After chatting up Hollywood donors about the tragic shootings in Charleston, S.C., and his legacy Thursday, President Obama managed to escape from the Beverly Hills Hotel — apparently unseen by the White House reporters traveling with him — to a late night dinner with Hollywood moguls Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, according to a report in Deadline.com.
The meal, according to the Tinseltown pub, was entirely off the president’s official schedule and comes on the heels of a private concert event with Prince and Stevie Wonder the president held for nearly 500 guests at the White House Saturday. The White House also deemed that event private and withheld it from the president’s official schedule released to the press.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment about the secret confab with the famous director and DreamWorks Animation executive. Spielberg and Katzenberg both doled out $1 million each to Obama’s super PAC Priorities USA late in the 2012 campaign, bringing the re-election’s total haul to the PAC from Katzenberg’s to $3 million that cycle, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Leaving Obama’s private meetings with Hollywood bigwigs off the public schedule is par for the course during Obama’s visits to Los Angeles. In Aug. 2013, he and Katzenberg shared a meal at Obama’s Burbank hotel when the president was in town for an appearance on the “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno.
And during the summer of Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, he left the White House pool that follows him on trips waiting in an idling motorcade outside while he met with nearly “two dozen of Hollywood’s hottest stars,” according to the Hollywood Reporter and the New York Times. The young celebrities included: Jessica Alba, Jeremy Renner (“The Avengers,” “The Hurt Locker”), Brandon Routh (“Superman Returns”), Dianna Agron (“Glee”), Zachary Quinto (“Star Trek”), Josh Radnor (“How I Met Your Mother”), Tatyana Ali (“The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”), Zach Braff (“Scrubs”), Benjamin McKenzie (“Southland,” “The O.C.”), Sophia Bush (“One Tree Hill”) and Kal Penn (“Harold and Kumar”), the papers reported.
The president Friday morning is scheduled to visit a northeast Los Angeles neighborhood for a garage WTF podcast with comic Marc Maron. The podcast has a strong following, often hitting the No. 1 spot for comedy on iTunes.com, but the appearance has its fair share of detractors, many of whom also criticized Obama for his appearing on Zach Galifianakis’s web show “Between Two Ferns” in early 2014 to try to boost traffic on healthcare.gov after is roll-out debacle.
In a release, Maron touted the presidential appearance as “a big day for our country, for me and for my cats. I’m looking forward to a respectful conversation with the president. I’m calling it the WTF Summit. I hope he’s cool with that.”
VanityFair tweeted: “If looking for Prez he is in @MarcMaron’s garage taping a podcast.”
Later Friday, Obama heads north to San Francisco for a speech at the U.S. Conference of Mayors and more fundraisers — one at the home of climate-change activist and billionaire Tom Steyer. He is expected to spend this weekend hitting the links in a verdant, water-guzzling Palm Springs-area resort amid a historic state drought.
