The TV news producer lady Borat got fired
The station? WAPT in Jackson, Mississippi. The news producer who didn't recognize Cohen, fell for his character's shtick, and booked him on her morning show? Dharma Arthur.
Dharma didn't know from Ali G. She didn't realize the silliness Cohen would unleash on her set (kissing male anchors, standing up during the interview, distracting the weather guy during his "bit"). It's one of the funniest things in the movie.
And the upshot? Arthur says she was fired for letting it happen, and has been unemployed and depressed, and tells Newsweek (via Fox News, and I got this from TMZ.com) that she was Cohen's "victim."
Hey, a good comedy always spills a little blood. Go to Youtube here to see chunks of it, bits, the first four minutes, etc. Here's the earlier bit about Bruno, the Borat follow-up Cohen has lined up, with a clip of Cohen in character.
The big New York magazines have become the rare Borat bashers (again, I laughed and laughed, but my line "a Jackass for college graduates" still applies). Jeff Wells has their links.
Niiice ... Borat is biggest small film in US ever
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles Guardian
Tuesday November 7, 2006
Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which features Baron Cohen's cod Kazakh TV journalist travelling across the US in search of cultural enlightenment and Pamela Anderson, also topped the UK box office for the weekend.
Borat thus shoves aside Fahrenheit 9/11 by documentary-maker Michael Moore, another man prone to pulling confrontational stunts on film, to take the record for a film opening at fewer than 1,000 cinemas. Fahrenheit 9/11, which went on to take more than $220m at the box office worldwide, had an opening weekend take of $23.9m in 2004.
The studio behind Borat, 20th Century Fox, had predicted an opening weekend take of around $15m.
While there had been much early enthusiasm for the film following festival screenings, there were fears that the appetite for a bumbling anti-Semitic, pro-incest fake Kazakh who engages in an extended bout of vigorous nude wrestling with his producer might not be mainstream enough to translate to the box office.
Accordingly Fox reduced the number of opening weekend cinemas for Borat, calculating that the film would work better in fewer, more crowded cinemas. The strategy seemed to work.
"This picture was playing to full houses," said Bruce Snyder, Fox's head of distribution. "The planets aligned, the moons aligned, the stars aligned, and everything came together perfectly for us on this weekend."
