Kardashian Korner

The Hollywood Reporter recently did a huge profile on the Kardashians, titled "The Kardashian Decade: How a Sex Tape Led to a Billion-Dollar Brand." Here are some highlights from the long article:

On where everyone was before the show started:
Kris Jenner (star, executive producer): "Before the show, I was managing Bruce's speaking career and personal appearances."

Kim Kardashian (star, executive producer): "I was going to [Pierce College], and after school I would go work the cash register at our store, Dash. This all happened when I was 27 …"

Kendall Jenner (star): "That's so crazy because I'm not even 27. We've lived the same amount of time of the same thing, but I'm not even the age you were when you started."

Ryan Seacrest (executive producer): "Everyone was talking about The Osbournes, and I said to my development executive Eliot [Goldberg], "Let's try to find something in this world and take it to E!""

Kris: "One night, Deena Katz [casting director for Dancing With the Stars] came over for dinner and life was swirling around, and she said, "This is a reality show — I think you should really talk to Ryan Seacrest." So I did."

Seacrest: "Kris told me what she envisioned, and I said, "Let's send a crew to your house and tape some stuff and then we'll take a look at it." Then I realized I didn't have a crew; I didn't even have a camera. I had Eliot buy a camera, and he went and shot them. He called me after and said, "I think we have something special.""


Kourtney Kardashian (star, executive producer): "We had talked to producers about doing a show about the three of us running the store, Dash, where Khloe and I would do the day-to-day, and Kim would come in as a stylist. It didn't go anywhere."

On Caitlyn Jenner's claims that she is actually the one who came up with the show:
Kris: "It's so absurd. I'm not sure what the motivation was for her to say something like that. Maybe somebody should remind her that it's called Keeping Up With the Kardashians."


Ted Harbert (then-CEO of E! Networks): "Just like anybody else, I knew of the family through [O.J. Simpson attorney] Robert Kardashian. There was a bit of the stuff with Kim hanging around Paris Hilton and, of course, the fun with Ray J [who made a sex tape with Kim]. That was sort of world news."

On how their level of fame rose throughout filming:
Khloe: "In those days, our first and second season especially, no one knew who we were. We were allowed to leave the gates to film and not have it be a distraction. No one bothered us."

Kim: "When we would travel, I remember people calling mine, Kourtney, and Khloe's names and we thought they knew us from high school or something. We just didn't get it. Then they started chasing us down at the airport. That was the first time that we were like, "Oh my God.""

Khloe: "In Armenia, I've never seen so many people. I got separated from Kim and everyone, and they all got in the van and left. I was like, "Hello? I'm still in the fucking crowd of people!" Everyone forgot about me and Erin Paxton, our audio mixer, took her boom and literally fished me back into our producer's van."


Kendall: "Kylie and I did a magazine signing for Seventeen, and it was at some store at The Grove and we had a crazy line around the corner. The store owner came up to us and said, "Justin Bieber was here a week ago and didn't get this response.""

On Twitter:
Kris: "There was barely Twitter when we started. Ryan called Kim and said, "There's this thing called Twitter you might want to pay attention to." The girls [began] embracing their audience and sharing their lives."

Seacrest: "There were conversations where we said, "Is this OK that posts are happening today and the show airs five months later?" We didn't know if it was good or bad. We ended up determining that it was fueling the narrative and people will want to see what really happened."


Dow: "Kim sort of paved the way for the economic structure of native influencer marketing. Before the rise of the common man YouTuber in their bedroom, you had people like her. She was the one who kicked down the door and got the brands to spend money in that area because she showed success. Brands noticed that when when you would pay a celebrity to send out a branded tweet, they were getting more click-throughs for the dollar, so it made more monetary sense. That's why that revolution started."

On all of the Kardashian spinoffs:
Harbert: "Sometime during the first season, I said, "There are other shows in this family." Being able to get that many franchises from one family is sort of a schedule saver."


Seacrest: "We had a successful mother ship and we thought, "Let's try a spinoff." They were opening a Dash store in Miami, so that gave us a premise [Kourtney & Kim Take Miami]. I got a call from Jeff Shell, who was under Steve Burke at Comcast, which owned E! before the NBC merger. He said, "Should we be investing in spinoffs?" I told him, "I'll take the risk.""

Harbert: "A couple of years in, I said, "Wait until Kylie and Kendall are 18 years old, then there's a whole new generation of shows that can supply the schedule for years." [Life of Kylie premiered Aug. 6 to solid ratings.]"

Kylie Jenner (star): "I feel like I've been hiding myself and my personal life for a really long time, so I thought it was time to do this show and hopefully be a little more understood."

Khloe: "I never wanted to do Khloe & Lamar [which ran for two seasons in 2011 and 2012]; my ex-husband did. He sold it to E!, and I let it happen because I wanted him to be happy. I was the one who canceled it. It was way too much. [Odom was hospitalized in 2015 after being found unconscious at a Nevada brothel. The couple divorced in 2016.]"


Jenkins: "We deferred to Khloe on what she was comfortable with, because someone's life was hanging in the balance and that someone is a hero to a lot of young people. It wasn't necessary to go stick a camera in Lamar's face while he's on death's door in the hospital. It's just too much, so I guess, in a way, there is a line."

Read the full long interview at The Hollywood Reporter.