Letters

B-List (Celebrity)

How It's Used

“The moment was a telling example of the odd intersection between the former president and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who are the unofficial royal couple of New York Democrats, and the party's mayoral nominee. Their star power has overshadowed him at times, and their smoothness has left him looking like a B-list candidate after mishaps like yesterday's, some New York Democrats say.”

“Like most of his other genre films, [Enzo] Castellari knew that shelling out a stack of lira for a couple of B-list Hollywood actors gave his exploitation films sellable elements. And for 'Bastards,' he snagged the big, blonde 'Walking Tall' he-man Bo Svenson (after Burt Lancaster apparently said 'No thanks') and ex-NFL cool cat Fred ‘the Hammer’ Williamson. And if those names on a marquee weren’t catnip enough for grindhouse audiences, then 'Bastards' shameless tagline would certainly have done the trick: 'Whatever the Dirty Dozen Did, They Do It Dirtier!’."

“But whereas several comedians attack mass-market entertainment and B-list celebrities, [Sandra] Bernhard's diatribes are always fascinatingly hollow, because you sense not only her desire to deconstruct the secrets of network pablum, but also her obvious desire to get some of that, and the associated designer goodies, for herself.  You might hear other Kelly Ripa putdowns, but none so spectacularly laced with envy.”

“Here’s the time line from last Saturday. At 6:30 p.m. the abandoned Nissan Pathfinder was found smoking in Times Square. Relevant public officials marooned at the correspondents dinner in Washington quickly got word. Over the next hour and a half, several news organizations spread it as well while Times Square was evacuated. To clear the Broadway theater district at curtain time on Saturday night isn’t like emptying a high school; it’s a virtual military operation. By 8 p.m., the crossroads of the world looked like a ghost town, yet if you tuned in to a cable news network, it wasn’t news. No one seemed to know or to care. On MSNBC, which I was watching, it didn’t even merit a mention on a crawl.

“MSNBC was instead busy covering the correspondents dinner itself, so we could feast on journalists schmoozing with mostly B-list show business folk—and sometimes C-list, as in Kim Kardashian.”

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