There have been two Geraldo Riveras through his long career. One of them was a reporter who has done some remarkable work. The other was a television show host who did what it took to get an audience.
A lot of people don't realize that I started my career in sports and was a sports reporter long before I was on television. I used to be an NBA reporter and an NHL reporter.
Steve hadn't been to acting school. He had no preconceived notions. His background was exactly what you see on television; he's done that all his life. We thought we'd do one show. What happened was, it did really well, so we did a part two. And from then on, we found that Steve's natural behavior in the wild happens to be fascinating!
The fact is that television, even before the movies, offered the chance to control our work and to get to do it again when we did something right. So television has always been better to writers than any other medium for a long time.
I like the fact that it [social media] is unfiltered. In other words it's not Geraldo of Fox News or Geraldo of WABC Radio, it's Geraldo. And you know it's raw, unedited, what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling, or, you know, some mistakes I'm making in real time. And I see that as a way to go out kicking and screaming. People will be hearing from me 'til the bitter end now.
In television, there's this weird sense of isolation from your audience; you kind of get this feeling that you write the show for you and your wife and your friends and the other people who work on the show. It's our little show, and then it goes out into the world, and somebody watches it.
I wrote the show West Wing for the two years before and the two years after 9/11. Suddenly everyone in the world had been through something that our characters had not been through; the whole trajectory of the world had changed. Yet our show took place in a parallel universe. I wasn't really sure what to do about this. In no one's wildest dreams did it occur that an event like this could possibly happen.
Some of the supporting roles that I've done as an actor, I took them because I knew that I would get to watch some of the leading guys in the movies, and also I'd get to work with them.
With his long sharp nails he opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight and with the other ceased my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound so that I must either suffocate or swallow... Some of the...Oh my god…my god What have I done?
I was fired from my own television show, CBS's Family Law. It was the second time this had happened in my career, the first being when I was fired from The Facts of Life. I had been grateful to work in TV for so long but had always been chasing a career as a feature writer-director and had completely failed.
If you're a host of a video show and you're on the cleanest show on television for eight years, people want to say, 'Well, that's what that person does.' That was the dilemma for me, career-wise.
The difference between a reporter, a newspaper columnist, a paid speaker, a television personality, a radio talk show host, a blogger, a movie producer, a publicist, and a political strategist, is growing less - and not more - distinct.
You do show after show after show and get them done and on the air. Television devours material. We work a minimum of 12, 14 hours, and often 15, 18 hours a day.
I never considered game show host as a career, but it's fun because I get to inject some of my comedy into it.
I have always been involved with radio, whether it was as an artist talking to radio about my own songs, or as a promotion man at Def Jam to working records through my company. In 2000 I was asked to host a show in Norfolk VA and through that show I was then asked to host the morning show in Detroit. The concept of the show was around Hip Hop. We were active in the community and we wanted to do a local show that had a hip hop feel around it.
'Bonfire' was kicking around for a very long time. It was an idea I wanted to explore for a television show. Then I was given this weird gift of time when 'Jessica Jones' finished season one. I got really organized and just kind of banged it out, but it took a long time. It took two years to even have a first draft.
I don't think of myself of a late-show host any more than I think of myself of a game-show host. I mean, I've done both, I've been an actor. I'm just kind of a carny, that's it.