ACADEMY AWARDS

Oscar beat: final touches

Cruise's arrival with baby Suri, Kirsten's correction and Gore and DiCaprio's compliments of the crew.

By Steve Pond, The Envelope

February 23, 2007

At Oscar rehearsal, especially at Oscar rehearsal the day before the show, movie stars are a dime a dozen. But a former vice president and unsuccessful presidential candidate--now, that's something else entirely, as Al Gore proved when he stopped by the Kodak Theater on Saturday morning.

Gore, booked as a presenter on the Oscar show amidst swirling rumors that he either will or won't announce his presidential candidacy onstage at the Kodak, caused a real stir among crew members for whom nine hours full of movie stars is just one more day at work.

And when Gore walked onstage to rehearse, he was greeted with a rarity at Oscar rehearsals: an enthusiastic standing ovation from the crew members and guests.

When the applause died down, Gore proved himself a politician to the core. "I've been backstage watching," he told the crowd, many of whom were stand-ins who'd spent the morning accepting phony Oscar statuettes and making mock acceptance speeches. "And you have been making the best acceptance speeches I've ever heard."

Backstage, Gore was attended by a large group of aides, including his wife, Tipper Gore, and other family members. At one point fellow presenter Leonardo DiCaprio chatted with the politician and admired the support system.

"You have quite a team here," said DiCaprio at one point. "I'd like to hire these guys."

Gore laughed. "You have to understand," he said with a grin, "what our family's been through."

The rest of the morning and afternoon was devoted to business as usual--which, the Saturday before the show, means it was Star Day. From 8:30 in the morning (Hugh Jackman) to 5:45 in the afternoon (Anne Hathaway), stars arrived a 15-minute intervals to go over their scripts, read their lines, record voiceovers, collect show and Governors Ball tickets, and attend to everything else that being a presenter entails.

Co-producer Danette Herman, who is working on her 33rd Oscar show, says Star Day "has to work like clockwork." For the crew, it's essential to work as an efficient machine to ferry the stars from producer Laura Ziskin's office to the green room to the stage to the sound booth to all points in between.

Pages are assigned to escort each star, while a crew of stage managers take control of the different steps along the way. At one point, stage manager Rita Cossette brought "The Last King of Scotland" co-star James McEvoy from Ziskin's office to her colleague Dency Nelson's territory in the stage right wings.

"You're just being handed off from person to person today, aren't you?" said Nelson to first-time participant McEvoy.

"Yeah," said the Scottish actor. "I feel like the Olympic torch."

Close to 40 of McEvoy's colleagues got the same treatment on Saturday, from first-timers Abigail Breslin, Eva Green and Daniel Craig to Oscar vets Jack Nicholson, Nicole Kidman and John Travolta.

The number was higher than usual because Ziskin likes to use presenters in pairs rather than singly, though she doesn't always team them up in expected ways. (For instance, the readers who've been speculating on the Envelope's Gold Derby Forums that "Casino Royale" co-stars Craig and Green must be presenting together are mistaken; they are teamed up, but not with each other.)

Other moments from Star Day:

Tom Cruise, who normally skips Oscar rehearsals, showed up carrying his rosy-cheeked baby Suri, and never set her down or handed her off even when he was delivering his lines onstage.

Robert Downey Jr. slid to the microphone with a smooth pirouette, though he later admitted, "I can't say that I'll be repeating that tomorrow night."

Kirsten Dunst corrected the announcer's pronunciation of her first name "It's Kear-ston," she said, tugging her ear. The first time he rehearsed, Jerry Seinfeld declined to do the material he'd prepared--because, he told the small audience, "you won't laugh tomorrow if you've already heard it today." An hour later, after he'd been assured that he would face an entirely different audience come Sunday night, he returned to the stage an hour later to run through five minutes of well-received standup.

And several of the participants paid tribute to the remarkable efficiency of the Oscar crew. Hanks called them "the best awards crew there is," while Clint Eastwood walked into the wings and announced, "This is a first-class operation you have here." A nd when Ben Affleck spotted Dency Nelson, he broke into a big grin. "I was thinking about you this morning," he told Nelson, a veteran of 19 Oscar telecasts and countless other awards shows.

"I was thinking it'd be good to see you again," Affleck continued, "because I feel like we have a special relationship after all these shows we've done. And then I thought, wait a minute, every other actor probably feels like they have exactly the same relationship with you. And I felt so common."

Nelson laughed. "Oh, no," he lied, "they bring me in just for you."

Oscar Beat: Friday

The Oscar crew made it through Friday's rehearsals without setting the Kodak Theater on fire, which was a big step in the right direction for show producer Laura Ziskin.

Five years ago, the first time Ziskin produced the Oscars, Friday night before the show saw one of the most calamitous, near catastrophic rehearsals in history. The trouble all stemmed from Cirque du Soleil, the arty circus troupe that had been booked by Ziskin to provide a shot of adrenaline midway through the show.

In rehearsals, a muscular aerial artist swung on a rope over the crowd, but repeatedly landed, hard, right next to where Nicole Kidman would be sitting. Another performer flung a series of hula hoops to a compatriot in the aisle, but at least one of the hoops landed smack on top of the seat card that indicated where Julia Roberts would be sitting.

And finally, a stunt involving a twirling ball of fire went awry; after the Cirque performer extinguished his torch, the stage continued to burn, destroying 17 large tiles and prompting a series of panicky meetings and a lot of overtime.

At the end of the night, a discouraged Ziskin walked back to her room in the adjoining Renaissance Hotel, called her partner, screenwriter Alvin Sargent, and told him that she wanted to throw herself off the building.

This year, rest assured, Ziskin is in far better spirits. (By the way, the Cirque du Soleil problems were solved back in 2002, and the performance went off without a hitch.)

The good news for Ziskin is that the most complicated performances at this year's show, many of which were rehearsed on Friday, don't involve trapeze artists, flying hula hoops or balls of flame. This year, it's more a matter of intricate timing and creative camera movement--tricky things, to be sure, but ones that only threaten to scorch the stage metaphorically, not literally.

One minor annoyance came in the morning, when Ziskin and her staff spent some time shaking their heads over, and then laughing about, an Internet report that revealed several secrets about the show--some of them accurate, others misleading.

(For the record, and contrary to the widely disseminated report, the four acting awards will not all be handed out during the final third of the show. The usual order of awards has indeed been shuffled, but the acting presentations will happen throughout the evening: early in the show, in the middle of the show and at the end of the show.)

As usual for Oscar week, Friday was a day for music rehearsals. James Taylor and 17-time nominee Randy Newman did several easygoing renditions of Newman's song "Our Town," while Melissa Etheridge's "I've Got to Wake Up" received an energetic early-evening run-through.

The timing led to at least one humorous juxtaposition, when Newman and Taylor performed their "Cars" song while all around them technicians set huge mirrored panels and dropped in a showpiece crystal curtain--not, thankfully, for a newly revved-up version of their gentle, nostalgic ballad, but for the next item on the agenda. That would be the far more upbeat and glitzy "Dreamgirls" medley, a highly collaborative seven-minute extravaganza with several surprises amidst the performances by Beyonce, Jennifer Hudson, Anika Noni Rose and Keith Robinson.

Fittingly, the day of music also included an early-afternoon visit from veteran film composer Ennio Morricone, the recipient of an honorary Oscar this year. Celine Dion was on hand for that rehearsal, pronouncing herself "so honored" to be debuting a new song set to an old Morricone theme.

At about 6:30, after the long and complex "Dreamgirls" number had concluded to everyone's satisfaction, Ziskin stopped in the Kodak aisle to catch her breath after a day rife with divas (Beyonce, Celine, Jennifer…) but low on diva-like behavior.

"That one's taken a lot of work," she said of the "Dreamgirls" number. "But it's going to be great."

So does that mean that the second-time producer won't be making any despairing late-night phone calls to Sargent?

Ziskin grinned, and then looked at her watch. "Well," she said, "it's still early."