Talking Your Tech: 2011 celebrity highlights
LOS ANGELES -- In 2011, USA TODAY started the new Talking Your Tech series, featuring both celebrities and consumers opining about living with technology.
Today, we're looking back at celebrity interview highlights — visits that were in their homes, on the sets of their TV shows, at fancy hotels and backstage at movie premieres. Friday we'll look back at consumer highlights from 2011.
Great moments:
—Drew Carey: In 1988 I wrote a book about TV game shows, and for my research spent a good deal of time at The Price is Right at CBS's Television City. Stopping by over two decades later to interview current Price is Right host Drew Carey was my first time back, and amazingly, little had changed. The sets were still green and pink, the audience was enthusiastic and rambunctious and the games were very similar. However, the audience and host were quite a bit younger, and, as Carey told us, the big prizes had changed. The promise of a new car or fabulous trip to Cancun were still worth jumping up and down over, but the secondary categories — grandfather clocks and living room sets — had been replaced by tech. "Big screen TVs, 3-D, they love that stuff," said Carey. Many giveaways now include iPads, iPods and accessories as well.
—Christina Hendricks: The Mad Men beauty told us before the interview began that she had little use for tech, and that she would make for one boring chat. Then the cameras started rolling, and she couldn't have been more wrong. Hendricks told us how she ditched her iPhone for a Google Android Nexus phone because the auto-correct on iPhone texts drove her crazy. And how folks won't pick up the phone these days — so she does an end run by texting them instead. As Hendricks demonstrated, folks are more into tech than they sometimes realize.
—James Cameron: The director behind two of the biggest and most technologically advanced movies of all time, Avatar and Titanic, spent most of our time together talking about how he personally didn't find gadgets interesting. He said he wasn't into cell phones, didn't like the current crop of 3-D cameras, and what he'd really like to do is build "a submarine that goes to 36,000 feet."
—Wayne Brady: The host of CBS's Let's Make a Deal is a huge gamer. So much so that he sat with us during a break from the show and talked about his obsession, but couldn't wait to get back to his dressing room and let loose "killing zombies" on Mortal Kombat with game challenger and Deal announcer Jonathan Mangum. We accompanied them to the game center, where we asked Brady how playing games helps him lead a game show. "It doesn't," he said. Then he cracked: "As I'm doing a deal, I pretend they're Zelda and I'm Link," referring to the video game classic The Legend of Zelda. Then he got serious. "Work is the thing that happens around the game time."
—Corbin Bernson: We went to see the co-star of USA Network's Psych to talk Twitter and 3-D TV. But as we set up the cameras, Bernson kept opening packages of snow globes that had just arrived from eBay. Once we started the interview, I asked to see the entire collection. Some 8,000 globes, housed in a former garage, at a cost of over $500,000. This is what Bernson does to keep himself busy while killing time on the set, he said, perusing eBay France, eBay Canada and eBay Australia because he's exhausted eBay's U.S. site. That's one expensive hobby!
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