THE NEW YORK POST
Tuesday, September 12, 2000
NEAL TRAVIS' NEW YORK
FEEDING THE DOG THAT BIT THEM
TABLOID-TV veteran Burt Kearns is about to get his revenge on the medium he claims shunned him for revealing its dark and dirty secrets.
Rights to his "Tabloid Baby" book have just been bought by Columbia Tri-Star Television. The exposé will likely end up as a Showtime movie.
The book got an elaborate launch at Elaine's, but, according to Kearns, when talk-show producers actually glanced at it, the invitations to appear on programs - including "Dateline," "CBS This Morning," "Extra" and "Larry King Live" - suddenly were withdrawn.
"They thought the book was only about the rip-roaring old days of ‘A Current Affair' and ‘Hard Copy' and ‘Inside Edition,' which they could pretend had little to do with mainstream TV," Kearns tells me.
"But, as I point out in the book, the major networks now routinely employ tab-TV techniques - paying for stories, using hidden cameras,trapping people. At least, we on the original shows weren't acting like hypocrites.
"About the only one involved in that scene who's still on TV and not ashamed of his origins is Maury Povich [former "Current Affair" anchor]," Kearns says. "Maury refers to my book as ‘The Bible.' Maybe he'll play himself in the movie."
I hear the property has been bought for Tony Danza's Katyface Productions. Danza, who had a lot of run-ins with the tab-TV shows himself, will likely start casting in fall. Of course, our own older and wiser Steve Dunleavy figures prominently in the story.
"I'd love them to get John Malkovich to play Dunleavy," says Kearns. "I saw that Harry Benson portrait of Steve in The New Yorker profile last week, and it jumped off the page at me - John Malkovich is morphing into Steve Dunleavy."
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