Q&A Hollywood
Q: How did “The Simpsons” end up doing special shorts for Disney+? It's not a Disney show, is it?
A: “The Simpsons” is sort of a Disney show, in the same way that the Star Wars movies are now Disney movies: Disney bought them. Disney acquired the 21st Century Fox company in 2019 and most of its intellectual property with it. That included “The Simpsons,” which means that Disney+ is now the show's online streaming home. “Simpsons” creator James L. Brooks reportedly noticed that Disney+ had specific links on its home page for Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar, but you had to go digging for “The Simpsons,” so he suggested having his show “invade” the other branches of the Disney content universe. “It was just the desire that we had to reach out to the viewers [of] the other branches of Disney+, to see if they would be interested in us,” executive producer Al Jean told Variety magazine. The result so far has been “Simpsons” shorts set in the Star Wars universe (“The Force Awakens From its Nap”) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (“The Good, the Bart, and the Loki”).
Q: Do any of the stars of TV from the `60s have any opinion of the large salaries of today's stars?
A: “Acting is the most wildly overpaid position imaginable,” said Robert Downey Jr. (“Iron Man,” 2008), an actor whose debut happened decades ago, and he was including himself in that statement. I couldn't find any actors going on the record to complain about today's salaries versus what they got “back in the day,” but there are plenty of actors who think they themselves are getting too much. Downey, who began as a child actor in the `70s, made his statement in 2013, after a run of seven films that earned hundreds of millions of dollars each. Even so, he's not the first actor to express the idea. The great comedic actor David Niven (“The Pink Panther,” 1963) once said, “Can you imagine being wonderfully overpaid for dressing up and playing games?” His career peaked in the middle of the last century, and he died before anyone had ever even heard of Downey. The sentiment seems to be unchanged: Any amount of money can seem like too much for playing makebelieve. Beyond that, it's just economics; and the economics can get pretty sophisticated.
Q: How did “The Big Bang Theory” do the Season 6 scenes where Howard is in space? He's actually weightless several times.
A: Actually, he isn't. He's just good. (Did I sound like Howard there? I was trying to sound like Howard.) By Season 6, CBS's “The Big Bang Theory” was one of the biggest shows on TV, but even it couldn't afford to send a man to space. So, they recreated it with some creative set design, a rental, a platform and the magic of acting. The appearance of weightlessness was achieved by putting Howard on an invisible (to the camera) platform. “There was a very long, sort of skinny platform that a person could lie on and it would almost look like they were swimming through in weightlessness,” production designer John Shaffner said in an interview with CollectSpace.com. But he admitted it was up to the actors, most notably Simon Helberg as Howard, to really sell it: “They studied and really did a remarkable job with acting the weightlessness.” As for the set, that was comparatively simple — there's a company called WonderWorks that has a replica of the International Space Station that it rents out to film productions. Getting him to this fauxstation was harder. No one had made a replica of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft that's used to ferry astronauts to and from the real space station, so Shaffner and his team had to make one themselves. Their quest for accuracy was made a little easier by input from one of the guest stars: real-life NASA astronaut and engineer Mike Massimino, who told Shaffner their set was realistic — and realistically uncomfortable. Have a question? Email us at questions@tvtabloid.com. Please include your name and town. Personal replies will not be provided.