When Chris Rock stepped out onto the stage of the Dolby Theatre at 7:25 p.m. PT on Sunday night to present the best documentary feature Oscar — the 16th award presentation of the night if you were watching on TV, or 18th if you had been in attendance for the hour before the live telecast, when several were handed out and pretaped — there was no reason to anticipate any problems.
Rock’s rehearsal on Saturday in front of Academy officials and his friend Will Packer, the producers of the Oscars telecast, had gone smoothly. And on Sunday night, with just six Oscars still to be handed out, the end was in sight. Then, of course, came Rock’s joke about Jada Pinkett Smith — which was not in the script and not part of Rock’s routine at his rehearsal — which enraged Will Smith, followed by the slap seen and heard around the world.
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The Hollywood Reporter can report, for the first time, what was going on backstage when all hell broke loose at the Oscars, having spoken with multiple sources who were in the green room at the time.
“There were tons of people there,” says one source, who remembers spotting Serena Williams and Venus Williams, as well as numerous A-listers waiting to present upcoming awards including Jake Gyllenhaal, Zoe Kravitz, Kevin Costner, Anthony Hopkins and the trio who would later present Smith with his best actor Oscar: Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman and John Travolta.
Also present was a cadre of top-tier publicists including Smith’s own longtime rep, Meredith O’Sullivan Wasson.
Some were paying more attention than others to the action on the three TVs in the room, but as the Smith incident unfolded, according to another source, “It went very quiet.” Then, says another, “Everyone was like, ‘What the fuck is happening?! Did that just happen?! Oh my God!’ People were gasping.”
People who have just presented awards generally return to the green room, but Rock did not do so following the completion of the best documentary Oscar presentation to Questlove for Summer of Soul — which most in the audience and backstage barely remember, as they were still stunned. Smith returned to his seat after the altercation.
Rock’s manager, Jason Weinberg, sat stunned, and then was asked to go speak with the Los Angeles Police Department. (Rock ultimately declined to press charges against Smith.)
Once the show went to a commercial break, the Academy’s outgoing CEO Dawn Hudson and president David Rubin, accompanied by the Academy’s press spokesperson, hustled backstage, looking “as serious as could be,” and “walked very, very fast into a private room with Meredith,” one of the sources reports.
Hudson and Rubin never returned to their seats in the audience, and Wasson spent the next several commercial breaks commuting between the backstage area and Smith’s seat, where she conferred with him as he held the hand of Pinkett Smith, who seemed to be speaking with a representative of her own.
During the first commercial break after the incident, as captured on video, Smith went into a corner of the room with Denzel Washington and Tyler Perry, who appeared to be consoling him and advising him to brush the incident off his shoulders, each literally making the physical gesture on a different shoulder of Smith’s. As Smith returned to his front-row seat, he was approached and hugged by Bradley Cooper, and then headed back to his seat, wiping his eyes with a tissue along the way.
Several celebrities including Tiffany Haddish attempted to approach the Smiths, but quickly realized that it was not an opportune time to do so.
