Hollywood Babble On & On #323: Independent Daze...

1. TROUBLE IN PARADISE OR A TROJAN HORSE?

Lionsgate's management has made a deal with 19.8% shareholder Mark Rachesky to go on the company's board and apparently side with them against corporate activist/raider Carl Icahn.

The twist in the tail is that Rachesky is an old friend and former apprentice to Icahn. So you can look at this in two ways. Is there a breech in the relationship between Rachesky and his mentor? Or is he going to be a Trojan Horse, and help open the gates to Icahn and finalize his planned takeover of the company?

These two men have a lot of history, so it's a matter of time if we see if they're really rivals, or allies in the takeover of Lionsgate.

I hope that whoever takes over Lionsgate, that it's the company that survives. It has the potential to provide a new business model for Hollywood if the management has the right philosophy.

So let's keep our eyes peeled on this one.

2. WEINSTEIN CAN DO BASTERDS, BUT PROBABLY NOT MUCH ELSE...

Nikki Finke reports some good news and bad news for the battered and beleagured Weinstein Company.

First...

THE GOOD NEWS: It looks like Harvey and Bob were able to shake enough change out of the couch cushions, and clip enough enough coupons to put the $30 million minimum needed to handle the domestic release of Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds.

Of course this is a mixed blessing for the company. To raise this money they had to hoard all their available cash, and not release a lot of their upcoming production slate, including some rather expensive productions. Which is really not much of a change in their usual business model of burying productions made by anyone whose name doesn't rhyme with Benton Farentino.

However, this is still a terrible risk for the Weinstein Company, because their whole future is pretty much riding on this one film. As I've said before, the roots of the film are in the dark, nihilistic, and anarchistic European war-action-exploitation films of the 1960s and 70s. American audiences may not care for a dark, nihilistic and anarchistic view of the war that made grampa a hero, and could be turned off by the whole thing.

The film may do connect better with European audiences, who remember WW2 differently than Americans, but those distribution rights, and the revenues they come with, are with Universal. That means if Americans don't make Basterds a domestic hit, the Weinstein Co. is going to be screwed royally.

And now...

THE BAD NEWS: A rumour that the Encore/Starz media company was going to invest in TWC was referred to by a company insider as "complete and utter bullshit."

BURN!

But seriously, why would anyone invest in TWC in any way that didn't involve the ouster of the men whose name graces the stationary.

I mean these are the people who:

A. Bought loads of independent films, only to sit on them, sometimes for eons, and refuse to release them for obscure accountancy reasons, ensuring that any momentum, and potential for profits, from the festival attention these films got is lost completely.

B. Started a feud with NBC-Universal over Project Runway, resulting in millions lost to litigation over bad faith contract negotiations, and a major mega-conglomerate contemplating the aesthetics of their heads on pikes.

C. Put all their eggs in the basket of getting another Oscar under their belt, destroying relationships, alienating Academy voters, and putting no thought into releasing something that might, you know, make a lot of money.

D. Produced and released a lot of really shitty films that lost boatloads of money.

E. Pissed off just about everyone that ever did business with them.

I can understand the position of Encore/Starz completely.

Hollywood Babble On & On #322: A Couple of Miscellaneous Money-Movie Musings...

1. MGM GETS A THUMBS UP

At least they get a thumbs up from the auditors, who declared the long moribund company a "going concern" in a recent report. (h/t Nikki Finke)

Well, bully for MGM I say, especially with some interested and potentially very serious buyers sniffing around.

Let's hope that these buyers are able to get around the company's crippling debt, and get the company on a solid and productive footing again. And since I don't like to repeat myself, though I often do, here are a few tips they might want to consider.

Plus, I hope that they don't try to leap right into trying to make the company a mega-major again, it hasn't been that since the late 1960s, and has to start modest, and grow from there.

2. NBC PINS A SPIN MEISTER

Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC Universal, appointed a long-time friend to take over public relations for the battered network/studio conglomerate. I had made some suggestions of who they could hire, but Zucker had his own ideas.

This news has sparked one of my trademark PSYCHIC FLASHES!

I predict that they'll be crowing a lot about Sasha Baron Cohen's Bruno making a lot of money on its opening, while completely ignoring the financial and creative washout of Land of the Lost, or that NBC could be the only network on the air, and still end up in fourth place.

Hollywood Babble On & On #321: Michael Jackson Is Dead, Alas

I managed to avoid the almost non-stop live coverage of Michael Jackson's memorial service, but unless I am willing to move to a cave in Uzbekistan, I just can't escape hearing at least some of the tidbits. The coverage of the memorial scored about 31 million viewers in the USA, a few million less than the last funeral given such coverage, the memorial for Ronald Reagan in 2004.

But I'm not here to talk about ratings, instead I'm going to tell you what I think the memorial told me about Michael Jackson the man and the world he lived in. And I've made a couple of lists...

WHAT I SAW:

1. His coffin was GOLD PLATED. Yep, a solid bronze coffin, plated in 14k gold. I'm sorry, but even an 18th century French market would look at that crate and think it was ostentatious and went beyond the line of tacky, to the realm of just plain nutty.

2. People are criticizing the family for putting his young children out on stage to somehow defend their father to wider world.

3. Many of the speakers went beyond telling the world about his success as an entertainer, but instead declared him the greatest entertainer who ever lived, and giving him credit for things like the election of Barack Obama, which occurred about 20 years after his last major hit album.

4. Many of the same "friends and associates" are now trying to squeeze something for themselves out of his death, from his former personal videographer/manager (and former gay porn producer) selling insider tidbits to the highest bidder, and even Barbara Walters, ignoring the wishes of the grieving family to score some illicit footage with a spy camera.

5. The family is supposedly arguing over where to bury him. Some want him in Neverland, hoping to make it some sort of Graceland type theme park, while others want him buried someplace else where he could rest in peace, and not be part of a package tour, two-bits a gander.

WHAT THOSE THINGS TOLD ME:

1. I associate waste with Michael Jackson. Wasted potential, wasted talent, a thousand wasted opportunities, and millions in wasted dollars. What purpose does this coffin serve other than to promote some sort of image of Jacko as a mad wasteful royal wannabe, and giving the mutant grave-robbers of our post-apocalyptic future something worth stealing after society totally collapses in 2059? Like just about everything in Jackson's life, there were a million better things that could have been done with those resources, but those things weren't done for reasons that really don't make any rational sense.

2. Personally, I think those kids have enough baggage to deal with, and making them part of the on-stage circus just strikes me as exploitative. Of course exploiting and emotionally scarring children is a Jackson family tradition, and that's according to Michael himself.

3. This shows the tendency to glorify the man way beyond his accomplishments. He had a lot of hits, and one ultra-mega-hit album with Thriller, but his career really didn't have the longevity or artistic adaptability necessary for supreme greatness in entertainment. Everything he did after-Thriller was pretty much indistinguishable from Thriller, with the addition of extreme plastic surgery and crotch grabbing to his repertoire. Also the rush to sanctify Jackson was pretty much a slap in the face of people like Martin Luther King, and the other African Americans who did way more than him, with apparently a lot less appreciation.

He was a great entertainer, his past success showed that, but he wasn't the greatest, and while he did a lot, he didn't change the world in the ways these people claim. And let's not forget how many of these same people wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole when his sales were in the tank and he was being accused of child molestation. Like Jackson's life, and Hollywood itself, there's no restraint, and a bloated sense of importance.

4. Too many of the people who claimed friendship with Jackson are now trying to profit from him, and his death. It tells us a lot about the nature of fame and personal relationships. He used his personal relationships to get attention, and henceforth profit, and they in turn try to use their relationship with him for profit.

5. Everything associated with Jackson always seems to end in an argument, and usually in litigation. It's only a matter of time before the lawyers get involved, and then things will get really ugly, and no one involved will be safe.

Of course the big lesson of all this is that Jackson wasn't just an entertainer, he, and his memorial, was the embodiment of Hollywood itself. The wasting of potential & talent, the exploitation of innocent people, the overweening self-importance and ego at the expense of reality, the sleazy and corrupt nature of personal relationships, and even in death, everything ends in arguments and inevitable litigation.

He could have been a movie studio.

Hollywood Babble On & On #320: No Camp Hollywood This Year

According the indefatigable Nikki Finke the annual Camp Allen Big Money Confab is on again this year in Sun Valley, Idaho and that no studio or big media honchos were invited.

OUCH!

Now some folks are saying that it's inevitable, everything's going on the internet, and that for some reason the internet won't need professional quality entertainment content, but I beg to differ.

I think it's the studios' own damn fault that they weren't invited.

This camp is where the uber-rich gather, plot world domination, realize that they already dominate the world, pat each other on back, have some beer and barbecue, and then talk about where they can put their money to work.

One of those places where their money doesn't work is Hollywood.

Hollywood had it good during the hedge fund/sub-prime boom of the last few years, investors literally had money to burn, and when you're trying to dodge America's convoluted tax system, there's no better place to burn it than in the convoluted money system of Hollywood.

We're talking about a system where a film can make hundreds of millions at the box office, sell hundreds of thousands of DVDs, exponentially beating the costs of making and marketing, and still lose money.

This is the self-fulfilling idiocy that I've been talking about since I started this blog.

For those unwilling to look in my archives for the definition of that little nugget of unwisdom, I'll restate it here.

A self-fulfilling idiocy is a plan devised to solve a perceived (but not necessarily real) problem, yet this plan is so stupid, that only a complete idiot cannot see that it will cause even more (and all too real) problems in the future.

It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, only with more stupid.

Hollywood thought that they had a problem, namely that they weren't making enough money for themselves. So they created their convoluted accounting system that takes what should be a simple business and making it needlessly complicated.

The management tells the shareholders that it's to protect their interests and guard their profits, so the shareholders went along, at first.

Then the idiocy kicked in.

People who had profit participation in individual films started getting screwed out of their fair share, so they started demanding more money up front.

The studios then started spending more on "stars" causing costs to go up. To recoup the costs they started going after the unions. The unions started fighting back, getting more and more money up front, causing costs to rise even more.

All during this time the studio management started hiking their own salaries and perks to levels more befitting an 18th century French monarch than a mid-level business man.

Real profit margins began to shrink, but the investors stood by and let it happen, partially because of the tax write-offs, and partly because of the real money made by the occasional mega-blockbuster.

Costs keep going up, more in tune with the inflation rates of Zimbabwe than the real costs of making movies, and real margins continue to shrink. But they can continue to count on outside investment to keep them going because Wall Street was swimming in cash.

It basically went from being a business to a Ponzi Scheme, where instead of the first investors making the money, it's the management that scores the cash, through their salary and perks.

No one seemed to mind until the Wall Street money train came to a screeching halt. Suddenly investors started demanding actual returns on their investments, and the studios were gobsmacked, because they literally don't know how to do that.

So you get studios finding it hard to find financing, even though box-office numbers are strong, because who wants to toss their money into a black hole?

Which is why Hollywood was left out of Camp Allen, it's about opportunities, not idiocy. If Hollywood wants back in on the whole deal, they better get off their duffs and reform how everything is done in Hollywood, from the top down.

Hollywood Babble On & On #319: Money Musings From the WTF Files...

1. VIEW THIS?

There's a report going around the interwebs that a major studio is planning to do a big screen movie based on the Viewmaster.

I hope that it's a joke, not unlike my attempt at a Hungry-Hungry Hippos movie rumour, but a lot of people seem to be taking this Viewmaster movie seriously.

For those of you who don't predate Nintendo, the Viewmaster was a toy that looked like red plastic binoculars, but they didn't work like binoculars. You had to get a little cardboard circle, ringed with tiny photo-slides, shove it into the Viewmaster, hold it up to the light, look in, and you would see a 3D picture of the 1965 World's Fair.

Doesn't that just scream a big budget motion picture?

Which is why I hope it's a joke, because it's beyond ridiculous. Viewmasters may have pictures, but they certainly don't have any of the motion you need for a motion picture. They're the sort of toy that you use a little on Xmas day, toss in a box, and never think of again until years later and you're cleaning out your basement and say, "Hey, my old Viewmaster," look in it one more time, and then toss it back into the box until the scene repeats itself again when you're with your grandchildren and packing for you trip to the old folks home.

It's such a lame idea I'm certain that a studio is probably going to drop a few million on it.

2. MICHAEL JACKSON IS STILL EXPENSIVE

This time it's the taxpayers of California who are shelling out a reported $2.5 million for the police, and other sundries overseeing today's media circus.

AEG, the concert promoter and host of this event, has refused to pay for these extras, even though they are trying to use this event to suck some cash out of Jackson's legacy.

Now any other state would have said: "Whoa there pardner, no moolah, no memorial."

But this isn't any other state, this is California, otherwise known as fame's doormat.

A state that's paying vendors and suppliers with IOU's because it HAS NO MONEY, is taking a $2.5 million hit that it can't afford because it involves someone famous.

If AEG refused to put up the money for the police, fire, and ambulance services that have to oversee such an event, I'd have given them a big fat no. They could do it in another city, I wouldn't care. And don't talk about tourists will somehow pay for it by spending money in LA, and boost the economy, but I can't see it having that much of an effect. The state's economy, tax system, and government has become a massive black hole, where if you don't get your money up front, you're probably not going to get it at all once it's been picked apart. It's like studio bookkeeping, but writ large, and as a philosophy of governance.

Also, it's the principle of the thing. The state of California has to stop being a doormat for anyone and anything that can rouse some media attention, and get down to business.

I'd have billed AEG, and then billed the major media outlets like CNN, Fox News, and the networks for the right to cover the event. If they complain, tell them to sue, and remind them who the judges work for, and that by the time they get it to court, the event will be long over.

Sure, it's extortion, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Hollywood Babble On & On #318: Furious D's Remake-Reboot Round-Up

1. AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON
Reason for disgust- The film was done right the first time, and the fact that it's sort-of sequel American Werewolf in Paris was so quickly forgotten, shows that CG werewolves aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Reason for hope- Dimension is part of The Weinstein Company, which is broke, so this cinematic abomination getting made highly unlikely, and even if it does, Harvey's better at finding excuses to not release films than release them, it could still fail to see the light of a full moon.

2. RED DAWN
Reason for disgust- Red Dawn was extremely 80s. With the media telling us that nuclear annihilation was right around the corner, a film showing the conventional invasion of America by communist forces was a refreshing change of pace. Sadly, the Soviet Union obviously skipped the MGM story conference, because they collapsed about 20 years ago, which mean that it ceased to exist before the movie's lead characters were born.

Reason for hope- I can't see one. This is going to waste a lot of money for the already cash strapped MGM, unless they decide to turn it into a comedy and hire the South Park guys, America, fuck yeah.

3. CONAN THE BARBARIAN
Reason for disgust- I have a sneaking suspicion that they're going to draw their inspiration from neither the first film, or it's audaciously sword swinging source material, but will probably just rehash that cinematic abortion called Conan The Destroyer.

Reason for hope- At least Brett Ratner is reportedly not on the project anymore. Hopefully someone who appreciates the blood and guts nature of the source material, and didn't make X3

4. ROBOCOP
Reason for disgust- Robocop was a film about the 1980s, a very different time than the 2010's. It doesn't really age well, and slick special effects are not going to update it, especially after the bitter aftertaste left by the awful sequels, and the cheapo Canuck TV series.

Reason for hope- I can't see one.

5. CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
Reason for disgust- The film was great for its time, its creature suit was revolutionary, and created some scary and impressive imagery. Nowadays there is nothing impressive about special fx, audience see CG, and yawn, because it required no craftsmanship or artistry.

Reason for hope- At least Universal won't have to pay for the franchise. Other than that, I got nothing.

6. LOGAN'S RUN
Reason for disgust- Another film that was for and about its time. I can't really appreciate the film out of the context of the 1970s. Plus, the original was truly made by Jenny Agutter in that flimsy little outfit.

Reason for hope- A smart director and screenwriter could make it a brutal satire of Hollywood's obsession with youth and unbelievable standards of physical perfection, but that's highly unlikely. It'll probably turn into some sort of Matrix rehash.

7. FAHRENHEIT 451
Reason for disgust- While it was a brilliant novel, the concept of burning all books to control information, seems quaint in the age of the internet.

Reason for hope- I can't see much hope here, there are just too many temptations for Hollywood to screw it up.

8. T.J. HOOKER
Reason for disgust- The original show was an unremarkable cop show made a cult favourite by the off kilter charisma of William Shatner as the middle aged patrol sergeant teaching his rookie partner the ropes.

Reason for hope- Outside of Adrian Zmed getting work in a cameo role, the only real reason is an updated version of this scene on the big screen.



I understand that Charlize Theron's new agent Ari Emmanuel is negotiating for her to get the part.

Saturday Silliness Cinema: July 4th Edition

Sorry for not posting yesterday. Slow news day combined with this lingering flu, and my ongoing agent hunt kept me from posting.

Since today is the American 4th of July holiday, I found what can only be described as the ultimately American comedy clip, it's Don Rickles at the Roast for the quintessentially American comedian Bob Hope (who was an immigrant), and in it the Viceroy of Venom takes shots at Hope, then Governor and future president Ronald Reagan, evangelist Billy Graham, WW2 General Omar Bradley, Dean Martin, and a whole truckload of others.

Enjoy...

Hollywood Babble On & On #317: Miscellaneous Movie Musings...

1. ASTEROIDS? WTF?

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, is taking time off from carrying Paramount, to go to Universal to adapt a big screen live action version of the Atari video game Asteroids.

For those of you under 35 who don't remember Asteroids, you basically control a little trial, that flies around the screen, blasting strangely geometric "asteroids" with you mighty pixel cannon. Take a look at this picture to bask in its amazing eye-popping graphics.

Now I am not the type to think video game adaptations are all that great an idea, even when the games have a story, but I'm positively gobsmacked that someone thinks they can make a movie from the video game with even less narrative content than Pac-Man.

In fact, I think Universal got conned.

Face it, if you want to make a sci-fi action adventure with asteroids, slap together a script about rivalry among outer space miners, toss in a love interest, a disaster, and some pirates, aliens, or alien-pirates, after their booty, and call it Asteroids. It's just that easy.

There was no reason for them to go to Atari and spend good money to buy the movie rights to a game that's been mostly forgotten by even the people who made the high score screen. Asteroids is a common word, used all the time, and unless you're going to cast a bunch of geometric shapes, any story would be different from the complete non-story of the video game. But someone must have made one hell of a sales pitch, using terms like synergy, and paradigms, and other shit, and Universal fell for it like country rubes chugging snake oil.

I salute the people who sold Universal Asteroids as a movie, you truly are magnificent bastards.

2. HARVEY WEINSTEIN, CRITIC AT LARGE

Harvey Weinstein, the founder and destroyer of flailing failing indie TWC, recently posted his first official movie review at web-site The Daily Beast. Now if Harvey decides to keep doing movie reviews for a living, because he's certainly not making anything as a producer, he's going to need the sort of blurbs that will get his name onto movie posters again. So here are a few for him, gratis, because I know he's broke:

-"A brilliant independent movie, I could sit on it for years."

-"This film sucked so hard, I was looking for my name in the credits."

-"This is the sort of praiseworthy film I would crush with one of my multi-million dollar Oscar campaigns."

-"I passed on this script, so you know it must be good."

I hope you can find a use for them Harvey.

3. IN DEFENSE OF GWYNETH

Poor Gwyneth Paltrow, she's being attacked again for unfavorably comparing the USA, the nation of her birth, and the cradle of her career, to another country, this time Spain.

Well, I've decided to not attack Gwyneth for these statements. In fact, I think she has a good reason for making them.

This is a woman who has spent her life surrounded by rich people, and rich show-biz people. She has no idea what it's like for the people who live with incomes under seven figures, and it shows.

Her upbringing is the wealthy equivalent of being raised in the woods by inbred hillbillies who ain't got no knowing of dem dere folks who live in dem dere towns and cities and ain't got no hankerin' to learn about dem either. Except instead of a shack in a holler, it's a house in the Hamptons, or Beverly Hills, and the only Americans she knew who aren't rich are usually the servants, and they're only allowed to speak when spoken to, and even then it's strictly "Yes Mistress."

She's not a pretentious twat who hates her country, she only knows rich America. Blame them for the bad impression, not her for her ignorance.

Hollywood Babble On & On #316: When Smart Becomes Stupid & Stupid Becomes Smart

There was a time when Hollywood did very well with adult movies. I'm not talking about those "adult movies," I'm talking about movies for adults. The sort of films that don't rely on big explosions, and big special effects, including big cleavage, but instead were centered more on plot, dialogue, character, and often dealt with mature and intelligent themes and subject matter.

Nowadays it looks like most major studios avoid such films like the plague, preferring to have big robots smash each other to pieces for big bucks.

I think the blame can be divided two ways, 40% belongs to the audience, and 60% to Hollywood.

WHY IT'S THE AUDIENCE'S FAULT:

1. Demographics 20%: During the first "youthquake" that hit Hollywood in the 1950s independent producer Samuel Z. Arkoff estimated that the ideal target was the 19 year old American male, because he was the bellwether taste-maker at the time. Since then that has skewed younger and younger, and included the new phenom of "tweens."

These are the demographics that dominate audience buying habits. They either buy their own tickets, or decide the films that their parents can see, because they have a lock on the family's disposable income. Plus the younger viewers will go to see the same film again and again, putting a merely popular film into the realm of the blockbuster.

The problem is that if you want the true definition of an idiot with the attention span of a over-caffeinated gnat, it's a teenager. It's not a personal attack against them, all teens are idiots, I was an idiot when I was a teenager, so was you, and everyone you know. It's a scientific fact.

2. POOR URBAN PLANNING 10% & LAZINESS 10%: The days when you could walk down the street to your local neighbourhood theatre to see a flicker show do not exist for the average person. The bulk of people live in suburbs where it's just not easy to get anywhere, so going to a movie is no longer a casual thing, it's an event requiring a lot of logistical work. You have decide on a movie, find a theatre that's showing it, load up the car, find a parking space, which you probably have to pay for, stand in line at the Cineplex with a bunch of pimply little teenyboppers who are buying tickets to the PG film so they can sneak into the R rated movie next to yours, buy your ticket, buy your snacks, find a seat, etc...etc...

Most older folks think about all that and say: "Fuck it, I'll rent it from Netflix in a few months."

But they're not the only ones to blame....

WHY IT'S HOLLYWOOD'S FAULT:

1. SKYROCKETING COSTS 20%: The costs of making a film have been affected by an inflation unseen outside Zimbabwe. When you include the costs of distribution and marketing you could spend a minimum of $60-$100 million to release a "low budget" film.

Now this inflation is not a natural inflation, caused by the laws of supply and demand. It's an artificial inflation caused by poor business practices, but it's still making it extremely risky to make a film that doesn't have the potential to be a blockbuster.

2. OSCAR WHORING 20%: One of the worst things to have affected the Academy Awards was when Oscar movies became a genre onto themselves. At one time those films were called "prestige pics" and their purpose was to not only put bums in seats, but to win prizes and critical praise.

At some time in the 1990s, when Miramax began to dominate the Oscars, the shift started where putting bums in seats came in after the prizes and critical praise, and in many cases way after. After a while, lack of commercial success became a sign of Oscar worthiness, and you had films being made not to be enjoyed by the general audience, but by the narrow audience of Academy voters, who ironically, usually don't pay to see such films, preferring screeners given to them by producers.

I guess the best way to sum it up, is that Oscar films don't have to be good, because they're not being judged on if they're well made or not, but on whether they're important, and sincere enough to be worthy of an Oscar.

3. INABILITY TO ARGUE 20%: In places where everyone thinks alike people rapidly lose the ability to argue. In a social circle that includes a variety of opinions people say: "I disagree, and these are my points," which then get some counter points in return, and vice versa, until either one side wins, or they at least agree to disagree. However, toss disagreement into a milieu where the overwhelming majority agrees on just about everything, and suddenly things shift. The argument then goes: "I disagree, I may have points, but I'd rather impugn you and your motives as the main thrust of my case."

There is no place more wrapped up in group-think and conformity than Hollywood. Just do a survey of how they vote, and they tend to come overwhelming on one side of any issue.

It wasn't always like this. Hollywood was one big floating argument, especially during the early 1970s, the golden age of the mature political film. You had a more conservative "old guard" in a debate with the young whippersnappers who were coming out of New York television and later the first film schools. And these films took the form of a debate. Both sides would be presented in an intelligent and mature way. If the filmmaker had a political axe to grind, they at least tried to convince you, the viewer, that Nixon was evil, or that nuclear power was going to kill us all, with arguments.

Sadly, without the intellectual rigor that's born from constant debate, you see one side being passed on as angelic, and the other demonic, with no gray areas. If the villain, makes what could be construed as a valid political point, there is always included a "gotcha" moment where it's shown that he doesn't really believe any of it, he's just a posturing hypocrite. Because they believe that the audience is too stupid for a real debate with well rounded characters on both sides, and has to be spoon-fed that the filmmaker's side is good, and any other side is pure evil.

Of course such a stance is not going to win over the folks in flyover country who make films profitable, because they don't vote the way Hollywood does, and are considered part of the problem by Hollywood, and treated accordingly on screen.

These factors create what I call the Perfect Storm of Stupid. So called smart films get dumber, there's no profit in making dumb films smarter, because the target demographic isn't going to get it anyway, and audiences start to avoid the "smart" films because they come across as cliched as the "dumb" films, tedious in their self-righteousness, with an added soupcon of being insulting, not only to their intelligence, but also to their existence.

How can Hollywood pull itself out of the stupid spiral and start making films that make money without being dumber than dishwater?

Well, I may be a smug know it all, but even I have my limits, because it would take a complete shake-up of not only how Hollywood does business, but it's internal culture, as well, to make any sort of progress.

KARL MALDEN R.I.P.

Oscar winning character actor Karl Malden passed away at the age of 97.

He was born Mladen Sekulovich in Chicago, and started out as a theatre actor on Broadway, with some work in radio, and serving as a non-commissioned officer in the US Army Air Force in WW2. He resumed his acting career after the war, and thank to his connection to director Elia Kazan, he got the role of Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire, which landed him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

He worked steady in film and on stage, throughout the 50s and 60s, but made the leap to TV with The Streets of San Francisco, and became one of the definitive images of the 70s with his "don't leave home without it," ads for American Express.

He was always underrated as an actor, mostly avoiding the melodramatic "look at me" moments, and just being the character he was hired to play.

Malden managed to have a successful career, a long marriage (70 years), and a beloved public image, untainted by scandal, all by avoiding the traps of fame, and treating his work as work, and not some sort of entitlement. He was a class act, and had a good long run that every actor could learn from.

Hollywood Babble On & On #315: More Miscellaneous Movie-Money Musings

Happy Canada to my Canadian readers, both of you.

Happy ordinary day to all the rest, and by that I mean both of you.

Today I'm sick, sneezing, wheezing, and geezing, but I still managed to spit out some of the money and movie related musings that you crave like the salivating dogs that you are.

1. PARAMOUNT POPS THE PINK SLIPS

While Paramount's Transformers 2 raked in hundreds of millions of dollars at the box-office Adam Goodman, the studio's recently installed honcho decided to unceremoniously shit-can 31 people.

I'm not going to condemn Goodman for this action. He's relatively new at his post, most of the decisions that are starting to make Paramount a functioning commercial entity again, like Star Trek & Transformers 2, were made before he got the top spot, and he has to make some sort of impression if he is going to justify his bonus.

And nothing justifies a bonus than layoffs, whether the company needs it or not. He can make a lot of noise about all the money they're going to save, create a 1 day, 0.02% uptick on the stock price, and establish an identity for himself as a decisive man of action.

2. GEORGE CLOONEY HEADS TO SONY

Warner Bros. has decided not to renew their contract with actor, director, producer, activist, box-office sedative George Clooney, and Clooney and his Smokehouse Pictures production company has moved onto Sony Pictures.

Now I have to take a moment to wonder what glue they're huffing at Sony.

Clooney's good looking, charming, has won an Oscar, appears on a lot of magazine covers, and practically lives on the set of Entertainment Tonight, so you'd think that he'd be the biggest star in the world.

Not really.

If Clooney doesn't have a minimum of 10 other major actors with him, he couldn't sell tickets to the last lifeboat on the Titanic, and even then you can't really rely on it. Ocean's 13 made a little over $311,000,000 worldwide, but cost so much to make and promote, it probably only barely broke even.

Clooney's prime reason for existence is to make Hollywood feel good about itself. He's constantly praising Hollywood as a community for its charity, it's social activism, and how they're all better than the people who actually buy the tickets to movies. Hollywood then repays him in kind, praising him as the brightest star in the heavens, and praising his films as "intelligent" "mature" and to a certain extent above the heads of the average moviegoer.

Now the average moviegoer doesn't avoid his films because they're above their limited intellectual capacity, it's because Hollywood mistakes condescension for intelligence, and Clooney's non-Ocean's work are the definition of condescension.

His movies even follow a formula. He takes some play/article/book/life story about espionage/political/corporate intrigue, and a lot of self righteous posturing that tells the audience that they're evil for voting for someone, or buying a product he doesn't endorse, and then demands another Oscar.

So let's take a gander at the press release that announced the slate of films that Clooney's Smokehouse will be bringing to Sony, I'll put my personal notes in between:

THE CHALLENGE
Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. An adaptation of Jonathan Mahler’s nonfiction book chronicling the historic Supreme Court case in which two lawyers sued the Bush administration on behalf of accused terrorist Salim Hamdan.

Hmmmm.... after all those anti-Iraq War movies vanished at the box-office, does Clooney honestly believe that American audiences will pay to see this film? No, not really, he just wants to have his Atticus Finch style Oscar clip, speaking "truth to power" against those who are out of power, and who probably wouldn't have done anything against him anyway.

At least with Aaron Sorkin on script duty there'll be plenty of people talking very quickly as they walk up and down hallways.

OUR BRAND IS CRISIS
A satirical comedy about American spin doctors competing in the same Presidential election in Bolivia. Based on the documentary by Rachel Boynton, with a script by Peter Straughan (MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS).

Their brand is crisis, but their product is failure, because Americans don't exactly flock to satirical movies about elections, and especially Third World elections.

FARRAGUT NORTH
An adaptation of Beau Willimon’s critically acclaimed play, set during the Iowa primary of a presidential race.

Yet another election story. As if two years of pre-election speculations and postulations isn't enough, he really thinks American moviegoers will pay money for even more pre-election postulations.

ESCAPE FROM TEHRAN
The true story of how the CIA used a fake movie project to smuggle hostages out of 1979 Tehran. Chris Terrio is writing the screenplay.

He's probably going to cut out the fact that the Canadian Embassy made the whole thing possible because the CIA didn't even believe the Ayatollah Khomeinei would cause America any trouble until it was too late, and needed the Canucks to do all the work in the field.

THE TOURIST
A contemporary spy thriller about a spy who risks everything to reveal a conspiracy after he's accused of a murder he didn't commit. Based on the bestselling book by Olen Steinhauer. Tony Peckham is writing the screenplay.

It's like the Bourne movies, only with Clooney, and without the excitement.

THE INNOCENT MAN
Based on the bestselling nonfiction book by John Grisham, the true story of murder and injustice in a small town in Oklahoma. Adapted by David Gordon Green.

This film will be found guilty. Clooney trumps Grisham in the box-office game.

There was a time when such "serious" films could have connected with the audience, but that was a time when filmmakers actually made such films for a wide audience. Just look at the political films and thrillers of the 1970s, even when you didn't agree with the fundamental political stance of the filmmaker, they at least tried to make the film entertaining.

Nowadays "serious" films aren't about tackling controversial themes and subject matter in an entertaining way. They are all about Hollywood making itself feel morally and intellectually superior to the people who actually pay for their lavish, and often hypocritical lifestyles.

2 Good Reviews, Yippee!!

I'd like to thank Michael Bay for filling in for me this morning, I'm battling the swine flu and feel like warmed over dung.

The book I'm in Sha'Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse, got two good reviews available online.

One even included my chapter as a highlight, describing it as "fun." Which is sort of the point of the story.

Read them... HERE & HERE.

Now go buy the damn book.

AMAZING AND ABSOLUTELY TRUE MICHAEL BAY FACTS

Hello my people!

Michael Bay here, or, Michael Fucking Bay, if you're a critic. I've taken some time off from rolling in a giant bin of Transformer's money to hack into this insignificant little blog to tell you TEN AMAZING FACTS about the most amazing force of nature in the universe: Me.

1. I literally made the careers of Ben Affleck, Nic Cage, and Will Smith. Without me, they'd be homeless and dwelling in back alleys, trading hand-jobs for chrystal meth.

2. I invented "Jazz hands."

3. I fathered Octomom's eight children by having her look at a picture of one of my sperm. Yes, I'm that potent.

4. San Francisco Bay, Tokyo Bay, the Bay of Pigs, the Bay of Bengal, and thousands of other pieces of coastal geography were all named after me.

5. The phrase "to be held at bay," comes from the incident where I forced a rampaging rhino to freeze from the glamor of my smile.

6. In the year 2100 the Vatican will approve a sequel to the New Testament, called the Bay Testament.

7. I could make the Weinstein Company release a profitable movie, but I won't.

8. I don't drink coffee in the morning, I drink nitroglycerin, then I do jumping jacks to promote regularity.

9. Even I will admit that The Island was shit.

10. I don't use toilet paper, I use reviews.

Hollywood Babble On & On #314: The Secret of Michael Bay's Success

You know, I used to be befuddled by the success of Michael Bay. His films are loud, annoying, and with stories buried and sometimes completely lost under the incoherence of big eye-popping visuals.

For years I laboured under the concept that Bay did not direct films, but instead put all his energies into directing the trailers. Creating melodramatic imagery for the ad campaigns, but not bothering if the story made sense or not.

Well, I now think I was only partly right. (You see, I'm never wrong)

I think Bay's success is based on an unspoken invisible contract between him and the audience, one that cannot be articulated by either side, but each sort of understands that it's there. This invisible contract is based on something that Hollywood claims to revere, but in fact abhors: rebellion.

Yes, I've come to the conclusion that Michael Bay is the last rebel left in Hollywood.

I can read you're mind, and you're thinking that I've lost mine. Well don't worry, just let me explain, and everything will come clear.

In Hollywood, everything is about conformity, especially among those that Hollywood considers rebels. Just look at them, they all wear the same designer tattered clothing, have the same artfully messy hair, the same tattoos, and the same stereotypical vices. They're sort of person you meet at a bar who lectures you about how you're a slave to corporate consumer culture while they're dragging on Phillip Morris cigarette, and downing Seagram's brand liquor.

These are safe rebels, and no matter how much they deny it, they're corporate friendly rebels. Their style and lifestyle ensures their dependence on the largess of their corporate masters. They'll make fun of the beliefs and attitudes of the general audience, making jabs at religion, middle class mores, and their so-called "consumerist" culture, while never challenging the innate hypocrisy within their own social circle.

They'll take the occasional jab about their employers, but that's actually preferred by their masters, because it makes them feel like they're one of the cynical post-modern cool kids, hanging with the rebels with the wild hair and clothes and joining in on "sticking it to the man."

It's all phonier than an studio executive's expense claim.

Michael Bay makes no pretense of sticking it to the man, in fact, he goes swanning around like he is The Man. His image is of the cocky, arrogant, I'm Michael Fucking Bay and you're not, who still has the same haircut and dress sense he had in the 1980s, and he isn't going to change just to fit in with the other messy haired pseudo-rebels.

He knows that he's never going to win an Oscar, or even get nominated, or even a good review from a major critic, and he doesn't seem to give a shit because he's literally making Optimus Prime-loads of cash and those who don't like him or his films can kiss his probably well-toned behind.

Just look at his recent ad for M&Ms, if that isn't a great big "eat me" to his critics, both cinematic and personal, I don't know what is.

(Add the fact that he's a peanut M&M makes it all a Freudian festival.)

He's not rebelling against the middle class mores that they themselves live by, he's rebelling against the snobbishness and insularity of Hollywood itself. This drives Hollywood nuts, spawning a mini-industry of Michael Bay haters, who can't stand him, or his movies, resent that most of them make a lot of money, and that he's doesn't want to be one of the "cool kids" preferring to just be one of the "rich kids" and rubbing it in. He goads the haters even further, making his films, and his own image, bigger, louder, and more obnoxious every year.

The audience catches this vibe from him, even though they can't articulate it, they go to his movies, knowing that while his films only offer spectacle and may insult their intelligence, they're not going to insult their existence, like many so-called "smarter" films, and that making it a hit will really bug those who claim to know better. This makes the audience Bay's ally in his one man war on Hollywood's shibboleths, and sells tickets by the boatload.

So, to sum it all up, the secret of Bay's success is that he's literally the bug up Hollywood's ass. It's really that simple.

A Reader Writes....

Okay, today I got this comment from a reader about my recent post about Michael Jackson:

Anonymous said...

Actually, the Times UK reports Jackson had recorded 100 unreleased songs that Sony will compile & release over the next 5 years. He's also #1 on the Itunes & Billboard charts which means he is earning more than the reported 20 million he generated per year prior to his death.

You (& Mr Burnaska) seem to know so much about Jackson, his delusions, etc.
Why didn't you know that?

D, w/ all due respect, you appear to have an interesting, generally insightful perspective on the workings of the entertainment biz. But occasionally you allow your lack of personal success in that realm & the hatred for those who have succeeded to cloud that insight.

You might want to work on that in order to remain credible.

You'll probably delete this post.

Gee thanks for the advice and the psychological analysis Anonymous, if that is your real name. You have completely convinced me that I was completely and totally wrong about everything.

Michael Jackson was the greatest musician who ever lived, whose songs never annoyed me by repetitiveness and overplaying, he never mutilated himself with plastic surgery, and he didn't share his bed with little boys, monkeys, and do other weird and creepy things.

But I have a few questions:

If Jackson was so sane, and so consistently successful, and earning $20 million a year, why are folks reporting that he left behind $400 million in debts? Couldn't he live on $20 million a year? I could.

Why did every deal involving Michael Jackson, from auctioning off his curios, to shopping at his local pharmacy end in lawsuits? He was making $20 million a year, he had 100 songs banked with his record company, why not pay his bills?

Sure, Michael Jackson is #1 in sales right now, but will that actually translate into continuing sales for this 100 song back catalog over the next 5 years, or is it just ghoulish memento hunting, like folks who dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood at the scene of John Dillinger's shooting?

And while the songs maybe selling, even in the millions, how much of that $400 million debt will it cover?

And one last question...

Anonymous, are you just an Anonymous Jackson fan, a co-delusional, trolling for anyone daring to bad-mouth your pop-idol, or are you a sock-puppet for the record company/concert promoter trying to tamp down criticism while your employers try to squeeze out something to cover the millions pissed away on Jackson's now aborted comeback, in other words, a profiteer?

And by the way, I won't delete the post. I stand by my opinions, and won't let anyone who doesn't even have the balls to even make up a phony name, tell me otherwise. Also I probably should remind you of something: I'm talking about Hollywood, I still have, and always will have, more credibility as an obnoxious cranky blogger than 99.9% of Hollywood's media machine.

Thanks for commenting, I haven't had some troll in a while.

UPDATE: My critic speaks again-

You can read their full comment, but we'll skip the part about my bitterness and get to the meat of the issue:

thought about explaining the intricacies of Jackson's situation to you re: his 50-100mil music library, the other multi mil $ library's he owns, not to mention the fact his potential to earn much more than what he owed gave him leeway w/ his creditors. In addition to the publicity & payment for media exposure those lawsuits generate.

Now the value of his music library, and his partial share of the old ATV Music library, and the Lennon/McCartney songs are all well and good, but they didn't do him much good during his life. Plus, there are reports that the contract for the Lennon/McCartney songs are going to revert to the original owners in a few years, thus chopping a couple of hundred million off the catalogue's value.

I see his post-mortem albums having some sales at first, out of ghoulish curiosity, but I fully expect them to perform much like the way his last few albums did. A lot of hype, but resulting in little sales to recoup the costs spent on the hype, and lawsuits flying with the regularity of the swallows of Capistrano. This aborted tour was the 3rd comeback attempt that I can recall off the top of my head, and it showed all the signs of being exactly like the other two.

His creditors are going to realize this too, and they're going to pounce like ravenous wolves. I feel bad for his children, because by the time this is all over, they won't have anything left. Lawyers have a nasty habit of making everything cost more, exponentially more.

If you wanted a serious discussion, you would have said something more like:

"I must disagree with your points, I think the value of his song catalogue will solve all his estate's financial problems. I also believe that Jackson's history of bizarre behaviour, accusations of pedophilia, and the opinion of critics that the quality of his work was declining, will not affect future sales of his bank of over 100 unreleased new songs."

Then I would have said that you were free to disagree, I'd reiterate my points, and we'd leave it at that.

However, you made your comment an anonymous personal attack by claiming to know everything about me, you invited vitriol, which if you really understood me, you'd know that analysis liberally seasoned with sarcasm, snark, and even vitriol is what this blog is all about.

How can I criticize Hollywood and not criticize those who are considered "successful," especially when they insist on pissing that success away? Should I start a blog satirizing the homeless?

Your tendency to turn what should be a simple disagreement into some sort of personal vendetta doesn't bode well for your alleged career as a show-runner. Which sort of makes me glad that I won't be working for you, because I appear to have touched a nerve with you, and you are apparently very bitter about the writings of unknown Canadian bloggers.

(Do you see how that just invites a flaming?)

I knew writing about Jackson was going to bring out the obsessives. That's why I put the warning in the original post.

Hollywood Babble On & On #313: The 5 Stages of Gossip

I try to avoid celebrity gossip on this blog. Not so much out of a sense of moral superiority, but because after living in the 24/7/365 celebrity culture that surrounds us, I've come to realize that famous people are fundamentally boring people.

Too many follow predictable patterns of rise, fall, comeback, and crash, and usually for no better reason than common stupidity.

But I would like to take a moment to talk about the business of gossip.

Gossip, especially about the rich and the famous, is as old as civilization itself. I'm sure on a back wall of an ancient ruin in Iraq someone scratched Xerxes is cheating on his concubines with his catamite in cuneiform.

Of course that went into overdrive with the birth of the modern film industry. Hollywood created "more stars than in heaven" and while at first the studios kept the gossip under some semblance of control, they couldn't control it completely.

Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper became legends as the first modern gossip columnists, reporting on the sins, both mortal and venal of Hollywood's new elite. Walter Winchell soon followed, putting the power brokers of Washington and New York in his sights as well.

One thing that these groundbreaking gossips learned was that they didn't get ahead by being liked, they got ahead by being feared.

Celebrities had to kiss their ass or find their careers being slaughtered with rumor, innuendo, and sometimes outright slander at the hands of this unholy trio and their acolytes. Lawsuits were pointless, since the gossip's expenses were covered by their publishers, whose lawyers could tie up litigation for years.

This industry burst from newspaper columns, and the occasional fly-by-night gossip rag, to take over first the tabloid newspapers, luring them away from reports of Bigfoot and gruesome crimes, then mainstream "general interest" magazines, and TV shows from Entertainment Tonight to TMZ.

Gossip also became coin of the realm of the internet, leading the transformation of failed actor, turned freelance writer, turned receptionist, Mario Lavendeira into gossip king Perez Hilton.

Hilton's specialty was going lower than any other before him. His trademark was scribbling penises, or white-dots (for cocaine) all over poached paparazzi pics of celebrities, outing closeted (or just suspected of being closeted) celebrities, and putting general acceptance of the gay community back about two decades by embodying every negative stereotype you know, and making up a few new ones.

Of course his career is following the usual arc of a gossip monarch, he's just doing it way faster than the others, probably because of the lightspeed nature of the media itself.

1. NOVELTY: Most of the major gossip "stars" become gossips because of their failure to become celebrities based on anything like talent or ability. So they dig up some dirt, create a public image: Hedda Hopper- big hats and faux moral superiority, Walter Winchell- the "hard living" newspaperman, and Perez Hilton- The catty hairdresser stereotype. This novelty, coupled with the celebrity dirt people crave leads to initial success. This success leads to...

2. POWER THROUGH FEAR: Soon people start to fear appearing badly in the column or blog, so they start kissing the gossip's ass. The gossip starts getting invited to parties with the beautiful people, and treated like they were one of them. However, they are not one of them, and somewhere deep down they know this and this breeds deeper resentment. They start to take the power they have accrued, and the fear it creates, and they develop...

3. POWER MADNESS: The whole business of gossip transforms from just reporting the rumours to making and breaking people. Those who don't pay obeisance to them will be destroyed. Be it an actor Hedda Hopper doesn't like, a politician Winchell considered a "red," or a beauty queen that has the same religious beliefs as the president Hilton voted for.

4. CONSEQUENCES COME CALLING: When you make your living shoveling shit, the wind is going to change and some shit is going to blow into your face. It's a law of nature. Hedda Hopper got kicked in the ass by Spencer Tracy, Louella Parsons had more drinks thrown in her face than you can shake a stick at, and Walter Winchell eventually became a pariah from the people he wanted to hobnob with.

Hilton's hissy fit certainly didn't help his case. By going on the internet before going to the police, he trivialized the incident to one of his own stories, and the childish use of a homophobic slur, alienated the gay community that was already trying to distance themselves from him.

5. CRASH & BURN: With the consequences coming fast and furious, the sources of gossip tend to dry up. Hopper and Parsons eventually ended up just regurgitating press releases, and became "quaint and old fashioned" by the standards of their former acolytes. Winchell lost all his sources, all his clout, and ended up printing his column on a mimeograph in his apartment and handing it out on the street to passersby.

It's the cycle of life, and Perez is right in the middle of it, and he can't even see it.

Saturday Silliness Cinema: The Sketch Show

I'm not feeling 100% today, and I'll get back to my rantings about the business of show biz as soon as possible, so sit back and enjoy these rapid fire sketches from England.

Hollywood Babble On & On #312: Michael Jackson Is Dead, But The Mess Will Live On

I should start off by making a very blunt declaration.

I never liked Michael Jackson.

I didn't care for his music, I didn't care for his public image, and that ambivalence quickly shifted to outright disgust as the words "bizarre" and "wacky" began to dominate his life and career. I'm going to be blunt, cruelly blunt, so if you're a Michael Jackson fan, you might want to find another blog.

Michael Jackson went from a child star to grotesque self parody as he became a failed version of the Emperor Norton of pop culture.

Emperor Norton I was once a San Francisco businessman named Joshua Abraham Norton. When Norton lost his fortune in a fiasco over the price of rice, he disappeared for several years, only to reappear in Frisco, where he declared himself the Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

The thing was the entire city of San Francisco went along with his delusion. Businesses accepted the currency he printed, he lived in the "Imperial Suite" of the city's top hotel, and people accepted his decrees with applause, whether they followed them or not. This game went along for around 20 years until Norton's death in 1880. Even at this funeral, 30,000 people formed a parade to honour their deceased delusional monarch.

Michael Jackson's story is a little different. Jackson was never able to get businesses to accept his own currency, which is why almost every business deal Jackson got involved with appeared to end in expensive litigation.

But let's get back to the people involved in his delusion, they break down to two basic types:

THE PROFITEERS: These were the people who hung around him, telling him that everything he did was right, whether it was excessive plastic surgery, or dangling a baby off a balcony. Why? Because they wanted the Michael Jackson gravy train to keep on trucking. Despite having album sales in the toilet since the 1980s, and that he was hemorrhaging cash like a stuck pig, there was always a chance for a buck, thanks to the second type...

THE CO-DELUSIONALS: These were people who appeared to honestly believe the lunacy that Jackson believed, and even they can be broken down into two groups. On the fan side there were the now middle-aged women who would look at the surgically mangled face of Jackson and still see the cute little 10 year old dancing and singing his heart out, because if he didn't, his daddy was going to beat his ass into next week. They accepted his crazy behaviour out of sympathy for his tragic childhood.

Then there were the wannabe profiteers, folks who bought into Jackson's self-declaration as the "King of Pop," and figured that since the man was still living big, he had to still be big. A huge comeback was always just around the corner, and that if they got in on the ground floor, they'd make mucho dinero. Yet those comebacks never really happened.

None of these groups wanted Jackson to face the brutal truth that his career was washed up, he had no money coming in, and had more lawsuits than faux-military dress-suits. Or admit that people bought tickets to his concerts either out of nostalgic delusions, or a desire to watch a car-wreck in action. They had their own delusions to protect, and guarded them as much as the profiteers wanted to protect their meal ticket.

Of course this is just the beginning. Profiteers and Co-Delusionals will start clawing at the ragged remains of his estate in the vain hope of flogging something out of that dead horse. There will be lawsuits over debts, properties, custody of his children, and the music library that included a share in the Beatles-Lennon/McCartney song catalogue.

This is because when you live in a dream-world you don't really pay attention to petty mortal things like balancing a checkbook, or figuring how your kids will live after you're gone. You just rely on the fact that the magical unicorn will come along and drop off whatever you need.

Michael Jackson lived crazy, and attracted crazy like moths to a flame. So, fully expect for his death to attract even more crazy.

It Always Happens In Threes...

Shortly after the death of TV host Ed McMahon we have two more celebrity deaths to report.

FARRAH FAWCETT- Died at the age of 62 after a 3 year battle with cancer. She was a sexual icon of the 1970s, who reinvented her career during the TV movie and miniseries boom of the 1980s, including a chilling performance as a sociopath who kills her own child and tries to kill two more in Small Sacrifices.

MICHAEL JACKSON- Is dead of a reported heart attack at the age of 50. All I have to say is that this is going to start a media circus that will make the Anna Nicole Smith fiasco look tasteful and restrained.

There will also be lawsuits. The poor man couldn't shop for groceries without it ending in a lawsuit, so you can only imagine what his death will start. Expect suits over money, contracts, the custody of his children, and all sorts of things that will make his bizarre story even more bizarre.

His death will be just the beginning.

Hollywood Babble On & On #311: Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun, Double Your Bullshit Tolerance

Just when you think the Academy Awards have lost all credibility, they start slipping into the negative zone.

In case you haven't heard, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences have doubled the number of Best Picture nominees from the traditional 5 to 10.

10 nominees.

What the hell?

Of course the official reason for this incredibly dumb-ass move is that the studios want some of the more mainstream fare to have a chance over the actor-friendly, overly serious, pseudo-sincere melodramas, mostly released by studio's pseudo-indie divisions for the last few years.

However, Hollywood is the land of unintended consequences and there are going to be plenty with this decision.

Because when you double the number of Best Picture nominees you're going to:

1. Double the chances for Harvey Weinstein to be obnoxious while wasting millions of investor's money in the vain hope of getting another Oscar.

2. Double the number of tedious movie star vanity projects.

3. End Sean Penn's leave of absence from movie-making immediately, because it doubles his chances of justifying his existence.

4. Double the amount of screener DVDs filling landfills across Southern California.

5. Double the run time of the awards ceremony and halving the audience. (Which pretty much puts it down to two quadriplegics who caregiver left the TV remote out of reach.)

6. Completely ruining of the nice configuration of 5 TV monitors at the nomination press conference. No more 2 on each side, one over the announcer's head, now they're going to be stacking them like cord-wood.

7. Double the odds of a Miley Cyrus film getting a best picture nomination.

8. Double the chances of the Best Picture presenter getting lost reading the nominees, and starting all over again.

9. Double the chances of a Michael Bay film getting a nomination.

10. Doubling the odds of voters just saying "fuck it," and tossing their ballots.

10 nominees, 10 unintended consequences.

What a coincidence.

If You Have A Scary Story...

...and a face for radio, then I have just the contest for you.

The Wildclaw Theatre Company of Chicago is doing their annual "DeathScribe" competition, for short radio plays in the genres of horror or thriller.

And no, I'm not talking about the Michael Jackson album. I'm talking scary creepy, not creepy creepy.

So if you have, or can whip up, a short radio play (under 10 min) complete with audio and music cues, before July 30th, then you might get it performed by professional actors and sound FX artists.

Details are here.

I wrote a short piece called The Vivisection, inspired by my love of old Hammer horror films, and it was a lot of fun trying something new.

So give it a shot. Who knows, you might end up scaring something up.

Hollywood Babble On & On #310: Miscellaneous Money, Media, Movie, & Mourning Related Musings...

1. NIKKI FINKE GOES BIG.

Groundbreaking Hollywood business blogger Nikki Finke has sold her site Deadline Hollywood Daily to the Mail.com internet empire.

DHD will reportedly add a New York correspondent, and add a few new features to her site.

I wish her luck. I don't think she "sold out" in the proverbial and pejorative sense. She was basically a one woman show, and the demands of running such a popular site would overwhelm anyone, and would probably eventually effect the quality of the work she does.

That's not saying that there aren't any potential pitfalls, and I hope that Mail.com fully understands what they're getting into.

DHD was founded on a reputation of being the site that bucks the big-media friendly sites who basically just regurgitated press releases under the guise of investigative journalism. DHD got inside dope and put it up, whether the big media companies wanted it up there or not, especially if it was "or not."

That means any attempt to fiddle with the site and its standard of muckraking, would have the immediate effect of driving away first the sources who give the site its precious info, and then the audience that made the site so popular.

My advice to Mail.com, don't screw it up.

2. WHAT ABOUT PARAMOUNT?

I got this question from a reader:

Tony said...
Following your analogy, if Paramount's pending re-rescue is indeed a remake of Gulf + Western's 1966 takeover, how successful it is will depend on if the buyer "gets" what made the source material work, and can get something fresh out of it; if not, just as most current remakes flop, this new Paramount may, if not fold, be as moribund as MGM (even having another studio own its (Second) Golden Age films, as Universal now owns Paramount's First Golden Age features)

That is pretty accurate that anyone who takes over Paramount must truly "get" what made the source material (the company) successful, and putting a fresh spin on it.

Interestingly, what made Paramount successful was pretty much the opposite of what Paramount does now. You see during its first golden age (1920s-1950s) the company was known for hiring top producing, directing, and writing talent at their creative and commercial peak, and then not meddling with them like most studios, simply because if the powers that be didn't trust their judgment, they wouldn't have signed them to Paramount in the first place. Which is why Paramount had such heavy hitters as Alfred Hitchcock, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, and others on their roster at various times.

The second revival of the 1960s-1970s was brought on by marrying young film-making talent, with direct high-concept projects that won both commercial and critical success, like The Godfather (Francis Coppola) and Chinatown (Roman Polanski).

Nowadays they have to figure out a way to bring in top new talent, quality material, and make it in the most cost-effective way possible. Because if they don't, they just might end up like MGM, which is basically a library whose profits get swallowed up to pay corporate debt.

3. ED MCMAHON R.I.P.

Ed McMahon who was best known as Johnny Carson's sidekick on the Tonight Show, and probably one of the best pitchmen in TV history passed away at the age of 86. I'd rather not remember the last couple of years of his life, plagued by poor health, and bad finances, and think back to the laughs. Like this moment of TV history...

Hollywood Babble On & On #309: First As Tragedy, Next As Farce...

There's been a big shake-up at the top management of cash strapped major studio Paramount. Studio President John Lesher is out, to become a producer, and swiftly replaced by a former Dreamworks production head named Adam Goodman. It's suffered a massive bomb with the latest Eddie Murphy vehicle Imagine That, is bleeding money, thanks to massive debts, and can't seem to make anything remotely original, doing either reboots, or riffing off of old 80s toy franchises, like the Transformers, G.I. Joe, and would have done a movie version of My Little Pony, if they weren't hit with a trademark infringement suit from Sarah Jessica Parker.

And to top it all off, all of the company's summer releases are being produced by one man. All of their eggs are literally in one basket.

Despite the success of Star Trek's reboot, the company is in rough shape.

But it's happened before.

You see Paramount has been one of the biggest studios in Hollywood since almost the beginning. The United Artists company, now part of the moribund MGM, was started as an act of rebellion against the immense size and dominance of Paramount.

But with size Paramount has also been cursed with a very bureaucratic system. It tends to be slow to react to changing trends, and has a bad tendency of trying to force trends through tossing way too much money on big films that probably shouldn't be made, but get made simply because someone at Paramount thinks it's the sort of film they should be making simply because it's big.

Can anyone say Paint Your Wagon?

Can anyone say G.I. Joe, which looks like six kinds of suck judging by the trailers and marketing materials?

Some folks are predicting that Paramount may actually fold up shop. I think that's a little far fetched. What's more likely to happen is that like in the past it'll come close to complete collapse, then like every time before, someone will take advantage of the fire sale price, buy it, bring in fresh blood, and history will repeat itself all over again.

Because Hollywood history is more than cyclical, it's actually the historical equivalent of remakes. The same story told over and over, just not told as well as the first time, and increasingly dumbed down with every telling.

MAN THE BARRICADES!

Okay, maybe not.

However, the long battered and beleaguered assistants in Talent and Management Agencies have begun a web site to vent steam in ways that don't involve urine and a vente mocha latte.

It's called Can Yooouuu and allows those assistants to leave little stories of unreasonable demands, obnoxious behaviour, and just plain insensitivity on the part of their cruel masters.

You know how I feel about the whole agent/assistant situation, and if you don't, then read this.

Saturday Silliness Cinema: Zach Galifinakis

Sorry for not posting yesterday. I got drafted into helping plant rose bushes and the experience served to remind me that I hate, and I mean loathe, gardening. Especially when it involves digging in a front yard that has more rocks in it than granite quarry. Now I'm sore and cranky.

So it's a perfect time for a laugh.

With the movie The Hangover staying in the top 5 of the box office after 3 weeks, let's take a look at one of its breakout stars comedian Zach Galifinakis.

Zach Galifianakis Live at the Purple Onion from Zach Galifianakis

New Characters from ZACH GALIFIANAKIS from Zach Galifianakis

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis from Between Two Ferns

Hollywood Babble On & On #308: Agents, Assistants, & Absolute Poverty

Nikki Finke had a recent post about how the millionaire power-brokers at the newly merged William Morris-Endeavor Entertainment Agency are going to slash the salaries of their assistants to make them more in line with the more parsimonious policies of the Endeavor Agency.

There are literally tons of stories about already overworked, and underpaid assistants, being used, abused, and refused until they either quit, or get adopted by Barry Diller.

Now there are two reasons why they treat, and pay their assistants so poorly, and no, it does not come from a taste for having angry assistants piss in their soy latte.

1. MONEY & CONNECTIONS: Basically agencies don't appear to want anyone who might actually have to live on the wages they pay. Assistant is just an entry level position, and for agents it is all about connections, who is related to whom, and they don't want to have their positions entered by anyone who doesn't already have money and status in their little community.

The time when a poor kid from the old neighborhood could get a gig in the mail room and making it to the top spot through pluck, luck, and hustle is long over. Hollywood is a shrinking and inbred community, and if you don't have any connection to someone who is already a somebody in the industry, you will never get that mail room job.

2. TRIAL BY FIRE: When you base your hiring on contacts over merit, you are going to get quite a few weeds in your garden of talent.

So to get rid of those weeds, you need the Garden Weasel of Simple Brutality. That means shitty pay, long hours, no overtime, brutal workload, and employers who are demanding bottomless pits of need.

Hopefully you will get the jokers out of the deck, and hopefully find a few with the hustle and drive to become real agents.

This system goes back a long way, in fact, it's the oldest form of training known to civilization, and it's called the Apprenticeship.

You see, you can't really learn how to be a good agent in university. Sure, you can learn contract law, and some of the more technical aspects, but there are literally hundreds of other aspects that they don't teach in school. You can only learn how to handle those things by doing, and by doing it under the most stressful, wretched conditions they can finagle, so that when you do make it to the corner office, you can handle everything fate throws at you.

Now these systems tend to get worse as the industry gets richer. This is because those who were assistants when they first started had it rough, so they feel that they must make it rougher to make up for some feeling of inadequacy in the face of the legendary generation that preceded them.

I sort of picture the discussions about treating assistants going a lot like the old comedy sketch the Four Yorkeshiremen:

AGENT 1: Assistants these days have it easy. They don't know the meaning of working hard. When I started out I was only paid three cents an hour, had to live under my desk, and work 23 hours a day. Then my boss would make me crawl over broken glass to serve him coffee.

AGENT 2: You had it easy. When I was an assistant I was paid three cents a day, was forced to live behind the copier machine, work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, swim through a tank full of piranhas to serve him coffee, and then he'd toss it in my face, horribly scalding me.

AGENT 3: Ya pussy! When I was an assistant I was paid three cents a week, had to live in my boss' waste paper basket, work 36 hours a day, 9 days a week, and crawl on hot coals to give my boss his coffee, which he would then throw in my face, and then he'd shoot me in the kneecaps, crippling me for life.

AGENT 4: Too much soft living, that's your problem. When I was an assistant I was paid three cents a year, had to live in the urinal of the executive washroom, worked 48 hours a day, 30 days a week, 3,650 days a year, and everyday I had to swim across a pool of acid to get my boss his coffee, and then he'd throw it in my face, saw off my head with a rusty knife, and shit down my neck.

AGENT 1: B'ah, wuss.

This system isn't always foolproof. It leaves too many openings for ass-kissing, conniving, and scheming, and the judgment of the mentors who are supposed to do the weeding, can be too easily swayed by such things, or by the connections of the assistant and their relatives. So some of those weeds do bloom, and often these weeds lack the "start from nothing" hustle that made the founding of the Hollywood agency system legends.

And another flaw in this system, is that the really big agencies, drunk on their own prestige, usually are the worst employers. This means the really clever candidates with the rare and precious hustle aim for the smaller agencies, work their way up, become big fish in a small pond, and when the majors come to recruit them and their mojo, they have to pay the big bucks. The funny thing is, if they made a few adjustments to their system, they could probably get these people at the start, and keep them loyal to the agency that brought them, at a more reasonable cost.

Of course the key word is loyalty, and if you want that in Hollywood, you better get a dog.

Hollywood Babble On & On #307: 1982, The SF Golden Age?

Website The Wrap posted a piece that discussed how 1982 was a banner year for science-fiction and horror films.

Take a look at the list and see how you can't agree:

• E.T.
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
• Poltergeist
• Blade Runner
• The Thing
• Tron
• Mad Max 2/The Road Warrior

I mean those are some pretty heavy hitters. Even films like Blade Runner and The Thing, which lost money in their initial release became, first cult classics, in the then nascent pay-tv and video rental markets, and then grew to be considered full on classics of their genre.

I think this was due to a trend that started in the 60s, where filmmakers tried to take the genres of SF and horror, from their "B-movie" roots, and thanks to Star Wars now had the commercial viability, and special effects technology to do it.

Now I think those very things that SF/F/H so great in 1982 have now made most modern SF/F/H so damned forgettable.

Thanks to the past success of genre films, studios will toss a minimum of $100 million into the budget, and thanks to CGI, all you have to do is think of something, and you can make it happen on screen.

Sadly, once the novelty of being able to see everything wears off, it becomes a crutch to all but the most imaginative filmmakers. Why need to be subtle with your monster, when you can render its every pore and pimple in 3D and the studio is giving you millions to do it?

So where old filmmakers used story, and characters to make their films stand out above the limits of visual effects, modern filmmakers simply just toss in the CG and let that do all the work.

What do you think?

Can the SF/F/H cinema become as memorable as it was in good old 1982, or am I just an old fart enamored with nostalgia for the years I discovered such cinema?

Hollywood Babble On & On #306: On Comedy

There's a scene in an old episode of Seinfeld where Jerry visits a Catholic Priest in the confessional to discuss his dentist's recent conversion to Judaism, and how Jerry suspects he did it only for the jokes.

"Does that offend you as a Jew?" asks the Priest.

"No," answers Seinfeld, "it offends me as a comedian."

That's sums up how I feel about the whole David Letterman/Sarah Palin kerfuffle.

It doesn't offend me on any political level, I'm a Canadian, and American politics doesn't really involve me, but the fact that he allowed such a poorly conceived and executed joke make on air, offends me as someone who at least tries to be funny without the benefit of a multi-million dollar salary and staff of writers.

And it doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you are on, it was a bad joke that was badly executed, and Letterman didn't give any thought into it all, because if he did, he wouldn't have done the joke.

And here's why:

1. RELEVANCE: The 2008 election ended in November 2008. Sarah Palin then went back to being governor of Alaska, and pretty much stopped being national news. The only reason most people even heard that she had visited New York, was because Letterman made jokes about it. It wasn't big news, it wasn't even little news, and doing the routine meant that it was done at the expense of more relevant stories.

Yes, she did run as Vice President, but that was last year, she lost as well, and she went back to Alaska. Her visit to New York had about as much resonance nationally as the Governor of Wyoming visiting New York. Before this boondoggle the only people who seemed to care a whit about Palin were the people of Alaska who see her as their governor, a handful of Republican supporters who think she's their messiah, and the upper-echelons of the New York-Los Angeles media community, who think she's Lucifer incarnate.

Inadvertently, Letterman made her politically relevant again, and put a big fat target on his own head by attacking her child, and giving her supporters the material they need to get her back in the news.

2. ETHICS: Making jokes about the children of public figures is just plain tacky. Making sexual jokes about the teenage daughter of a public figure is really tacky. It doesn't matter if Letterman meant the 18 year old with the baby, or the 14 year old without, it's still really tacky. The children of politicians often find themselves the subject of unwanted media attention, constant questions from reporters, watching by cameras, and gossip by bloggers. They're trapped in a catch-22, if they do try to control the situation by doing occasional interviews, they're accused of being exploited as the puppets of their parents, if avoid the press, they're damned for participating in an alleged cover-up.

Teenage girls, whether they had a baby or not, don't need some comedian telling the country that they're so slutty they put out baseball players in the dugout, or getting propositioned by a hooker-chasing ex-governor. Ridicule the parent as much as you like, they wouldn't be in politics if they couldn't take a joke, but their children are not fair game. The question a comedian would have to ask is: "Would I want someone saying that about my own daughter?" The answer would be no, and those who would ridicule the children of someone famous deserve all the scorn they get.

3. LAZINESS: The whole routine struck me as the sort of material someone blurts out in the Writer's Room, gets a giggle, and then is quickly forgotten, because while it may amuse a bunch of people buzzed on caffeine, Chinese food, and Xenu knows what else, it's just not good enough for national television. It's like making fun of a colleague's genitals with a rudely placed egg-roll, it may get a laugh in the writer's room, but it doesn't make it worthy of late-night.

The fact that it made it through the usual process of getting a joke through to air, shows a decided lack of effort on the part of the writing staff, and on Letterman himself. I know that producing relevant news jokes on a daily basis is tough, but it's been done since the dawn of television, so it's not impossible. And the laziness shows in the structure of the routine itself.

Saying Palin has a "slutty flight attendant look" was cheap, and inaccurate. She has more of a naughty librarian look, but the writer was probably watching some p0rn with flight attendants on his computer, and that stuck in his head. (My advice to Letterman, if he has to fly commercial, bring your own food and drinks, flight attendants have feelings too, and ways of getting revenge.)

Plus, when you do news related material you have to make sure that you at least know who is in the story. You don't just make an assumption and run with it. If Dick Cheney said something joke-worthy, it would be poor work on the part of the comedy writer to go and place the quote in the mouth of Vladimir Putin. Not knowing which daughter was on the trip, and putting the wrong daughter in the cross-hairs, is a sign that someone wasn't doing their job.

4. ARROGANCE: Letterman made the joke because of a simple, yet false assumption. The bulk of his narrow social circle in New York opposed her run for the VP seat. That is their right, it's a free country, but they seem unhealthily obsessed with her, viewing her as a combination of Elmer Gantry, Forrest Gump, and Dracula in heels.

This goes beyond the simple attitude of "I don't agree with them politically so I will ridicule them and their positions," to an attitude of "I don't agree with them politically, so they must be retarded and evil, so I will ridicule them and their children."

Since everyone in Letterman's social circle shares his attitude, he assumed that the entire country shared his attitude.

And let's remember that bit of wisdom: Don't ASSUME anything, because you will only make an ASS out of U and ME.

Letterman didn't count on Fox News, talk radio, and conservative bloggers to jump on the issue like stink on a mule. I get the feeling that's because he doesn't watch Fox News, listen to talk radio, or read conservative bloggers, because if he did, then he would have seen this coming.

It's the perfect storm for them, Letterman's a millionaire late night comedian, who refuses to make jokes about the current ruling administration, employed by a multi-billion dollar mega-conglomerate, attacking the child of the governor of a state that's literally two countries away from his Manhattan circle in what appears to be some sort of petty revenge for campaigning for a party he doesn't like.

Letterman didn't seem to realize the law of unintended consequences. He made the joke in the hope of belittling a former candidate and her family, but instead gave her supporters the ammunition they needed to revive her standing on the national stage. The millions of people who voted for her, and even those who didn't, saw the joke as an attack on a child and joined in on the outrage, seeing a middle class mother turned governor of a relatively politically small state being attacked while the politically powerful walk unscathed on a nightly basis.

Why didn't Letterman see the shit-storm coming?

The only reason I can think of is arrogance.

Letterman runs his own shop, nobody dares say no to him about anything, he apparently listens to no one that doesn't agree with him completely, and after too many years of that you start to think that you're all that and a bag of chips, and that you can make a really bad joke, and not see the wave of shit it's going to start.

Should Letterman be fired?

No, I don't think so, and I doubt he will. He'll ride it out, and in a week or two it'll all be forgotten.

What he should do is obtain a little humility, because humility is the comedian's best tool. It's what helps a comedian tell the difference between a joke that deserves to get on air, one that can only causes shit.

Now I hope that Letterman sees that he screwed the pooch, and makes himself and his writers aim for a higher standard in their material.

And let this be the last we talk of politics here.

It's not my bailiwick.