Live From The Emmys

2 p.m. PT – Another year, another Emmy telecast. No one is asking me who I’m wearing (Michael Kors, Neiman Marcus outlet find, thank you very much). No one will offer to “freshen me up.” Only the stars get that re-primping treatment, though I could use a hairdresser after the exhaust from the car-sized generators cooling the press complex blew out my carefully combed hair on the way to my seat. (For a heavily-touted “green” Emmy broadcast, the energy consumption alone must be progressing global warming exponentially).

We’ll set the scene. The press (photographers, print, television and electronic press) are in giant tents east of the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium. We do not arrive in limos. We are not greeted with champagne from the sponsors. We are dressed in black tie-appropriate apparel, in a kind of “if the stars have to gussy up, so do you” kind of spirit. Here, in the general press room, we are crammed elbow-to-elbow, laptop-to-laptop, eight rows deep, awaiting the telecast to start live to the east coast in three hours. The parking lot outside is crammed with temporary offices (for the production crew), high-definition and standard definition uplink trucks (for the engineers) and “executive” version porta-potties (for us).

The set-up is a little different this year. Fox, which has the telecast this year, has added more plants to dress the stage where stars, writers, directors and producers will stand as they are peppered with questions from the press (mostly from TV people – it’s pretty hard to wrestle a mike away from them). The “walls” have been dressed with shimmery silver draping and the room is lit partially with the aid of pink chandeliers. Women in satin retro-print dresses, evocative of cigarette girls of times long passed, roam the room to pass out radios, with which to listen to the telecast over the din of the press room, plus licorice and sugary snacks.

The room hasn’t filled in yet. Critical mass will occur around 4:30 p.m., when the sun-cooked red carpet interviewers and their crews will flood in, searching for the catered dinner.

We will watch the telecast on big flat-screen TVs until the winners start streaming through our location. That occurs about an hour after they leave the stage. They have several stops (mostly dominated by TV entertainment news syndicated shows, before they reach us. We will know when they are coming; we are located right next to the photo room. Something akin to a Caribbean lightning storm is visible, the result of hundreds of strobes flashing, before the blinded winner comes in our room.

For now, we wait…

4:45 p.m. – I stand corrected. As part of the information being disseminated about the pro-ecology efforts of the Emmys, we’re told the use of solar panels and the installation of florescent lighting in the press room and other facilities has cut the usual power consumption by 75% B-20 biodiesel fuel is powering some of the generators. The red carpet is also made of 95,000 recycled plastic bottles. Your Gatorade bottle may be trod upon by Katherine Heigl as we speak. And the star power? That’s for ratings, no power savings there.

4:55 p.m. – Before the audio cuts out, we can hear the director chiding the audience to find their seats, snapping at Ellen DeGeneres, who’s filming material for her own show, “She’s not the queen tonight!” No love if you’re not the CURRENT Emmy host.

5:40 p.m. – The first winner to hit the press tent stage is Lost’s Terry O’Quinn. In what we hope will be the first of many honest answers, O’Quinn responded that the thing that keeps him going as an actor is “the hovering specter of poverty.” He was probed for clues to plot points to his series, but he didn’t bite, adding he doesn’t check out the Internet anymore, to see what fans are guessing about his show, either.

5:45 p.m. – Jaime Pressley proves that not every performer daydreams about the Emmy, fantasizing about the perfect display location. She said she hasn’t decided where to put her award “because I didn’t plan to win it.”

6:10 p.m. – Jeremy Piven was asked how he felt for winning for Entourage episodes that are, in essence, a year old. “I’d accept (an award) for something I did in high school!” he said. Asked how he finds the balance between being “a tough guy and an a**hole” for his role as Ari Gold, Piven said he invented a mantra for his character: “Ari’s the kind of guy who expected to make $40 million by age 40, or “he’d kill somebody.”