Geraldo Rivera is preparing for his “last hurrah.”
“I’m old, but I’m still cute and strong. And very butch,” says Fox News Channel’s Rivera, 62, whose live weekday news show launches Oct. 31 on the Fox broadcast network.
“It would be nice to go out with one more hit, to go once more into the breach where the network needs me. I think of myself as Special Forces, clearing the path for the infantry.” (Ten-hut!)
To accommodate “Rivera at Large,” Rivera will leave his cable show, FNC’s “At Large With Geraldo Rivera” (Saturdays and Sundays at 10 p.m.), later this month.
Fox’s “Rivera at Large” will have a stable of FNC correspondents covering that day’s top stories.
“We’ll bring urgency, passion, and a point of view,” says Rivera, who recently signed a four-year contract.
Here’s how the deal went down, according to Rivera: Roger Ailes, head of the Fox-owned stations and former FNC czar, “called me into his office and asked if I’d like to do this.”
“It’s the third job he’s offered me, and I took the first two (at CNBC and FNC). Roger told me it was a news program, and that it was up to me. I found the whole notion intriguing.”
The closer: The 30-minute “Rivera at Large” wouldn’t be a daytime talkie, as was his cheesy syndicated talkie that ran from 1987 to “98. “I didn’t want to end my career doing a daytime (talk) show.”
Though Fox denies it, Rivera says the new “At Large” is the first step in the network’s launch of a national evening newscast. And FNC’s Shepard Smith is his anchor of choice.
“He’s incisive, compassionate, young, good-looking and apolitical, except in human terms. He’s like me in the early Roone Arledge era (at ABC) in the late “70s – someone people can relate to, who won’t sell them a bill of goods.
“He’s the anchor of the future. I’m old enough to be his dad.”
Smith and CNN’s Anderson Cooper both drew media attention for their emotional reports from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans.
Cooper “is great,” Rivera says. “God bless him. Thanks to him, CNN finally has a pulse. He’s helping them look like something other than a corpse from the past.” Still, “he’s no Shep Smith.”
No comment from CNN or Cooper. (Darn.)
Off camera, Rivera says he’s never been happier or more at peace. Wife No. 5, Erica Levy, 30, gave birth to their first child, Solita Liliana Rivera, nine weeks ago.
He has two other daughters and two sons, ranging in age from 11 to 26, with whom he’s in touch almost daily. Moreover, the former babehound says “none of my four exes are mad at me. I’m giving divorce a good name.”
The most important lesson he’s learned about fatherhood? “You have to pay attention to your kid’s life, regardless of what’s happening in your own. I didn’t do that with the first four. Now I have another chance. I’m so grateful.”
Sex therapist coming next year to Showtime
“Sexual Healing,” a Showtime “reality documentary” series, will launch in late spring or early summer, the premium network announced Wednesday.
“Healing,” produced by Joe and Harry Gantz of HBO’s raunchy “Taxi Cab Confessions,” has sex therapist Laura Berman working with three couples to reach their “full sexual potential.”
Production is set to begin in February.
If “Healing” sounds familiar, it is. HBO’s “The Sex Inspectors,” part of its “Real Sex” franchise, completed its five-episode run last month.
A British import, “Inspectors” featured two sex experts working with a different couple each week.
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George Clooney is “mad as hell” and he’s not going to take it anymore.
Clooney will do a live remake of Paddy Chayefsky’s classic 1976 film, “Network,” for CBS, according to industry buzz. No word whether he’ll star in the project, projected for the fall.
A searing indictment of TV news, “Network” won Oscars for lead actors Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch, for supporting actress Beatrice Straight, and for Chayefsky’s screenplay. William Holden also starred.
In 2000, Clooney produced and starred in CBS’s live, black-and-white adaptation of the “64 Cold War drama, “Fail-Safe.”
No comment from CBS.
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(c) 2005, Chicago Tribune.
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AP-NY-10-05-05 1859EDT
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