Some Exclusive News Scoops!!!

You all heard about the Airbus A320 that had the miraculous landing on the Hudson River. Well I have an exclusive scoop. A photo taken seconds before the engines lost power, and it wasn't caused by geese!

Hollywood Babble On & On #214: On Thinking Ahead

Nikki Finke reports that the Motion Picture & Television Fund will be closing their retirement and hospital facilities by the end of the year, citing a $10 million annual loss for the organization as the main reason.

I think this is just awful. While every hears about the "A-List" and their overblown salaries, we don't hear about the thousands of Hollywood workers who toil in anonymity, who can barely pay their rent, let alone health insurance and retirement funds, and who rely on the MPTF as their safety net.

Now I could criticize the industry for not properly maintaining these institutions financially, I mean billions of dollars pass through the industry every year. $10 million a year is about 1/10th the budget of an average Hollywood film, without special effects, and only one major star. The money is out there, it's just not being managed right.

But knowing that Hollywood folks aren't really that good at seeing anything beyond their next paycheck, and aren't capable of realizing that one bad career decision, a bad accident, or a Bernie Madoff, could put them in need of the fund and its services, I've decided to do something constructive. I am offering fund-raising ideas to save the facilities.

1. Media outlets that do Awards Show red carpet spots should pay a fee to the fund. It doesn't have to be a big fee, but if you want a shot of Angelina Jolie's latest gown, or get the celebs to talk to you, then you gotta pony up some dough for the fund. And the unions should strictly enforce this with fines if they talk or pose to non-paying outlets.

2. A paparazzi tax. Get the state to pass a law that 30% of all fees earned by paparazzi get donated to the fund. It should help curb a lot of those semi-amateur paps who scurry around celebs like ants on a picnic when their profit margin after legal fees, trespassing fines, and overhead are paid.

3. Get celebrities to fake scandals. This will work in two ways. First, the money paid by the tabloids for the dirt will be donated to the fund, then when the celebrities sue for libel they can kick back a share after their legal fees are paid.

I'm pretty sure that'll earn enough to cover the losses, and leave enough for an endowment fund that won't be run by Bernie Madoff.

What suggestions do you folks have to save the fund and its facilities?

Ricardo Montalban is Dead.

Ricardo Montalban, one the classiest actors in Hollywood history, known by millions as the charming and enigmatic Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island, but beloved by generations of geeks as Khan Noonian Singh the greatest Star Trek villain of all time has passed away.

He started out in Hollywood in the 1940s as one of the few Hispanic actors working in the industry. And in the tradition of old-school miscasting, was often cast as Asian characters. He also toiled playing Latin lovers in musicals, American Indians in westerns, and any other ethnicity the studios needed, though he did break the mold to play a Boston cop in the film noir Mystery Street. He also worked a lot in television, beginning his spot as a sci-fi icon with a guest spot on a then struggling TV show called Star Trek as a genetically engineered super-dictator from the anarchic future of the 1990s.

He reappeared as that villain in the film Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, putting him in the rare position of having a hit movie, and a hit TV show (Fantasy Island) at the same time. And just to illustrate his presence as an actor, the film is always viewed as a battle between Khan and Kirk, yet he and Shatner are never in the same scene, they only speak via monitors and communicators. Any other actor would leave the audience feeling cheated that there wasn't a face to face scene between him and Shatner, but you don't with Montalban, because he makes the character fill every scene he's in, even when he's just a voice on a speaker, or a face on a screen.

You'd be hard pressed to find a modern actor that could pull that off.

And he kept working for the love of it, even when ill health confined him to a wheelchair.

He was predeceased by Georgiana Young his wife of 63 years.

First Patrick McGoohan, now Ricardo Montalban.

From now on, this time will be called Black Wednesday by sci-fi/fantasy fans the world over.

Rest in Peace Ricardo. You were always a class act.

Rest In Peace Number 6

Patrick McGoohan passed away at the age of 80.

He is probably best known for The Prisoner, a bizarre, surrealistic take on the 60s spy genre that he helped create, and even wrote episodes for under the name Paddy Fitz. In the show he played a spy who resigned for unknown reasons, someone, it's never identified who, kidnapped him and placed him on The Island, a strange, creepily pleasant prison for people with secrets.

His captors take away his name, which is never revealed, call him Number 6, and do everything in their power to break his mind and spirit to steal his secret. He becomes the Island's rebel declaring at the beginning of each episode: "I am not a number! I am a free man!"

As a kid it was my first taste of Kafkaesque existentialism, and it was an experiment that was ahead of its time in many ways.

He was also notorious for turning down the role of James Bond, twice. His reason for the refusal was because he considered Bond an "amoral thug" and thought the character's constant seductions would be disrespectful to his wife.

He was more than just an actor, or even a star, he was an artistic ground-breaker who helped took television past the edge in ways that are only now being appreciated.

Rest in peace Mr. McGoohan, you were never a number, and always will be a free man.

We Have A Question...

I just got an e-mail from a reader named Kit, who asked:

Dear Furious D,
Is there anyone in the film industry that is good? Or at least a capable businessmen?
Can you name us ONE?

Probably not.

At least I'm being honest.

Sure, I hear some things about how some folks are smart, and good to work with, but being as far a Hollywood outsider you can get without leaving the continent, I can't really confirm or deny those stories.

What I can confirm or deny is when someone screws up big time. Because when someone screws up, there's evidence, and it's public enough for a crank in the hinterlands like me can find it. Movies fail, TV shows get canceled, companies go bankrupt, and lots of law-suits get filed.

When someone in Hollywood is doing their job right, it's very hard to find that evidence. Movies people like get made and do well, TV shows chug along profitably, and companies do well. That's not good material for the Hollywood media chum bucket that attracts the large media sharks that obnoxious little blog remora like me cling to in the vain hope of snatching a morsel for myself.

Of course, if I just talk about how great folks are, I'd be just rehashing press releases, or Variety fluffer pieces. And I can't really do what I hope to accomplish that way.

What I want to do, what I hope this blog will someday do, is that one person reads what I have to say about reforming the way Hollywood does business. And that somehow this blog plants a seed in that person's mind . Hopefully, one day, in a distant future with flying cars and robot butlers, that seed will bloom and convince that person to be the kind of good businessperson that doesn't get crapped on in an obscure little business blog. One that happens to be written by my brain, which will be floating in a tank of gelatinous goo attached to an android body.

There are probably some good businesspeople out there. There has to be, or the gears of the movie industry would have completely ground to a halt sometime in the mid-1980s. Sadly, they're outnumbered and surrounded like a small pack of survivors in a zombie movie farmhouse. Their enemy the legions of narrow minded opportunists, unable to think about anything beyond what scheme will get them a bigger bonus this quarter, a fancier company car than their co-workers, and a quickie with a wannabe starlet from Pig's Knuckle Arkansas.

Good businesspeople are all about building, creating, making the pie bigger so everyone get a good piece. Bad businesspeople are all about taking whatever they can as fast as they can, before someone finds out that they have no talent or interest in their jobs.

And the ironic part is that the it's the good businessperson who has the longer, richer, career.

Which is why I'm asking any Hollywood insiders that might stumble across this little blog to nominate the people they think are good businesspeople, or just plain good people. Tell me who they are, and what makes them good, or good at what they do. Don't be afraid, it's not like anyone reads this anyway.

Random Thoughts That Rattle Around In This Head of Mine...

I congratulated Kate Winslet on her wonderful pair of Golden Globes, and she slapped me.

(insert drumshot)

I get no respect, no respect at all.

Neither does NBC.

Despite what Variety says, the Golden Globes had the lowest ratings since NBC started carrying them in 1996.

Dammit. Silverman can't even get a hit with drunk celebrities making asses out of themselves.

(insert drumshot)

Radical Islamic extremists have threatened to behead Madonna.

I know how they feel after I heard her last single.

(insert drumshot)

These are the jokes folks.... hey, where are you going... come back, I'm here all week, try the veal, and don't forget to tip your waitress.

Comic Book Confidential: Putting the Hero Back In Superheroes?

Comic book writer and creator of Fables, Bill Willingham, writes an interesting post in the new conservative/libertarian pop-culture blog Big Hollywood about the decline of heroism in superhero comics. He makes quite a few interesting points to ponder, such as the use of superheroes to make political points on behalf of the creators, superheroes being plagued with doubt over the rightness of trying to do the right thing, losing the patriotism that originally defined the characters, and general anti-hero bad-ass nihilism.

I can understand why the writers of comic books balk at returning to the old fashioned notions of heroism. They may say that it's because they consider it "corny," "hokey," and "contrived," but the real reason is that it's hard to do right.

It wasn't that hard back in days of yore, before people started encasing their comics in hard plastic slabs and actually read them for stories of adventure and heroism. In those days it was easy to write superheros who were truly heroic, who never felt doubt, and never felt ashamed to say "truth, justice, and the American way." That was because in the old days those were the cliches.

Cliches are cliches because they get used a lot, and in the old days the cliches was that superheros did the right thing, villains did the wrong thing, and the good guys won just in time to leave room for an ad for Sea Monkeys and X-Ray Specs.

But like all cliches they have a best before date, and by the 1970s that date had been reached. But new talents emerged to bring life back the medium. They sought new ideas, new themes, and found them in the profound loss of faith and general social ennui that engulfed the western world at that time.

The old cliches were gradually phased out. Superhero comics began to explore darker themes, with greater moral complexity, and even moral ambiguity affecting the characters. This truly came to the fore with the arrival of Allan Moore & David Gibbons Watchmen, and Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns in the mid-1980s.

In these stories superheros showed their dark side. Sometimes letting their obsession with their cause clouding their judgment, and sometimes they crossed the line. For a long time it still rang as new and fresh to readers.

But then I think it started to go wrong.

This new moral complexity became a cliche, and like all cliches it became simplified. Moral ambiguity became amoral nihilism, and soon not only were readers not sure who the villains were, in some books, the villains were the stars. In recent years it's become almost camp self-parody, with comics creators losing focus on new themes and ideas, trying only to top each other by how "bad-ass" and "extreme" they can make their characters.

Ironically, the best superhero story I've seen in a long time wasn't even in comics, but in the movie The Dark Knight. It raises the issues of the rightness of Batman's methods, but handles it intelligently, never really losing its sense of moral clarity or falling into whiny pseudo-moralising. While Batman does do some pretty rough things, it's not done for the sake of being "bad-ass," it's done because it's the best option from a list of bad options.

And the most heroic act in the film has nothing to do with catching a crook, or saving a life. Batman's most heroic act is taking the blame for the crimes of Two-Face. He sacrifices his standing as a hero in the public's mind to maintain the martyr status of Harvey Dent. He becomes hated, an outcast, forced back into the shadows, abandoned by his allies, because it's the best option from a list of bad options, to keep the city from completely losing hope in the face of evil.

Batman doesn't become a whiny emo-stalker like Superman in the less successful Superman Returns, who gets mopey when he finds out people don't worship him any more. Batman allows himself to become hated, because he doesn't feel any need to be popular, just neccessary, the man, as Alfred says in the movie, who endures, who does the thing that no one else will do not because it's the easy thing, but because it's the right thing.

My suggestion, maybe comics writers should start looking back at the themes of really classical heroism. It won't be easy, but neither is the life of a hero, even a superhero. We live in an age of uncertainty, and would be nice to have some back, even if it's only in fantasy.

Hollywood Babble On & On #213: Ministry of the Arts in the USA?

According to the always indefatigable Nikki Finke, music legend Quincy Jones has started a petition for the incoming Obama Administration to form a Ministry of the Arts for the United States. This body would oversee funding for the creation and promotion of the arts in America.

Now I'm a Canadian, and as a Canadian I've seen government arts funding in action, or to be more specific inaction.

You see while the idea of public funding for the arts sounds all well and good, it is a double edged sword that has the potential to do way more harm than good.

Government funding has the potential to create an elite clique that seizes control of the art world simply by getting positions, or influence over, the ministry's funding bodies.

This changes the rules of success in the arts from having a combination of talent, originality, and drive, to being connected to the ruling political party. Because no how well the legislation is written, the people running the arts funding programs will be political appointees with their own agendas to funnel the funding to their friends, their pet projects, and to those who can otherwise advance those agendas, friends, or pet projects.

Also public funding is like crack cocaine to the arts, they always want more, and there will never be enough. Wealthy private patrons then get out of supporting the arts, preferring to let the state subsidize their social lives via government back galleries, theaters, and music programs. Before you know it, there are no avenues for artistic success that are not government funded or subsidized, and run by those elite cliques I told you about.

And there's the issue of pseudo-censorship when it comes to state arts funding. Playwright Tom Stoppard told a story about how in 1968 a radical leftist group cried censorship because a major national newspaper refused to print their manifesto on their front page. Stoppard summed up the absurdity of it all by saying: "that's not censorship, that's editing."

Do you see what I'm getting at?

No one, not even the state, should be compelled to spend their money, effort, and time to support something that they don't want to support, that is one of the fundamental freedoms of humanity. However, the presence of the state in arts funding implies some sort of right to support, whether they want to support it or not. Just remember the whole incident of the statue of the Virgin Mary made from elephant dung in a New York museum. When then mayor Rudy Giuliani refused the statue city funding, the elite set screamed censorship.

They were wrong, censorship is when the elite set pays for their own dung-statuary to be displayed in their own museum, and the city sends in cops to smash everything and arrest the artist.

By refusing to pay for something the majority of citizens considered a petty, and pretty unoriginal stunt designed only to offend but offering no real insight, Giuliani was editing.

Or let me put it another way.

If you don't give a white supremacist $10,000 of your own money to make statues honouring Adolph Hitler, are you censoring that artist?

No, you're showing some taste and discretion, in other words, you're editing, and forcing you to give money to someone to support something you don't want, would be wrong.

But therein lies the trap of state funded arts. Quality, insight, and appeal quickly fade as reasons for art to succeed, in fact, success becomes anathema. Instead artists will pursue a sort of anti-audience mindset, hoping to maintain and promote their careers by intimidating bureaucrats through crying censorship, rather than making art that people might actually want to pay for.

If you need proof, just look at Canada's English language film scene. It's so wrapped up in appealing to a small clique that they don't even bother showing 90% of the films outside of the Toronto Film Festival. And if the state decides that they don't want to pay for someone's all musical film about necrophilia, then it's time to scream censorship.

So if the US government wants to get into the Art business, then they better think it through, or else it could become a massive boondoggle achieving nothing but 6 figure salaries for politicians and their cronies.

Of course that could be what they want in the first place.

Saturday Silliness Cinema: Peter Sellers

Last week we looked at legendary British comedian Spike Milligan, today we look at his one-time partner in comedy crime Peter Sellers. Sellers was born Richard Henry Sellers to a family of entertainers who worked Britain's music halls and burlesque houses, and Peter joined the family business at an early age. And despite his father being Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Sellers was raised Catholic and was taught by Nuns.

During World War 2 Sellers worked with Royal Air Force ground crews maintaining fighters and bombers in Europe and Asia, while working on the side in the RAF's entertainment division doing shows for the troops playing the drums in bands and telling jokes. After the war he worked stand-up in the fading music halls and burgeoning nightclub circuit before being recruited to join Milligan and Harry Secombe in a new radio production called The Goon Show.

The Goon Show was a smash, and Sellers became a star in Britain, appearing in a series of successful British films and his first Hollywood appearance as an eccentric Indian doctor in Hope and Crosby's final "Road" movie The Road to Hong Kong.



The 60s saw a boom in Sellers' career, with classic movie roles with directors like Stanley Kubrick and Blake Edwards to appearances on TV like this Beatles TV special where he performs A Hard Day's Night as Laurence Olivier playing Richard The Third.



The 70s were harder on Sellers. Personal troubles and bad career choices, many based on astrology, led to a slump in his career. But the revival of the Pink Panther franchise gave new life to his career and got him a very telling guest spot on TVs top show The Muppet Show, now infamous for his refusal to appear as himself.



Sellers died tragically at the age of 54 in 1980 from a heart damaged by years of substance abuse, and a dependence on "psychic surgeons" and quack medicines to treat it. Though his true final film to be released while he was still alive, Being There, a labour of love for the comedian, won him not only some commercial success but critical acclaim, and even a BAFTA award for best actor.

So enjoy some of the work of a true, and tragic comedy genius.

Discount Bin Movie Club: American Gangster

You gotta love the post-Xmas Boxing day sales, I got the two disc Special Edition of Ridley Scott's American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe for $5.

The film is a fictionalized version of the rise and fall of Frank Lucas (Washington), Harlem's heroin kingpin, and the fall and rise of Richie Roberts (Crowe), New jersey drug-cop turned prosecutor. Lucas is a bodyguard/driver for Bumpy Johnson, Harlem's legendary crime boss, after Bumpy's death in 1968 Lucas is left adrift until he spots an opportunity. He rapidly builds an empire by going directly to the source of Asian heroin, and brings it into the USA in the coffins of dead soldiers, undercutting his competition with a superior product at a cheaper price.

Roberts is an honest cop surrounded by dishonest cops, he's been branded as an outsider for turning in almost a million dollars in seized money, but this leads to him being recruited for a new federally backed anti-drug squad. Roberts is also struggling through law school, while going through an ugly divorce/custody battle, and trying to keep his head above water despite all the friends and enemies dragging him down.

Both men are likable, but also despicable in their own ways. Lucas is honest, straight shooting, and a true capitalist in that he believes that both sides should profit from any deal, but he's also a ruthless killer, and a peddler of poison that further kills or destroys scores more people on a daily basis. Roberts is also honest and straight shooting, but he can be also be self-righteous, irresponsible with personal relationships, and sometimes even petty. The film doesn't shy away from a complete warts and all view of both men.

The screenplay and direction work well capturing the gritty life of New York and New Jersey in the 1970s, an age where America's most prominent city seemed to be coming apart at the seems from crime, corruption, and social decay. Characters are well fleshed out, with good performances overall, especially from Washington and Crowe, making it one of the best films of the past five years.

My only problem wasn't with the film, but with the DVD itself. It's a phenomenon I find happening a lot in recent "blockbuster" releases where the music and sound-effects are booming loud and the dialogue sounds muffled, in some scenes requiring subtitles just to make out what they're saying. I don't know why this is happening, and you'd think that the studios would want people to be able to make out what the characters are saying.