How NBC Broke Paris Hilton's Deep Personal Bond With Barbara Walters With A Bigger Bag Of Cash
Perhaps the only thing more depressing than calculating that if Paris Hilton receives the $1 million NBC is reportedly paying her for their World! Exclusive! Post-Jail! Interview!, she effectively will have earned $43,478.26 for each of the 23 days she served in prison is reading about the behind-the-scenes chess match (chess is the game where one person places a stack of twenty-dollar bills on a table, and then the other player counters by dumping a Hefty bag full of hundreds on top of it, right?) that resulted in the Peacock's big "get." The NY Times reports that NBC was triumphant in the Hilton showdown because ABC, like the tragic loser in so many ethnic-joke duels, brought a knife to a gunfight:
Ms. Walters told ABC executives that Ms. Hilton's father, Rick Hilton, after getting the ABC offer last Sunday, called back Wednesday to say that the interview would go to a competitor, because at $100,000 ABC was "not even in the same galaxy" in terms of what was being offered. [...]
As ABC representatives described the conversation, Mr. Hilton told Ms. Walters, "It is a money issue." He was also reported to have said that Paris Hilton had made the decision to go with NBC and that she had chosen to speak with Meredith Vieira and not Matt Lauer because she believed that Mr. Lauer had previously made remarks about her she considered disparaging.
Ms. Walters questioned the decision, the ABC representatives said, noting that the Hilton side previously emphasized that Ms. Hilton's credibility was the paramount issue in the decision to be interviewed. But ABC said Mr. Hilton replied, "Nobody turns down money like this."
An actual amount was not discussed, but Ms. Walters told ABC that based on her previous conversations with the Hilton representatives, she believed that the offer from NBC surpassed $750,000.
NBC executives would not confirm yesterday that they had any agreement with Ms. Hilton at all.
While NBC remains coy about their victory, TMZ reports that they have already assigned the code-word "Rome" to the secret project, a choice that is perfectly evocative of the spectacular collapse of a decadent, orgy-loving society that will be initiated by the first tear that breaks free from the corner of Hilton's quivering eye, right before she tells a sympathetic Meredith Vieira about how her $40k-per-day experience has, "Like, totally made me realize how lucky I am? You know?"
