Roger’s Barbies
This NYT piece on the make-up for the movie “Bombshell” says a lot about Fox News. If you have read the various exposes or watched the Showtime movie with Russell Crowe playing Roger Ailes, you already know the Fox was basically Ailes’s personal brothel. This film apparently focuses more on the women and what it took to make them look the way they look is instructive:
They were Roger’s angels. Megyn Kelly, Gretchen Carlson and the other women at Fox all had a specific look that was intended to please him. New York Magazine once described it as “pert noses, bronze skin, blonde hair”; they showed lots of leg, were almost always white and, in the end, appeared “conspicuously unnatural.”
Those women, and the sexual harassment they endured at the hands of the Fox titan Roger Ailes, are the subjects of “Bombshell,” the movie directed by Jay Roach and starring Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie.
The film has won praise for capturing a toxic work environment and for the performances of its stars. It has also drawn notice for the uncanny resemblance the lead actresses have to the real-life counterparts they portray.
Makeup was key to that and to the story. Vivian Baker, the head of the makeup department, said that in these women’s world, it symbolized power — both their own and Ailes’s.
[…]
“The look,” Baker said, “fits within that whole concept of women as Barbie dolls.”
It wasn’t just the blonds. The brunettes were also made up to look like Barbie dolls. At least one of them had no problem with it:
On set, [Kimberly] Guilfoyle was always seated in “the leg chair,” because the position allows viewers a full view of the host’s bottom half. During a meeting with the show’s co-hosts, Fox chairman Roger Ailes presented an image of the set. Guilfoyle was seated on the end, legs on display.
“There’s Kimberly, doing her job,” Ailes told the group, according to two people familiar with the meeting…When Gretchen Carlson publicly accused Ailes of sexual harassment, Ailes’s wife, Beth, enlisted Guilfoyle to rally women to his defense.
Guilfoyle embraced the effort, alienating other hosts, including Megyn Kelly, who complained about her to the Murdoch family, which controls the conservative-leaning network, according to four people familiar with the incident.
It turned out that Guilfoyle had her own issues with inappropriate workplace behavior. And now she’s hooked up with Donald Trump Jr.
I haven’t seen the movie. I wonder if her story is featured. It should be. It’s part of it.
In any case, the “look” of the women on the network has always been downright bizarre. Ailes was selling them to his aging male viewership as fantasy figures — his fantasy. And it was always extremely creepy and disturbing.
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