HOLLYWOOD IS CHANGING, SAYS ACTIVIST TIM ROBBINS
So Tim Robbins and Donald Trump walk into a bar.Not together.
They just happened to be in the same Greenwich Village club one night in the mid-1990s. But given the fact that fame is an irresistible magnet for Mr. Trump, the two men naturally ended up in a picture. “I was throwing a private party for a friend, and he tried to crash it and I wouldn’t let him,” Mr. Robbins recalls. But Mr. Trump is not that easily put off, even when his quarry has disdain for him.
“We were in a little roped-off section of the club that I had rented out and I was leaving to go to the bathroom and all of the sudden, there he is. And before I know it, I turn around and there’s photo flashes, and it was weird. He wanted a photo with me because I was famous. He used to do that a lot, by the way. He wanted to be photographed with famous people all the time.” It is strange that this onetime cardboard-cutout celebrity popping up at Gotham parties has turned into a psychic dentist drill, boring into Americans’ deepest, most painful schisms on race, gender and inequality.
“Think about this,” Mr. Robbins says, over scallops, fries and espresso in the bar at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo. “You pursue celebrities your entire life when you’re a real-estate developer, and then you become the most powerful person in the country and no one wants to be photographed with you. This is the time when most celebrities will go to your side, and no one is going to his.”