One of these days, some guy in the stage crew of the Academy Awards is going to write a best-selling book about all the things that go wrong or almost go wrong. There are always a few stories that make the rounds of Hollywood soon after the ceremony and this year's seems to be the tale of the Thrown Phone and the Giant Rotating Orb That Wouldn't Rotate.
In the middle of his monologue, Steve Martin told a joke that didn't do well, in part because someone — seemingly in an upper balcony — threw a cell phone onto the stage. Martin remarked, "Okay, I now understand that having someone throw a phone in the middle of a joke is a bad idea. Sorry…that was my decision." This is apparently not what really happened.
You may have noticed, high in the Kodak Theater, a big clunky thing like a chandelier without lights. This was a design element that was supposed to spin slowly throughout the show. Everyone referred to it as "the orb."
The orb rotated throughout days of rehearsal. The orb rotated all day Sunday. About ten minutes before the ceremony started, the orb suddenly stopped rotating. Crew members were dispatched to see if they could get it moving again. They were up in the rafters trying to fix it while Martin was doing his monologue…and one of the men up there dropped his walkie-talkie.
That's what fell onto the stage — and one can only imagine what would have happened if it had hit the host. Fortunately, it didn't. And Martin, thinking quickly, decided to act like it was an intentional joke that didn't work, rather than have the audience start worrying about objects dropping on him or on them. Whatever, it was probably a very smart call. (A couple of critics took him to task for the apparently failed bit, and I'm told Howard Stern was faulting the director for not having the camera in the right place to see the hurled cell phone. None of those folks, of course, could have known it was not planned.)
The orb never did start revolving, and this killed a joke that had been written for later in the show. Martin was going to come out, call everyone's attention to the huge spinning object, then say, "We don't know what that thing is up there but we've developed a theory as to why it's turning like that. We think it's slowly unscrewing." This reportedly got a huge laugh from those present at rehearsal but since that thing wasn't rotating, it had to go.
And there you go: A Secret of the Oscars. See what kind of juicy tidbits you get when you come to this site?