Saturday Silliness Cinema: The One & Only Don Rickles

For decades Don Rickles has been inaccurately described as an "insult" comic, while his style is a combination of lightning quick improv and a form of teasing that actually leaves his targets feeling honoured for getting zinged. After serving in the navy on a torpedo boat in WW2, Rickles tried to make it as a dramatic actor, but had to make ends meet doing stand up in the booming nightclub circuit. At first he did standard impressions and jokes, but really hit his comedic stride by diverging from scripted material and playing with the audience.

He hit it big in the 1950s when Frank Sinatra caught his act. Rickles spotted Sinatra in the audience and said: "I just saw your movie, The Pride and the Passion and I want to tell you, the cannon's acting was great." He then said: "Make yourself at home, Frank. Hit somebody!"

Sinatra loved it and got a lot of his celebrity friends to go to be "zinged" by the man dubbed Mr. Warmth by the press, and Rickles became the hottest act in Vegas.

No one is safe from Rickles' unique brand of venom, not even the then governor of California, and future US President Ronald Reagan, as seen in this roast.



Rickles has always been a popular guest on talk shows, because of his ability to liven up the show without a script, and only the foibles of the people around him, like in this 1984 clip from the Tonight Show, where Rickles has some fun at the expense of host Carson's recent, and highly costly divorce.



Rickles is still a big draw on the stand-up circuit, the usual success in sitcoms that most comedians pursued, having eluded him because heavily scripted and censored comedy really doesn't mesh with his loose, improvisational style. But he has had some good turns as a dramatic actor, most notably in Martin Scorsese's crime epic Casino, where, according to Rickles he "carried DeNiro."

Hollywood Babble On & On #225: Dream a Little Dream of DreamWorks.

According to the always indefatigable and inestimable Nikki Finke the deal between Universal and DreamWorks 2.0 has been kiboshed. Word has it that DreamWorks wanted money, a lot of money, as well as distribution, lots of money, and that Universal, wasn't willing to give money and already had too much on its plate, distribution wise.

Now all is not lost for DreamWorks because Disney is waiting in the wings, they need DreamWorks' output to fill their release slate, and might sell Miramax to finance the deal. Which strikes me as odd, but I'll get back to that in a moment.

This incident illustrates one of the major problems Hollywood has and they have only themselves to blame.

Some folks have asked why DreamWorks Bosses Spielberg and Katzenberg haven't ponied up their own dough to make the Universal deal go through. Well, they don't because they're intelligent men, and there's a word people have to describe people who invest their own money in the movie business: Suckers.

I'm not accusing Spielberg and Katzenberg of anything untoward, I don't know them, and I don't know how they do business, though I will say that they do have the least complaints against them, which does say something. What I am saying is that Hollywood is a terrible place to do business, and nobody is willing to be played for a sucker anymore.

When high-price litigation is considered standard operating procedure, your industry is in trouble. Because the days when people were willing to piss away their money for a tax write-off are over. They want results, and the don't want the headaches associated with doing business with Hollywood.

So now the credit crunch is threatening the viability one industry that managed to thrive during the Great Depression. There is a solution, but it is a painful and drastic one: Hollywood must reinvent its business model, it must simplify all facets of the business, and realize that there is no shame in both sides of a deal getting what they want. In fact, they need to realize that it's a good thing.

-- Okay, now onto Miramax. The report said that Disney might sell Miramax to finance the DreamWorks deal, which strikes me as odd, because I thought Miramax was just a name Disney slapped on its occasional "indie" release in the years since the Weinsteins went off on their own. So who would want to buy a name that doesn't really have the cachet it once had in the 1990s?

Hollywood Babble On & On #224: Image Is Everything

John Nolte (nee Dirty Harry) of the conservative film site Big Hollywood recently posted a piece decrying the assertion that colour film is the main reason behind the dearth of quality movie stars among today's celebrities. To sum it up, the theory states that colour made the stars look too human, and thus brought them down to Earth, and ruined stardom. Nolte refutes the argument by showing select clips of many classic actors, maintaining their star status in colour films like The Quiet Man and Rear Window.

Now some think that the main reason today's stars don't shine as bright as those in the past is that not only are only the old stars good movies remembered, they were "hyper-idealized" through a false image presenting them as more heroic, romantic, suave, or just plain nicer than they actually were.

Now both assertions are true, to a point, but there's some nuance to them, especially when it comes to the role of the image in a star's career.

Back in the olden days of Hollywood stars did have carefully constructed images, and those images were constructed by the studios they were contracted too. Because back then actors were viewed as entertainers, and since it was the job of the entertainer to win over audiences, a carefully constructed image was needed. This image was needed to not only appeal to the audience, and some were pretty dead on the money, like Jimmy Stewart as the likable decent middle-American everyman, but also as a form of protection. You see, Jimmy Stewart-types are pretty rare in the real world, and even rarer in Hollywood, and the simple fact is that actors with a penchant for snorting cocaine off the buttocks of underage transvestite prostitutes while lying on a bed made of hundred dollar bills don't really connect emotionally with the general public. So you have to create an image for the public.

Yes, the image is a lie, but like most good stories, it's a lie meant to entertain the audience. Because to be blunt: assholes aren't really very entertaining, unless they're falling flat on their face in a big burst of schadenfreude.

However, things started to change. The power of the studios began to wane, stars began to strike out on their own, and forge their own images. This also coincided with the emergence of method actors, which elevated the actor's opinion of himself from being an entertainer, to an artiste gifted with unusually keen insight into the human condition. So the image many actors pursued was in imitation of Marlon Brando, the rebellious eccentric, who claims to exist above the fray of Hollywood, and looks down on industry with contempt.

This got worse in the 60s and 70s, where actors took to the spirit of rebellion, and ran with it like an ADD child hopped up sugar. What were they rebelling against? Good taste definitely, judging by the clothes, and anything else they could get.

This meshed perfectly with the rising tabloid culture that fed on celebrity scandal, which the celebrities gleefully supplied.

But by the time the 2000s rolled along, the "rebels" of the 60s and 70s, were the elder statesmen of the industry, and had been the dominant players in the business side since at least the 1980s. While the image of being a rebel was still desirable in Hollywood, there wasn't anything left in Hollywood to rebel against. That is, except for the audience.

So the status quo shaking rebel, morphed into the obnoxious self-important asshole, eschewing the lives of quiet desperation lived by the great unwashed, in favour of a life of loud and obnoxious self inflation. And with a 24/7/365 tabloid news cycle, there was a bottomless chum-bucket that needed filling, and the celebrities were eager to try. Because a mindset became formed in Hollywood that said it didn't really matter if anyone was willing to pay to see you in a movie to get you work in Hollywood, what really mattered was how much attention you got from the paparazzi and tabloid media.

It's not an exactly accurate mindset, just ask Lindsey Lohan how her career is going, but it's still a powerful one.

To sum up, in the old days: images were created to hide the somewhat asshole natures of certain movie stars, but nowadays, asshole has become the desired image of movie stars.

And that's just one of the reasons why today's movie stars don't really shine as bright as the old ones.

Strictly Business: Makers & Takers

I just saw that President Obama has tacked on a $500,000 pay cap for the CEOs of businesses receiving federal bailout money. His critics are calling this a political ploy, and it probably is, but it does bring up an important issue in the business world: Executive salaries.

As my guest blogger Christian Bale tried to tell you yesterday, CEOs are getting paid huge salaries that more often than not have nothing to do with their job performance or the financial health of their company. And that's not counting the massive amounts earned in bonuses, stock options, and other perks. In many cases, especially in Hollywood, these CEOs are literally sucking the life out of the companies they are supposed to guide to prosperity. Everybody's getting screwed out of their share of the profits, and in some cases, massive multibillion dollar strikes can be averted for the cost of one CEO's salary.

Now before you start thinking that this is going to be some sort of crypto-Marxist polemic calling people to raise the black flag, man the barricades and break wind in the palaces of the mighty while all wearing grey overalls. This isn't one of those.

In fact, I don't really see a problem with a CEO earning big money.

However, the keyword is "earn."

You see there are two types of people in business: Makers, and Takers.

A maker earns money by making money. This is an act of creation, it is literally the taking of that proverbial economic pie, and making it either bigger, or making a whole new pie. A maker creates wealth, spreads it around, which increases the all around economy, and lo and behold, increases the maker's personal wealth as well. This is because businesses run by Makers, tend to grow, and grow, and grow.

Takers can only see the proverbial pie as finite, and then try to take all of it for themselves. This is an act of destruction, draining wealth from the general economy, and using every trick in the book, and some they just pull out of their ass, to keep things exactly the way they are. And while they may believe that they are "winners" by acting this way, they are in fact limiting at best, or sabotaging at worst, their own success and personal prosperity. This is because Taker-run businesses may have short runs of success, but ultimately shrink, or end up chopped up and the pieces sold.

Makers build successful businesses, while Takers run them into the ground for their own aggrandizement.

So I guess you could sum up that I'm saying that the business world needs more Makers, and a hell of a lot fewer Takers.

HOLLYWOOD BABBLE ON & ON #223: BALE BARKS ABOUT BOSSES (NSFW)

"IT'S A FUCKING OUTRAGE!"
BY
GUEST
BLOGGER
CHRISTIAN BALE
(actor/raconteur)

This is just too fucking much!

Can you fucking believe it, I just had a fucking look at what the fucking big media bosses are getting paid, and I can't fucking believe it!

Robert Iger, CEO of Walt fucking Disney got paid 30 million fucking dollars even though the fucking stock price dropped over $10 a fucking share!

Rupert fucking Murdoch got $27 fucking million, and his fucking COO, Peter fucking Chernin got $28 fucking million, even though the fucking share value of fucking News fucking Corp. dropped almost 2/3s!

Les Moonves, CEO of CB-fucking-S, got paid $36.8 million even though their fucking stock dropped from $25.55 to $5.80 a share. That's almost 4/5s of its fucking value. And he got almost $37 million fucking dollars!

I can't fucking believe it!

And you can't say that these people are all doing it for the fucking bottom line. The bottom fucking line means that other people with a stake in the fucking business are going to get their fair fucking share. These fuckers don't care about the fucking bottom line, but a couple of fucking lines above that.

You know what I'm fucking talking about. The fucking line that marks off what these fuckers are going to get fucking paid. Then it's sweet fuck all for everyone else. Including the stars of fucking movies that make a billion fucking dollars at the box office, while the head company fucker pockets $19 million fucking dollars!

I got nothing against making a good fucking living. But you gotta make that fucking money, not just fucking take it, especially when the company is supposedly losing fucking money!

If the company's making lots of fucking money for fucking everyone, then go right ahead and pocket the big fucking bucks. But don't just take it from your fucking investors, fucking shareholders, and fucking people with fucking points in their fucking movies.

Because that would be just fucked.

Hollywood Babble On & On #222: He's Got A Right To Sing the Blues

Allan Rosenberg, character actor and president of the Screen Actor's Guild (SAG), has been having a rough time. His union's divided, his hand picked negotiator Doug Allan was bounced in a inside coup, and the AMPTP is giving him and the union the steam off their pee in negotiations.

I'm not going to jump on the bandwagon and declare that Rosenberg is somehow a bad person for all these problems, and I'm not going to make mock of his recent blues singing about his recent troubles.

Okay, maybe a little, but that's because deep down, I am a really petty, petty man.

But to get back on track, I am going to discuss why I think Rosenberg was the wrong man, at the wrong job, at the wrong time.

Just about anyone who has reported on Rosenberg says that he's an idealist. Someone who thinks that the Screen Actors Guild can somehow make Hollywood a utopia replete with money for everyone, unicorns, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Sadly, idealism and $3.50 will get you a vente mocha latte, and not much else.

And the union he took over wasn't in any shape to face down the AMPTP in any form because:

1. SAG was rife with internal divisions.

2. SAG wasn't in any shape financially to endure a lengthy strike, and because of those divisions that situation has become even worse.

3. The "A-List" of SAG membership doesn't give a tinker's cuss about the work-a-day actors, and many will often act against the union to avoid anything that might make the studios look at the actual box-office value of those same "A-List" actors.

4. Other unions, AFTRA I'm looking in your direction, were actively undermining SAG in their plan to be the last union standing for actors in Hollywood.

5. The moguls of the AMPTP were actively promoting problems 1-4, because it improved their standing.

Surrounded by clashing agendas and outright treachery, Rosenberg really didn't stand much of a chance, and neither would any idealist.

Now a cynical conniving bastard, might have, but he's not available.

Saturday Silliness Cineama: And Now For Something Completely Different...

I suppose you've all heard of the Monty Python YouTube Channel, well, as a Python fan since childhood, I just had to take advantage of it. And since I'm not above the unabashed capitalism of their inclusion of an Amazon link to hawk their wares, here's that link too. So without much further ado, here's something completely different....

Hollywood Babble On & On #221: The End of Ideas?

As I write this, word is pinging around the internet like a ferret on meth that a major studio is all set to do a remake of the classic outlaws in love movie Bonnie & Clyde, this time starring tween queen Hillary Duff as the titular Bonnie. Now unlike some commenters I'm not going to say that this Nicolodeon inspired bastardisation of a beloved crime film is some sign of the apocalypse, how it will lead to a remake of The Wild Bunch starring the Jonas Brothers and Joey Fatone of N*Sync as the evil General Mapache, and that you should start hoarding supplies and ammunition in your compound in the woods.

Nor will I say that it marks the end of ideas in Hollywood. The reason why I won't say that is simple, because people have been saying that since the day after the invention of cinema when someone used the pie in the face gag in two films in a row The simple truth is that as long as there are humans living on this planet, people will be having ideas.

What it does mark is a symptom of the possible loss of any testicular fortitude in studio management.

I'll explain that in a second, but first a little history.

Remakes have been an integral part of Hollywood history pretty much since the beginning of the medium. And being a remake does not automatically disqualify any film from classic status. Just look at The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart as private eye Sam Spade, it was the third movie version of Dashiell Hammett novel produced by Warner Bros. and has become the definitive version for generations of film fans. So I won't condemn all remakes as an infernal machination of Hell's Grim Tyrant, but what I will condemn the motives behind the remakes.

In the Golden Age of Hollywood remakes were usually done for, what seemed to the studio, a pretty good reason. These reasons could be remaking the movie in question with sound, or in Technicolor, or even as a musical, or just having a do-over with a film that had a good idea, but had what was seen as poor execution. The problem with remakes today is that many don't have a reason behind them other than fear, the fear of being fired.

You see most studio executives these days are not the entrepreneurs and impresarios of old. They are not risk takers looking to construct a legacy in both business and culture, they are just takers, interested solely in getting fat paychecks, bonuses, and perks, and keeping them coming as long as possible. The surest way to maintain their jobs are to take the fewest risks as possible. The problem is that purely original material is inherently risky, because no one truly knows how the audience will react to something that doesn't have that ring of familiarity.

Now it used to be that those who gave projects that precious green-light were willing to settle for things that, although original, could at least be pitched to have some sort of similarity to a hit from the past. "It's like Jaws, but in the desert," they'd say, or "It's like Star Wars meets Ghostbusters with a hint of My Dinner With Andre."

But things have changed. With costs skyrocketing because of the industry's shoddy business practices, the ratio of risk to reward began went into a very uncomfortable place, the sort of place that could ruin the career of an up and coming executive. So movies being merely familiar stopped being good enough, they literally had to come from something that was already well known. Which is why we get adaptations of best-selling novels, comic books, and especially remakes galore.

Remakes are especially popular with executives, not only because they're familiar to the audience, but because they can just remake properties they already own, meaning they don't have to pay as much as they would to adapt a novel or comic book. They no longer need reasons for remakes outside of redoing a movie for about 10X to 100X the cost and some slicker special effects.

To try to avoid being branded with the stigma of being a remake, they attempt to give them new names like "re-imagining," "re-booting," or "re-energizing." Such "re-brandings" almost never work, with many remakes fading fast not only at the box-office, but in the public memory, but that's not going to stop Hollywood from milking that money cow. Because while writers and filmmakers are not out of ideas, the Hollywood executives are. Ideas having been scared out of them sometime in the 1990s.

Not all remakes are bad, and some even do well, but the successful ones share three specific traits.

1. They were made by filmmakers who were passionate about the material.

2. They really offered a fresh and original take on the original story, not just slicker special effects.

3. They were made because of that fresh and original take, not just slapped together because of a familiar title.

Now Hollywood isn't going to stop doing remakes, that would take a miracle, so I propose a new policy when it comes to remakes. Movie history is loaded with movies that had good central ideas to them, but poor execution in the original film, how about giving them a try.

Worst Placement of a Commercial Ever

From the Canadian broadcast of a recent episode of Battlestar Galactica. (Warning, a tad graphic, and spoilers if you haven't seen it yet.)

Timing is everything.

Hollywood Babble On & On #220: Too Many Awards, Too Few Care

Kate Winslet won the Screen Actor's Guild Award which she was the odds on favourite to win, and once again she was completely gobsmacked by the win and could barely speak.

Come on Kate. You're a good actress and all that, but this is your third major award this year, which pretty much guarantees you a fourth. There's no shame in having a quick prepared statement for when you win, especially when it's as pre-ordained as this year's awards season seem to be. Of course if she had, then she'd be committing a cardinal sin in the Fame Game, which would be acknowledging the sheer pointlessness of modern award shows. (Which is the point of this post, and not a cheap excuse to post a picture of Kate Winslet.)

You see, the script that all must follow goes something like this: No matter how locked in you have the award, even if your competition was more or less disqualified by getting busted the day before the final ballots were filled in setting fire to a synagogue while singing the "Horst Wessel Waltz," you must still act as if you were not expecting it.

You must act like this is the greatest honour on the planet Earth and that you are not worthy of such a glorious honour.

To do anything else would be "disrespectful" of this great honour, even though it's definition of "the best" is often tainted by a certain level of snobbery. Snobbery that allows people to rather cynically make films for the sole purpose of winning awards for the people involved, regardless of their quality and/or cultural staying power.

It wasn't always like this, there was a time when any film could at least get nominated, regardless of genre, cast, or political leanings. Stars who won would go to the dais, thank the Academy, thank some friends and family, and then go back to their seats. And while not every best picture winner really won the sweepstakes to perennial classic status, I'll wager washboards to wigs that the ratio between classic/forgotten was still far better than recent years.

But what caused this change?

Two things: Method Actors, and Television.

Now I'm not knocking Method Actors, per se, but how people view method actors. You see when the first generation from the Actor's Studio arrived on screens in the late 1940s and early 1950s they were considered a revelation. They seemed so dramatic, yet so real, and suddenly acting went from a job that could make you famous, to a job that gave you some sort of special insight into the human condition. The ability to cry on cue by using the memory of the day their goldfish died turned actors from mere entertainers, to deep and profound artists.

With themselves being taken way too seriously, they started to take everything associated with them way too seriously. Awards ceremonies, which used to be partly social, partly promotional events, suddenly became hugely important events. And because these events were so important the words they said on that stage more powerful than the Gettysburg Address, and the Complete Orations of Cicero combined, and many of them much longer. They were compelled to thank all the little people that helped them become so wonderful, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Now some could make a statement by not showing up. The first person to boycott the Oscars was George C. Scott when he was nominated for Patton. Scott did it because he didn't like the idea of actors competing with each other, and even called it a "meat parade." However it was Brando who took it to the next level, sending actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather in his place when he won for The Godfather to make a political speech on the behalf of the Native Americans involved in an armed standoff with the federal government at Wounded Knee.

Now the stunt really didn't do anything to end the troubles at Wounded Knee, or help anyone, or their cause. In fact it might have done more harm by making it, and its association with the notedly eccentric Brando, a punchline for comedians for years afterwards. But it did do something that has affected awards shows ever since, it made the Oscar dais a political platform.

You see when it comes to celebrities, it's monkey-see monkey-do, especially if the first monkey to do something holds a position of admiration, like being the first breakout method actor in Hollywood. Of course none since would allow anyone else to make the statement for them, that would take away from their precious spotlight time. Instead you have cleebrities declaring on everything from war (against), to universal health care (for), and wearing a variety of coloured ribbons denoting their support for everything from curing breast cancer (pink), to ending chain e-mails (brown).

Of course this attitude has made award shows range from unwatchable to comical as they make their broad declarations to the cheers of people who all think exactly like them for fear of never getting invited to another award show.

And its even affected the films. Changing it from any film having the possibility of a nomination, to only serious dramas, and broad epics making the cut, to films being made solely for awards and nothing else.

These films had to be worthy of such an honours, and to do that must belong to an ever narrowing range of genres from biopics, to tales of Suburban angst, to anything involving illicit sex and Nazis that doesn't have the words: Ilsa and She-Wolf in the title.

That brings us to television and awards shows. You the networks need awards shows for several reasons.

1. Award shows are a veritable factory of cheap content. Networks are all owned by big media companies, these media companies need content not only for their networks, but for all the entertainment related shows they have in syndication. Award shows provide content that goes far beyond their three hour plus run-time. Before the awards there are speculation about who will be nominated, who will be snubbed, and most importantly, what they will wear on the red carpet, then comes the post-show analysis of that clothing, who won, who lost, and their speeches. And this goes beyond television, to newspapers, magazines, and web-sites. That's why every award show where there's a chance someone famous might show up is now getting televised.

2. The big media companies need them to win investors. You see there's nothing that impresses a mutual fund manager from Dusseldorf and convince him to invest with your studio than an invite to either a nosebleed seat at an awards show, or to one of the lavish all-star after-parties. There they can have a few drinks, and get an even more intoxicating taste of being among the beautiful people for an evening. Xenu only knows the number of contracts signed because some money man got to shake hands with Angelina Jolie. So the companies promote these events, heavily, not just to win ratings, but to inflate their importance to the people they need to keep the ever precious money flowing.

All of this combines to create an attitude that puts awards show beyond their true status as a way those in a certain trade could honour their own, to the bloated, self-important, ego-fests blighting our airwaves from now til Oscar night.