RUSH: Andy in El Paso, welcome to the EIB Network, sir. It’s nice to have you with us.
CALLER: Mega dittos from the land of the liberals in El Paso, Texas.
RUSH: Thank you, sir. I flew over El Paso the other day on the way to Los Angeles. It’s out there all by itself.
CALLER: Yes, sir. We’re way out.
RUSH: You’ve gotta be going there to get there.
CALLER: Yes, sir. I wanted to nominate you for an Oscar for your performance on the 1/2 Hour News Hour, after the dialogue you were having with Curt, the host. Was his name Curt?
RUSH: Yeah, this is the skit last night. That would be an Emmy because it’s television. An Oscar is for the big screen, and I don’t have a chance of ever being on the big screen, unless some liberal in a movie house throws me up against it, which won’t happen because I don’t go there. Let me play this. We’ve got the sound bite. We’ve got the audio sound bite of this. The audio will pretty much give you an idea of the skit, but there’s a lot of video in this. Obviously it’s a TV skit. You’ve gotta watch it. The whole thing is at RushLimbaugh.com via Windows Media Player, but this is the opening skit last night. I’m coming out of an elevator, and I’m very earnest. I’m really in a hurry coming out of the elevator, and the anchor of the show, Curt McNally, stops me and wants to talk to me, and I’m sort of a little impatient because I got somewhere to go. So that’s how it starts.
(Playing of 1/2 Hour News Hour skit.)
AUDIENCE: (wild applause)
RUSH: Now, after I leave Curt in the hallway outside the elevator, the camera follows me walking down a couple halls and into a doorway making sure nobody can see me, and the room in which I’m controlling the world is a television control room with just massive monitors all over the place. It was really done well. It took five hours to shoot that sketch. For those of you who have seen it, five hours! Nope. Five hours. Well, there’s a portion in that skit where I hit the R button on a computer keyboard, and that brings the whole board of monitors to life. Fourteen takes of my finger! They do everything, and then for every angle — like we had to do the conversation, Curt and I. (Curt Long is his real name.) The conversation took an hour. It took first a master take that’s right — they have two cameras — then they move the cameras, get close-ups on him and then they move the cameras and get close-ups on me, doing the whole thing over and over again. After an hour, they’ve got all kinds of possible angles, sometimes the lighting wasn’t working, audio battery went out, these things happen. Going in the doors, they had to shoot that. That probably took a half hour, because they had to have cameras inside the room walking in the door, had the cameras outside the room and it’s the same camera. So you finish one place, set ’em up, relight, and do all this stuff. It took five hours to shoot that thing, and then we did a second skit that took four hours.
I think it’s going to be (interruption). I’ve just been asked in the IFB if I miss TV. You know, this one was fun. I couldn’t do this every day. I could not do this, if this was my job, to do this every day. This was nine hours, for about maybe three total minutes of footage that will air. This skit, they had to edit a couple things out of it because it didn’t work, aired Sunday night, because it was originally going to air Thursday night and have a little bit about being on on Thursday night, which is not its normal night, had to pull that out since we moved it back to Sunday. The second skit, I’ll just tell you the premise. You know, everybody’s got a fragrance these days, so we introduce a new fragrance, El Rushbo. It just causes women to go berserk and nuts, and that’s all I’ll say. (laughing) It was funny. I play myself in this one, obviously, too. Yeah, five hours to do that skit. It’s fun doing it, but after awhile you say, ‘Okay, I’ve done it. It’s over. It’s not going to be done any better,’ but this is not the way professional directors and producers do things. They just keep taking it over and over and over again because it can always be better, or maybe the lighting could be better, or something. There are many times, like in the El Rushbo skit, we had to do a whole bunch of different takes of one scene where all I’m doing is sitting at a bar smoking a cigar. It was the lighting, number of other things. But it’s time intensive. But when it’s over with, it’s worth it when the skit’s good, when it plays well and so forth. But, boy, doing that every day (interruption). Did I what? The what? What no sympathy on the bar cigar thing? What do you mean? Well, no sympathy, I’m not asking for sympathy on that, except I’m drinking a martini with olives in it, and it’s water. Have you ever drank olive-flavored water? I said, ‘Where is the real vodka here?’ after awhile. By the way, when you have to have a puff of smoke on every take, you’re not just casually smoking a cigar. It was work smoking that cigar, Snerdley, and this is the point I want you all to realize.