Entertainment Tonight and The Insider (two shows that are scheduled to run directly from one to the other, share the same font and colour scheme in their logos and illustrative graphics and share content to the extent that they really don’t need to even be two shows) have been getting a heap of press over the fact that they have a video tape of Heath Ledger doing a heap of drugs in a drug party at the Chateau Marmont two years ago. They had scheduled to show the video tonight but have since decided that showing it would be disrespectful to the Ledger family.
Entertainment Tonight and The Insider never cease to amaze. There’s a reason they have the maternal Mary Hart as an anchor and that is because if they didn’t, it’d be another shrill, blonde 22 year old aspiring film actress with an eating disorder and that, as an image, would be too generic and disheartening for the public to deal with. It would be too clear a statement as to what the show really is; namely, a profit generating gutter dwelling crap fest.
Out of respect? As opposed to the way they dealt with Anna Nicole Smith’s death which was entirely respectful? AND the fact that they freaking already have essentially showed everything they were going to show anyway in their promotional ads. The way ET and TI are set up they never just play a story from beginning to end. The entire show is teasers of what is to come and then, all of a sudden the show is over and you wonder what the hell you even just watched. The entire Heath Ledger film may as well have been seen at this point.
PLUS – the film was shot two years ago. Everyone knew he did drugs; that wasn’t a mystery at all. A film showing him doing drugs two years ago is just crap, sensationalist fodder. It’s not actually proving anything new at all.
ET and TI have pulled the plug on this I would say almost ENTIRELY because market research has shown that exploiting Ledger’s drug use to get ratings would be seen as crass at this point and they’d suffer in terms of ad revenue in the long run. They’re vultures. [source]
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