For 20 years I produced Network documentaries and magazine segments for 60 Minutes, Prime Time Live and other news programs. Five years ago, I retired from News and launched “Vicki’s Home Styling” which stages homes for sale, transforms homes by redesign & organizes the seemingly impossible.
With Staging, I will make your house look as good as it can for as little as possible , greatly improving your chance to sell more quickly and closer to the the price you want. Redesign: I will “play” with your possessions and recreate a room… an entire house. Organize. I love doing it. Give me any space, filled with confusion and boxes whose contents you no longer remember, and I’ll create order and style.
You might have seen some of my TV pieces. Here’s a small sampling.
Men Are From Mars; Women Are From Venus. But They Have to Live On Earth. Hosted by Barbara Walters. Produced and Directed by Vicki Samuels. A two hour special testing the theories of this bestselling book by entering the private lives of 6 diverse couples.
Biker Women, TBS’s highest rated documentary for the year. Directed by Vicki Samuels. Film follows 5 smart and, of course, beautiful women bike their way from the West Coast to the wildest biker festival in Sturgis, North Dakota.
Nicole Kidman: 60 Minutes, with Leslie Stahl. Produced by Vicki Samuels. In her first ever prime time interview, Kidman takes us into the hills of Romania where shooting the film, Cold Mountain and takes us, as well, into her private life: Her radical parents, her film career, and, for the first time, her divorce from Tom Cruise.
CELEBRITY BEHIND THE SCENES:
Over 25 years as a Network News Producer, I produced stories on hundreds of celebrities. Below are small “behind the scenes” tidbits that the pieces aired on television never told. I will continue to add stories as I remember them.
Nicole Kidman: When the unknown Australian Kidman married Tom Cruise, many believed she was an untalented actress uniting with Hollywood royalty to get ahead. But in truth, by age 13, Kidman was a huge star in her home country with Hollywood already beckoning. Kidman was also originally portrayed as arrogant and unfriendly. But Kidman told me her behavior was misinterpreted. She is painfully shy. As a child she would hide under her mother’s long dress at parties; as a Hollywood insider, Kidman is still afraid to go to parties alone. When Kidman’s PR Firm and “60 Minutes” discussed the actress’s first prime time interview, we were told we could not ask Kidman about her divorce which she had never discussed publicly. ”60 Minutes” answered, ”Either we ask one question or there is no interview.” Kidman and her film company wanted exposure for ”The Hours”, for which everyone was certain Kidman would get an academy award nomination. The deal was struck, yet as soon as we asked Nicole our one question about Cruise, she couldn’t stop talking about him. “He’s the love of my life,” she said then. (This was before she met and married Keith Urban.) “And no”, Nicole continued, “Tom is certainly not gay.” Some insiders say it was Nicole’s fault for the divorce. Cruise, in public, would only say, “Nicole knows the reason why.” So do I, I believe, but I’m not saying.
If you want to know a little more about Kidman, read on: Romania, during the filming of “Cold Mountain”, was indeed cold. Blizzard conditions and temperatures hovering around zero had all of us, cast and crew, covered in layers and layers of clothing from head to toe, with only eyes and nose revealed. As we walked, the mud sucked our legs down to our knees. And there coming through the woods, with her long, wavy, red hair cascading over an open coat, seemingly oblivious to the weather, floated Nicole, looking as beautiful as humanly possible. To be around Nicole is to be enchanted, not just by her looks, but also her intelligence and humility. Playwright David Hare says that almost everyone in Hollywood fakes being humble but, he says, Nicole is the real deal. Growing up in Australia, her mother was an early feminist, and her father, a labor organizer. Child Nicole handed out leftist pamplets on the conservative suburban street corners where they lived. Her porcelain skin is the reason she became an actress. Unable to be out in the sun, severely burning, Nicole spent her time alone, reading and play acting. While in Romania, Kidman, unlike almost all other celebrities I’ve spent time around, would actually communicate with me personally instead of through her PR representative. She would call and ask if I got what I needed shot that day or apologise if there were any problems. She would share her concerns and ask for mine. I had not to expected to like Nicole Kidman before I spent time with her. In fact, most celebrities you meet are disappointing in so many ways. Nicole was a wonderful surprise.
Bono, lead singer U2: The year was 1989. It had taken 8 months to finally get an interview with Bono, who at the time was on the cover of Time magazine as the biggest rock star in the world. He would only do the interview in Central Park, which meant it was a logistical nightmare. We had to pick a secluded area where we would not be interrupted by anyone in the park. This meant creating a platform on rocks up in the hills. A large fabric overhang had to also be constructed so as to control the sun light as it would be changing during the interview. When Bono arrived, he took off his jacket and held it out with his fingers for the sound man to take, as he looked the other way. “I’m not your f—–g butler. I’m a sound man,” he said to Bono. I didn’t say anything but was secretly glad he had confronted this obnoxious behavior. During the interview, Bono talked about how he had lost touch with the normal world, having become accustomed to being completely catered to.
Clint Eastwood: I produced three separate pieces on Clint Eastwood over a five year period. First I was surprised to see that the clothes he wore were all polyester. He is not as cool off screen as on. As all celebrities, Clint always was nice and charming to the correspondent and myself as the producer. Yet when the camera stop rolling, there were glimpses of another Clint. During one such break, he turned to the head of Publicity for his movie studio–an important studio job– and ordered curtly, “Go to my room right now. Order me a tuna fish sandwich the way I like it and you wait there until it’s delivered to make sure it’s done right.” He then returned to us, his demeanor changing back to his easy going, nice guy persona.
The Rolling Stones: Around 1985. This was a very short interview with all the band members standing around Mick Jaggar as he alone talked. Keith Richards was so doped up he couldn’t stand without Ron Wood holding him up. Keith also could not hold his head up and it kept falling down each time he tried. All the band members, including Mick, acted as if nothing was wrong. When the interview was over, the band members hauled Richards up on their shoulders, and with his feet dragging, they carried Keith away.
Michael Jackson’s : His House & His Father: I was around Michael a few different times over the course of 15 years. He always talked in a whispering voice and never really had anything to say, that is, to us in the media. He would answer no question that had not been cleared by him in advance. In his own autobiography, Jackson wrote of his father’s tyranny, making his kids practice for 8 hours straight in a garage heated to over 100 degrees. Joe Jackson was also physically abusive, according to Michael. For one news magazine show, I flew out to L.A. to explore whether Joe Jackson was worth doing as a magazine piece. I spent a week at Michael Jackson’s previous home to Neverland, a house he built in Encino for he and his family. The house itself told me more about Michael than the times I had been around him personally. First, it is completely decorated by giant stained glass windows depicting Disney movies. Cinderella and the Prince occupies one huge wall of the living room. Everywhere there are Disney giant replicas and references. Paths surrounding the house and leading to penned in animals have the names of the 7 dwarfs. Another large room has huge glass containers each encasing one of Michael’s various glitter outfits. A brass plaque states location & date. Over the 7 car garage was Michael’s private hang-out with music equipment, couches, and more glass cases of Michael memorabilia. The entire walls and ceilings of these rooms are plastered with magazine pictures of Michael and every famous person with whom he had ever been photographed. Yet there was not a single picture of his other siblings.
During the week I was in California I tried to get insiders from the music companies to talk about Joe Jackson, but they all said they were afraid to comment for the record. Joe was a scary man, they told me. Even though Michael and Janet had both fired their father as their manager, no one in the music business knew the real relationship. Thus Joe was effective in using the names of his famous kids to get whatever he wanted for his struggling artists. Not everything he tried to get was necessarily on the up and up, these people admitted. With no one willing to talk about Joe Jackson, we never followed through on the story.
More coming…..If you want to ask questions, go to Vicki@vickishomestyling.com
