Hollywood Babble On & On #1106: Random Nuggets

SHOULD I REPEAT MYSELF?

A piece in Variety about the dearth of female directors making money-making feature films reminded me of the piece I wrote about the dearth of female feature film spec-writers which wondered if it was sexism or something unseen.

RIP RUN RUN SHAW

Legendary producer Sir Run Run Shaw, who with his older brother Runme Shaw, helped turn the Hong Kong film industry into a major international force, has passed away at the age of 106.

He started out in 1926 at the age of 19 helping his brother produce and distribute first silent films, and then some of Asia's first "talkies."

After World War 2 they helped revive the Asian film industry with Shaw Brothers Studio that brought the modern Martial Arts movie to the world.

He expanded from movies to pretty much all facets of media and in his later years became well known for his generous philanthropy.

EONE HUNDRED MILLION

EOne the fast growing Canadian media company has set up a $100 million fund to acquire independent films for them to distribute. 

This is good news for Canadian and British producers looking for a distributor since both lost some outlets in the recent spate of takeovers and mergers, including EOne's takeover of former Canuck juggernaut Alliance Films.

Good luck to them, I always like it when a company puts its money where its mouth is.

Hollywood Babble On & On #965: Random Penguin Update

It looks like it's official.

Penguin Books, one of the biggest publishers in the world, and in operation since 1935 is going to merge with Random House, as per an agreement between their parent companies, the media giants Pearson and Bertelsmann.

This is after posting my own objections to the merger, and Rupert Murdoch getting some giggles by having News Corp bid for Penguin, probably just to make the elite literati shit a collective brick.

I'm not particularly happy with this news. It's going to start a contraction in the publishing industry that will hurt writers and readers.

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Speaking of books, let's move onto a happier subject. My e-book STUDIO NOTES FOR LITERARY CLASSICS is now available from Amazon for $2.99.

Over 200 enlightening, entertaining, and enraging little missives from an alternate universe where the great works of humanity's literary canon had to deal with the meddling that goes into today's feature films.

If you want me to stop shilling it, buy a copy, give it as a gift that will amaze your friends and worry your family.

Trailer Trashing: 2001?

Here's a fan made trailer for Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey done as if it were a modern day Michael Bay style summer blockbuster. Both blasphemous and amusing...

The only other big movie news is that Peter Jackson is going to make a 3rd Hobbit movie, and you can read what I think about that idea here, which I wrote when it was just an idea. Plot-wise: It's going to be a buddy/road-trip movie about Gollum searching for his lost ring with Jar-Jar Binks.

Hollywood Babble On & On #826: Xmas Drippings From My Brain Pan...

CRASH CASH BASH!

A court has ordered independent producer Bob Yari and his companies to shell out $12 million to writer/director Paul Haggis, star Brendan Fraser, and others over profits from the film Crash.

The fact that what should be a normal business procedure requires lawyers, judges, and various and sundry recriminations is a sad statement on the way the movie biz operates.

MERRY XMAS MOVIES AREN'T THAT MERRY

Mike Shaw at Britain's Independent newspaper wrote a piece about how Hollywood's attempts at making Christmas movies usually fall short because they're unwilling to embrace the darker emotions found around the season.  It sort of fits a piece I wrote last year about Hollywood's inability to drum up the sincerity needed to make a decent Christmas movie.

AARON SORKIN'S GOT A TITLE & IT'S FAMILIAR

Hollywood uber-scribe Aaron Sorkin's new HBO series about behind the scenes in a cable TV newsroom now has an official title: The Newsroom.

A little on the nose, if you ask me, but also a tad familiar.... at least to me.

You see, Canada already had a series called The Newsroom.  It was created by writer / director / actor Ken Finkleman who returned to his native Canada after years slogging in the Hollywood trenches grinding out sequels, Madonna movie, and script-doctoring on sitcoms to do his own show his way.

It starred Finkleman as George Findlay, a petty, vain, selfish, insensitive, ignorant, scheming neurotic with chronic constipation, who was the producer of a nightly TV news show.  The show was darkly funny as Findlay tried to get ahead, get laid, or get both with things becoming more abstract and surreal as the show progressed.  It was also unique in the fact that it had several limited run dramas spun-off the show also featuring the Findlay character that ran between the three seasons of The Newsroom.

Now while it has the same title, I'm sure that Sorkin's show will be very different.  Loaded with lot's of noble archetype journalists walking up and down hallways talking very quickly as they declare their integrity and complain about Fox News.

Hmmm.... now that I think about it, maybe they should hire Finkleman for a rewrite.

Link Piece: Polone On Perks

Agent turn manager turned producer Gavin Polone wrote an interesting piece on star perks that fills in a lot of facts to go with what I wrote in my piece about how overpaid stars cost more than just their bloated up front salaries.

The sort of thing the article is talking about.

A Little Bit O'Filler!

Welcome to the show folks...

Not much to blog about today, so here's a link to the website of TV producer Tim Gibbons and his post on how to pitch a TV show.

Hopefully some inspiration that doesn't involve Charlie Sheen will pop up tomorrow.

Hollywood Babble On & On #628: Reboots, Remakes, & Reckonings?

Welcome to the show folks....

REMAKE MAKES ME RE-RUN

CBS has tapped show-runners Ron (Battlestar Galactica) Moore and Naren (CSI) Shankar for a reboot of the 60s spy-fi western show Wild Wild West.

In the spirit of remakes I shall re-run my original thoughts on hearing this news a while ago, and let you read it HERE. Of course I might like to add that it will probably feature more killer robots and really gory crime scenes than I originally thought.

SPEAKING OF REMAKES

Peter Douglas, a producer and son of movie legend Kirk Douglas, is putting together a production company that will be completely dedicated to remakes.

Chiefly they'll be looking at films that were either produced by, or starred Kirk Douglas, as well as several films by thriller master John Frankenheimer including his 60s classics Seven Days In May, Seconds, and Grand Prix.

Lets look at the pros and cons of this sort of project.

PROS:

1. Hollywood is currently terrified of anything remotely original. Projects stemming from the favorite decade of the baby boomers who run Hollywood (the 60s) are pretty much guaranteed a pick-up by a major studio.

2. If Seconds and Grand Prix get made by people with actual talent they could become hits. Seconds is an offbeat thriller about an older man who undergoes radical treatment by a mysterious organization to get a new "second" life as a younger man living a fantasy lifestyle. If done right it can still hold a lot of relevance to modern audiences in the age of botox and the unreal expectations of reality television. Grand Prix could be made as pure action-packed melodrama about fast cars, danger loving men and the women who love them.

3. The original films will get some more attention and probably get some play on cable TV, and get some nice "collector's edition" type releases on DVD. That's a good thing.

CONS:

1. Seven Days In May could become a repeat of The Manchurian Candidate remake boondoggle. Hollywood is not very good at making a politically themed film that can sell commercially. Remember how they changed the plot of The Manchurian Candidate from a Korean war soldiers brainwashed and terrorized by Communist Chinese agents into Gulf War veterans brainwashed and terrorized by the sinister Manchurian Global Corporation to enact an elaborate plot of assassination and skullduggery to accomplish what a few fat campaign donations would do a hell of a lot cheaper and easier.

But I digress....

Seven Days In May is about a rogue military officer plotting to overthrow the President of the USA for being too liberal. Now does anyone outside of Hollywood think that a film casting the members of the American military as the villain, during wartime, will sell the movie to the rest of the country? And let's not forget Hollywood's complete lack of subtlety when it comes to making "hot button" politically themed films like The Manchurian Candidate. I can't see them doing this in any way that will not seem cartoonish in comparison to the taut suspense of the original.

2. If the films in question aren't done really, really well, they are going to clash with not only the memories of the originals, but the inevitable resurfacing of the films in question on cable TV. If they don't amp up the quality over the originals, preferring to just dump in a lot of CGI and over the top nonsensical action, the movies will tank, even the ones that had potential to succeed.

Link Piece-- Guardian VS Quango!

Welcome to the show folks...

A tip of my sombrero to Jonathan from Save The British Film Industry for this link to a video from British newspaper the Guardian, casting a surprisingly critical look at how the UK Film Council is being mismanaged.

Hollywood Babble On & On #565: Bits & Bites

Welcome to the show folks...

1. RUSSEL BRAND TO GET MEDIEVAL?

Brit comedian/professional image Russel Brand has expressed interest in doing a historical action comedy where he plays legendary medieval mercenary John Hawkwood. For those not well versed in the history of late medieval Condottieri, Hawkwood was an English mercenary who went on to command the armies of various factions in war torn Italy.

I'll admit that I'm not a Brand fan, and I have the bad feeling that he'll play the character, like he plays all other characters like a washed up 80s rock star. My prediction, he'll drop out screaming "I can't ruin my image!" the moment he finds out that he needs a haircut to look like Hawkwood.

2. ALIENS TO GET LOST?

Fox and Ridley Scott have reportedly hired Damon Lindelof, the former head writer of TV's Lost to work on the script for the planned prequel to Alien.

My prediction: The movie will features various humans and aliens wandering around an island where nothing makes sense, then it will have a vague ending that won't answer any questions raised during the movie.

3. THIS IS NOT HOW YOU DO IT!

TV mogul Haim Saban has asked CBS honcho Les Moonves to pull Oliver Stone's Secret History of America from Showtime's schedule as punishment over Stone's recent comments about a so-called Jewish dominated media preventing Hitler from being seen "in context" and for making the Holocaust "a big deal."

Haim, I'm sure you're a lovely guy, but I have to say that this sort of talk is not how you deflate an obnoxious windbag like Oliver Stone. Get his show taken off the air and suddenly Oliver Stone is a martyr in the sort of places where he seems to seek approval, like among the rulers of Venezuela and Iran. You need an all new tactic.

Stone is basically one massive ego who thinks he knows everything about everything, and that everyone else is just a puppet of some shadowy conspiracy between the US Military/Industrial Complex, Big Oil, the Freemasons, that's secretly being run by Will Wheaton, otherwise known as TV's Wesley Crusher. If he hadn't made such big movies in the 80s like Platoon and the first Wall Street, he'd be living in a shack in Idaho writing manifestos on an old Smith Corona about how the antlers of the local deer conceal hidden devices designed to steal his brainwaves.

So here's what you do: You mock him. You make fun of his documentary. You get a bunch of historians a platform to discuss his factual errors, trust me, they will find them. Make him a laughingstock.

Make him a martyr and he'll never shut up. Make him a walking joke, and he might just clue in if he has any brain cells left.

Then you make him apologize for Alexander. Egad that was a steaming POS.

4. INEXPERIENCED ACTRESS SCREWS UP, FILM AT ELEVEN!

A lot of people are making hay over reports from observers that model turned singer turned First Lady of France Carla Bruni-Sarkozy screwed up her silent cameo in a Woody Allen movie by looking at the camera, possibly up to 35 times.

Well, when you stunt cast you gotta accept that there will be some risk involved. Film acting isn't as easy for some as people would like you to think it is. In fact, it's loaded with tricks and traps that long time pros don't even think of after they've corrected their screw ups for the 100th time. This is especially true when you stunt cast someone who spent somewhere around 20 years engaging the camera by looking directly at it with a sexy 'come hither' look when she was a model. You need a cattle-prod to break that habit.

5. AT THE MOVIES OF MADNESS

Guillermo Del Toro has signed on to adapt HP Lovecraft's novella At The Mountains of Madness with James Cameron producing.

The novella's the story of a 1920s expedition to the Antarctic that uncovers some ancient horrors that defy imagination. It was a direct inspiration for "Who Goes There," the story used as the basis for the classic 80s horror film The Thing. Now if there ever was someone born to do Lovecraft on film, it's Del Toro. However, I do have some advice for him.

A. Macho up the characters. The average Lovercraft protagonist usually faints at the sight of horror and then goes mad. Audiences aren't going to dig that. Someone's going to have to take some sort of stand when the Great Old Ones start sliming up the joint.

B. Don't let Cameron write the script. Let him sign the checks, but don't let do rewrites. If you do, he'll toss in some deranged ex-Marine who goes bat-shit crazy and tries to kill everyone for no good reason.

C. Make a film that will work in 2D too. I know the theaters are saying it's the wave of the future and will remain forever, but audiences are already starting to get a little tired of sub-standard film-making hiding behind a 3D bush. By the time you're done post-production, the whole craze could be deader than Mel Gibson's image.

D. Don't let James Cameron anywhere near the script. Seriously, it's for your own good and the good of the film. He'll slap in the plot from Ferngully and that will be bad for everyone.

6. SAY WHA?

The Weinstein Company has announced that it will boost it's release slate in the coming year.

Translation: They might actually try to release a movie into theaters instead of just announcing they're going to release it several times, only to play it in one theater in Utah, then dump it into the nearest DVD discount bin which is their usual practice.

Sure, I'll believe it when I see it.

Hollywood Babble On & On #498: Miscellaneous Musings

Welcome to the show folks...

Just a couple of quick notes tonight...

1. Michael Burns and Lionsgate management are saying that the company's numbers are orgasmically great this quarter, they're bragging about it on TV, and declaring themselves the winner in their ongoing battle with takeover baron Carl Icahn.

Carl Icahn's calling bullshit on all this crowing and cawing, and says that the fight will go on, whether he gets his 51% majority or not.

All I have to say is...

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

2. Two cable channels OWN, and E Channel, are both doing reality shows about eating disorders.

Bastards.

I pitched them a sitcom about an anorexic actress and her morbidly obese roommate called Thick & Thin, and they both passed. It had everything a sitcom needs to be a hit, especially the cruel mockery of emotionally crippled characters. Plus it would have meant work for both Nicole Richie and Kirstie Alley.

Now that bit is either going to get me booed as the heartless insensitive bastard that I am, or get me a development deal with NBC.

3. Paramount has axed the proposed sequel to Anchorman, even though the cast and director were willing to cut their salaries to get the film made. Personally, with Will Ferrell's recent box office record, and the decidedly unpromising looking action comedy The Other Guys coming out in August, I can understand Paramount's decision.

4. Conan O'Brien will be appearing on 60 Minutes to discuss his side of the recent Tonight Show wars. It also gives people under 70 a reason to watch 60 Minutes.

Hollywood Babble On & On #465: Miscellaneous Musings

Welcome to the show folks...

Time for a few little tidbits for your amusement and edification.

REDHEAD GOES RED FOR SYFY.

Geek/gamer goddess Felicia Day, famous for her roles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and her web-series The Guild, has inked a deal to star in Red, a Syfy TV movie, playing a novice werewolf hunter.

If you listen carefully and you can hear thousands of nerds squealing in ecstasy.

AVATAR'S UNORIGINAL? I'M SHOCKED, SHOCKED!!

A Canadian cafe owner has filed a lawsuit against James Cameron, claiming his mega-blockbuster Avatar was stolen from his screenplay.

Now I don't know the merits of the man's case. What I do know is that he's going to have to get in line behind the writers of Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, Ferngully, The Smurfs, and about two hundred other claimants.

That's the problem when you put all your originality in your special effects and not your story.

LET THERE BE 3D IMAX PRINTS!

Some producers have announced plans to do a big budget 3D adaptation of the Book of Genesis.

Personally, I don't know what about Phil Collins' drumming would make a good 3D movie, but...

Oh, sorry, they mean the Bible's Book of Genesis.

Well, I'm going to make 3 predictions, or prophecies, if I may, about this project:

1. The film will be Rated R, for violence, and the at least implied nudity in the Garden of Eden.

2. The casting of Taylor Lautner as God will be considered a huge mistake.

3. The script by Kurtzmann and Orci will somehow involve shape-shifting robots.

SEAN PENN WAS NOT THE BELLE OF THE BALL

Sean Penn did not attend the Governor's Ball after the Academy Awards last night. Some reports say he was banned for getting into a confrontation with his ex-wife's current beau, one of the producers of The Hurt Locker.

Well, we can't go on just rumors. We need wild speculations, and here are my Top 10.

10 Other Possible Reasons Penn Wasn't At The Governor's Ball:

1. Wore the same dress as Sarah Jessica Parker.

2. Banned because he kept punching out the official photographer.

3. Banned because he kept mispronouncing Wolfgang Puck's last name.

5. Went to get some cigarettes and didn't come back.

6. Didn't want to spend the night listening to James Cameron crying about losing out to an ex-wife.

7. Elinor Burkett kept cutting in front of him in line, and he left in tears.

8. Refused to attend the ball to protest Bea Arthur being left out of the memorial reel.

9. The John Hughes memorial brought back too many bitter memories of the time he lost out the lead in 16 Candles to Molly Ringwald.

10. Banned because no one wanted the smell of cigarettes and all encompassing resentment floating around the ball.

Hollywood Babble On & On #406: Happy Birthday To Me...

Welcome to the show folks...

I'm blogging a little late because it was my birthday today, and I spent a good chunk of that birthday helping my father replace a sump-pump during a flood inducing rainstorm. Joy.

Anyway, I'm here so let's get busy...

1. I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW CABLE OVERLORDS

Well, barring any governmental interference the sale of NBC-Universal to the Comcast Cable giant is pretty much done and dusted. And for some reason Jeff Zucker is still in the cat-bird seat, which can only be explained in one of three ways.

• Zucker has incriminating evidence on every CEO in America, and hence can blackmail his way to success despite turning NBC into a wasteland, and coasting on already successful cable channels.
• Comcast is only keeping Zucker so they can have a smooth transition, which will include massive firings and layoffs, ending with the defenestration of Senor Zucker from his corner office.
• Zucker has some sort of black magic mojo going on.

Josef Adalian at The Wrap, has 5 ideas about what to do with NBC, which is still the flagship of the TV side of the business, and he makes some good points. I would move Leno to 8 PM but I'd also shrink his show down to once, maybe twice, a week, but that's just me.

I wish Comcast good luck turning things around, they're going to need it.

2. IN OTHER UNIVERSAL RELATED NEWS

The street is abuzz with the possibility that Debbie Liebling, outgoing Fox exec will be moving in as Universal's head of production. She's got a good background in developing comedy properties, like South Park, and Borat, and has maintained good relations with the people who make them. Universal could use more cost-effective comedy after things like Land of the Lost.

Now some have criticized Debbie Liebling for the failure of Fox Atomic during her tenure. Personally, the failure was pretty much locked in when the Fox brain-trust gave it the lame name of Fox Atomic. I mean say what you will about the Weinsteins, they at least had the good sense to name their genre division Dimension Films and not Miramax Atomic. So I will give her the benefit of the doubt.

3. BULLY FOR YOU SONY

Sony Pictures had a banner year, breaking records left and right. Giving them one of my rarely dispensed and highly coveted Magnificent Bastard Awards!

Which will be revoked in about 5 minutes when they start poor-mouthing themselves to get out of paying people, so I say they should take some time to enjoy it.

I don't give those awards out every day.

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.

A Quick piece of Self Promotion...

Mike Hanson, the creator of Sha'Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse, a novel-anthology hybrid to which I contributed Chapter 6: Dixie Chrononauts, will be appearing on the Ben Eads Dark Fiction Show, on Saturday May 30th, at 11 PM EST.

If you can't catch it live, you can download it as a podcast and listen to it at your leisure.

And if you would like a copy of the book then click my widget...

Hollywood Babble On & On #269: Miscellaneous Musings...

1. Actor Jamie Foxx apologized for making some tasteless comments about teenage Disney starlet Miley Cyrus. And while it's fine that he apologized and all that, but what I started thinking about, is exactly why he made the comments in the first place, and I can only think that it comes from a deep sense of insecurity.

I mean Miley Cyrus is a perfect target for the sort of self-aggrandizing ridicule Foxx seems to need to justify his existence. She's a teenager, she's rich, she's got a bit of a "hick" image, an audience of children, she's practically property of the Disney conglomerate, and her music is the sort of bland, mindless pop pap that will ensure that she'll be lucky to find a gig doing birthday parties after the age of 20.

She's more to be pitied than scorned because she will be spat out by those who made her as soon as they finish chewing her up. One can only hope that she does a good job holding onto her money before it's stripped away by the vicissitudes of bad, or corrupt, management, and shady media business practices, because she'll stop selling as soon as her fan base hit their sullen pubescent phase. Once that happens the only people who will still care are the tabloid media running the ghoulish countdown to profit from the schadenfreude generated by what they hope to be her inevitable downfall.

Foxx's stunt tells me a lot about him. It tells that he feels that desperately needs a certain amount of "street cred" as an "artist" and a "rebel" without actually doing anything that really rebels against his Hollywood clique, because that might really endanger his career. So he goes after an easy target, gets a little press, both for the words, and the apology, and then gets a pat on the back for "daring" to stand up to Disney who probably forgot the comments around 5 minutes after he made them, because they don't cost them a damn cent, and that's all they care about.

It's like that whole Russell Brand bruhaha where he made phone calls to an elderly actor about the sexual habits of his granddaughter. It got him fired from the BBC, but I suspect that he did so he could get fired, and then use that cachet as a "rebel" who got himself fired to get better gigs at better places.

2. The new web incarnation of Movieline is now online. I'd like to wish the folks there good luck, and hope they have a good run.

3. I forgot to do the shameless book whoring last post... sorry about that.... buy the damn book anyway....

Friday Fiction Feature

My latest experiment in fiction-improv, an adventure called Tooth & Claw, is up at my writing site.

PART ONE

PART TWO

Check them out and enjoy.

Hollywood Babble On & On #241: City of Angels Not A City of Filmmakers?

Moviemaker magazine posted the 25 best cities to be an independent filmmaker. (h/t Nikki Finke) the #1 city was Chicago, Illinois.

The thing that struck me was that Los Angeles didn't make the cut. In fact the only California city to make it was San Diego, and that was at #23. (14 spots behind Milwaukee, WI at #9)

Now at first I thought they deliberately excluded Los Angeles because it's already the movie capitol. However, I didn't see any mention of such an exclusion in the article, so I have to assume that it's a major burn to the Los Angeles area.

Now I've never been to Los Angeles, but I have talked to some folks who have lived out there, and one common theme I hear from all of them is that, for the most part, it's not that great a place to live once the novelty of mostly sunny weather wears thin. The city is poorly designed, with too much sprawl, too much traffic, too many taxes, too few amenities, and the fabled sunshine is often obscured by vehicular smog or the smoke from the brush fires that regularly threaten the mansions of the wealthy.

Which makes me wonder, have the boom times that fed the city's epic growth poisoned the well. Los Angeles could be wonderful, if you're rich enough to live in one of the neighbourhoods high enough in the hills, or close enough to the sea to escape the choking sprawl. But even then the facade of paradise doesn't seem all that great. Life is expensive, wealthy neighbourhoods don't appear particularly friendly as everyone seems to get into their cars in their indoor garages in mansions surrounded by walls, drive through their armoured gates, to only get out at another indoor garage with more security than the Pentagon. The concept of a friendly chat with the neighbour over the backyard fence seems long gone there.

Those who live without the benefit of millions have to live with the highest state income and sales taxes in the country, (until recently) extremely overpriced housing, and the inability to go anywhere without a car. (I used to live in downtown Toronto, and I used to walk everywhere, or took public transit, and didn't even need a car. Which is good because I'm an awful driver.)

That's why I'd like any of my readers who live in the Los Angeles area to tell me if they agree with me about my sense of Los Angeles, or if they think I'm full of shit. I normally try to avoid judging places before I visit them, but what I see of LA doesn't make me want to visit, especially when it's not considered friendly to very industry that made the city famous. If I'm wrong, then tell me, if I'm right, then feed my already bloated ego.

Don't be shy, let it rip!

Strictly Business: Not Quite The Bottom Line

Billionaire business tycoon Carl Icahn has a blog, and he's written a piece about the need for reform in corporate governance. Now he's not calling for more government regulation, because when you do a little digging, government regulation is pretty much at the root of most economic woes. What Icahn wants are some concrete and inviolate laws that would return power to the shareholders.

What a radical idea, having the people who actually own the company have a say in how it's run.

You see, a lot of corporations these days are run by the CEOs, for the CEOs, and investors be damned. They get the companies incorporated in a state with fairly lax corporate laws, they then rewrite the corporation's bylaws and stack the Board of Directors with their cronies to make sure that those who are able to grab the top spot, can not only hold onto the power, but all the rewards as well.

Now I'm not against CEOs earning big money, but the key word is earning. How many times have we seen major corporations driven into near insolvency while the CEO not only bags a massive salary, but huge bonuses, and a golden parachute that could buy India if they actually do get fired, while the shareholders not only lose money on their investment, they can't do anything to change it. Those CEOs do not earn their rewards, they just take them. A CEO who earns all his boons and bonuses does so by making real profits, and creating real dividends for their shareholders.

The neo-feudalist "taker" CEOs are the kind of CEOs who buy $50 million corporate jets with the federal bailout money that was supposed to stave off bankruptcy. Can you name anyone who isn't the CEO or his crony that could possibly support that decision? Probably not.

It used to be said that all companies care about is the bottom line, if only that were true. You see the bottom line has the elements that would create real value for shareholders, and using that as a basis for decision making at least has some merits. The problem is that most companies are not thinking about the bottom line, instead they're basing their decisions on a few lines up from the bottom, the ones that delineate CEO salary, bonuses, and perks, and when that's all anyone thinks of, the bottom line suffers, shareholder suffers, and the whole economy suffers.

Link Piece: Big Hollywood is Online

Conservative film blogger John Nolte, formerly Dirty Harry, has just gone online as the new editor-in-chief of web-news mogul Andrew Breitbart's new venture Big Hollywood.

The site's purpose is to bring more diversity to the discussion of where pop-culture & politics meet. I'll miss Dirty Harry's Place as I got a lot of my visitors from there, but I wish them all sorts of luck on their new venture, because a viable culture needs as many different voices as it can get.

Hollywood Babble On & On #161: Withered England?

What's up with the British lately? Take a look at this post from IMDB--

Protest Over Bond Trailer*

4 September 2008 5:02 AM, PDT

Clips from the trailer of the new James Bond movie Quantum Of Solace have been criticised for allegedly glamorising gun crime.

Anti-gun campaigners in the U.K. have complained about images taken from the forthcoming 007 film, which show its star, Daniel Craig, holding a large machine gun.

The protestors insist the commercial should not be broadcast following a recent spate of armed crime across Britain.

Lyn Costello, spokeswoman for Mothers Against Murder and Aggression, says, "Kids are killing each other - they are shooting and stabbing each other and everyone has to take responsibility for stopping this."

Posters advertising Angelina Jolie's latest film Wanted - which feature the beauty grasping a gun - were banned in Britain earlier this week for allegedly promoting violence.

Once again the country formerly known as Great Britain has begun to dance on the slippery slope of censorship. This time the dance is done to the tune of "preventing" the gun and knife violence that is currently spilling blood on streets all over Britain.

Does it work?

No, the stabbings, shootings, beatings, rapes, and murders will continue unabated in the streets of Britain.

Then why do they do it?

Because they have to feel that they're doing something, and actually directly tackling the issues of soul crushing, dehumanizing state-sponsored poverty, drugs, alcohol, poor education, dreadful housing, and most importantly; family dysfunction that are at the roots of street level violence is way to hard. And top it all off with the fact that fixing these root causes would require challenging their own deeply held socio-political shibboleths you can see why they go after movies and television.

It's just easier.

It's not the first time, Britain actually has a history of this sort of thing.

In 1928 a Brit claimed that the movie London After Midnight, and the appearance of its star, Lon Chaney, had unhinged his mind and compelled him to kill his girlfriend in Hyde Park.

The defence didn't work, and he went down, but the film was censored in Britain anyway, just in case.

And it's not just violence that's drawn the ire of the "censorship for prevention" lobby, are also going after smoking, using a cell phone and/or not wearing seat-belts while driving. Even the usually calm, and collected comedian Stephen Fry is getting driven around the bend by this phenomenon and talks about it in his latest audio blog: Compliance Defiance.

Conservatives and libertarians call this phenomenon "the nanny state" where people try to get the government to control every facet of human behaviour from cradle to grave in the vain hope that it will create some sort of happy utopia where unicorns prance in green fields, beneath rainbows, and Alyson Hannigan... you know where I'm going with this...

Anyway, the foundation of this belief is that there either no such thing as free will, or that free will is something to be crushed, because the ability to make choices, can lead to wrong choices.

And that's what drives people nuts about this issue.

They don't want to admit that some people are, for lack of a better word, assholes who are prone to crime, violence, and misbehaviour, because they enjoy the thrill they get from being assholes.

There have always been assholes though-out human history, and, sadly, there will always be assholes in our future. Some, I think, are born that way, others are made, but either way, they make the conscious choice to stay assholes when the alternatives present themselves, because they want to be assholes.

But you can't really use that as a "scientific" excuse, because folks want their happy ending, where there's an easy solution that can fit snugly into the 90 minute running time of a TV movie. They want a magic button they can push to make the whole thing go away, and they think that button will be censorship.

And the ironic thing, is that it's just an adjusted and politically correct version of the old Hayes Production Code, which most of them would deride as tyrannical. Yet when they try to explain how their codes are different, and therefore somehow better, they come up with the same bland platitudes of saving humanity from itself.

Of course, I think they are just talking out of their ass.

What do you think?