, I get it because you spend a significant amount of time with that person and, especially with what we’re dealing with on this show and that close and that intimate, you do develop that relationship off-screen. I think you have to in order to bring it on-screen, but it is all for the sake of the work and for the job, and that’s it. And then you come home and let it go.
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©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Ally Walker, Cynthia Mort, graphic sex, HBO, intercourse, male full frontal nudity, male genitalia, Michelle Borth, Mr. Skin, MySpace, Playboy, sexy, Tell Me You Love Me, The Sopranos, Wiccan
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Michelle Borth, "Tell Me You Love Me" actress: Mr. Media Interview, Pt. 2
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: One of the things that I know people have talked about a lot about the show is the male full frontal nudity, which, even in movies, you don’t see that, and that seems to bring that other element to the show that makes it seem that much more graphic because you’re really not used to seeing that.
MICHELLE BORTH: I think that’s the whole point, though. I think it’s really interesting that that’s been like a big fuss because I almost want to say to the men, “Oh, boo hoo, are you feeling exploited? I’m sorry!” I think it’s funny that people are shocked by it because we’ve seen frontal nudity from women. We’ve seen topless scenes and all of that. I like the show. I like that we’re bringing that to the screen. I think that it wouldn’t do the show justice if we just favored one gender. The show is about the truth of relationships, and it doesn’t favor specifically to the men audience by giving you lots of T & A. I love that because that’s not what the show is about. It is not about the sex and the nudity and all of that because a lot of the sex, number one, is unsexy sex. It is not sex that turns you on. It is awkward, and it’s weird. And maybe showing male genitalia will reinforce the whole point. People are comparing it to pornography, but it’s not. It’s about showing an authentic relationship, and I’m glad that we’re doing it because I think we should be.
ANDELMAN: But, Michelle, at the same time, you’re right, fair is fair. We’re gonna see female nudity; we should see male nudity. But because we’re so unused to seeing it, it seems like seeing that penis, at times, makes the sex seem that much more real even if it’s not “happy” sex. I think that’s the part of it that makes it more surprising to people when they see it because it’s like, “Wow, that guy’s not covered up there. That doesn’t look as simulated as that movie I saw in the hotel.”
BORTH: No. You are absolutely right. And I think that the reason for that is it will pull you out of the moment and pull you out of the scene, I think, if you cut to a lamp during a sex scene. The show is very voyeuristic. You’re watching people go through all their troubles. You’re watching them in the bedroom. You’re watching them in the therapy room. We don’t cut away at the awkward moments. We don’t pan to something else when you’re not supposed to see something, so you’re right. It does make it more real, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do for the show, and that is to make you feel involved with these characters and to live and breathe with these characters. And it doesn’t take you out of the moment. So I think that it does justice for the scenes.
ANDELMAN: Now, you said that you’re 29. You’re not 22 or 23, which is what I guessed from just watching, so you seem more confident and more secure in your sexuality and who you are. That’s got to make it easier for you to do something like this.
BORTH: Absolutely. I am. I am really comfortable with sexuality and nudity. I think it’s just kind of the way that I was raised, just really liberal. And I am just comfortable with myself. My mom did a good job. I’ve got great self-esteem. This doesn’t say that it wasn’t completely nerve-wracking doing them. It absolutely was. It’s not easy. It’s not easy getting naked and being in scenes in front of a room full of people. Oh my God, it’s terrifying. I don’t care how confident or how great you think you look, you’re nervous. Once I initially got over the nerves in doing it, it’s like riding a bike, after the first one you’re just like oh alright, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s get naked. Let’s do it. Yeah, then absolutely then it’s fine. But I also thought it was really essential to really own the confidence because that is Jamie’s whole deal. She is this really sexually confident woman and individual. She uses it as a crutch for so many different things, and if I didn’t portray that, I wouldn’t be doing her character justice. I had to.
ANDELMAN: As we’re talking, the show is still a few days away from airing for the first time. Are you nervous about the potential loss of privacy that may take place if the show catches on? Even if the show becomes a minor hit, people are gonna see you in a completely different light.
BORTH: I never even thought about that. I honestly didn’t think about that. No, no I’m not. If it happens, yeah, then fine, great if people notice me. I think people are gonna have their own opinions. I know some people are gonna judge me and whether or not I’m gonna get heckled or people are gonna be mean to me, I don’t know. I think that I prepared myself for all of it because I’ve been with this project for so long and after the TCA’s and the big stir of the sex, I was like, “Alright, this is gonna be a big deal. I need to prepare myself for anything that’s gonna come because there’s gonna be good and there’s gonna be bad and, whatever it is, I’m just ready for it.” So, yeah, I think that maybe I’m ready for it. I hope so. I think I’m ready for the good and the bad.
ANDELMAN: A few weeks ago I interviewed the editor of Playboy for Mr. Media, and we were talking about how, over the years, many actresses who are looking to break out or change the world’s perception of them posed for Playboy. I wondered if this was the kind of thing that would have kind of the same effect or if that might even be the effect that you might be looking for.
BORTH: I would say no. For me personally, I don’t feel I need to have to justify. No, I don’t. I didn’t do it for any other reason than I thought it was a great show and a great character and a great job on a great network.
ANDELMAN: Let me ask a little bit about you. We’ve talked an awful lot about sex. I think I’ve talked to you more about sex this afternoon than I usually talk to my wife about it in a month. Where are you from? Why did you want to become an actress?
BORTH: I’m from New York, and I don’t really know why I wanted to become an actor. Now, in hindsight, I would’ve been like, “No, don’t do it! I don’t advise it!” I think it was because it was the only thing that, for me, it was an outlet for me that I couldn’t find anywhere else that allowed me to express myself. I was a little out of control as a teenager, and I did some bad things. I found acting to be that outlet that allowed me to express my anger and my pain and my hurt and my fears without having to do anything bad, without having to be bad, or do anything bad. It was just an outlet that I finally found. I was like, “Oh, my God. This makes me feel good. It feels right. I’m good at it, and I’m not breaking any laws.” So that’s why.
ANDELMAN: And you mentioned brothers. How many siblings do you have?
BORTH: I have two younger brothers. Two younger brothers, yeah, and they’re back in New York.
BOB ANDELMAN: Okay. And your folks, what do they do?
MICHELLE BORTH: My mother owns a home improvement business. She’s like the Mrs. Bob Vila of the 21st century. She’s a hot, hot Italian woman with a lot of tools. She is. I want to get her her own show so bad. She’s like Sophia Loren with a tool belt. She’s amazing.
ANDELMAN: She sounds like a TV show waiting to happen.
BORTH: She is! I could talk about it forever. And my father works for the New York Times.
ANDELMAN: Really?
BORTH: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: What does he do with the New York Times?
BORTH: He has for about twenty years. He does all the layout and formatting and color corrections. Whatever you see physically on the page, he’s probably put there.
ANDELMAN: You’re a perfect interview for the Mr. Media space. Great. We talked earlier before the interview. I found your MySpace page kind of by accident. You allow people to see your page, but let’s warn them ahead of time, they cannot contact you directly through the page.
BORTH: No.
ANDELMAN: It looks like you have a lot of fun. It looks like you have a lot of friends, and there’re some good times on there. This comes back to the privacy issue, though. Are you a little nervous about letting people see that much of you? Will that page disappear soon?
BORTH: It’s interesting that you’ve brought this up, but I really never thought about it in the past. I’m a person who’s pretty honest, and more than anything else, I’m a really honest person. I’m really open. I don’t like secrets. I think it takes too much energy and effort to lie about stuff. So it’s a lot easier just to tell it like it is, and I’ve always been that way. I honestly couldn’t say that six months from now that page is gonna not be private. I can’t say because if I start getting flooded, it’s one thing if I’m getting flooded with positive things, but if I start getting flooded with negative things, then yeah, I will make it private because I don’t need it, and I don’t want it. There’s no point in it so I would probably make it private if that starts to happen. But otherwise, I don’t have anything to hide unless it completely inconveniences my life to a point where I can’t function on a daily basis. I don’t have a problem with it. I think that if you’re on a TV show, and you do a hit movie or something, yeah, okay, you need to expect the fact that people are gonna be interested in your life. And people are gonna want to know what you’re doing and stuff like that, and I’m like why not? I don’t care. I don’t. I don’t care. If people want to see or they’re just curious, fine. I think it’s harmless.
ANDELMAN: Then let me ask you two questions based on your MySpace page. Can you stand on your head?
BORTH: Oh, my God! I was a gymnast for thirteen years. I can! I can stand and twirl and twist on my hands and on my head.
ANDELMAN: And then explain the quote right next to your picture. It says, “Bikers n bitches, skydivers n witches.”
BORTH: That is exactly what it means. I like bikers and bitches, and I love skydivers and witches. My dad’s a big biker, and I love motorcycles. Skydiving is my biggest passion, second to acting. Yeah, I can’t say anything more than that. It just makes me feel incredible and alive. And one of my closest friends, who I actually met through skydiving, is a goddess witch, and I just really started getting into it. I’m not practicing anything. I’m not really a religious person, but it’s interesting to me. And it’s a really interesting kind of people in that whole witch world. It’s interesting to me. It’s like a big summation of me, that quote.
ANDELMAN: Is your friend a Wiccan?
BORTH: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: Okay. I don’t know that much about it, but I know enough to be dangerous.
BORTH: Yeah, yeah. She throws goddess parties, and she does, if your pet is out of whack, she can come and talk to your pet, and she cleanses houses for people. She’s like a Hollywood witch. Her name is Fiona Horn. She’s amazing. She does these great things, and she’s got a huge following, and it was just something that I never knew about. This whole world I didn’t know about. They’re really quite interesting.
ANDELMAN: I thought your page was quite interesting. It looked, like I said, it looked like you have a lot of fun, and you have friends. And it’s nice to see that. It’s obvious that a page like that was set up for you, literally, as a personal MySpace page because there’s no hint of an HBO publicist putting their stamp on it yet.
BORTH: No. I thought about it. I don’t think I’m gonna try to use that page as a tool for promoting myself. The closest thing I’ve done is probably put some photos that I use to submit myself for magazines and stuff like that because, more specifically, the photographers are friends of mine so I want to promote them, and I have their name under. But otherwise, I’d like to keep it personal. I don’t want to use it as a tool for like oh, what’s Michelle Borth doing next. It’s just more for me like, “Hey, my skydiver friends, when are we going up north? Where are we going next, and what’s happening?” I’d rather keep it to that.
ANDELMAN: Well, you’ve been very patient and generous with your time. Just a couple last things. Where would you like to see your career go alongside and beyond “Tell Me You Love Me”? What kind of things would you like to be offered?
BORTH: I would love for my career to go alongside and beyond “Tell Me.” It’s hard to say because my personal taste is definitely more towards the indie films. I’d love to work with Darren Aronofsky. I just really like those dark sort of indie films. So I’d like to go in that direction, more of like a Lili Taylor or something. But, which isn’t to say that, if Superman 3 came out, that I wouldn’t want to do it. Absolutely. I just hope to continue to do quality work more than anything. I enjoyed the work and the films that I’ve done in the past, but now having been on a show, I feel unspoiled, and I’m fucked at the same time because I’m like, “Oh, well, it doesn’t get any better than this.” So I can’t digress into anything bad. I just want to do good work whether it’s big blockbuster films or small indie films. I just want to do good work that I’m proud of.
ANDELMAN: And I was giving you an opportunity to say, “I’d really like to do a voice on ‘The Simpsons,’ or I’m a secret Trekkie, and I’m really hoping to get a cameo on a Trek film” or any of that kind of stuff.
BORTH: David Fincher, call me!
ANDELMAN: That’s good. Alright. And for the men, you brought it up early on, and I have to ask the question. You mentioned that before this, you had done one topless role, and I want to save them some time searching the internet. What movie was that in?
BORTH: I’ll save you all the time, and it’s only on a DVD. It’s not on when it’s on cable. Silent Warnings was actually one of my first films with Stephen Baldwin and Billy Zane. It’s a bunch of aliens, yeah, trying to kill us in a crop circle. Sorry to disappoint, it’s only two seconds. It’s a two second topless scene. And that’s it.
ANDELMAN: Sounds like a Mr. Skin moment.
BORTH: If you want the skin, you tune in to HBO.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
(Return to Part 1)
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: One of the things that I know people have talked about a lot about the show is the male full frontal nudity, which, even in movies, you don’t see that, and that seems to bring that other element to the show that makes it seem that much more graphic because you’re really not used to seeing that.
MICHELLE BORTH: I think that’s the whole point, though. I think it’s really interesting that that’s been like a big fuss because I almost want to say to the men, “Oh, boo hoo, are you feeling exploited? I’m sorry!” I think it’s funny that people are shocked by it because we’ve seen frontal nudity from women. We’ve seen topless scenes and all of that. I like the show. I like that we’re bringing that to the screen. I think that it wouldn’t do the show justice if we just favored one gender. The show is about the truth of relationships, and it doesn’t favor specifically to the men audience by giving you lots of T & A. I love that because that’s not what the show is about. It is not about the sex and the nudity and all of that because a lot of the sex, number one, is unsexy sex. It is not sex that turns you on. It is awkward, and it’s weird. And maybe showing male genitalia will reinforce the whole point. People are comparing it to pornography, but it’s not. It’s about showing an authentic relationship, and I’m glad that we’re doing it because I think we should be.
Michelle Borth Clips on YouTube
Video Clip #1
Video Clip #2
Video Clip #1
Video Clip #2
ANDELMAN: But, Michelle, at the same time, you’re right, fair is fair. We’re gonna see female nudity; we should see male nudity. But because we’re so unused to seeing it, it seems like seeing that penis, at times, makes the sex seem that much more real even if it’s not “happy” sex. I think that’s the part of it that makes it more surprising to people when they see it because it’s like, “Wow, that guy’s not covered up there. That doesn’t look as simulated as that movie I saw in the hotel.”
BORTH: No. You are absolutely right. And I think that the reason for that is it will pull you out of the moment and pull you out of the scene, I think, if you cut to a lamp during a sex scene. The show is very voyeuristic. You’re watching people go through all their troubles. You’re watching them in the bedroom. You’re watching them in the therapy room. We don’t cut away at the awkward moments. We don’t pan to something else when you’re not supposed to see something, so you’re right. It does make it more real, and it does exactly what it’s supposed to do for the show, and that is to make you feel involved with these characters and to live and breathe with these characters. And it doesn’t take you out of the moment. So I think that it does justice for the scenes.
ANDELMAN: Now, you said that you’re 29. You’re not 22 or 23, which is what I guessed from just watching, so you seem more confident and more secure in your sexuality and who you are. That’s got to make it easier for you to do something like this.
BORTH: Absolutely. I am. I am really comfortable with sexuality and nudity. I think it’s just kind of the way that I was raised, just really liberal. And I am just comfortable with myself. My mom did a good job. I’ve got great self-esteem. This doesn’t say that it wasn’t completely nerve-wracking doing them. It absolutely was. It’s not easy. It’s not easy getting naked and being in scenes in front of a room full of people. Oh my God, it’s terrifying. I don’t care how confident or how great you think you look, you’re nervous. Once I initially got over the nerves in doing it, it’s like riding a bike, after the first one you’re just like oh alright, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s get naked. Let’s do it. Yeah, then absolutely then it’s fine. But I also thought it was really essential to really own the confidence because that is Jamie’s whole deal. She is this really sexually confident woman and individual. She uses it as a crutch for so many different things, and if I didn’t portray that, I wouldn’t be doing her character justice. I had to.
ANDELMAN: As we’re talking, the show is still a few days away from airing for the first time. Are you nervous about the potential loss of privacy that may take place if the show catches on? Even if the show becomes a minor hit, people are gonna see you in a completely different light.
BORTH: I never even thought about that. I honestly didn’t think about that. No, no I’m not. If it happens, yeah, then fine, great if people notice me. I think people are gonna have their own opinions. I know some people are gonna judge me and whether or not I’m gonna get heckled or people are gonna be mean to me, I don’t know. I think that I prepared myself for all of it because I’ve been with this project for so long and after the TCA’s and the big stir of the sex, I was like, “Alright, this is gonna be a big deal. I need to prepare myself for anything that’s gonna come because there’s gonna be good and there’s gonna be bad and, whatever it is, I’m just ready for it.” So, yeah, I think that maybe I’m ready for it. I hope so. I think I’m ready for the good and the bad.
ANDELMAN: A few weeks ago I interviewed the editor of Playboy for Mr. Media, and we were talking about how, over the years, many actresses who are looking to break out or change the world’s perception of them posed for Playboy. I wondered if this was the kind of thing that would have kind of the same effect or if that might even be the effect that you might be looking for.
BORTH: I would say no. For me personally, I don’t feel I need to have to justify. No, I don’t. I didn’t do it for any other reason than I thought it was a great show and a great character and a great job on a great network.
ANDELMAN: Let me ask a little bit about you. We’ve talked an awful lot about sex. I think I’ve talked to you more about sex this afternoon than I usually talk to my wife about it in a month. Where are you from? Why did you want to become an actress?
BORTH: I’m from New York, and I don’t really know why I wanted to become an actor. Now, in hindsight, I would’ve been like, “No, don’t do it! I don’t advise it!” I think it was because it was the only thing that, for me, it was an outlet for me that I couldn’t find anywhere else that allowed me to express myself. I was a little out of control as a teenager, and I did some bad things. I found acting to be that outlet that allowed me to express my anger and my pain and my hurt and my fears without having to do anything bad, without having to be bad, or do anything bad. It was just an outlet that I finally found. I was like, “Oh, my God. This makes me feel good. It feels right. I’m good at it, and I’m not breaking any laws.” So that’s why.
ANDELMAN: And you mentioned brothers. How many siblings do you have?
BORTH: I have two younger brothers. Two younger brothers, yeah, and they’re back in New York.
BOB ANDELMAN: Okay. And your folks, what do they do?
MICHELLE BORTH: My mother owns a home improvement business. She’s like the Mrs. Bob Vila of the 21st century. She’s a hot, hot Italian woman with a lot of tools. She is. I want to get her her own show so bad. She’s like Sophia Loren with a tool belt. She’s amazing.
ANDELMAN: She sounds like a TV show waiting to happen.
BORTH: She is! I could talk about it forever. And my father works for the New York Times.
ANDELMAN: Really?
BORTH: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: What does he do with the New York Times?
BORTH: He has for about twenty years. He does all the layout and formatting and color corrections. Whatever you see physically on the page, he’s probably put there.
ANDELMAN: You’re a perfect interview for the Mr. Media space. Great. We talked earlier before the interview. I found your MySpace page kind of by accident. You allow people to see your page, but let’s warn them ahead of time, they cannot contact you directly through the page.
BORTH: No.
ANDELMAN: It looks like you have a lot of fun. It looks like you have a lot of friends, and there’re some good times on there. This comes back to the privacy issue, though. Are you a little nervous about letting people see that much of you? Will that page disappear soon?
BORTH: It’s interesting that you’ve brought this up, but I really never thought about it in the past. I’m a person who’s pretty honest, and more than anything else, I’m a really honest person. I’m really open. I don’t like secrets. I think it takes too much energy and effort to lie about stuff. So it’s a lot easier just to tell it like it is, and I’ve always been that way. I honestly couldn’t say that six months from now that page is gonna not be private. I can’t say because if I start getting flooded, it’s one thing if I’m getting flooded with positive things, but if I start getting flooded with negative things, then yeah, I will make it private because I don’t need it, and I don’t want it. There’s no point in it so I would probably make it private if that starts to happen. But otherwise, I don’t have anything to hide unless it completely inconveniences my life to a point where I can’t function on a daily basis. I don’t have a problem with it. I think that if you’re on a TV show, and you do a hit movie or something, yeah, okay, you need to expect the fact that people are gonna be interested in your life. And people are gonna want to know what you’re doing and stuff like that, and I’m like why not? I don’t care. I don’t. I don’t care. If people want to see or they’re just curious, fine. I think it’s harmless.
ANDELMAN: Then let me ask you two questions based on your MySpace page. Can you stand on your head?
BORTH: Oh, my God! I was a gymnast for thirteen years. I can! I can stand and twirl and twist on my hands and on my head.
ANDELMAN: And then explain the quote right next to your picture. It says, “Bikers n bitches, skydivers n witches.”
BORTH: That is exactly what it means. I like bikers and bitches, and I love skydivers and witches. My dad’s a big biker, and I love motorcycles. Skydiving is my biggest passion, second to acting. Yeah, I can’t say anything more than that. It just makes me feel incredible and alive. And one of my closest friends, who I actually met through skydiving, is a goddess witch, and I just really started getting into it. I’m not practicing anything. I’m not really a religious person, but it’s interesting to me. And it’s a really interesting kind of people in that whole witch world. It’s interesting to me. It’s like a big summation of me, that quote.
ANDELMAN: Is your friend a Wiccan?
BORTH: Yeah.
ANDELMAN: Okay. I don’t know that much about it, but I know enough to be dangerous.
BORTH: Yeah, yeah. She throws goddess parties, and she does, if your pet is out of whack, she can come and talk to your pet, and she cleanses houses for people. She’s like a Hollywood witch. Her name is Fiona Horn. She’s amazing. She does these great things, and she’s got a huge following, and it was just something that I never knew about. This whole world I didn’t know about. They’re really quite interesting.
ANDELMAN: I thought your page was quite interesting. It looked, like I said, it looked like you have a lot of fun, and you have friends. And it’s nice to see that. It’s obvious that a page like that was set up for you, literally, as a personal MySpace page because there’s no hint of an HBO publicist putting their stamp on it yet.
BORTH: No. I thought about it. I don’t think I’m gonna try to use that page as a tool for promoting myself. The closest thing I’ve done is probably put some photos that I use to submit myself for magazines and stuff like that because, more specifically, the photographers are friends of mine so I want to promote them, and I have their name under. But otherwise, I’d like to keep it personal. I don’t want to use it as a tool for like oh, what’s Michelle Borth doing next. It’s just more for me like, “Hey, my skydiver friends, when are we going up north? Where are we going next, and what’s happening?” I’d rather keep it to that.
ANDELMAN: Well, you’ve been very patient and generous with your time. Just a couple last things. Where would you like to see your career go alongside and beyond “Tell Me You Love Me”? What kind of things would you like to be offered?
BORTH: I would love for my career to go alongside and beyond “Tell Me.” It’s hard to say because my personal taste is definitely more towards the indie films. I’d love to work with Darren Aronofsky. I just really like those dark sort of indie films. So I’d like to go in that direction, more of like a Lili Taylor or something. But, which isn’t to say that, if Superman 3 came out, that I wouldn’t want to do it. Absolutely. I just hope to continue to do quality work more than anything. I enjoyed the work and the films that I’ve done in the past, but now having been on a show, I feel unspoiled, and I’m fucked at the same time because I’m like, “Oh, well, it doesn’t get any better than this.” So I can’t digress into anything bad. I just want to do good work whether it’s big blockbuster films or small indie films. I just want to do good work that I’m proud of.
ANDELMAN: And I was giving you an opportunity to say, “I’d really like to do a voice on ‘The Simpsons,’ or I’m a secret Trekkie, and I’m really hoping to get a cameo on a Trek film” or any of that kind of stuff.
BORTH: David Fincher, call me!
ANDELMAN: That’s good. Alright. And for the men, you brought it up early on, and I have to ask the question. You mentioned that before this, you had done one topless role, and I want to save them some time searching the internet. What movie was that in?
BORTH: I’ll save you all the time, and it’s only on a DVD. It’s not on when it’s on cable. Silent Warnings was actually one of my first films with Stephen Baldwin and Billy Zane. It’s a bunch of aliens, yeah, trying to kill us in a crop circle. Sorry to disappoint, it’s only two seconds. It’s a two second topless scene. And that’s it.
ANDELMAN: Sounds like a Mr. Skin moment.
BORTH: If you want the skin, you tune in to HBO.
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Ally Walker, Cynthia Mort, graphic sex, HBO, intercourse, male full frontal nudity, male genitalia, Michelle Borth, Mr. Skin, MySpace, Playboy, sexy, Tell Me You Love Me, The Sopranos, Wiccan
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