Cycle Eleven Spoilers
The casting episode will have a futuristic theme.
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Banks looked at a photo of a redhead named Britney. “Oh, my God. There are four girls named Britney and two named Olivia. Am I going to have to change all their names again?” She studied another photo. “This girl is a bombshell,” she said. “Is she Southern?”
“Yes,” Mok said. “I wonder if she’s bigoted. That could be interesting.” Mok paused. “How’s our one Asian girl doing? Isn’t she also a stunt woman?”
Michelle Mock shook her head. “Unfortunately, she’s not into rocking Asia, but what do you think about Nicole? She’s tried a few times already.”
“I want to give the girl a third-person lesson,” Banks said. “Don’t ever speak of yourself in the third person. My mama taught me that.”
“Who are our most self-centered girls?” Mok asked. “Who’s stirring the pot? Has anyone surprised people?”
“Well,” Michelle said, “there’s a girl who dresses her rats in diapers and takes them to the mall.”
Mok nodded and said: “Over all, it sounds like we have a really strong group. Let’s see what they’re like in front of the panel of judges.”
“I don’t know,” Banks replied. “When I caught a glimpse of them earlier, it looked like a beauty pageant rather than a sea of models. They are all wearing too much makeup.”
“We’ll fix that,” Sisk said. “They think that’s what you want.”
Banks nodded. She had just two days off between her last talk-show taping and today, and yet she seemed neither exhausted nor jaded about the prospect of doing “Top Model” for the 11th time. “This one was really hard to map out,” Mok told me earlier. “We always decide the grid of the show in advance of picking the girls, and it used to be easy. But it’s harder and harder to come up with fresh challenges.” In Cycle 10, which concluded in mid-May, they surprised the audience by crowning a plus-size girl named Whitney Thompson as the winner.
“We try to bring in a cast that will keep the show interesting,” Mok said, “but there is sometimes a disconnect between Tyra’s message of female empowerment and the goals of the contestants, who, all too often, just want to be famous.”
The theme for the “Top Model” opener of Cycle 11 was “futuristic,” and the producers decided to tape the segment in a former furniture showroom full of globes in Day-Glo colors. The floors and walls of the cavernous space were painted in white lacquer, and the camera crew wore hospital booties over their shoes to avoid marks. Banks, who had changed into a vaguely militaristic black dress with peaked shoulders, was positioned behind a long narrow table at one end of the room. Sitting on either side of her were Jay Manuel and J. Alexander, two of the longtime judges on “Top Model.” For the purposes of the space-age tone of the show, they were introduced on camera as Beta J and Alpha J., respectively. Banks said, “It’s time to see who’s technologically bankable,” sounding as if she were leading the charge from the prow of a starship.
Any trace of sci-fi campiness disappeared when the first girl burst into the room. She was blond and was wearing white short shorts and a tight blue T-shirt with black heels. She had large breasts and looked more like a candidate for “Playboy” than for the catwalk. “I do imitations,” she said. “I can imitate black girls.” Alpha J., who is black, asked, “What are black ghetto clothes?” The would-be contestant paused. “Three sweatshirts, giant shoes and a rainbow headband,” she said. Off to the side, Mok smiled.
Banks asked the girl why she wanted to be a model. “It is my destiny,” the aspirant said. “I turn on my TV and I think, I can do that.”
Banks looked almost angry. “That’s not a reason to do something. Why not open a magazine and study? Can you name five top models right now? Can you name five designers? People just want to be stars. That’s not what we’re looking for.” The girl did not seem all that fazed by Banks’s speech. “Goodbye,” Banks said.
“Wait till you see me in my bathing suit,” the contestant said, as she turned and walked away.
And so it went. The “Top Model” contestants were so invested in the competition that no amount of criticism or scolding seemed to have an impact. A plus-size girl was told that she wasn’t plus enough, and the judges threw towels at her and instructed her to stuff them in her jeans. Which she did. A dark-skinned black girl announced: “I am America’s next top model. I need this show, and this show needs me.” She could not name a single fashion designer, but she did tell the judges that she was a virgin. Applicant No. 5 said the biggest misconception about her was that she was a lesbian. She described her three pet rats. Beta J enthused over her. “Snotty, eccentric, rats, questionable sexuality - you are perfect for the fashion industry.” The sixth aspirant looked a little like Hilary Swank and had recently graduated from Harvard. “I was an English and American literature major,” she said. Banks asked her to pose like her favorite character from an American novel, but she froze and could not come up with a character to play. “Let’s try an animal,” Banks said helpfully. “Be . . . White Fang from Jack London.” The girl got down on all fours and growled at the judges.
Throughout all these acts of abasement and bravado, Banks seemed, as she always does on “Top Model,” analytically and emotionally invested. As her mother was to her, she is to these girls. “I don’t ask them to do anything that I wasn’t asked to do,” Banks said before the auditions began. “But even if they don’t become models, they have to learn how to be strong. When they give up, or they stop trying, I get so mad. I can never believe it. How can you quit? Life is hard sometimes, but how can you quit?”
“We were at the studio until 11:30,” Banks said the next day over a cup of broccoli soup in the lobby restaurant of the building that houses her agents. She was dressed casually in jeans tucked into boots and a tight waist-length brown leather jacket over a low-cut sweater. Her hair was in loose curls, and she was wearing almost no makeup. With her face free of paint and glitter, Banks seemed to glow. “Nearly all the girls made it to the next round, but it was frustrating. I think, at Bankable, we’re cooling on reality shows. In the beginning, the girls were spontaneous. But now everyone looks at ‘Top Model’ as a way to become a star.” She paused and then said: “For the next cycle, they’re going to have to do homework about the fashion business. I want girls I can help become professional models. I don’t want to help girls just become known - there’s no point to that.”
Fame for fame’s sake does not fit with the Tyra Banks brand. To see yourself as a brand is to have a kind of guarantee with the public: when you think of Oprah Winfrey or Martha Stewart, you immediately conjure a particular world. Banks’s goal is to create that sort of instant identification in everything she does. Over and over, she told me that she defines the Tyra brand as “attainable fantasy,” but that description seems a bit narrow. Banks, like Winfrey and Stewart, is dedicated to dreams coming true through work and determination; empowerment, especially for young women, is Banks’s actual “attainable fantasy.” And while the 11th cycle of “Top Model” will probably be entertaining, it felt like the winning formula of the show had eclipsed Banks’s message. It was hard not to contrast the brashness of the “Top Model” girls with the less fortunate girls that often populate the audience of the “Tyra Show.” Perhaps the fantasy had become too attainable.
When I mentioned this to Banks, she countered: “I don’t know if that’s true. There will be girls on that show who are vulnerable or confused or less confident, just like there are girls on the talk show that see their lives as hopeless. And, in everything I do, I feel it is so important that whatever happens to someone - women especially - doesn’t have to be their fate. You can, and you must, move forward. That is something I try to instill every day on the talk show. You have to go get your life back.”
Banks inherited this philosophy from her mother, but she has always been determined. When she was 20, she wrote in one of her notebooks: “If Michael Jordan can sell tennis shoes and Magic Johnson can sell cars, I can sell cornflakes. I can and I will. So just sit back and relax because here I come. . . . I’m going to hurt and abuse.” Banks looked pleased when she read that passage aloud. “It was a moment,” she said now. “When I showed that to my mom the other day, she said, ‘You didn’t just happen overnight.’ ”
Since her mother also trained her to see the end at the beginning, Banks can imagine a day when she will not be on camera. “It won’t always be my face,” she said, as she finished her soup. “I know that nothing lives forever, and I’m prepared for that. But there’s no end to producing. I’ll still be at the helm.”
Our waitress arrived to clear the dishes. She was tall and willowy with red hair. “You could totally model,” Banks said, as she sized her up. “Why aren’t you modeling?” The waitress said something about the attacks on 9/11 sidetracking her. “You should do your waitressing at night,” Banks continued. “And you should see every big agency in the city. If they say ‘no,’ no biggie - I got turned down by a lot. Hit all the open calls and just go. Less makeup though. I know you’re at work, but hardly anything on your face and wear a wife-beater, jeans and flip-flops. Real simple.”
The waitress looked overwhelmed but thrilled. Banks was in her element - a transformation was within her grasp. And the waitress was grateful. “I just went with the red hair,” she said, “Do you like it?”
Banks stared a second. “Yesss!” she said. “I love it. But your hair is not the point. You’re going to do this, aren’t you? You’re going to remember this day. This is the day your life changed.”
From a NY Times article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/magazine/01tyra-t.html?pagewanted=9&_r=2