At Tuesday's "Verity" premiere in New York, Anne Hathaway took charge of the step-and-repeat, telling the cast where to look, pointing at each of them, and counting to ten, according to Page Six. On "The Tonight Show" Wednesday, she called the viral clip "the stuff of nightmares" and apologized to everybody.
Nobody tells you this in acting school, but the red carpet is 95% group-photo logistics. There are forty cameras, nine cast members, fifteen seconds of flash, and somebody has to be the traffic cop. For twenty years the traffic cop has been a production assistant with a walkie, but on Tuesday Hathaway decided the job deserved a real lead, and the internet immediately named her the Red Carpet Traffic Cop. Dakota Johnson's "And then I'm gonna leave" is the most honest line spoken on a red carpet in years. The cast is just waiting for their marks to be called so they can go inside.
Here is the actual mechanism the PR team should have seen coming: the apology is the second piece of content. The clip got her one day of attention. The Fallon apology, delivered with "That girl came out to play last night. Actually, she didn't come to play. She came for business," is the sequel, and it is the funnier one. The machine now runs a two-parter. Part one is the moment. Part two is the star explaining on camera that she is not a machine. Congratulations to everyone involved, because both parts are trending.
A pregnant star directing the snappers in a gown with a built-in baby-bump window, counting to ten like a choir teacher, is not a scandal. It is a job description. Somewhere in an agency there is a form labeled "carpet logistics, on-camera," and this week somebody checked the box.
YOUR TURN: Was she being helpful, or was she just the first person to notice the photo was bad?
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