As I’m sure most of Brooklyn pizza-lovers have heard, Patsy Grimaldi will be returning in March to his coal-fired oven at the site of the current Grimaldi’s pizzeria.  He’s going to call it Juliana’s after his late mother.  With such a happy ending to a sad story,  I thought it was worth a link to my blog post from April of 2010.  Now if only the tourists will keep lining up for the Grimaldi’s next door (although I’m not so sure they’ll be opening too soon), so that we can get our old neighborhood joint back!

Now The Wrap explains in very simple terms why Reed Hastings HAD to do what he did. It was that or go out of business.  I understand completely and have no complaint.  I’d rather have a Netflix that is more difficult to use than no Netflix.

But why do I have to get this from The Wrap??????    Why couldn’t Reed Hastings figure out a way to spin this so that his customers wouldn’t run riot?.

And  “Qwikster”?   Is he f*cking nuts?  Netflix has alway been a future-oriented company, which is why it was called Netflix when it was sending out all it’s content by mail.   He knew that the internet was where things were going, so he chose a company name accordingly.

Now he picks a name that sounds like technology companies that went under, like Friendster and Napster.

Oh… now I get it.   Hastings is still looking ahead.   Before Qwikster even opens, he’s  put in the order for the casket.

                                                                                                                                          http://bradcolbow.com

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings’ hasty announcement to divide Netflix into companies will go down in the history books as one of the most colossal marketing blunders by an extremely successful company. It is Netflix’s New Coke.

For me, a reasonably informed and fair person would understand that the previous price hike was not his fault. The studios felt they weren’t making enough money off of Netflix, so they raised their rates enormously.  Netflix could either go under, or raise its prices. Users could either accept that or quit, if it was too expensive for their budgets. Hastings was club-footed in explaining this, but, in my opinion, he didn’t do anything wrong.  I bit the bullet and paid more.  If you really use it, Netflix is still an awesome deal.  Think about the price of one movie ticket.

Now he suddenly comes out with a plan that has numerous disadvantages for his customers and doesn’t have a single advantage.

To get our old Netflix back, the answer is simple. The day that Qwikflix, I mean Qwikster,  comes out, we need hundreds of thousands of people to cancel one or both of the Netflix services. It won’t be a sacrifice, as a few days later, the old Netflix we love will be back.

Readers of this blog will remember that last year I went to the Toronto Film Festival for three days and returned home to a $1723 bill from AT&T. I wrote a blog post about it that went viral on the web and reached the attention of the FCC and finally a phone call from the office of the CEO of AT&T, Randall L. Stephenson, where I received 50% off of my bill.

Needless to say, I learned a lot through the experience, so I would like to pass on what I learned this year, particularly to my friends who are headed up Toronto. Here are a number of things you can do to keep your data costs down. All this information is only for AT&T and only for Canada. If you have a different carrier or are going to a different country, you need to check it out on the site, as different rates may apply.

AT&T

Telephone: For Canada, this is a no-brainer and caused me no problems last year. AT&T offers a “Nation With Canada plan,” which you can find here.  (You have to put in your zip code to find out what the rates are for you.)   For my zip code, there are numerous deals, but for example you can get 900 minutes plus 1000 Nights and Weekends for $79.99. Remember that this is charged on top of what you normally pay for your monthly bill, so it might cost from practically nothing to an extra $10 or $20 to get an upgrade. But the data bill is still a very expensive $2 a MB on this plan, and data usage is what got me the $1723 bill last year.

If you call an operator, they will probably try to steer you to  an “AT&T Traveler Package”   This only reduces the rate per minute to fifty-nine cents as opposed to the flat rate above.   It costs six bucks as opposed to the twenty or thirty the above plan will run you.  But oh boy, will it cost you on the minutes…

With certain plans there is something called “A-List” which allows you to call a few people for free. Put your loved ones back home and the clients you will be calling the most into your A-List and all those calls will be free.

Data:

If you don’t have data roaming on, you won’t get any international data charges. If you’re on holiday and don’t need to be reached all the time—you’re all set. It is the default setting,  but definitely  go to Settings/General/Network and make sure it’s off.  But this post is directed towards people who are working and need to be able to receive and send email all day long, regardless of whether they are near wi-fi or not. 

Take a look at this page.   It helps you calculate how many megabytes you use when you do various things when you use your phone overseas.  I’m actually not sure what it costs per MB in Canada without a plan, but I bet it isn’t low.  In some countries AT&T charges $20 a MB, or $40 to watch one YouTube video.

So I recommend getting a plan.

Last year, the best plan that AT&T offered was $199.99/month for 200 MB. After that it was $5 a MB. This year, I am happy to report that their best plan is 800 MB plan for $199.99. There are of course cheaper plans, including 275 MB for $99.99. Even better news is that overages go for $10/10 MB. This is one-fifth of what overages cost last year. So, I think that AT&T deserves a lot of praise for listening to their customers, as no doubt they are losing a lot of money. I also think that the FCC deserves credit for calling attention to this issue.  You can find these plans here.

VERY IMPORTANT: In order to get these top rates on phone and data you need to sign on for the ENTIRE MONTH. If you go on the 800 MB plan for three days, you’ll get one-tenth of 30 days worth pro-rated, or around 80 MB. The good news is that the operator will happily backdate your plan to the beginning of the month.

OTHER THINGS YOU CAN DO

If you don’t buy a data plan, or even if you do, there are any number of things you can do to keep you data bill down.

Use wireless as much as you can. You don’t pay any data fees for wireless. If you have wireless where you will be staying and wireless where you will be working, you shouldn’t have much of a data bill. When you have a lot of emails to write, you can stop in at Starbucks or at the many festival venues that offer wireless service.

Make sure that your hotel has wireless internet service in the rooms. This was my undoing last year, as my hotel only had wired internet. Wired internet is getting to be pretty common in hotesl, so make sure to ask.  If you’re going to be working somewhere all day, then you need to have wireless service there too.

Remember that spam and newsletters are data. If you receive a lot of newsletters and get a lot of spam you can get charged mucho money if you’re not on a plan. But there are ways to reduce the amount of that stuff you get. I use Gmail. If data is turned off on my phone (for example, if I’m sleeping), I can go to Gmail on my computer and delete everything I don’t want, particularly the spam. Then when I turn on the phone, nothing comes in.

Another thing you can do is to unsubscribe to all the newsletters you don’t want.  FYI, it is US law that there should be an “unsubscribe” button that you can easily find on an email. One or two clicks at most.  If it doesn’t stop right then—they are breaking the law.  Warning: be very careful that you only unsubscribe from a newsletter that’s real.  It could be a phony, and when you push “unsubscribe” you may be alerting a spammer that you are a real person.

Another good thing to do when you shop online is give them a second email address, one you don’t check as much. 

Turn your smart phone into a dumb phone. The iPhone is a wonderful thing but it sucks data every which way. When you click onto many of your games and other apps it automatically goes onto the internet. Go into settings/location services and turn as much of this stuff off as you can. There are so many things you can do with cloud computing on your iPhone, like Drop Box and Google apps. Don’t do them over 3G.

Want to post a picture to Facebook? Sending it via 3G will cost you. Take the picture and go somewhere there is wireless.

There are apps you can get that will give you a Toronto Map that you can keep on your phone so you won’t have to access the internet to look at it. If you have an iPad they are particularly helpful . I like the Smart Maps one, because it allows you to put little stick pins in the map to mark where the Toronto venues, restaurants and your hotel are.  You can also use any app that reads PDFs.  My favorite is GoodReader, because you can draw and type on it.  Just scan a good Toronto map and you’re good to go.

Streaming video is incredibly expensive. I don’t recommend you ever do it over 3G. Personally, I don’t even want to hit the YouTube button by accident. I’m going to go to Settings/ General/Restrictions and turn YouTube off. You can turn other stuff off there, like iTunes or even Safari.

Attachments are expensive. As a publicist I send out a lot of attachments from my computer. Because of a quirk of Gmail, copies of them turn up on my iPhone and I have to pay for them as phone data. This year I will send my attachments out from a different email like Yahoo and this shouldn’t be a problem. I’m going to make a note on my Yahoo address so people will remember to respond to my usual Gmail one.

Don’t trust the AT&T app that tells you how much data you’re using.  This page is a lie if you are roaming, as the woman from the CEO’s page readily admitted. As it takes two monhs for them to get all the information from the Canadian carrier about your international billing, it’s impossible for them to tell you the data use at any given moment when you are traveling.  Before you get on the plane, go to Settings/General/Usage, and before you leave, push “reset statistics.” Then you will always know how much data you are sending and receiving. This may notmatch up exactly with what you will eventually get charged, but it will at least give you some idea of your usage.

I’m signed up for the 800 MB plan, but I know it will be overkill because I am doing so many things that I bet I’ll hardly use any data at all. But last year was scary, and I’d rather better safe than sorry.  It wasn’t just the money, it was all the hassling over the phone. 

I hope this is helpful, and if it isn’t please don’t sue me. Better deals may exist. One thing I discovered last year with AT&T is that different operators told me different things each time I called before I went to Canada.  I recorded all my conversations with operators before I left for Toronto  last year, but it didn’t matter, as being given wrong information was no defense.  Even when the woman in the AT&T CEO’s office agreed with me that the information I was given was wrong (because that was the information they were still giving to everybody) it didn’t matter. So this year, I’ve decided if it isn’t on the website, I don’t care what I hear on the phone.

Good luck!

I wrote my first screenplay, the ensemble college drama, Falling from the Sky, soon after I moved to New York City in the mid-1970’s. It was a series of seemingly unrelated stories, thinly disguised portraits of people I knew at the University of Wisconsin, that are all linked by an active of violence: a bomb that was set off by a student radical group that resulted in an innocent grad student being killed. (This really happened.) Many people responded to some of the characters and scenes in it, which parodied the contradictions of the way “radical” politics and love intersected in that time and that place.  The one thing I remember about it is that the character based on me was called Shmotsky.  The first line of the script, uttered as the bomb went off in the middle of the night, is:

Wake up Shmotsky, it’s the end of the world.

Script number two was called The Naked Truth, about this crotchety old director named Foosweenkle who was a genius, but couldn’t get work anymore because he was an alcoholic and impossible to work with. The hero devises a scheme to produce one of Foosweenkle’s brilliant scripts with Foosweenkle secretly directing it, using a young theatre director as a front. When the film is done, the critics are astounded by the talent of this “brilliant” first-time director, and all this success goes to the ringer director’s head. Foosweenkle rages and is on the verge of exposing the fraud. Guess what happens then? That’s what I could never figure out, and that was the problem with the script.

Something for Nothing was a heist movie co-written withmy friend Jane Hammerslough. It was inspired by the Marla Maples/Donald Trump story, unfolding at the time. In the movie, the Maples character gets tossed out of a Trump Tower high rise and has nowhere to go. She falls in with a slackerish guy (I was thinking Bill Murray), who invites her to move in with this group of eccentric men and women people who live in his loft in Chinatown. “Outraged” by her treatment and always looking for cash, Bill Murray and his gang to plan the robbery of the Trump guy’s most precious possession, a gem worth zillions of dollars, and protected by state-of-the-art equipment.

The twist was that Bill Murray’s gang was going to purchase everything they needed to snatch the gem on Canal Street. I was endlessly fascinated with all the crap you could buy on Canal: broken pieces of plastic, unidentifiable motors, weird toys from Asia, knock-offs of expensive products, computer circuit boards, etc., the wretched refuse of a homeless person’s garage sale. Bill Murray and his gang of shmos put all these things together in unexpected ways, and with a little inside help from “Marla,” they actually [SPOILER ALERT!!!] do get in and snatch Trump’s gem. Afterwards Bill Murray escapes out the window riding a huge dinosaur blow-up doll inflated with helium.

For screenplay number three, What’s What, I reached back to my adolescence for a tale of Jewish teenagers on a weekend retreat, accompanied by their Rabbi. The movie revolves around a joke told by Catskills comic Mickey Katz which is told many times:

A guy goes to his father and says, “Dad, I wanna go to college” and his dad says “Do you know what’s what?” (pronounced VAT’S VAT?) And the thinks about it for awhile, but just can’t come up with a compelling answer, and eventually he says, “Dad, I don’t know what’s what,” so his Dad says, “alright already, you shmekel who doesn’t know vat’s vat, you’re joining the family business and we’ll forget about all this college nonsense.” So the guy does this and after many years he has worked all the time and never been out on a date. When he finally works up the nerve, she invites him to her place and she says she wants to go and get comfortable. When she comes back in the room she’s not wearing anything but a leather strap. “WHAT’S THIS?” he cries out. And she says, “What’s what?” and he says, “IF I KNEW WHAT’S WHAT I WOULDA GONE TO COLLEGE!” Badumbum.

There were a series of other Jewish jokes that flowed through the story, but the main thread was a L’Avventura-type plot: a girl runs off into the woods and the various students break off in groups and look for her. Much is learned along the way about the meaning of life and how to tell a joke properly, which was of course the deeper meaning of the title: the kids learn what’s what.

The response to What’s What was encouraging, so, with some trepidation, I gave it to Adrienne for her feedback. Needless to say, she was not anxious to read it, as she obviously worrying about whether she’d hate it or not.  But she did like it.

What’s What changed our relationship in a very important way. After that, Adrienne saw me as someone who wasn’t just a publicist, but as someone who could be creative in his own right.  As I had no confidence about my writing, I sought her approval with every subsequent script I wrote. If Adrienne said something I did was good—then it was good; if she said it wasn’t good—then I had to change it. While this was my problem, not hers—it proved to be a big problem when I wrote and directed a short film called Tiger: His Fall and Rise, in which Adrienne starred opposite Thomas Jay Ryan (Henry Fool).

This film, a film noir musical about a singing frog, brought me to the brink of financial ruin. More about Tiger next week.

During the year Adrienne and I worked together on I’ll Take You There, our professional relationship gradually evolved into a more personal one, one which deepened over the following years. Eventually, she became my best friend, more important than the women I dated at the time. Unlike anybody I’d ever known previously, she made it her business to transform my love life, and try to make me happier. I won’t claim that I was her best friend, because I believe she did the same thing for other people, and was equally precious to them.

Adrienne’s method for fixing my life involved setting me up on dates with her friends. These women were all remarkable—extraordinary in their beauty and accomplishments. She honored me by maintaining that I deserved women as impressive as that. The fact that none of these setups became an actual girlfriend (although one is a friend to this day) was beside the point. On the other hand, she never liked any of the women I found on my own. It was the opposite; she thought I was too good for them.

The odd thing about this was in her life, she went through what she considered a long string of unhappy experiences with men. As she wrote:

In my twenties I had every bad kind of relationship imaginable. I questioned just about every move I made and I failed an awful lot in a variety of ways--sometimes loud and noisily, and sometimes in small subtly painful ways. There was unrest, boredom, a feeling of hopelessness, powerlessness, and a garden variety angst. Mostly, (modest film career or no modest film career, depending on the month) there was a lot of wandering. I guess what I was really doing was searching, and trying to figure out who the hell I was. And being rather clumsy.

While she was so confident and upbeat about every other aspect of her life, this compartment of her personality could make her feel melancholy and lost. Adrienne turned this into material by dramatizing this side of herself in her movies, to comic effect.  From her first short, Urban Legend, she began her films with the lead character desolate after a breakup, or worse, trapped in a smothering relationship, as in Waitress:

That was always her magic trick in her films and in her life.  She could use laughter as judo.  As she wrote:

Humor has been an important asset for me. It was an important part of my childhood. I never wanted to be a great actress--I admired Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett long before I knew who Marlon Brando was. Mel Brooks and Woody Allen were my heroes. And when bad (and rather strange) things happened during my childhood, like the sudden death of my father when I was 12, or the sudden paralysis of the left side of my face from Bell's Palsy when I was 15 (not a good age, by the way, for either of those things to happen), it was a saving grace that I could find the funny within the painful and the unheard of.

If you don’t know what Bell’s Palsy looks like, Sylvester Stallone has had it since childhood, and Fox reporter Greta Von Susteren has it now. I’m sure it was a devastating challenge for Adrienne to get through, but the only complaint she expressed to me about it was that people would look at her with this “oh, you poor thing” look on their face. Anyway, eventually her Bell’s Palsy went away.

I never found out if the men in her life were as bad as she said they were.  There are two sides to every story and I only got to hear hers.  As did anybody who saw her movies, particularly Earl in Waitress, who got on a list of the “10 Worst Movie Husbands.”  Here are some others from her rogue’s gallery:

She also wrote a hilarious essay about Oprah Winfrey’s increasing frustration with her endless non-marriage to her fiancé, Stedman Graham. (It was read at Adrienne’s memorial by one of Adrienne’s closest friends, actress Pamela Gray.)

But some of Adrienne’s portraits of men weren’t humorous at all:

These characters stood for a world that was chaotic and precarious, where in a second a woman could be selfishly used or much worse. In her unproduced screenplay “The Morgan Stories,” there is a both a rape and an act of lethal violence.

On the other hand, Adrienne had a fondness for sweet, guileless men in her movies, who refuse to give up their courtship of the women they sincerely love. Waitress fans will fondly remember Ogie (Eddie Jemison), unstoppable in his wooing of Adrienne’s character Dawn, and Alan North plays a similar role in I’ll Take You There.

The open-heartedness of these men leads into the other side of Adrienne, which I mentioned before—her confident, ebullient, joyful side, overwhelmed with boundless love that she directed towards her art and to her friends. Some might call it presumptuous for me to attribute this aspect of her personality to her biography, but I feel certain that her joyful strength came from the boundless love her mother gave her. Adrienne never stopped saying that her mother made her feel that she could do anything. In her telling, her mother’s love was unconditional, grand, glorious--one colossal sun of love. Adrienne told me again and again about the depths of her appreciation for the gifts her mother gave her.

And it was this side of Adrienne that created a character that turns up again and again in her movies—a character I call “The Teacher.” Usually the Teacher is old and eccentric, or even outright crazy, although Ally Sheedy’s Bernice in I’ll Take You There is young and nuts. Sometimes there’s a little touch of magic in them like Jan Leslie Harding’s homeless woman in Urban Legend, Louise Lasser’s fortune teller in Sudden Manhattan, and Ben Vereen in I’ll Take You There. There’s not just one Teacher per film; I count four Teachers in I’ll Take You There. (Adrienne played one of them.) The Teacher Adrienne characters are the catalysts to get the mopey Adrienne characters to stop feeling sorry for themselves and get out of bed. Interestingly, the depressed Adrienne character can also serve up magical assistance to others, as Jenna in Waitress does with her makeover for Dawn and her magical pies for everybody.

In a nutshell, that’s my formula for Adrienne’s storytelling: a virtual conversation between the two parts of her personality, told with quirky humor and absurdity, and suffused with a love for people and their foibles. The fun is in the diverse ways that Adrienne worked this recipe out. Was she aware she was doing this?I doubt it. She wrote her scripts very quickly and these stories just came out of her without her bothering to analyze them.

I believe that the above clips fall within the requirements of Fair Use. My aim is to get more people to watch her films; I want to increase the profits of the copyright-holders.  On the page where the clips are linked to, there is elaborate information on how you can purchase and rent the films, including Waitress.  Sudden Manhattan, I’ll Take You There, and Serious Moonlight are all available on Netflix Instant Watch.

Throughout college and my early years in New York, I had a very complicated relationship with my best friend. He was an amazing guy, brilliant, funny, and in a lot of ways true blue: I could always count on him to come through for me in a crisis. But when it came to women, he was trouble. He slept with my girlfriends. He went through elaborate measures to encourage me to court an attractive friend of his girlfriend, knowing all the while that she was hopelessly in love with him. He once worked as a bouncer at a massage parlor and he brought one of the masseuses over to my apartment, explaining that she considered me a "fine hunk of penis." (I should add that the masseuse was the girlfriend of his roommate, a judo black belt, and I sent her out the door). Old girlfriends of his came on to me, and as they often were quite hot, I sometimes took them up on their offers. We went on like this for a dozen years or more, with me enjoying his company too much to face up to the blatantly homoerotic and sick competition that was going on, and how hurtful it was to me. The truth is there was so much more I liked about him than I didn't like, and eventually he got a long-time girlfriend who kept him in line. But he would piss me off and I wouldn't talk to him for a year, until finally one those separations went on so long that we stopped seeing each other altogether.

After that I decided I was through with male friendship and started actively pursuing non-sexual relationships with women. The perfect setup was if they had a boyfriend or fiancé or husband that I really liked, but was living in another country or something. I could call one of these women up at a moment's notice and say, "do you want to go to this party?" and she'd be totally up for it. Most of these relationships have endured to this day, whereas I can't even remember the names of some of the women I dated.

I remember when I was working on High Art and I was squiring my client Ally Sheedy to one event after another that her then sister-in-law/agent Rachel Sheedy told her, "it's so great that you have a gay friend to go all those places with you." If you made movies about all these women's lives, I suppose you would cast me as the gay best friend who happened to be straight. In some cases I was the confidante; they could tell me everything, and I could do the same with them, and in others it wasn't so intimate, I was just around to escort them to movies and parties. The thing that fascinated me, because it happened every time, was that as I got to know them in the context of a friendship, I could see that a more conventional man/woman relationship would never have worked. They weren’t at all right for me in that way, but as friends they were perfect.

In almost all cases, I got the better side of these friendships as the women were so much smarter and wiser than I was. They were always there to provide insight on the female mind. I would try to provide the same about men, but they understood men pretty well. I suppose I mainly provided a shoulder to cry on, plus any entertainment value they could get out of our friendship. I always wanted to have a girlfriend, but I was desperate if I didn't have a few good female friends on the hook. After all, when the woman you are crazy about breaks up with you, who do you call?

In the early 90s I was working in New York as the VP of the New York office of the international movie PR firm Dennis Davidson Associates (DDA). My number one client, Sony Pictures Classics, hired me to work on Amateur, the newest film by Hal Hartley, whose The Unbelievable Truth, had so enchanted me in London years before, and who had now, with his subsequent films, become one of my very favorite filmmakers.

  I set up a lot of press for Hal, and the male lead, Martin Donovan (still a friend), but mostly I worked with Elina Lowensohn. Once I spent some time with her, I knew that she was best friend material, and I was determined to woo her to be my non-girlfriend. She had it all. Her husband, painter Philippe Richard, lived mostly in Paris, but I really hit off with him when he was in New York. She was one of the most interesting people I had ever met. A Romanian refugee of the Ceausescu regime, she had suffered enormously in her life, and yet remained more upbeat than most people. She also had a unique and poetic way of speaking English that was irresistible. Although she looked like a bombshell with a Louise Brooks bob, inside she was the kindly old lady down the hall, who upon seeing you downhearted, insists that you come over for soup. The only problem with Elina was that because she was so wonderful, everybody in New York wanted as much time with her as they could get. Among the people on the waiting list was Adrienne Shelly, and Elina would mention seeing her now and then. I definitely could have met Adrienne through Elina, but as I was such a superfan of Adrienne, I didn't want to. Civilians dream of meeting their favorite actors, and even stand on the sidewalk for a glimpse, but professionals (who are also fans) have been burned too many times. When you really like somebody's work, you just don't want to be disappointed, and that can easily happen when you assume the role of an employee.

One of the few exceptions was Ally Sheedy. I got to know everybody in her life. She was on a roll with High Art, picking up prize after prize and, as her publicist, I wanted her career to keep soaring. I took a very close hand in everything she did. When she was cast in the lead role of I'll Take You There, Adrienne's second feature film as a writer/director, of course I set up a visit to the set. It was a long subway ride to some distant part of  Brooklyn (or somewhere equally exotic). I had this little Sony Handicam, slightly bigger than a still camera (remember those?), that I took with me everywhere. While I was on set, I figured I could capture a little b-roll, material that could be used for the film's release.

So instead of trying to conjure up how exhausted Adrienne was one that day, here it is, video of the very first moments I encountered Adrienne Shelly.

And that's how it began. I ended up working on I'll Take You There for an entire year without pay.

Last week I began what will be a series of posts on my friendship with the late writer/director/actor Adrienne Shelly. After it appeared I heard from some people who wanted to know, “just where are you going with this?” Because it sounded like I was going in a very personal direction. Which I am. These friends wanted me to reflect on the savagery of her death, and whether that puts my memories of her in a special category. After all, she leaves a husband dealing day-to-day with unending grief over her loss, and there is a daughter who is growing up without a mother. I have a responsibility to be careful about what I reveal.

On the other hand, I have my own not unsubstantial grief to deal with about Adrienne. I was her publicist, which led to the two of us becoming friends, and over time, she became my best friend. Aside from my wife and family, she was the person I was closest to in my whole life. In a similar way to me writing about my mother’s recent passing, I was hoping that writing about Adrienne would help me get some closure about what happened to her. Still, considering the tenderness of the situation, it did make sense for me to stop and think about where I was going with this.

So I thought about it, and decided I wanted to write it the exact same way as I had planned to. Here is why:

I’d like people to start talking about Adrienne’s entire body of work as a writer and director. Not just Waitress, but her previous movies too. During the time I knew her, the central preoccupation of her life was her fierce desire to be respected as a writer/director. She didn’t feel that the arbiters of the independent film world got her. She felt that if she was truly respected, then it wouldn’t be such an ordeal for her to get her movies made, and seen. Neither her debut, Sudden Manhattan, or her second film, I’ll Take You There, received any significant distribution. This was heartbreaking for her.

For many years it was my task as her publicist to try to make people pay attention to her work. I don’t see why I should stop trying now. I want to celebrate what she did do during her all-too-brief time on the planet, rather than mourn what she never had the chance to do.

So those of you who fell in love with her when you saw Waitress…do yourself a favor and honor her dream by checking them out. They are both on Netflix Instant Watch. You can also find Serious Moonlight there, as well as my favorite film she did with Hal Hartley, Trust.

So what does this have to do with my desire to present a personal portrait of Adrienne as a human being? I want to do it because Adrienne was the ultimate autobiographical filmmaker. While most writers utilize their own life as material in one way or another, with Adrienne it was practically 100%. Like Larry David, many of the things her characters did in her stories were things she did herself in real life. In my opinion, you will enjoy the world of her films in a much deeper way if you know a little bit about who she was. I want to try to draw some lines between the person and the artist.

Next week I’ll pick up the thread from last week.

Me directing Adrienne Shelly and Thomas Jay Ryan on the set of my short film Tiger: His Fall & Rise

I didn’t have a Royal Wedding when I lived in London, but I did fall in love.

I spent a few months in England in 1990 when I was working as the production publicist on the film Shining Through, starring Melanie Griffith and Michael Douglas. When shooting began on locations in Germany and Austria, I was living in hotels with the crew and I always had people to hang out with. But when the production moved to England for interiors at Pinewood Studios, everybody returned to their homes and families, I spent my weekends alone.

As I don’t enjoy living in hotels, I asked the production to help me rent a furnished flat in London. They got me a place in a super-posh area called Mayfair, in a neighborhood called Shepherd Market. When I told one of the female members of the crew I was going to live there, she burst out laughing. She explained to me that it was “so and so caught with his pants down” type of place, where numerous Members of Parliament and other upper class notables got caught with high-end call girls. And it was true. Every night when I went to the little grocery shop, all these hot women leaned out their windows making kissy noises at me when I walked by at night. “Hey baby…”

For a movie lover like me, an old studio with a history like Pinewood is a fascinating place to prowl around in. Out in the back lot was what remained of the Gotham City set built for Tim Burton’s Batman movie, but you couldn’t go in, you could only look through the fence. It was so sad; these amazing sets were slowly disintegrating in the British rain. I was able to go through the long tunnel of the Alien³ set that was built on Pinewood’s biggest stage, known as the Bond stage, as so many of the most spectacular scenes in James Bond movies were filmed there. I loved wandering the halls of the Pinewood offices, looking at the famous names on the office doors. The carpet was so moist it made squishy noises. That pretty much summed up my experience in England…damp.

On the weekends, I was super-lonely and bored. This was before cable TV and the internet, and there were only a few channels. I couldn’t believe I was in a country where people thought darts were worthy of being televised. It seemed to me that their coverage of the US leaned towards fringe Americana like Elvis impersonators, Burning Man types, and guys who made huge 20-foot high balls out of twine. They loved seeing us Yanks looking like weirdos and assholes.

My apartment was nice, but very cramped. To get out of there, I went to as many movies as I could. With the awful exchange rate it was $30 a ticket at nearby Leicester Square. It stopped me thinking about how unhappy I was working on Shining Through and how long it was going to be before I’d be going home.

One night I went to see a film called “The Unbelievable Truth.” I’d read good things about it in the Village Voice. The director, Hal Hartley, was supposed to be a major new talent.

Here’s a bit of what I saw:

This film was definitely not intended to be “realistic.” It was the kind of confused teen movie that Brecht, Godard, David Mamet, and Sylvia Plath might have teamed up to do after a week-long drunken binge in Rockville Centre. Hartley’s influences were easy enough to see, but he added enough to make something quite new and sparkly. He had created a vision that was so controlled it was trussed. He knew where the camera should go. He edited it himself. There was a weird affectless to the way the actors were delivering their lines, and a tightness to the way they moved (or didn’t move). The dialogue had a singular ping-pong rhythm: people either weren’t listening to each other, or avoiding listening each other, or generally residing in their Own Private Long Island. There was repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition, as in a well-known scene where a very young Edie Falco says the same five lines four times in a row to Robert John Burke who gives non-responsive responses that don’t hinder her from continuing in this Escher-like dialogue loop endlessly. The music was as hip and cool as the movie. It stuck with you in a kind of sad minimal beauty.  A lot of it was written by a guy with the delicious name of Ned Rifle, who turned out to be Hartley too.

I liked The Unbelievable Truth a lot, but the thing that was really on my mind was: “Who the hell is that actress?”

Amid the distancing style of the film, which was always working to keep your emotional connection at bay, this girl was breaking my heart. She was whip-smart. She was capable of expressing a lot without saying anything. She was hysterically funny without seeming to be trying to be funny or letting you know for sure that she was trying to be funny, or was just weird enough to make you uncomfortable. She kept you off balance. How were you supposed to respond. I wasn’t sure how much of what she was doing was acting and how much was really her. No, it was impossible that it was all just acting, and only filling out her responsibilities to Hartley’s tightly woven vision. This woman was too young to understand a character like this unless she had lived through some pretty bad things herself. She knew what the end of the world was and could see it hurtling towards her on the L.I.E. You have to have lived depression to dig into that dark a cave.

She was broken somehow.

And that’s what I was, sitting in that theatre all by myself. Maybe that’s what I always have been since I was a teenager. It wasn’t about being far away from my home and alone. I have always been that way, even when I’ve been in a party teeming with people.

Her name was Adrienne Shelly.

More next week.

While riding on a train goin’ west
I fell asleep for to take my rest
I dreamed a dream that made me sad
Concerning myself and the first few friends I had

Today, April 25^th, 2011, is my birthday. I still feel the same way inside as I did in my twenties. Unfortunately, each morning that face in the mirror chases that notion away every morning.

With half-damp eyes I stared to the room
Where my friends and I spent many an afternoon
Where we together weathered many a storm
Laughin’ and singin’ till the early hours of the morn

On Saturday, my wife assembled some of my friends for a brunch. Not everybody could come. Many people wanted to, but couldn’t come because of Easter or other prior engagements. But it sure was nice to see everybody.

By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung
Our words were told, our songs were sung
Where we longed for nothin’ and were quite satisfied
Talkin’ and a-jokin’ about the world outside

It made me think about how you lose people that were once a central part of your life, like your friends from high school and college. You see those people almost every day for years, until graduation happens … and that’s about it. At the time, you’d never imagine that you’d lose some or even all of those people forever, but you do.

It made me think about how you lose people that were once a central part of your life, like high school. College, work, etc. You see those people almost every day for years, until the thing that united you ends… and that’s about it. At the time, you’d never imagine that you’d lose some or even all of those people forever, but you do.

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold
We never thought we could ever get old
We thought we could sit forever in fun
But our chances really was a million to one

I quarreled with some of my friends so much that we reached a point where there was no point in continuing. Others slipped out of my life without me noticing it. Some became famous and forgot they knew me. Some moved to other cities. Some got married and had children. Some simply changed. One died.

As easy it was to tell black from white
It was all that easy to tell wrong from right
And our choices were few and the thought never hit
That the one road we traveled would ever shatter and split

I’m not blaming anyone. It’s the natural order of things. As I’ve gotten older, the constant hunger to connect with more and more people has eroded. At this stage in my life I’m not really looking to make too many new friends. It’s hard enough to find time for the old ones.

How many a year has passed and gone
And many a gamble has been lost and won
And many a road taken by many a friend
And each one I’ve never seen again

After all the thousands of people I’ve encountered in my life, it comes down to my family, the people I saw on Saturday, and a few precious others. Some relationships have endured, and some have fallen away. Is it passing the test of time or is it just dumb luck?

I wish, I wish, I wish in vain
That we could sit simply in that room again
Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat
I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that

The words in italics are the lyrics to the song  “Bob Dylan’s Dream”
Copyright © 1963, 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1992 by Special Rider Music

People often tell me that I should collect some of my best blog posts and publish them in book form. Sometimes I get this advice from friends; sometimes I get it in comments. In the last month there have been three people I respect who have strongly urged me to do it. A friend of mine who teaches a class at NYU even said that if my book existed he’d assign it to his class.

The fact is, I have one of the least-read blogs from as long as the record-keeping of bloggery as been chronicled. PhDers have noted that it is less read than cave paintings and Sumerian cuneiforms were at the time of their publication. I am not a modest man, but I am a realist and I must accept that this is not the kind of raw material that is displayed at Starbucks, praised by Oprah, lands on the NY Times best-seller list, is downloaded on iTunes, narrated by Robert Evans on an audiobook, or download on torrent sites.

Still, I’m frequently told that there are not many things written about the film industry that are exactly like this blog. If that is true, perhaps it is because people who are currently in the middle of working in the industry, as I am, don’t think they should write about it. They think it would be career suicide. Some people go from a career in the industry to because hard-nosed journalists, as Anne Thompson has done. As a former publicist, she has special insight and knows better than most journalists how to suss out the bullshit publicists try to feed her. But that doesn’t mean that she’s telling tales from her past, as these former colleagues are now sources.

I have lost some friendships with because of this blog. They thought it was a kind of betrayal. How dare I write about things that were supposed to be private? I was on the payroll and keeping my mouth shut was something, while never overtly stated, was tacitly understood. That’s how they could feel comfortable to be their unguarded selves in my company. My question is: if there is an earthquake and it happens that a well-known actor is standing next to me at that moment, do I cede the experience to the actor? Does that moment no longer belong to me? Should I go through my life with a memory pen and scratch out all the interesting bits where a celebrity was in the vicinity? This is not a hypothetical question, as I have been instructed to use such a pen, and I have complied. And sometimes I choose to use an eraser on my own. There are people I wouldn’t even think of writing about. If I am worried, I sometimes ask people for permission. But it would be impossible to do that all the time; this blog might be unwritable.

On the other hand, it is understood that celebrities can write about their careers without getting release forms from everyone they collaborated with. Well-known writers can do the same. Nora Ephron famously said, “everything is material.” I cling to the naïve belief that the worth and justification for my writing will stand for itself. If I write well enough, if my opinions are well considered, then the enterprise of “My Life as a Blog” is legitimate.

The truth is that sometimes I write something that strikes a chord with people and sometimes I write something that falls flat. Sometimes the personal stories I tell display the wisdom of my actions; sometimes they prove that I am an idiot. But that is an excellent description of me: a smart guy who often is an ignoramus. To be clear, I’m not saying I have acted like a jackass; I’m saying I am often am a certifiable jackass. And those moments are my favorites. For example, my instructing Jim Jarmusch that he should leave an excellent short film he made as a short—in other words, that he should not make Stranger Than Paradise. I absolutely love that story and have dined out on it for decades.

I remember I was working on a project with Lily Tomlin and I was saying something and she looked at me quizzically—and she’s a super nice person and liked me--but she said, “Isn’t that… stupid?” She had no intention of being insulting, she was just confused, as I normally had the ability to forge intelligible thought. And she was right on the money about that moment—dumb as a plank I was.

Every Sunday night when I have to push the “enter” button and put my latest post up on my site I tense up and wonder: Will this be a Lily Tomlin week? Or will it mean something to people? Even if it’s a few people.

One of my favorite books is “Joe Gould’s Secret,” written by the great Joseph Mitchell (and made into a movie by Stanley Tucci.) For a New Yorker story, Mitchell writes a portrait of a guy who tells everybody in his circle that he’s writing the Great American Novel. SPOILER ALERT! Gould’s secret is he isn’t writing anything at all, just intriguing scraps that fool people into thinking he is up to something that will send the literary world in to a new orbit. When Mitchell finds out, he is of course dismayed that his article seems to be in disarray, but after some reflection, he gets a vision of the mind-numbing amounts of books: bookstores, libraries, archives, remainder bins, etc.---rivers, oceans, galaxies of books, books, and more books. Thank heavens, he thought, that there is one less book littering the world’s mental landscape.

Jean-Luc Godard said that a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end--just not in that order—and without me consciously being aware of it, both a narrative and themes have been emerging in this blog. Some of these stories have been written already; some have yet to be written, but I know they are coming. It’s the story of a Midwestern kid who given an extremely stern moral education by his Rabbi when he was growing up. And also in culture—he memorized all of Bob Dylan’s songs, and they were Biblically judgmental of hypocrisy and other moral foul play. He loved movies, so he set out for Manhattan, or as it is also known, Sodom. His moral background proved a grievous disadvantage as he tried to fit into the film industry. It confused people who lacked these deficiencies. They correctly understood that the purpose of life was to screw over as many people as possible in as gratuitously nasty a way as they possibly could. I remember having a conversation with an independent film producer (I think it was Ted Hope) and we both agreed that the people in the specialty film world were much meaner than those in the Hollywood world. (My guess is that it is like an academic environment—when there are less riches to be had, people rabidly chew each other like the dogs at Michael Vicks’ house.)

But he discovered that there was a miracle in the midst of all this. Some of the people he encountered were so spellbindingly talented and beautiful and kind and funny that his eyes misted over every time they entered the room. In fact, as I write this description of my story I am literally weeping thinking about some of these people. I’m getting pictures in my head and they are vivid.

Did these folks make up for everything else? There are those who have their lives elevated by religion or politics or art. For me it is those human beings; they were and continue to be my salvation. And for some reason I feel the need to spread the gospel. But this involves talking about all the bad stuff, as they only exist within that larger context.

And the question is: what is constructive information and what is merely gossip? Most blogs are filled with gossip. I love reading gossip; I just don’t want to write it myself, and will be very disappointed with myself if I do. If what I write is taken out of the electronic sphere, printed and bound, will they be cleansed somehow? As a publicist I know that context is all.

I have made this promise to myself that I will write an essay every week. I know that under the deadline I will make mistakes and there will be very bad ones that I will regret. Moreover they will make some people angry and may lose me work. And I need work to survive. On the other hand, many great opportunities have come out of it, like this past weekend when I was put up at a ritzy resort in Sarasota for a festival panel on the blacklist.

Do these stories have value or would it be better to toss them into the dustbin of film history? There are those who have told me I’m courageous for writing this blog the way I do, but as Lily Tomlin noted, maybe I’m just stupid.

So tell me, my tonstant weaders, all the vast dozens of you… assuming I could get it published, do you think I should I write a book?

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about Elia Kazan and the blacklist and discovered I had hit a raw nerve. Some people felt that I had left Kazan off the hook for some terrible crimes; others were filled with rage that I would take it upon myself to judge Kazan. A long-time friend took her name off my mailing list. A respected critic wrote only three words “Who are you?” followed by a list of all the books he’d written, the festival juries he’d served on, etc. His point, as I understood it, was: where did I, a total nobody, get off making a judgment on Kazan, one of the greatest film artists in history?

After reading my post, Tom Hall, the Artistic Director of the Sarasota Film Festival, invited me to serve on a panel on the blacklist, along with Peter Askin (Trumbo), and Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace).  (The panel will take place this coming Sunday, April 17^th at 3pm at the Sarasota Opera House.) While Tom recognized I wasn’t an expert, based on my blog he felt I had something to contribute. As this is coming up a week from today, I’ve been thinking about what my contribution might be.

Rightly or wrongly, Kazan is the epic face of collaboration during the blacklist, in the same way as his counterpart, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, is the monolith of righteousness. As he was the most successful director in the theatre as well as movies, everyone felt Kazan had little to lose by defying the committee. He could keep working. As Kazan chose not to take that road, he was judged to be a greedy opportunist who sold out his friends for riches. While many were wracked with conflicts about their appearances before the committee, Kazan paid for a full page ad in the New York Times explaining why he did the right thing. There was a tone-deaf, Marie Antoinette quality to the way Kazan presented himself in the midst of all the broken lives, lost marriages and suicides wrought by the blacklist.

On the other hand, what was Kazan’s crime? Was he the only one who named names or behaved dishonorably? What about the grandstanding congressmen like J. Parnell Thomas who started the mess? What about the studio executives who actually created the blacklist? It wasn’t Kazan’s fault that he had to choose between losing his career or giving names of Communists to the committee. And as Richard Schickel wrote in his book on Kazan, there is a very solid argument that the 1950’s left could be strongly condemned for ignoring and/or defending the activities of Stalin, who had already killed almost a million people in his purges and cleansings, and sent fourteen million people to his Gulags by the time Kazan gave his testimony in 1952. Why stand up for people who were defending one of the worst butchers in history?

Things are never as simple as people would like to make them.

There are many things you can say in defense of Kazan’s actions, but there is no getting away from the fact that Kazan will always remain a very potent symbol. Those for whom the blacklist is still a living thing will never forgive him. Shortly before Kazan was presented with his honorary Oscar in 1999, blacklisted writer Abraham Polonsky told Entertainment Weekly that he was hoping someone would shoot Kazan, saying “it would no doubt be a thrill on an otherwise dull evening.” That kind of hateful talk is of course unacceptable.

On the other hand, there are people who aren’t curious about what Kazan did--they simply support him unconditionally because of his talent. I’m not at all comfortable with that. Should geniuses get a free pass? Do they live outside morality?

And this leads me to Roman Polanski. Is it okay to drug a 13-year-old girl and have anal sex with her against her will? And then leave her crying in your car, waiting for you to drive her home? And then say that the judge was just jealous—he would have liked to do the same thing? And never apologize?

Here are a few of the people who think that is fine and dandy: Martin Scorsese, Natalie Portman, Tilda Swinton, Jeanne Moreau, Jonathan Demme, Pedro Almodovar, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Paul Auster, the Dardennes Brothers, Wim Wenders, David Lynch, Guillermo del Toro, Wes Anderson, Mike Nichols, Darren Aronofsky, among many others.

Would these people want somebody to drug and anally rape their own 13-year-old child? Of course not, they simply feel that great artists must be defended at all times, no matter what they do. And it is this lazy, knee-jerk response that troubles me.

The blacklist was a nasty, cruel, ugly, disgusting, vicious, and appalling time. And just as Polanski should not get a free pass for what he did—neither should Kazan for the role he played in the blacklist. We need to think these things through, and not let extraordinary talent blind us to larger issues. I believe that how honorably we live means as much as the way we tell our stories. Which is not to suggest that I think “good” behavior bears any connection to better art—I far prefer Kazan’s movies to Dalton Trumbo’s scripts—just that these things matter.

Kazan’s films were always praised, but he was often denied awards, including the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award, and prizes from the San Francisco Film Festival, and LA Film Critics. There were too many people around who remembered the evils of the blacklist to get majority votes on these award-giving juries. It took nine years for Karl Malden to talk the Academy into giving Kazan an honorary Oscar and when he finally succeeded, it set off a firestorm. There was a movement to get people not to applaud, which at the end of the day proved unsuccessful. The 90-year-old Kazan got a standing ovation, with only a few, including Nick Nolte, sitting on their hands. If I had been there, I know I would have been with the people standing up and applauding.

But would I stand up and cheer for Roman Polanski? No, I would not.

My Mom died on Tuesday morning, March 22^nd, in Madison, Wisconsin. She was 90 years old.

After my Dad died a few years ago,  Mom had moved three times: from her apartment to a small room in Assisted Living to a large and sumptuous one at Hospice. Each time she moved, she got rid of more of her belongings. Hospice doesn’t allow you to bring furniture, so all she had with her when she died was a few articles of clothing, some family photos, some posters, and a handful of knickknacks. There was so little in the room that my sister Bonnie was able to pick it all up in less than an hour and put it in her car.

“I’m running a race,” she told Bonnie. “And I don’t want to win.” That was why she was at Hospice. She was tired of all the drugs and tests and treatments that she had been putting up with for so many years. She was ready to go, and she wanted to have as much comfort as possible for her last days. My sister and brother made the arrangements. It costs a fortune to get into Hospice, but Mom had saved all her life. When it was cold—and it is very cold in Wisconsin—she didn’t turn on the heat; when it was hot, she didn’t turn on the air conditioning. When I phoned her from New York, within a minute or two she tried to wrap up the conversation, as long distance was expensive, and she continued to believe this long after I was paying flat rates for my phone service. Mom had lived through the Depression and that formed the way she would always see the world. But that lifetime of frugality meant that entering Hospice was no problem. My sister Bonnie, who is a saint, went to see her every day. My brother Harry also carried his end, dealing with taxes, legal and financial issues, down to the tiniest detail. I moved to New York and rarely called her. I called her so rarely that I am ashamed to say how rarely I called her, it’s so appalling.

Of course, I was her favorite.

Once she got into Hospice I tried to call her every day. I wondered if she thought it was weird that after all that time her errant son was suddenly becoming so dutiful. It was pretty obvious why. As the weeks went by she stopped talking during these phone calls. There was no interchange at all. I had to try to give a speech about all the things that were going on in my life and my wife Melissa’s life. It’s not an easy thing to do; it was really difficult to think of things to say. And I would ask her, “Are you still there, Mom? Do you want me to stop talking?” and she’d always say, “no, don’t stop, I enjoy listening.” It was unnerving having these one-sided conversations. Eventually she didn’t even say anything at all. But on one of my last silent phone calls with her, Bonnie tried to take the phone away from her but she wouldn’t let go.

Melissa and I had booked a trip to Madison for early April, but on Tuesday the 15^th I got an email from a Hospice representative that ended with:

If you are expecting to have a meaningful visit in early April when you arrive, you may not fulfill that expectation.  As she continues to not eat or drink, she will become weaker and less responsive. Her ability to survive until then is questionable.

I quickly made plans to fly to Madison on Saturday.  My first sight of my Mom in the Hospice room will stick in my brain forever. She wasn’t wearing her wig. She had lost her hair years ago, and I had rarely seen her without it for more than a few moments. She was very proud and always wanted to make a dignified impression. But I guess she just didn’t care anymore. Bonnie said she had stopped wearing her wedding ring too.

Mom had been agitated recently and had tried to get out of bed. One night she fell out of bed and dislocated her hip. I couldn’t sleep for days after that happened. Harry set up a conference call with Hospice. They were nervous. Another family might have sued, but that’s not the way it goes with us. All we wanted was for her to be safe and comfortable. They got her a lower bed and put a pad on the floor. I told them I wanted more drugs for her, and they listened to me patiently, ignoring every word. They have a protocol and that’s what they follow.

It was pretty clear to me why my Mom had been trying to get up. She was trying to get out of there. If God wouldn’t hurry up and take her, she was going to take matters into her own hands.

Mom still had all her faculties right up to the last days before she became unresponsive. What was going on inside her head? Was she dreaming? Did she know I was there? I remembered how I had worked on Pedro Almodovar’s movie Talk to Her. The hero of the film spoke to a woman every day when she was in a coma. And eventually she woke up. Could Mom hear me? Could she understand?

I held her hand and talked to her. But there was no response at all.

After an hour or so, Harry came in. He had driven down from St. Paul. We sat there all day watching her. There was no response at all from her. She didn’t open her eyes, respond to my hand, or say anything.

Later that day, Bonnie and her husband David (who also had been making enormous sacrifices through this time) showed up.  As often happened when the family got together, we were also happy to see each other that we didn’t address to many questions to Mom.  My brother would talk about the various issues she needed to deal with and we would all have fun together.   It was easy to not have much direct interaction with Mom.  And so it was that night,  We were having fun and our mother was just in the back of the room, breathing quietly.

As I was leaving, I went up to my mother and said goodnight. Her face twitched and she made a little sound. I asked my sister if that meant she had responded to me, and she told me the Hospice people said that that kind of thing didn’t necessarily mean anything. As I left with Harry, we both agreed that something had definitely happened. There was no doubt.

The next morning, Harry and I returned to our mother’s bedside. Harry started telling her how important she had been to him, the profound way she had changed his life. After Bonnie arrived, I decided to try a different approach. I started telling funny stories about our youth. One story led to another and soon the three of us were sharing our memories.

Suddenly Mom’s face twitched and she made a noise. It was like, “mmmm” or “ummmm.” It was an expression of sensual pleasure, like she had just eaten something delicious. This really shook us up. With this encouragement, we continued to tell stories and Mom continued to respond to us. If she really liked a story, she’d make a bigger noise.

During those hours, the three of got to say everything we always wanted to say to her. If she had been her usual self, she probably would have shushed us up, but we were able to go on and on without interruption.

One of the Hospice women had told us that people won’t die when there’s a family vigil around. They don’t want to disappoint everybody. So Bonnie took charge: she told Mom that we would miss her and we would be very sad without her, but if she wanted to go, she could go, and not worry about us.

I flew back to New York that night. Two days later, she was gone.

If you’ve ever left a comment on my blog, you’ve probably noticed that you don’t have to retype any letters to leave a comment.   These things are called Captcha and I find them annoying when I encounter them. Sometimes I can’t get them right and I just give up.  

I find I get a lot of great comments by not putting up barriers like that, and I get the most wonderful praise for my inimitable prose.  Of course there are also links hidden inside these comments that are manipulated by SEO (search engine optimization companies), but I don’t care.  It makes me feel good.  At least I know that the SEO robots are wild about my stuff. 

Normally I save these comments just for myself, but this week I’m going to share a few. 

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Normally I post every Sunday night on this blog, and normally it’s about movies, but this week is different.

I decided that tonight,  after Peter King began his Homeland Security Committee Hearings on “Radicalization in the U.S. Muslim community was the time to put out my new video, “American Muslims.”  I didn’t want to wait until Sunday.

This is a slideshow of very accomplished, successful, and in some cases, legendary American Muslims.    They are actors, comedians, musicians, athletes, writers, scientists... even Miss USA 2010.  

Because I used Yusuf Islam’s (Cat Stevens') song, “The Wind,” the video can’t be watched on this site from everywhere in the world.   It’s okay if you’re in the U.S.  (Unfortunately it means that YouTube also run ads.) 

Most of you will be familiar with some or most of the people in the video, but  as we all are knowledgeable in different areas, here’s some background on people you might not know.

KAREEM RASHAD SULTAN KHAN was a U.S. Army Specialist who died in Iraq. Inspired by 9/11, he wanted to show that Muslims, like him, were patriotic Americans willing to lay their lives down for their country. He enlisted immediately after graduation and was sent to Iraq in July 2006. He received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart for his service, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

LEWIS ARQUETTE is best known for playing "J.D. Patrick" on "The Waltons." He is the son of Cliff Arquette (aka "Charlie Weaver") and the father of Rosanna, Patricia, David, Alexis, and Richmond Arquette.

Comedian/Actor AASIF MANDVI is currently the "Middle Eastern Affairs Correspondent" on "The Daily Show."

IQBAL THEBA plays Principal Figgins on "Glee."

MARA BROCK AKIL began her career as a writer for "South Central" and "Moesha," and then became the Supervising Producer of "The Jamie Foxx Show." She created and executive produced "Girlfriends" and "The Game," and is currently a consulting producer for "Cougar Town."

KAMRAN PASHA co-produced the TV series "Sleeper Cell," and produced "Bionic Woman" and "Kings."

PARVEZ SHARMA' s debut film "A Jihad for Love" has won five international awards and has been seen by over eight million people in 49 countries. Even though the film has faced theological condemnation and has been banned in a number of countries, Sharma remains (in his own words) "fatwa-free" as he has become a leading spokesperson on defending Islam and yet being able to speak for urgent reform, as a Muslim. He has conducted and led more than 200 live events across the world talking about Islam and in part its relation to homosexuality.

FAZLUR KHAN, more than any other individual, ushered in a renaissance in skyscraper construction during the second half of the twentieth century, and has been called the "Einstein of structural engineering," His most famous buildings are the John Hancock Center and the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower), which was the world's tallest building for several decades.

AHMED ZAWAIL won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry. He is the Linus Pauling Chair Professor Chemistry and Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology.

HAKEEM OLAJUWON – If you’re not a basketball fan (like me) then you should know that . Hakeem "the Dream" Olajuwon of the Houston Rockets is in the Basketball Hall of Fame and is considered by most experts to be one of the top 25 basketball players of all-time.

MICHAEL WOLFE is a poet and author who is a frequent lecturer on Islamic issues at universities across the US including Harvard, As a small press publisher, he published Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries, as well as works by Paul Bowles and others. Wolfe has made and continues to make numerous award-winning short and long films for PBS and worldwide release.

Rightly or wrongly, I chose not to include members of The Nations of Gods and Earth, also known as the Five Percenters. Some people consider the Five Percenters to be Muslims, but mainstream Muslims do not. This is why I left out people like Busta Rhymes, Nas, Rakim, etc., although no one would argue that I short-changed rappers in this video.

IMAN was born a Muslim, and is cited in Wikipedia and in other places online as being a Muslim, but I have no idea if she is still a practicing one.

Her name in Arabic means "faith."

This is a video I did of Tom Cruise’s famous Scientology video with commentary from Charlie Sheen, taken from his GMA interview

Which of these two men is the most disconnected from reality?

Me, Madonna, Jellybean Benitez, and Tim Ransom at Limelight in September 1984.
This photo by Patrick McMullan appeared in his 2003 book So 80s

My friend Tim Ransom wrote a few comments to my last blog on Madonna. His words were so impassioned that Kenneth M. Walsh wrote another post about Tim’s comments on his blog, followed by another one by Matthew Rettenmund on his blog. 

Anyway sharing correspondence with Tim made me think of the photo above with Tim, the Divine Ms. Madge and me taken by another well-known photographer I introduced to Madonna, Patrick McMullan.

Orion Pictures, the studio behind Desperately Seeking Susan, was setting up a theme party at Limelight for their film, “Amadeus.” The concept was that he was that Mozart was pop star of his day, so they wanted to get as many well known young singers and musicians as they could. I asked Madonna if I could take her to the party, expecting her customary insolence, but she said that would be fine. That wasn’t the answer I was expecting, so I added, “why don’t you bring [her boyfriend] Jelly too?”

Tim, who was the stand-in for Aidan Quinn, was on the set every day, and was close enough with Madonna to give her regular foot rubs. She adored him and eventually he was cast in the role of the Bellhop and played a brief scene with her. (Photos can be seen here.) Tim asked if he could come too, so I asked Orion to put him on the guest list.

Madonna lived a few blocks away from me in those days. My place was on Centre Market Place in Little Italy, across the street from the old Police Headquarters, which was deserted then. (Now it is a very upscale condo). She had a Soho  loft on Broome Street, on the northwest side of West Broadway, a few flights up. Her buzzer didn’t open the door, so she had to throw the keys down from the window. Oddly, I had actually looked at this very loft when it was up for rent. It was more than I could afford, but not that much more. Her debut album, Madonna, had been out a  year, and while it had done very well, I’m pretty sure she hadn’t banked much money yet.   She told me she’d already completed the tracks for her follow-up,  Like a Virgin, but Warners/Sire had pushed back the release because sales of Madonna continued so steadily.  She did her infamous “Like a Virgin” dance rolling around the stage at the MTV Awards during an off day from Desperately Seeking Susan shooting.  She told me that Cyndi Lauper wouldn’t even look at her that night, which bothered her (!!!) because she said she wanted to be friends with other women singers.

As Madonna didn’t work every day, I’d go over to her place every now and then so she could do her photo approvals. Madonna’s  loft was a long rectangle, around a thousand square feet, with a large mirror on the far end and a Roland keyboard (probably the JX-3P heard on so many of her songs of that period) near the door.  I don’t remember there being much else; it looked more like a dance studio or a gallery than a home. 

True story: the very last time I went to pick up color slides and contact sheets from Madonna, she didn’t feel like letting me upstairs, so she threw them out the window, and they went flying into traffic, The contact sheets didn’t matter (we could make more), but the original slide were priceless and irreplaceable. If you consider how well known the film became, you can imagine what a big deal it would have been if these images had been lost forever. I practically got killed saving those pictures. When I told this story to Desperately Seeking Susan set photographer Andy Schwartz, he nearly died too.

Despite all her MTV fame, a waitress at the Hard Rock Café on 57^th  tried to kick us out during an interview she was doing with David Keeps for Star Hits. “We’ve got to clean your table!” Madonna was dressed up in her costume with all the accessories, looking the same as when she was performing. (I was always impressed with her professionalism.) Needless to say, when I told the waitress, she was pretty embarrassed, but please--this was the Hard Rock Café, not Sardi’s! It was lame enough that we were doing the interview in their dumb tourist joint, without this nonsense. Who was the moron who set it up there? (Ummm… that would be me.)

Another  indication of Madonna’s heat level at the time:  when I went to Tower Records to buy her album, there weren’t any in  ”M” bins in the rock and pop section.  Eventually a guy directed me to the mezzanine where the “dance” music was.

Also, Orion insisted that Desperately Seeking Susan open in March 1985 even though it was shot in the fall of 1984—a hastily accelerated post-production schedule. Why? Because they feared that Madonna might be a flash in the pan and they wanted to pop the film out before the interest in the material girl dematerialized.   This despite Madonna having two best-selling records, mountains of press, parades of teen girls dressed like her, and  five videos in power rotation on MTV.  (The “Into the Groove” video featuring Desperately Seeking Susan clips became  the sixth.)  Better rev up to hyper-speed with the opening date!  Full-blown obscurity could hit Madonna any second!

I remember having difficulty getting a cab on the night of the Amadeus party.  Soho wasn’t the madhouse it is today; it was often deserted at night. I was getting pretty stressed out. I finally got a cab and had to beg the driver to wait at the curb while I waited for  Madonna and Jelly to come down.

In the cab up Madonna told me about her future plans. She wanted to do a contemporary adaptation of The Blue Angel. I could see real possibilities in the idea, but I admit I also thought, “Madonna saw The Blue Angel? “

If you’re not a New Yorker, Limelight was a club that was built in the former Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion, at 6^th Avenue and 20^th Street (it’s now a mall). The club had just opened a year before, and I had actually set up one of the first parties there, for “The Fourth Man,” a movie I mentioned in my last post.

Patrick McMullan (photo by Steven Ekerovich)

The first person I saw when we came in was Roger Daltrey. Honestly I don’t remember anybody else famous being there, but that was cool, although he was a lot shorter than I imagined. Tim Ransom came over and we started to hang out. I figured I had to do my job so I went looking for journalists. Eventually I saw Patrick McMullan and he shot the photo above, as well as a few singles of Madonna. When his coffee table book So 80s came out in 2003 McMullan told Interview:

I was at this Dallas Boesendahl party for Amadeus at Limelight (September 12 1984), and a publicist named Reid Rosefelt said to me, “You should come meet this girl Madonna.” I said, “Sure,  I'm very happy to meet her,” but I didn't know who she was.  So I met her and took a few pictures of her. She couldn't have been sweeter. It was just a very simple, unguarded moment.

Perhaps because I introduced Patrick to Madonna, he included a photo of me, along with Tim and Jellybean in his book. Right behind Madonna you can see a violinist dressed up in (17)80s finery for the party.  A very sharp-eyed person can see that I’m wearing a button for Stranger Than Paradise, featured in this post. 

When we decided to leave, things got a little complicated. For some reason we didn’t go out the front door, and started wandering around the church’s meandering hallways looking for another exit. But we couldn’t find one-- it was like that famous scene in Spinal Tap—we kept circling around. Finally, totally exasperated, I said the one thing I ever said that made Madonna laugh:

“Who do I have to blow to get out of here?”

She liked that.

“Is he gay?” asked Madonna. “Gay men take good pictures of me.”

When I worked at the PMK PR firm in 1980, every time we signed a new client, Michael Maslansky (the “M” in PMK) used to have them photographed by Herb Ritts. I’m sure this had more than a little to do with Herb being represented by Michael’s wife Marysa, who had a photo agency called Visages, but the photos were always wonderful. I never met Herb until years later when I had my own company and was handling Paul Verhoeven’s “The Fourth Man.” For an Interview photo, Herb tiptoed me and the film’s Dutch femme fatale, Renée Soutendijk, up to the roof above the dilapidated structure that sat on the site of what is now the Chelsea Piers. It was obvious that we were trespassing and that made it fun, but you couldn’t help but wonder, “How much time had he spent prowling around all that broken glass and torn metal, before he found that perfect spot?”

“I have no idea if Herb Ritts is gay, Madonna,” I said. “But I promise you will like his pictures.” As usual, Madonna was busting my balls, but the important thing was that she and Rosanna Arquette were  willing to give up an entire Saturday off from shooting “Desperately Seeking Susan” for the special photography shoot. Ann Lander, the Orion exec in charge of photography had assigned Herb to create some portraits that I could circulate to magazines. If all went well, maybe there would be a poster in there too.

But what should the poster be? What would be a solitary image that would capture the story? If you haven’t seen it, the  film is about this bored New Jersey housewife named Roberta (played by Arquette) who follows the personal ads, and is obsessed with a free-spirited type named Susan who uses the personals to keep in touch with her boyfriend. Roberta decides to follow Susan around and when Susan sells her jacket at a thrift store, Roberta buys it, setting in motion a mistaken identity plot. Through the jacket (and a case of amnesia), in a lot of ways Roberta gets to become Susan. The jacket is the engine that makes the whole plot go. So I knew I wanted to display the jacket in a significant way in the poster.

Madonna and Rosanna had totally different kinds of bodies, so Production/Costume Designer Santo Loquasto had made two jackets. But nobody was supposed to know that there was more than one—it would defeat the whole purpose. But something told me that having them both of them in the “Susan” outfits was the way to go. It didn’t make literal sense, but I convinced myself it made metaphorical sense: Roberta and Susan were twins, two sides of the same coin, sisters. Both of them stepped into the other one’s lives, and tried them on for size.

Nowadays photo shoots like these are a big deal, with limos for talent, and a gaggle of publicists and studio executives, but the only people from the movie were me and the wardrobe supervisor Melissa Stanton (who brought the jackets, costumes and accessories), Herb’s crew, and Madonna and Rosanna, who cabbed over themselves. [Why am I so sure they didn’t get cars? Because afterwards Madonna complained that she couldn’t take the subway anymore. She had only recently reached the level of fame where people hassled her on the trains, and she was pissed off about this intrusion on her freedom.]

Upon my entry to the studio, I was greeted by the sight of Madonna whipping off her shirt to change into another outfit. Nothing modest about this girl. I thought to myself, “that’s something very few people will ever see.” Little did I know. Melissa was there with the costumes, but Herb didn’t seem interested. All day long he put the two of them through pose after pose, none of which had nothing to do with the movie.

Rosanna and Madonna had a peculiar relationship. On one hand they were friends and even hung out together outside of work, but on another… Madonna had a way of sucking all the air out of the room. It’s my understanding that the movie was greenlit because Rosanna, red-hot after “The Executioner’s Song” and “Baby, It’s You,” had agreed to be in it. Rosanna was unquestionably the lead and worked practically every day, while Madonna’s role was much smaller in terms of actual scenes. But there was no denying that Madonna was Madonna and she was “Susan,” in a movie called “Desperately Seeking Susan.” Once, when somebody on the street asked who was in the film, I heard Rosanna say, “Madonna.”

The truth was, Madonna had the kind of brash confidence that could overwhelm a lot of people, and certainly a more sensitive type like Rosanna. This photo shoot was a perfect example.

At one point, Ritts was shooting some sultry glamour shots of Rosanna posing against a cloth backdrop, when Madonna came over. After gaping at Rosanna for a minute she said, “You look so good I’d like to fuck you myself.” It was funny, but you could almost hear the air—sssssss!—slipping out of Rosanna’s confidence, as her moment was stolen, and it became all about Madonna. And come on! This was Rosanna Arquette, after all—a true fantasy figure for a good portion of the men in America! Moments later, Madonna grabbed the backdrop, commandeered the same pose… and Herb shot an image that became a famous poster.

Eventually it was time for lunch so Melissa and I went out and got some sandwiches. That was catering. “Who wants the tuna?” Madonna played me a track, “Sidewalk Talk,” for a compilation album “Jellybean Rocks the House,” her boyfriend Jellybean Benitez was producing. She seemed pleased that I liked it, which made me feel good. She often made fun of me on the set, but the truth was I spent a lot of time with her alone, going over pictures in her trailer and in her loft (she lived a few blocks from me) and we got along very well. Her instincts for publicity were amazing even then and I have always considered her one of my mentors. (I’ve learned a thing or two from other publicists, but the best training comes from natural born salesmen like her.) My favorite story about her was about how she got her manager. She asked who handled Michael Jackson and when she found out it was Freddy DeMann, she called him. Who would have the chutzpah to do that? Freddy signed her.

Legendary style-setter Andre Leon Talley turned up unannounced and wanted Herb to shoot a photo of Madonna for Vanity Fair. Before I could say anything, Talley put a pair of multi-colored men’s boxer shorts on top of Madonna’s head and started twisting them around.

This put me in a tough spot because neither Freddy DeMann or Madonna’s publicist Liz Rosenberg had approved this. Madonna said I should call Freddy at home and if he said it was okay, she’d do it. As bratty as she could be, in the important ways she was pretty easy to deal with in those days. I’d say, “look, you have to do this now so that you won’t have to do it later,” and she got it.

It was starting to get pretty late and I decided it was time to put my foot down--I told Herb it was time to shoot the “Desperately Seeking Susan” costumes. After a very long day shooting pictures completely unrelated to the movie, I think he spent an hour or two doing it.   But those few frames turned out to be gold.

As we were getting ready to go, I really did see something that I think very few people have ever seen, at least for a long time. Madonna called Jellybean and they were in the middle of some kind of argument. For a few moments I saw her impregnable shell break away: she appeared to be a normal young woman unsatisfied or hurt by whatever her boyfriend up to. As I had learned that day, showing her breasts wasn’t a big issue to Madonna, but showing vulnerability definitely was: as soon as she spied me looking, she tucked that honest emotion back into whatever place she kept them in, and was “Madonna” again.

Herb Ritts’ Rolling Stone Cover of Madonna and Rosanna
The only picture of them on this page not shot on that first day.

Early the next week, Herb turned up at Madonna’s trailer with several hundred dollars worth of extraordinary photos. Platinum Prints. Museum quality stuff. I’d never seen anything like it. I surmised that he was hoping to photograph Ms. Ciccone again. I think it’s an understatement to say that’s exactly what happened. He became one of Lady Madonna’s top court photographers, shooting many of her most memorable images, until his untimely death in 2002.

Sometime after the film wrapped, I happened to be at the New York Orion office for a publicity meeting when the ad agency was making a presentation. The focus was on the New Jersey housewife part of the movie. Rosanna’s face was on a toaster and Madonna’s face was on a piece of toast. Something I can’t remember with a microwave oven. Each one was more terrible than the one before. As it happened, I had brought a set of the slides from the Ritts photo session to the meeting. I pulled them out and said, “have you guys seen these?” They hadn’t. Ann Lander had gone on vacation and locked the photos up in her safe. Seriously. There was a hush in the room.

This wasn’t the end of the story, however. Some people at Orion thought that the image would make people think it was a lesbian movie. Thankfully the film’s producers, Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, were able to make their case and the result is the poster as you can see it above.

Pretty much every “Desperately Seeking Susan” slide Herb took during that hour got used thousands of times. One of them even became a Playboy Cover.

Years later I visited the London Film Museum… and there it was! My poster! I was truly proud. I felt that in this tiny way, I had been part of the history of film. After all, that image would not exist if I hadn’t thought it up! Okay, okay, Herb, Rosanna, Madonna, Santo, Melissa, Susan Seidelman, screenwriter Leora Barish, and even Ann Lander had something to do with it too.

As Rosanna Arquette is still someone I have kept in touch with and I believe reads my blog now and then, I apologize for once again making this story ALL ABOUT MADONNA. She has always had a way of making everything about her.

Years later I ran into Madonna at Lee’s Art Shop on 57^th Street. I introduced myself and said that I worked on “Desperately Seeking Susan.” “A lot of people worked on ‘Desperately Seeking Susan,’” she said, as she walked past me.

MORE ON MADONNA this coming Sunday

Donald Rugoff with Robert Downey, Sr.  (LIFE photo)

In my blog last week about Miramax, I said I’d never worked for anybody like them, which was literally true. But I failed to mention that there was a razzle-dazzle showman in the art film business long before the Weinstein Brother turned up. I just never worked for him.

His name was Donald Rugoff.

Like my old boss, Dan Talbot, Rugoff booked his films into his own New York Theatres. But Talbot rarely had more than one screen, and it was usually a small, if beloved,cinema.

Rugoff, on the other hand, owned the town. His empire included nearly all of the most desirable screens in the city: Cinema I, Cinema II, Cinema III, Paris, Plaza, Sutton, Beekman, Paramount, Murray Hill, Gramercy and Art theaters. These were the palaces in which he launched the New York releases of his distribution company: Cinema 5..

I doubt many people in the new generation of the specialty film business today have ever heard Rugoff’s name. But he was a star! Just look at a few of he films he brought out: “The Cool World,” “Nothing But a Man,” “Morgan!” “The Endless Summer,” “Elvira Madigan,” “The Two of Us,” “Z,” “More,” “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “Putney Swope,” “The Firemen’s Ball,” “Alexander,” “Trash,” “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” “Marjoe,” “Gimme Shelter,” “The Hellstrom Chronicle,” “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” “On Any Sunday,” “A Sense of Loss,” “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine,” “Greaser’s Palace,” “Cesar and Rosalie,” “The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe,” “State of Siege,” “Scenes From a Marriage,” “Distant Thunder,” “Going Places,” “Swept Away,” “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” “Seven Beauties,” “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “Volcano,” “A Slave of Love,” “Man on the Roof,” “Harlan County U.S.A.,” “Coup de Grace,” “Providence,” “Pumping Iron “Jabberwocky,” “The Man Who Loved Women,” “A Special Day,” “Padre Padrone,” “Outrageous!” “Iphigenia,” “Viva Italia!” and “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.”

This is the point in my post where I would normally tell a personal anecdote or two. But while he was somebody who was constantly in my thoughts throughout my early years in the business, I’m sad to say I never met the man. Not once.  So let me reprint a letter that was written to the New York Times upon the occasion of Rugoff’s death in 1989, by Dan Talbot, someone who knew him well.

DONALD RUGOFF:  In Memory of a “Wild Genius”

As an old colleague of Don Rugoff's, I'm compelled to write about him upon the occasion of his death last month. I was involved with Don from the time he started in our business in the early 1960's. He was, of course, impossible to make do with. As the head of the best group of theaters in Manhattan until 1979, he was in a position of great power and, given his spiky personality, he had the capacity to make people furious with him.

On the other hand, he was an uncommonly generous soul, without the foggiest notion of the normal uses of money. Don was a stand-in for the guy who stood on street corners throwing away $100 bills. One of the mad ones. Naturally, directors and producers loved him, thought of him as a wild genius. Relished his stew of unpredictability and showmanship. Once he staged a $35,000 champagne party for Dusan Makaveyev at the Plaza Hotel for the opening of Makaveyev's brilliant movie ''WR: Mysteries of the Organism.'' He liked doing things on the spur of the moment. ''Yeah, let's rent a boat tomorrow and stack it with flags announcing our new film. Call Glorious Foods. Get a steeplejack who'll climb up the sails. We'll circle Manhattan two times. Invite Norman Mailer and Andy Warhol.''

For you who have come to the city only in the past 10 years, I can tell you that you missed a Golden Age of cinema-going before Don lost control of his theaters in 1979. You cannot imagine how thrilling is was to stand on line at the Beekman, waiting to see the new Woody Allen movie. Virtually all Don's theaters played films on an exclusive basis, so that you had the sense of an event taking place at each theater.

Don visited his theaters daily. He would catch ushers picking their noses and yell at them, check the bathrooms, hold long conversations with the projectionist and the manager, scowl at the slightest mis-frame or sudden drop in the sound level.

And what wonderful theaters! He put together the team to build Cinema 1 and 2, model theaters of our time. He shoe-horned Cinema 3 into an impossible space in the Plaza Hotel, and it came out a beauty. Each theater had its own identity, separate and apart from the others, because Don liked to experiment with color, fabric, wall design, lighting, floor covering, bathroom fixtures, door handles, the box office.

For a number of years Don dropped put. Then, about a year ago I got a call from him from Martha's Vineyard. He was opening a film society in a cafe in Edgartown. Would I supply him with films? I never visited him in Edgartown but I have to believe that he did something special there, that he had made good purchase on his audience and treated it honorably. He booked tough films from us. He must have stood in the lobby discussing the films with his audience. He surely wouldn't allow popcorn in the theater. There were probably Jasper Johns and Milton Avery prints on the walls of the lobby. One could go on imagining all sorts of things. But the curtain's down and I shall miss Don. He was an original.

While I didn’t know Rugoff, some of the people who did have posted some comments, including Ira Deutchman, Fabiano Canosa, Don Krim, and Susan Pile.  Check them out.    If anybody else has something to share, please contribute. 

Don Rugoff was a great man and a great New Yorker. Attention must be paid.

“The King’s Speech” is the most recent example of what the Weinstein brothers have done countless times: produce or acquire a film that their instincts tell them has Oscar potential, and then vigorously promote it as if their life depended on it. Their connection to this particular film is only of the moment because they have done this so many times before and will no doubt do it many times in the future. Next year it will be on to the next one.

Trying like hell to get a bucketful of Oscars for movies like “The King’s Speech” is just what they do. It’s actually “The Social Network” that captures who they are.

In the summer of 1983, I noticed a brief item in Variety. A company called Miramax had picked up rights to a Brazilian film called “Eréndira,” based on a story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, directed by Ruy Guerra, and starring Irene Papas, that was set for its US premiere at the New York Film Festival. I had never heard of the company, but the film seemed right up my alley: Marquez was one of my favorite novelists, I knew Ruy Guerra’s work, but most of all my profession to that date had been working with the kind of modest foreign art films that had their US debut every year at the New York Film Festival. I called them up right away and set up a meeting.

Ruy Guerra as Don Pedro de Ursua in Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”

Their office was a small apartment in a residential building across the street from the Citibank on 56^th and Broadway. Miramax turned out to be a secretary, Harvey Weinstein, Bob Weinstein, and Robert Newman (now a celebrated agent with clients like Martin Scorsese, Guillermo del Toro and Danny Boyle.)   The Weinsteins had made some money producing rock concerts in Buffalo, but as longtime film fans, were moving into the film business, first with rock concert films like Paul McCartney’s “Rockshow,” and a horror film called “The Burning,” (the film debut of future Oscar winner Holly Hunter and “Seinfeld star Jason Alexander. But their biggest success was “The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball,” a concert film they had created by editing the rights to two films of Amnesty International benefit shows into one movie. “Eréndira” was to be their first venture into the foreign art film arena.

I’d been through this kind of publicity job endless times before. The Film Society of Lincoln Center would bring in Ruy Guerra and put him up at the Algonquin Hotel, where I’d set up interviews. The cost of his publicity schedule would be cab fare and some meals. After eleven years working in the New York art film business, that was all I knew. Everybody I worked with cut their costs to the bone, and I had no reason to believe that the Weinstein brothers would be any different.

Talk about being wrong.

There was nothing out of the ordinary at the start. Ruy Guerra and his nectarious blossom of a girlfriend, Claudia Ohana, who played Eréndira, came to town and I put a publicity schedule together. These stories would be held until the release the spring of the following year. But then, Harvey and Bob began a campaign to bring Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was also a co-screenwriter into the country. Although Marquez had become a Nobel Laureate the year before, he was still painted as a Fidel-loving subversive by the US immigration services and denied visas. At first I thought this was just a publicity stunt, but I gradually realized that they were completely serious. It didn’t bother them one bit that so many powerful cultural organizations had failed to bring Marquez in—they were going to be the ones to do it. I ended up working on the film for almost a year and I don’t remember them ever giving up for a second.

This was different. I wasn’t aware of any major studio films that were willing to take on the US government in such a fiery, relentless way.

But that was nothing until I saw the poster. They had taken the Brazilian artwork, unbuttoned the top button of Eréndira’s blouse and added extra cleavage to Claudia Ohana’s chest. Cleavage! I died laughing. I had never seen anything so crass. Would art filmgoers want to see the film more if they believed that Claudia had slightly bigger breasts? And it seemed so off the mark as the essence of Claudia (and Eréndira’s) sensuality, emanated from her barely ripe sensuality. But then I thought about it and I realized that this was a truly erotic movie, and the Brazilian poster was sort of prim. It didn’t signal the pleasures the film offered as well as Miramax poster did. I had to give them credit. They were showmen, paying attention to every detail. Maybe it was cheesy, but who  was I to say? Maybe it would help. (And significantly, every poster I can find on the web from other countries used the Miramax art.)

Claudia Ohana in “Eréndira”

In the spring, they brought in the internationally famous Greek actress Irene Papas (“Z,” “Zorba the Greek,” “The Trojan Women,” “The Guns of Navarone”) and the brothers set me to work all over again. Papas was a legend, and you couldn’t put her up at the Howard Johnson. You have to go first class in everything and I was astounded to see this kind of cash outlay for what most other distributors would consider a little film. Obviously she was on a whole other level than Ruy Guerra and I booked her everywhere-- newspapers, magazine, big TV shows, the whole works. Even during my brief stint at PMK I had never got coverage like this. The brothers also set up fancy parties. I got to meet Anthony Quinn! Their belief in the film was boundless.

Eventually Irene left town and I figured that was it for me, “Eréndira”-wise. Wrong again.

When the summer came, Harvey called me and said that Claudia Ohana was coming to New York to do a commercial photo shoot. Could I get her in Playboy? I could and I did. I also set up a lush schedule photo shoots with Claudia in lots of other places. Finally, I took Claudia to the airport and finally, finally, finally, I was done with “Eréndira.” With all the time I had spent on the film I figured I’d been paid less than a penny an hour.

Claudia’s Latin American Playboy Covers

I have no idea if Miramax made money on “Eréndira,” but it was beside the point as they had taught me a crucial lesson. These two outsiders came in and reinvented the entire business as I had known it. They weren’t trying to do it better than everybody else did; they didn’t give a damn about what anybody else did. They were looking straight up. As Christopher Lloyd’s character said in “Back to the Future”—“Roads! Where we’re going we don’t need roads!” The sky was not the limit for them because they didn’t consider the notion of there being a sky. Harvey had kicked my ass, made me work harder for less money than I ever had in my life, but he had made a real publicist out of me.

Don’t ever let ANYBODY ever tell you a film is small.
There are no small movies, only small imaginations.
There is no limit to the amount of passion and care you can put into a movie if you love it.
NEVER give up. There is never enough that you can do.

You want to know some of the business people who think this way? Looks at the world with no top? Steve Jobs. Rupert Murdoch. Bill Gates. Steven Spielberg. Michael Bloomberg. Mark Zuckerberg.

And when he’s on his game… Harvey Weinstein.

Hubris like this is very rare in business executives, but it is quite common with visionary artists. People often use the same kinds of words to describe people like this: uncompromising, arrogant, difficult, controlling, demanding, and sometimes… cruel. Something extra is inside these people and something is missing too. They’re probably born that way, lucky or cursed, and no doubt spurred by something chemical.

Like everybody else, I was fascinated to read the reports of Harvey’s bad behavior. I didn’t know that guy. The guy I knew was a charmer. When I ran into him (on the extremely rare occasions where he remembered who I was), he was always gracious. I only encountered the cruel Harvey second-hand, through the way some of the people who worked for him treated me. That wasn’t fun.

I was pretty good at my job before I worked with the Weinstein Brothers-- passionate, hard-working, and movie mad—but afterwards my outlook changed. It opened up. Shortly after “Eréndira,” I publicized “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Desperately Seeking Susan,” the biggest successes I had ever had after thirteen years in the business.

In the subsequent years I worked for many people who loathed the Weinstein brothers. I imagine it will make them furious if they happen to read these words of praise. But it’s a fact that when those companies hired me, they got a publicist who was schooled and inspired by Harvey and Bob Weinstein.

If they liked the results, then they owe him, whether they want to accept it or not.

The 2011 Sundance Film Festival ends today and I have this to say about it.

Actually I have nothing to say as I wasn’t there.  But I do have a question.

What percentage, do you think, of the films screened for the first time at Sundance will be seen for the first time via DVD, VOD, Blu-Ray, Netflix Instant Watch, rented from iTunes or Amazon, seen on a free-with ads-site like SnagFilms or Hulu, or perhaps more significantly, downloaded as a torrent or from a Rapidshare-type service?

If that question intrigues or concerns you, then Sundance wasn’t the only significant film-related event of January 2011. Here are six others that will play a major role in the way people watch movies in the future.

January 6:^: More than 80 iPad-style tablets are introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Is the electronics industry is betting the bank on making the Tablet a mass market product like the DVD player and Smart Phone?

If they succeed, what will that mean for Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Video on Demand, Hulu, as well as sites like SnagFilms, Mubi, IndiePix, etc.? Is this product going to be a game-changer for online video?

January 18: The FCC approves the NBCU merger. Comcast agrees to give up management rights of Hulu, while retaining their co-ownership with News Corp and Disney.

What does it mean to the way TV and films are watched online when a cable company owns such a monumental amount of content?

Even if Comcast doesn’t have management rights over Hulu, what’s to stop them from pulling out “SNL,” “30 Rock,” “The Office” and the rest anyway? Will managing Hulu even matter? (see below).

January 20: Amazon buys LOVEFiLM, Europe’s Netflix. LOVEFiLM, has 1.6 million members and operates in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.

Amazon has the advantage of being able to integrate LOVEFiLM into their Amazon stores in the UK and elsewhere. With their vast resources they have the potential to be the dominant player in international online video.

This is not an easy business, as it is complicated to secure rights to major studio movies for a host of different territories. Apple has been selling online video through many of their international iTunes stores for years. Netflix expanded into Canada in September where it has been an enormous success, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings has suggested that he has plans to expand Netflix to other countries.

Online video outside the US is on the move like never before. Has its time finally come? What will this mean for a film industry that is still trying to figure out how online video will work here?

January 26: Torrentfreak reports that Google has begun censoring file-sharing-related terms. Per Torrent Freak’s story, search engine results for "BitTorrent," "RapidShare," "Megaupload" will be filtered out from its instant search and auto-complete search features. As of now, the filter does not affect full Google search results.

The Pirate Bay and the rest are pikers when it comes to finding Torrents and compared to Google. Will they extend their filter to full searches, which is the only thing that matters? Assuming they do and their filter is effective, will this provide serious assistance to the efforts of the MPAA and the RIAA to stem online piracy?

January 27: Netflix releases its fourth quarter profit report and subscriptions are up 166% (3.08 million) from fourth quarter 2009 (1.1 million). They end 2010 with 20 million subscribers, up 63% from the previous year.  All signs are that this growth will continue. To put this in perspective, there are about 120 million households in the US with a TV.

January 27: The Wall Street Journal Reports Strife at Hulu

The Journal reports that Hulu founder Jason Kilar threatened to quit if the price on the “Hulu Plus” subscription service didn’t go from $9.99 monthly to $4.99. A compromise was made at $7.99.

While Comcast isn’t involved in decisions on Hulu’s future, Fox and Disney are increasingly feeling that Hulu, may be cannibalizing their cable profits. Disney has blind-sided Kilar by ”quietly” setting up their own Hulu-type service,

The Journal also reports:

In what would be a major shift in direction, Hulu management has discussed recasting Hulu as an online cable operator that would use the Web to send live TV channels and video-on-demand content to subscribers, say people familiar with the talks. The new service, which is still under discussion, would mimic the bundles of channels now sold by cable and satellite operators, the people said.

In other words, they are discussing killing Hulu as we know it.

If they really did this, instead of a site with free movies with very few commercials, it would be a subscription service with all the commercials you see on cable. Sound appealing to you?  Personally, I’d rather watch my cable TV using my DVR.

Hulu is not the real issue. Worries about Hulu are basically worries about the future of cable TV. The real question is: can the studios hold onto the highly profitable cable business model they have today? Or will the January I’ve written about above be followed by a February and a March and an April and a May and on and on forever in a never-ending evolution of the way new technology, new business concepts and the internet affect the way we watch movies and TV?

Can the major studios and the cable companies catch all the fireflies that are buzzing around their heads?

Your thoughts?

Robert Redford and the author on the set of “The Milagro Beanfield War”

It was the end of the summer of 1986. I’d only been back in New York City a short while after spending a good portion of the year out of town on publicity jobs, first in Belize for Peter Weir’s “The Mosquito Coast,” followed by a stint in Miami for Susan Seidelman’s “Desperately Seeking Susan.” I was exhausted, I had money in the bank, and I was making arrangements to pull up stakes in New York and move to Los Angeles. I wasn’t looking for work until I got a call from legendary publicist Lois Smith.

“Hello ducks,” she said. “Bob Redford is making a movie in New Mexico. It’s called ‘The Milagro Beanfield War.’ I’ve told him about you and I’d like to set up a meeting. Are you interested?”

So much for for my plans. I was going to meet with Robert Redford, and maybe even work with him! Woohoo!

Still, I was uncomfortable with this whole “Bob” thing. While I could see how Lois would call him “Bob,” as she’d known him for decades, I couldn’t imagine me calling him “Bob.” It made me think of high school, when my friends and I used to joke around like we were pals with Ingmar Bergman, and drop comments from our good buddy “Ing.” “Bob” seemed like the wrong name for Robert Redford anyway.

I only knew two things about Redford. The first was his reputation for being late. The second was that he had a playful sense of humor, as reflected in the series of practical jokes he and Paul Newman were always playing on each other.

When I arrived at his office at the appointed time, Lois put me in a tiny private office, and informed me that he might be—surprise!—a bit late. I pulled out my stash of reading materials from my shoulder bag: the latest New Yorker, my copy of the “Milagro Beanfield War” novel, that day’s Times, even a few sections of the Sunday Times I hadn’t gotten around to reading yet. I spread everything out on the desk like a picnic blanket, enough stuff to keep anybody occupied for a leisurely weekend at the beach. And then I buried myself in the Arts & Leisure.  I‘d barely read a few articles when I looked up to see a man standing in a doorway, grinning at me.

“Come on, I’m not that late!” he said.

I stood up to shake his hand.

“I’m Bob Redford,” he said.

“Hi Bob,” I said. (It just slipped out somehow.) “Good to meet you.”

I believe my little prank started my working relationship with Redford on the right foot. Yeah, I got the job, and even worked with him a few times after that. Some of working with Redford involved waiting; all of it was interesting, challenging, and fun. After all, if Robert Redford isn’t worth waiting for…who is?

One of the biggest misfortunes of my life was being taught logic in high school. It provided an impractical and counter-productive foundation for the illogical world I’ve lived in ever since.

In logic class, I and my fellow ill-fated classmates were taught a series of formulas called “tautologies,” which are always true. There is no possibility of negating them. Ever. One is called Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc. This means that it is always a fallacy to assume that because one thing happened, followed by another thing, then the first thing caused the next. In other words: if I clap my hands just before dawn, that’s not why the sun came up.

I will quickly apply Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc to the current controversy surrounding the shootings in Tucson, Arizona, and then, as this is a movie blog, get onto my primary topic, “The Myth of the Ticket-Selling Movie Star.”

As to the former, I believe a lot of people of various political persuasions are coming around to the idea that there’s no evidence that Jared Lee Loughlin was motivated by politics and uncivil dialogue. But the logic of Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc takes us a step further than that and says that even if he regularly watched Limbaugh fan and watched FOX News, that alone is not enough to make the assumption that that was responsible for making him do what he did.

One of the things I usually like about Bill Maher is that he calls out the absurdity of people who don’t believe in evolution, global warming, or having a President who was born in the U.S. But in this case, like many politicians and commentators, he followed his preconceptions rather than logic, and blamed the right wing. In this he mirrors the illogic of conservatives who proclaim that President Bush kept the country safe. These things fly in the face of Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc, as do thousands of other suppositions that are the bedrock of conventional thought.

Okay, now I will proceed, with grandiose rhetorical overstatement, to “The Myth of the Ticket-Selling Movie Star.”

A Ticket-Selling movie star is thought by many to possess a persona that is so appealing that people will go see a movie just because they are in it. If the actor doesn’t play the persona, then it often doesn’t work. Angelina Jolie’s star persona is said to be in action roles, and the evidence supports this: “A Mighty Heart” (9 M), “Changeling,” ($36M), versus “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” ($186M), “The Good Shepherd” ($60M), “Wanted” ($134M), “Salt,” ($118M), and “The Tourist” ($62M). Likewise, nobody is surprised when “Greenberg” fails to become a hit simply because Ben Stiller is in it. While the correlations of genuine movie star persona to grosses doesn’t always work, but it certainly happens enough so that most people make the reasonable judgment that one caused the other.

Reasonable, yes, and very possible true. But not logical.

But what other explanation or explanations could there possibly be? In fact it is possible to look at the information in the previous paragraph and draw a slightly different conclusion.

Perhaps we have it backwards. Perhaps it is the movies that draw the audiences and the movie stars are people who have successfully managed to star in those movies.

No matter funny Ben Stiller is, no matter how much people love his humor, if all he did in his career was “Greenberg”-type movies, he would never be called someone whose name could fill theatre. Likewise, “A Mighty Heart” and “Changeling” were not conceived as blockbusters, and if Angelina Jolie had solely followed that path, then she would also not be seen as a ticket-selling movie star.

Let’s say you are one of those two people, and have gotten to the point where you get sent scripts, walk into offices, and have lunches. If you choose project A, followed by B, C, D—you’re a star who puts butts in seats. You choose project E, followed by F, G, H—you’re not a ticket-selling star, and that’s that. For years, Robert De Niro chose the kind of artistic projects that weren’t likely to make huge profits, until one day, he decided to make different choices and now his films make a fockin’ lot of money.

John Travolta certainly found his winning persona with “Saturday Night Fever” and “Grease.” He had it all, but he did not choose wisely after that. There are also many people who had a flash point of success of opportunity, or many years of being considered capable of putting butts in seats, but then dropped off the list, either because of emotional issues, or because they simply had no wish to be stars, and deliberately avoided those kinds of roles.

The commonly-believed perception that you sell tickets means you get offered projects of all kinds, including exploitatively commercial ones, as well as prestige films with great scripts, directors, and co-stars. Once you are in that position, what do you do? Are your instincts sound? Or do you listen to seasoned advisors who presumably give you sound advice? There are actors known for turning down a list of the some of the biggest blockbusters ever made, and there are also actors that are known for tying up scripts for years while they contemplate if they are “right.”This doesn’t mean that ticket-selling stars pick good movies, just commercial ones, as Nicholas Cage’s career demonstrates well.

I saw terror in the trailers of more than one of these presumed ticket-sellers. Some actors are not the most emotionally stable or confident people and it is often a very frightening thing for them to go to the set. While others see these people as money in the bank, for them stardom is like hurtling out-of-control down a highway, where one slip-up might take them over a cliff. They do not want to lose what they have. And of course, eventually most of them do.

If the notion of ticket-selling movie stars is in fact a puffed up illusion similar to the funhouse games of Wall Street—and I’m not saying it is—the hyper-inflation of actor’s salaries is lucrative for the people who live off of percentages. Larger actor salaries means larger budgets overall which increase studio overhead fees, also calculated by percentages. Many of the most powerful agents become studio heads, and the money is passed back and forth between members of the club.

The mammoth salaries are obviously very nutritious for the actors, and they also can be useful for producers, as they can often get the green light for movies simply by having a single person agree to play the lead role.

I could go on and on with the advantages for many people of this idea of the ticket-selling star, but ultimately, whether that idea is true or not is irrelevant to the subject of this blog, which is logical thinking, or more precisely, the lack of it. I believe I have offered a plausible secondary explanation for why certain actors always seem to be in high-grossing movies. My actual opinion is the real story is a combination of the two, and probably some other factors.

I believe—but logically do not know for sure—that Will Smith’s presence in a film will sell tickets. Still there’s no doubt that he also has impressive commercial instincts. It’s fair to say that he had something to do with selecting and developing “The Karate Kid” (worldwide gross $359M) for his son Jaden, and as a music industry pro, overseeing his daughter Willow’s chart-topping record, “Whip My Hair.” The kids are talented, but they are too young to make these kinds of judgments all by themselves. Will Smith has a magic touch, whether he’s in a movie or not. Since I worked with him on “Six Degrees of Separation,” I’ve thought that Will Smith was as likable and charming a person you could ever meet, but honestly I never dreamed he would have achieved the level of success he has. If people go to movies because he is in them, it’s because of all the hard work he’s put in to get to where he is.

“With his naturalistic delivery and relaxed animal physicality Mr. Wahlberg doesn’t seem to be acting, while a twitchy, jumpy Mr. Bale all but pinwheels off the screen. Mr. Wahlberg’s acting seems more a matter of being, while Mr. Bale’s appears self-consciously performed.”
                                  --Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

By what  criteria do we judge the best acting?

Is it something we describe with words like bold, inventive, brazen, adventurous, commanding, fearless , and tour-de-force? Or…

If we are taken out of our immersion in the story by a conscious awareness that “this is a great, Academy Award worthy performance,” is anything lost?

What is the purpose of acting? If we notice ACTING, is it gone? I don’t know the answer to this, and maybe there isn’t one. But it’s a question worth exploring.

I have often wondered what would happen if all the critics, non-acting members of the film industry, all the evaluators of who is worthy of praise, and prognosticators of who should win prizes, if all these people took some acting classes. Would they see things any differently?

Ever notice how there is often a “surprise” nominee or winner of one of the acting Academy Awards? Someone that was barely recognized or even ignored by the critics and the award-giving groups? These appraisals come from the illustrious and very tiny list of actors who are in the Academy, not the 93,000 voting members of the Screen Actors Guild.  What yardsticks do these very special people use when they judge acting?

Obviously, big budget movies need movie stars, and movie stars are weighted down by our memories of their previous performances and our knowledge of their private lives. It’s very hard for them to truly disappear into a role, and you certainly can’t blame them for that.

Likewise some very good stories are gigantic ones, as over-sized, featuring multi-layered characters facing extraordinary circumstances. Very few actors have what it takes to play characters like this, and for this, we give praise and awards.

But how big an achievement is it to look like you’re not doing anything? If you succeed, you’re fooling everyone, not an easy thing to do, and not a way to get noticed. If you’re one of the rare people who can do it, you bring something enormous to the power of the film…but no prize for you!

You could say, “I know all about Mark Wahlberg’s life and he is that guy in ‘The Fighter.’ He’s just playing himself.” I would ask you to go in front of a camera and say lines and play someone who is “just like yourself.” Good luck. It’s not as easy as it looks.

Could Wahlberg have played Bale’s part? Obviously he would pull the twitch factor down many notches, but I think he would have been sensational—absolutely real, just in a less theatrical way. And he might have gotten a nomination, as he did for “The Departed.” But could Bale play Wahlberg’s part? I don’t think so. That role requires a quietude that I don’t think a baroque actor like Bale can muster.

With a few exceptions, I love and admire the 2010 movie performances that are being touted for awards. My favorite is Jeon Do-yeon in Lee Chang-dong’s “Secret Sunshine.” It’s a whopper of a role and she is astounding. But unlike all the other great performances I saw last year, hers is in my favorite movie. And I think it’s because of Song Kang-ho, who has a not terribly exciting role. He plays kind of a shlub, not too bright, nothing special about him at all. But without Song’s performance, the movie would be unbearable.

If you see this film knowing nothing about Korean cinema, I doubt you would guess that Song is a superstar, somebody whose name on a film guarantees an audience, the star of such films as “Joint Security Area,” “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance,” “Memories of Murder,” “The Host,” “The Good, the Bad, the Weird,” and “Thirst.” But at the height of his career, he takes this supporting role of a shmo and he plays him like a shmo. Perfectly. And the blend of his ordinariness with Jeon’s intensity makes for a masterpiece.

Unlike Lee’s previous films “Peppermint Candy,” and “Oasis” (maybe too culture-bound), I think this movie could easily be remade in the U.S. But if that happened, it’s unlikely that an American star on Song’s level would accept this role. And if they did, I doubt they would have the capacity to do it as modestly.

So… what’s my point? I certainly don’t want to disparage the actors who hit the ball out of the park this year, and gave me such movie-going pleasure. I’m just paying homage to the actors who made me forget there was a thing called acting. They tricked me, and I am very grateful to them for doing that.

I’d like to end with a quote from the exquisite Jeon Do-yeon, that I found in IMDb:

"I enjoy acting so much that I have no need or desire to be called a great actor. This is partly my personality, but also the fact that I get so absorbed in acting, to where I can't see or think of anything else. I can't tell you what great acting is, but for me, it is to give everything you have with honesty, sincerity and persistence.

When 2009 passed into 2010, I didn’t have time to celebrate the new year. I spent those hours focused on a business project I finally was about to launch--a website called SpeedCine.

I had worked from six am to 11 pm six and a half days a week for a year and a half, and finally it was ready for my early January presentation.  It was a complete realization of my dream.  It worked perfectly. It did everything I had ever hoped it would do.

There was only one problem. Very few people were interested in the service I was providing.

It was a catastrophe. After briefly considering going all out and risking everything, I decided to face reality, cut my losses, and a month later I shut it down.

Since I closed SpeedCine, many wonderful things have come my way I did a lot of publicity writing, which I love (starting my fifth Woody Allen film now). I reestablished my friendship with Errol Morris, who I hadn’t seen in seven years. I reconnected with many other old friends when I went to Toronto to do publicity on Errol’s film “Tabloid.” I got a $1500 data bill from AT&T, and even that was great. Being overcharged by AT&T put me in contact with a lot of interesting people, from a guy at the FCC to a nice women who worked for AT&T’s CEO. And after the heavy traffic that my AT&T posts brought me, twice as many people now read my blog. And I had the honor of working with the brilliant Whit Stillman while he was making his new film “Damsels in Distress,” and met its star, Greta Gerwig, one of my favorite actresses.

Writing this blog was another highlight of 2010. I’ve gradually surrendered to the idea of it being more and more autobiographical. This was a big risk for me. I’d previously thought there would be no reason to read my blog unless there was something involving films or filmmaking in there somewhere, but oddly enough, I have received a lot more praise than criticism for doing this.

When I closed SpeedCine, I moved the clutter away from my desktop Mac and put my synthesizer back up there (it had sat on the floor for eighteen months). I could compose music again. I could fool around with making short films for YouTube.

And my wife appreciated my liberation from the computer monitor. We had a lot more time to enjoy life together.

So one door closed at the beginning of 2010 and many other doors opened. It’s a cliché, but clichés are clichés because they are often true. (Note that the previous sentence is an accurate cliché about clichés.)

The last few years have been very tough for myself and many of my friends, but I embark on 2011 with high hopes. I wish them for all of you as well.

Filled with holiday spirit, I’m re-running my Chanukah/Christmas post from 2009, one of my favorites.   It’s my gift to my new readers who’ve never seen it  and it’s my my gift to me, as I’m feeling pretty lazy at the moment.  For everyone else, I apologize and hope your friends and family took care of you. 

Let’s face it, Chanukah is a really lackluster Christmas substitute. For one thing, very few of us can even pronounce “Chanukah.” While both holidays start with the same two letters, their “Chr” sounds like “Cr” but our “Ch” sounds like a cat getting rid of a hairball. Nobody in my family knew exactly how far to go with their “Ch.” One aunt got so enthusiastic with her “chhhh” that she chhh-ocked a loogey right into the Kugel.

While Christians had scientific evidence that Jesus was born on December 25^th, even though that date had been a pagan celebration centuries before his B-day, Chanukah was based on a totally made-up event: Judah Maccabee’s alleged candle miracle. In case you haven’t heard, this myth was invented hundreds of years after Mr. Maccabee was pushing up the daisies. Even my esteemed Rabbi, Manfred Swarsensky, more or less admitted to me that we picked our holiday out of a hat. I’m sure we Jews would have turned Yom Kippur into a high-flying jubilee if it was in December.

No, Purim is the real gift-giving holiday for Jews, but it comes near Easter, when there are less sales. From a kid’s point of view, Purim kicked Chanukah’s ass. For my goy readers, on Purim you get these noise-makers called gragers that you swing around during the Purim service, every time the rabbi says “Haman” (the Dick Cheney in the Purim backstory). Of course my good friend Mark Harris would pretend he heard wrong and swung his grager every time Rabbi S. said “Esther,” which was a lot. This became contagious, and before too long, we were all giggly, and the Temple was filled with grager-delic pandemonium. As punishment for our horseplay, Swarsensky made us all stay late in Bar Mitzvah class and miss “Batman.”

But as much as I love Purim, I know it wouldn’t have held up against Christmas any more than Chanukah because it has no tree.  Many of my fellow Hebrews coped with tree-envy by getting what they called a “Chanukah Bush.” For me that was like a bad toupee… who did they think they were fooling? Just show me one bush that looks like that…it’s a tree. And if you want to do anything Chanukah-related with it, you should buy nine and use one to set the rest ablaze.

If we had had a Chanukah Bush at our house I know it would have been lame. We would’ve trimmed it with all these Jewish chatchkes, little Menorahs, and six-pointed stars. That’s like putting Billy Graham’s picture under the Mezuzah on the door. If you’re going to have a Christmas Tree, don’t pussy out: go to K-Mart, get some Angels, Rudolphs and Frosties, and be done with it. Snowflakes would be nice. Snowflakes are non-denominational.

But the thing that gives most Chanukah-boosters an inferiority complex is our pathetic holiday music. There are a lot of good Yid musicians, but I guess that they couldn’t get worked up enough about Chanukah, aside from Adam Sandler. The Christians had all the best songwriters, like Irving Berlin. They had Mel Torme singing “The Christmas Song,” we had Allen Sherman singing a parody of “I Have a Little Dreidel.”

But don’t get me started on Dreidels. Am I the only one who thinks this is the dumbest game ever invented? You spin a four-sided top that has the first letters of the Hebrew alphabet on it. And then? How do you win? How do you lose? The game was too damned existential for me. Why was I was spinning the Dreidel? To learn how to spin a top better? That’s not exactly Monopoly. And in any case I had Dreidel-spinning mastered by the time I was five. Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing anybody over five engrossed in a scintillating game of Dreidel. Perhaps that’s why there are Chess tournaments, but no Dreidel tournaments.

So this year I was planning to celebrate Christmas the way Jews have done since ancient times—going to a Chinese restaurant. But my wife—the former Melissa Goldberg—is dragging me out for a hearty Christmas dinner with friends. Bah humbug, I say. I sure as hell hope that the occasion isn’t too jolly or merry or overloaded with a surfeit of good tidings. I don’t like to have Christmas shoved in my face.

But I am bringing my guitar and my Reader’s Digest book of Christmas carols. I sing Christmas carols all year round, not just because they are so beautiful, but also because so many of them are about people who can’t make it home for Christmas. I can relate to that. The only one I refuse to do is “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” I can’t get through that one without busting out bawling.  The song is a wholesome Norman Rockwell portrait of a little kid who comes downstairs and is so sweet and naive that he doesn’t know what the f*ck is going on. I grew up in the Midwest and there was a time when I actually was like that kid, until I got to be nine and started getting neurotic. But little kids today will never have the opportunity to ever experience that kind of purity, the way I did. Instead of hiding down in the living room watching Mommy kissing Santa Claus, they’re up in their bedroom downloading porn.

But as you can tell, I love Christmas for it’s own sake and not just because Chanukah blows. Even when I was alone, thinking of suicide, drowning my troubles in Mogen David, “It’s A Wonderful Life” came on TV to brighten my perspective and make me understand what really matters.

Obviously, Frank Capra was not a Jew.

When people dream of the awards they’d like to receive, some of them think of the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony, the Pulitzer, the SAG or AFI Award, the Golden Palm, the Sundance Jury Award, the Gotham, the Independent Spirit, the National Board of Review, the Booker Prize, the People’s Choice, or the Nobel. Not me.

I want a Golden Globe.

Here are my reasons why I believe that the Golden Globe is the most prestigious award in the world:

Each member of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has a snapshot taken with all potential nominees. How could anyone judge the worth of a potential candidate unless they pose cheek to jowl with them, grinning ear to ear?

The HFPA is the most independent thinking of entertainment awards groups. The other organizations in the prize-giving cabal bestow nominations to the SAME films, like “The Social Network,” “The King’s Speech,” and “Black Swan,” raising legitimate concerns about secret covenants, and backroom deals made in smoky rooms. The HFP proves its autonomy is beyond doubt by nominating films like “The Tourist” and “Burlesque.”

Absence of Payola. Many so-called award-giving bodies give out cheesy handouts to their winners, like the MacArthur, which forks over half a million bucks, and the Nobel, which shells out a cool million. The members of the Hollywood Foreign Press take the millions of dollars they earn through TV rights and properly give it to themselves.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association is the foremost leader in the fight for world rights. The HFPA is currently suing Dick Clark Productions, who has negotiated TV rights to their awards broadcast without their permission, a truly heinous act.

Cocktails are served at the ceremony. Other organizations are fuddy-duddies frozen in the pre-Prohibition era, with old-fashioned thinking that has no bearing on contemporary tastes. Just try bringing a Bud Lite to the the Nobel ceremony, even in a paper bag.

Finally, this is out of date, but still relevant to the illustrious stature of the Globes:

Every single member of the HFPA used to get a “gift” from all potential nominees. Sadly, this practice ended a few years ago, but it will always remain the historical firmament for the thousands of past nominations and awards.

Recently, The Wrap uncovered an angry letter from ex-HFPA publicist Michael Russell, flinging numerous accusations against HFPA President Phillip Berk, one of the most respected and best-loved members of the Hollywood community.  Even more preposterously, Russell accused Berk and the HFPA of unspecified “unsavory business practices.”   I have no idea what  those so-called “unsavory practices” might be, and reject his complaints as the whinings of a disgruntled former employee.

Nothing Russell or anyone could ever say will interfere with my dream of getting a Golden Globe, or even being invited to the ceremony.  If I could only hold that  mighty icon of artistic achievement in my hands for a few moments, I know I would not only die happily, I would live forever.

The thought of being on stage with Ricky Gervais, one of my favorite comedians and actors makes me giddy.  He is a genius at portraying clueless idiots with grandiose delusions of their importance.

Sadly, I must accept the fact that I am never going to get nominated for a Golden Globe. After all, very few people have the slightest idea who I am.

Maybe I should go on “Dancing with the Stars.”

The release of the new 18-disc Elia Kazan box set, which includes Kent Jones and Martin Scorsese’s new documentary, “A Letter to Elia,” has got me thinking about the evolution of my thoughts about the director of such classic films as “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,”On the Waterfront,” ”East of Eden,” “America, America,” the interpreter and informal dramaturge for great American playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, and the elicitor of legendary performances from Marlon Brando, James Dean and so many others.

Kazan is all these things, but he is also a source of deep resentment from many, an anger that is dimly understood by a younger generation of movie fans.

As most people who read this blog know, in the early fifties Kazan was a “friendly witness” for the House Committee of Un-American Activities (HUAC), giving names of people in the film industry who were Communists. While there were dozens of others who did the same thing, people lost their livelihoods because of his revelations, although Kazan has always denied this. In any case he lost many long-time friends and was widely denounced.

But if he hadn’t willingly testified, the course of his life would have been irrevocably changed, and it’s impossible to say whether “On the Waterfront” (written by his fellow name-namer Budd Schulberg) would have ever been made, let alone “East of Eden,” “Baby Doll,” or “A Face in the Crowd.” What would not working with Kazan have meant for James Dean’s development as an actor? Would Kazan have still made “Splendor in the Grass,” a movie I loved, after the blacklist ended? In light of what he did, does this matter? It does to me.

In 1971, blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo directed the film “Johnny Got His Gun,” based on his 1939 novel. As the blacklist officially ended in 1960 when Kirk Douglas put Trumbo’s name on the script for “Spartacus,” the publicity for the film centered on the blacklist. This piqued my interest in the period and when I got to college I did some research and wrote an article, “Celluloid Sedition? The Strange Case of the Hollywood Ten,” for the local film magazine, The Velvet Light Trap.  The more I studied it, the more the moral issues consumed me.  What would I have done?  It is so easy to judge people when history doesn’t  force hard choices on you.

HUAC actually held two investigations, one in the late forties and one in the early fifties. During the first one, eleven men were called in to answer the question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" The first, Bertolt Brecht, left the country the next day. The others, one of which was Trumbo, who became known as “The Hollywood Ten” refused to answer, and went to jail. After their release, all of them—except director Edward Dmytryk, who agreed to cooperate--came out barred from working in from industry. The blacklist had begun.

I doubt these men had any idea they would face such harsh consequences. If he had known, I doubt that Ring Lardner, Jr. would have responded to the “are you now…” question with, “I could answer… but if I did I would hate myself in the morning.” With the possible exception of the pompous Communist bigshot John Howard Lawson, I believe the Hollywood Ten were essentially innocents. I don’t think they thought it was possible in America to go to prison or lose their ability to work simply by practicing their rights to speech and assembly.

By the second round of HUAC hearings in 1952, everybody knew the deal: cooperate or be totally screwed. But this time the deal was much more strenuous than simply answering whether you’d been in the party. You also had to be a snitch. Many of the accused had renounced the party—or had never even been a member--so they were actually eager to talk about themselves. But the new rules were that once you said anything about yourself, you had to name names. It was Kafkaesque. Academy Award-winning John Garfield was a left-winger who rejected the party, but as a non-party member claimed he had no names to offer, so his career was ruined anyway, and he died of a heart attack soon after. Unless you were a ranting reactionary like Adolph Menjou, it was either lose your career or, in the eyes of many, lose your soul. Arthur Miller, who stood up to the committee, later wrote about the cruel twisted logic of those years in “The Crucible.”

Still, there were a range of options within this inquisition.  On one edge, you could  deliver a fiery speech denouncing the committee, and seal your fate;  and on the other margin you could really go to town like screenwriter Martin Berkeley, who identified a whopping 162 people.  In the areas in between there were people who desperately struggled to cooperate but ended up being blacklisted anyway, like Garfield and  Larry Parks.  If you wanted to be absolutely certain that your career was secure, you needed to plant yourself  firmly in the collaboration  zone.  And this is what so many people condemned about Kazan.  He was thought to be too overtly friendly, an opportunist who gave it up without a fight.  He saw it differently, of course.  Why lose your life to protect people you disavow?  The problem with this argument is that many people who had turned against the Communists still refused to turn any of them in.

The blacklist was a brutish, nasty thing which destroyed lives, often slowly, through alcoholism. Divorces, strokes and heart attacks were common. Whether you were able to work or not, the suffering could eat through your life like a fever, as you helplessly watched your friends crumble into despair and ruin. As Kazan would later say about himself, Hollywood folk define themselves by their jobs: without work, they don’t feel like they exist. In the face of all this misery, Kazan’s reign as the king of Hollywood caused the rage against him to fester. Of course, it was American hysteria, HUAC and the cowardice of the studios that created the blacklist. Kazan had nothing to do with that and he was only one of dozens who gave names to the committee. His unforgivable sin was being the most talented and celebrated person to cooperate.

Lillian Hellman, who was defiant to the committee, wrote a book on the period, which she entitled “Scoundrel Time,” but Trumbo, who paid a bigger price than most, gave a famous 1970 speech to the Writer’s Guild where he said there were no heroes and villains during the blacklist, only victims. His words made as many people angry as it pacified others, but it did signal a new era in thinking about the era.

As the decades passed, many of the blacklisted people died, memories faded, and the general consensus about Kazan became forgiveness. Still, when Martin Scorsese and Karl Malden lobbied to get him a special Academy Award in 1999 (when he was 90), Kazan’s icon Marlon Brando refused to present it, and Robert De Niro, star of Kazan’s “The Last Tycoon,” replaced him. The audience of his Hollywood peers gave Kazan a prolonged standing ovation, but the TV camera focused on Nick Nolte, grimly sitting on his hands. After almost fifty years, Nick Nolte was still pissed off at Kazan for something that happened when Nolte was eleven.  I have worked with Nick Nolte and love him, but what the hell kind of choices did he have to make when he was eleven and  in the years since?  Would he readily walk away from ever being a movie actor again?

Shortly after I came to New York, I was at a party after a New York Film Festival screening. Somebody came over to me and said, “Reid, I have somebody I know you’ll like to meet.” I turned around and this gentleman extended his hand warmly. “I’m Elia Kazan,” he said. What ensued was a discussion about the movie we had just seen. I could use this space to invent something about how insightful he was, but the truth is I don’t remember a single word he said, only how courtly and dignified he was. I wasn’t nervous at all talking to The Great Man, even though I was in awe of the art he had created. He set me completely at ease, and seemed genuinely interested in what I had to say. A man can be a genius, a legend, susceptible to human frailty, and many other things, but when he stands inches away from you, he is a human being, nothing more, nothing less. Any thoughts of the blacklist couldn’t have been further from my mind.

I hesitate to add another syllable to the cluster of gossip, conjecture and rumor surrounding Ronni Chasen’s murder.

I worked with her on a few movies some time ago, but I didn’t know her well. But it’s definitely more shocking when someone you knew even slightly becomes a victim to something as heinous as this. I keep flashing back to what she was like, her unstoppable positivity. Why her of all people?

It’s tragic when someone dies in the prime of life, worse when it happens violently, but worse of all if it becomes a tabloid story. I went through this in an intensely personal way when Adrienne Shelly was murdered. She had been my best friend for many years (although we weren’t as close at that time), so not only did I and all her friends have to deal with the fact that our dear friend was gone in such a savage way, we also had the media nosing around for details. What would have been an anguished but private affair, became something tremendously more painful.

When you add some kind of show business connection to a real-life ongoing murder mystery, it’s irresistible to the media. If Ronni had been an accountant from Sherman Oaks, her case would obviously not have been subject to this kind of intense scrutiny. The media would report it and quickly move on, until the police found a suspect, and even then it would be a small local story. But with Ronni, who wasn’t even famous and only worked with famous people, certain parts of the media have laid siege to her story.

In one sense it’s a positive thing that the media is casting an intense spotlight on the case, so the pressure is kept on the police for the murderer or murderers to be found, but for me the reportage has stepped way over the line into exploitation and her privacy is being invaded in gratuitous ways. Subtle inferences are being drawn, and questions are being floated. Could Ronni have had some kind of secret life? Unless the police find out the murder had something to do with money, it’s none of our business how much she had, or for God’s sake, how much of it was in real estate versus investments or whatever. But this is the way things work in the age of TMZ and Radar.com.

The other night I watched a very young woman reporter on CNN outraged that she couldn’t see Ronni’s coroner’s report--or even worse—the coroner’s report of the “person of interest.” She was indignant, and argued that the people of Beverly Hills were scared and they had a right to know the truth. Her disingenuous claim of civic-mindedness disgusted me, as obviously it was all about her perverse sense of entitlement that the police owed her a meaningless “scoop.” (If there’s anything that’s not a mystery, it’s what technically caused Ronni’s death.)

I’m not going to say that all of the coverage has been disrespectful; many journalists have found a very good tone for covering this. But there are a lot of cynical people who are using the brutal killing of a really nice woman as a ratings grabber. Shame on them. And double shame on them because a lot of them knew her personally.

Ronni’s murder has become a media event, and there is more than a little irony in that because her life’s work was about handling the media, understanding the way it works and trying to control it for the benefit of her clients. Damage control can be a big part of the job. But one of the saddest things that every publicist learns is that there are some stories you simply can’t control, no matter how much you want to get your client out of harm’s way. We are trained to get the entire story out as quickly as possible, but if the story can be painted as lurid and the resolution to the story is unknown it just keeps going and going, no matter how clever or experienced you are.

I wish there was a publicist who had the magic wand to protect Ronni as well as she did so many of her clients over the years.

In my post on “The Naked Gun,” I wrote about Leslie Nielsen’s adventures with a rubber toy that made fart noises.  It was called “Le Tooter,”  and he always had it in his pocket, at the ready.  He said it changed his life.  It made people see him as a silly guy, not some kind of imposing dramatic actor.  I never found out whether it predated his transition to comedic roles, but certainly the fact that he was deadpan funny was something that the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trio revealed to the world, not something they created. 

What can you say about someone who enjoyed standing straight-faced while making rude noises in elevators? 

That he loved making people laugh, and he will be very, very much missed.

Built in the twenties, the building had been the lavish home of the owners of a posh downtown hotel, until bad times turned it into a boarding house. Luckily, or unluckily, even worse times made its real estate value plummet to the level that filmmakers Jim Klein and Julia Reichert could buy it, and fill every inch of it with young people hungry to do grass roots political media work.

They called it Media House.

It was enormous. The main floor had a huge living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and an enclosed porch that Julia and Jim used for the office of New Day Films, the feminist distribution company they founded to release their movies, as well as those of some of their filmmaker friends. The second floor had five bedrooms, and a sleeping enclosed porch, which is where my buddy Andy Garrison lived. The third floor was an attic with two maid’s rooms: one was a sound studio and the second was Cathy Cartwright’s room. (In lieu of a fire escape, Cathy had a trusty axe and a rope ladder for safety.) The basement had a toilet the Media Housers converted into a darkroom, and Tony remodeled a lot of the rest of the basement into a lavish bedroom for himself. That’s probably why Tony was the first one to hear me when I arrived in the middle of the night.

In general seven or eight people lived at Media House, but when I got to Dayton they were gearing up for a big project they called “Summer Lights,” and there were even more people who came in just for that. It was kind of one of those little cars at the Circus where the door opens and more and more clowns come out, but in this case you could sit on the couch in the living room listening to NPR and be engulfed by an endless cascade of youthful political types. In addition to Tony, Andy and Cathy, I’m told that some of the other people that lived there around them were Sherry Novick, Eric Johnson, Tricia Hart (married to Eric), and Barbara Tuss.

Everybody put in all their earnings except Julia and Jim who put in part and left the rest for New Day Films. There was only one house checking account. Everybody was responsible for certain chores like cleaning the bathroom, shopping, doing the books, paying bills, etc., and most assisted in various ways with Julia and Jim’s filmmaking. They each got a weekly allowance of around $12 a week to do something fun like get a beer or see a movie. As alien as all this share-the-wealth mishegas was to me, the atmosphere didn’t scream POLITICAL COLLECTIVE!   It wasn’t a super serious place, more like “Friends,” with a dollop of Marxism thrown in to spice up some episodes. It was a relaxed place to hang out and they were kind enough to let me do that all the time. I do remember a fight I had with Jim when the Time/Newsweek covers came out on Bruce Springsteen. He said Springsteen was all hype, and I—who had been listening to the first album for a long time—maintained that he more than deserved all the praise he was getting. Jim was mainly expressing his suspicion of media flim-flammery (soon to be my profession), but I played him the record and he just didn’t get it, and that really puzzled me. (Of course, if you remember Holly Near, then you know who was Number One on the Hit Parade at Media House.) Jim himself was a wonderful musician, and some of my happiest memories of those days involve listening to him play the piano.

I must admit I thought it was a pretty sweet deal for Julia and Jim. Everybody paid, and I assumed they owned the place. They got the mortgage paid, cooking, cleaning, and assistance on their films, etc. Their new film, “Union Maids,” was going to come out and it was going to have their names on it, and they would derive the most benefit. But since then I’ve reflected and I see that it took great vision, commitment and risk for them to put the whole thing together, and every single person, myself included, got a tremendous amount out of being a part of it. Many of the people who lived at Media House have gone on to great success as filmmakers in their own right.

The boogeyman for Media House’s “Summer Lights” project was the evil Dayton Power & Light company, and its nefarious utility-related crimes and ecological misdemeanors. I believe that DP&L had recently instituted a policy of flushing the toilets when poor people were taking showers, and they had drawn up plans for a mini-nuclear power plant in the PermaFilm room at Twyman’s. Honestly, I didn’t care much about DP&L—as I would soon be on a different power grid--I just wanted to be friends with the Media Housers, meet girls, and have something to do, so I passionately signed on to the anti-DP&L cause. Viva la Revolucion!

“Summer Lights” was a series of shows put on local parks in “working class” areas. Before the shows, members of the Media House contingent would pick a poor neighborhood, and go door-to-door, like left-wing Jehovah’s Witnesses. They spent time with people, got to know them, listening to their concerns, taking their photos, while, not so incidentally, peppering them with their anti-DP&L shpiel. The Media Housers treated these people with real respect. I doubt many young people came by, listened to them, and asked to take their pictures. It was good for everyone, as the young people received training in photography, among other media skills, and got valuable life experience.

When it came time for the “Summer Lights” show, the Media Housers leafleted the whole neighborhood, and put up a huge screen in the park so that all the locals who agreed to be photographed became “stars,” their giant faces gleaming down at their friends. It was the kind of thing that could make you feel really good.

Unfortunately there was a live component to the “Summer Lights” events, and I’m embarrassed to say, it was “Guerrilla Theatre,” featuring me. (Does anybody use the term “Guerrilla Theatre” anymore? Nowadays, all you hear is “Guerilla Marketing.”) I played a character called “Reddy Kilowatt,” after the cartoon corporate mascot for the electrical industry. The real Reddy was just shoes, gloves and a head, connected by bolts of electricity. He was always smiling, and I could never figure out why, because with that much juice shooting through him, Reddy was a goner. My Reddy was just me in a t-shirt with a star on it and a top hat who held an electric light bulb. I don’t remember if the bulb lit up, but I do know that when I was a kid I had an Uncle Fester toy light bulb from the Addams Family that did, so I understood the underlying technology for this kind of prop. (Julia and Andy claim to still have pictures of me in this getup, so they know.) I don’t remember, but it’s likely that I represented big bad DP&L. Cathy Cartwright’s 12-year-old sister, Nancy, who would later become the voice of Bart Simpson, played Margaret from “Dennis the Menace.” Maybe somebody from Media House can explain what Margaret from “Dennis the Menace” had to do with Dayton utility issues? If we could have seen the future, maybe Nancy should have played Mr. Burns at “Summer Lights,” and I should have played Margaret, or even better, Ralph Wiggum.

And then there was—I’m sad to report--a song about solar energy. Come on! Everybody join in!

It took a little while for me to figure out who was involved with who in the community that centered around Media House. What fine young lady was already in a relationship or gay? Who might possibly be interested in me? It wasn’t like it was that big a group. It was more like a bar at closing time: choose or lose. I’m sure that thoughts like these never once occurred to high-minded guys like Tony and Andy, but they consumed me during my hours of toil at Twyman’s. There were two attractive feministas I had crushes on who were willing to make a pilgrimage to the Rosefelt bachelor lair. The first one came over on a Saturday afternoon. My memory is that we had tea and talked about how swell it was in Mao’s China. The second one came for an evening movie. For some reason, I brought home “Casino Royale,” which I hadn’t seen and still haven’t because we didn’t get past the credits. So the second one, whose name was Judy, was now my girlfriend, and the other one was really hurt. I think it meant something totally different to her to be invited over for tea and Mao than it did to me, and I betrayed that. The truth is that there was a part of me that was sensitive and responded to her sweetness, and another part that was selfish and only thought about myself, and Judy was by far the hottest of the two, and therefore there was no contest.

Not that Judy was any intellectual slouch. She had just come back to Dayton (where she grew up) to be near her mother after her father died. A friend of hers had joked that some filmmakers from Antioch had moved to Dayton to organize the masses, and she decided to check it out. But Judy’s involvement in “Summer Lights” came from a perspective that was the complete opposite of mine--for her, it wasn’t political enough. She had issues with, in her words, “Alinsky-style organizing.” She talked like that.

It’s very difficult for me to look back on those days from the jaded perspective of today and figure out what I actually thought about Judy’s politics or those of anybody at the Media House. What ideas did I honestly share with them and to what extent was I bluffing to be liked and accepted? After all, I had been a true believer for a lot of my college years, definitely saw myself on the left and still basically do. It’s too facile, and actually wrong to say in retrospect that I completely rejected everything, just because I’m quite sure I didn’t swallow it whole. In essence I was on the same side of the fence as everybody, just a lot closer to the fence than they were. They were way out there. I think the following anecdote illustrates this very well:

When I left for New York, the Media House people kindly let me store my bigger stuff in their basement. A few months later, when I returned to Dayton to get everything, I found out that they had given away my TV, and had cut the lock on my beloved bicycle and had started using it, which would have been fine if they’d asked, or at least taken care of it. I discovered it buried in a snowdrift. I went everywhere on that bike all through college, kept it oiled, tuned, and gleaming, and now it was basically a junker, capable of transportation, nothing more. And my TV! Were they nuts? I never signed on to their stinkin’ Mickey Mao Club! In fairness, they did consent to drive me across town, so I could go into these strangers’ living room and cart the TV away like a repo man.

This was the essence of the difference. I would never in a billion years have even thought of actually living at Media House. Sharing?  I was too selfish, and didn’t feel guilty about that at all.  I could talk the left-wing talk, but ultimately I didn’t believe it enough in order to plunge in fully.  So what was my politics at that age?  What was my anything?   If you cut through all the shiny surfaces of  everything I was  trying to project at 22 years old, you would find inside somebody who had no idea who he was, and was trying to keep the show moving fast enough so that nobody else could figure that out. 

The Media House collective lasted, in various configurations, for eight years, from 1972 to 1980, and then, like so many things, it ended. People scattered, and the house was ultimately sold. Tony went to Philly, Andy went to Austin, and Sherry went to the Bay area. Julia and Jim divorced in 1986. Judy went all the way to France, had kids, changed her name to Judith, and wrote a book, Feminism in the Heartland, on the women’s movement in Dayton. The film that the people in the Media House were working on while I was there, “Union Maids,” which Tony and Sherry shot, ended up being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. I designed the ads at my drawing board at New Yorker Films. Julia and Jim would receive a second Academy Award nomination in 1984 for their last joint collaboration, “Seeing Red,” which my PR firm represented. Julia has continued to make award-winning films with her new partner, Steven Bognar, including the Emmy-winning “Lion in the House,” and the Academy Award-nominated “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant.” Jim has worked steadily as an editor and directed the features “Letter to the Next Generation” and “Taken for a Ride.” But for a lot of these people, the bonds that were forged at Media House have never faded, and they continue to collaborate. For example, Jim edited all three of Tony’s films, and Tony came to Ohio to help Jim edit his last two movies.

You can even hear Jim’s piano playing on the soundtrack of “The Last Truck.”

His name was Tony Heriza. Like me, he was a very recent college grad, from Antioch College in Yellow Springs. Julia and Jim were teachers there, and now Tony and a lot of their students and others were living as a collective in this home. They called it “Media House.” They all worked straight jobs and contributed their salaries to the collective, and were mutually involved in political projects in their off-hours. And in a weird fluke, Tony was also starting a job at Twyman Films the next day, just as I was.

The next morning, I met Jim and Julia and a lot of the others. My immediate impression, was that everybody was very nice, and pretty similar to a lot of the people I had been acquainted with in Madison. The right politics, and sort of defined by having the right politics, in the same way that some people define themselves by their jobs or their artistic pursuits. These were people who appeared to think that if they did some good things, they could make the world better. My close friends back home had similar politics, but they were more the kind of people who didn’t think things were going to get better unless you burned the whole thing down. The Media House people were really smart, had admirable goals, and weren’t cynical. But by then, I‘d been through my Jewish period, my rock band period, my musical theatre period, my political action period, and now had moved on to the filmmaking and not terribly political period of my life. But there were some pretty girls in the circle of left-wing action around Media House, and I knew that I was going to be a very lonely guy during my sojourn in Dayton if I didn’t join in. Choosing whether to be a Media Houser was a non-question. It provided an instant circle of friends.

Twyman’s was an easy walk from Media House and Tony and I were there in minutes. I learned that Media House wasn’t in suburbia at all, in fact the neighborhood was kind of crummy. (To prove Media House’s street cred, Jim proudly told me there was a crack den next door.) Twyman’s was a modest two-story building in front of a slightly rundown street, next door to a McDonald’s.

I had always thought that Twyman’s was a pointless company, for me anyway. I never booked films for my film club from them once, and I didn’t know anybody in the sixteen film societies in Madison who did either. What was the point? They didn’t have a single film that wasn’t available somewhere else, often for less money. Their attempted marketing stratagem, which didn’t bowl me over, was that their prints were better. I didn’t find this terribly compelling.

Tony’s job was downstairs in their projector rental shop, as I would, during the half of the day I wasn’t designing the catalog. It was very hard for me to find my bearings and be there, in a new city, working my first real job. All these weirdos worked there. I never had to deal with people like Elva Mae the accountant with her huge magnifying glass always pressed in front of her face. She was this big eye. It was a huge comedown to realize how little money was left after they took the taxes out of my hefty $160 weekly check.

The film bookers sat around a circular table. The phones rang incessantly and they would spin the booking books back and forth like a lurching top. Left! Right! Right! Left! And the phone would be ringing and ringing. They’d have the phones in one hand as they spun this hoop of doom. If Dante had taken a gander at this instrument of torture there’s no way he would have been able to deal. “No! No! Take it away, please! Of course, what I didn’t know then, is that I would one day be toiling at this whirling dreidel of damnation.

You had to sit outside Alan Twyman’s office for awhile waiting for your meeting. He went to offices in New York and elsewhere and they would always make him wait, so he figured that was how it was done with important people. What he never figured out was that the people in those offices actually had jobs. All the time I worked there I couldn’t really see what he did. There was an office manager, Harold Bowman, who handled the staff. I suppose that he had to make the deals with the various companies that gave Twyman their movies. That couldn’t be more than a few days work a year. So he did some thumb-twiddling in there until he felt sufficient time had passed for you to be summoned into his office. And he didn’t mind if you looked in there and saw that he was virtually motionless. Perhaps he was pondering some new concepts in print enhancement.

Alan was very good-looking, carefully groomed, snappily dressed, sort of prissy, with a pronounced self-importance. He acted like he fancied himself a big-time film mogul, the lord of this third-tier sector of the motion picture industry. He was always distant, but sometimes he could have a dry wit. The firm was passed down from his Dad, also called Alan Twyman. I think one of them was called Alan P. Twyman, and the other one was Alan T. Twyman. The elder was referred to by the staff as “Mr. T.” Once there was absolute pandemonium when Twyman Senior turned up for a visit. Elva Mae would started bellowing, “Mr. T’s in the parking lot! “Mr. T’s in the parking lot!”

The younger Twyman had taken over recently, and was executing some big plans to take the company into the future. In addition to my redesign of the catalog, he’d hired this guy named John Geoghegan as a copywriter. Geoghegan was a slickster and had some kind of academic credentials, as he had been a professor somewhere. I was jealous of him because he was going to write all the time, while I was going to be a designer half the day, and spend the other half in the rental shop. My design room was upstairs in the room that housed The Permafilm Machine, the technology that gave Twyman its amazing prints . What was PermaFilm? I never found out, but at Twyman’s it was somewhere between the formula for Coca-Cola and the Holy Grail—and boy did it stink! All day long I breathed in PermaFilm vapors, which couldn’t have done me any good.

I rented a basement apartment in the shadow of a highway for $100 a month plus a $25 security deposit. The first night there, I had to get up to go to the bathroom and I turn on the lights. The entire floor was covered with huge roaches. They had scurried out in all directions from under my bed. There must have been over a hundred of them, and their pals kept coming out from under the bed. How was I going to live in this awful place?

The answer came the next day when I came back from work and found the back door to the apartment lying on the floor. Gone was my radio shack cassette player, and everything electronic. The worst loss was my electric shaver. That night I hiked to the local 7-11 and bought a cheap Bic disposable razor. I’d never used one of them before, and my first attempt wasn’t pretty. I went to work the next morning with four or five deep slices on my face.

When I came home the next day I saw there was an apartment available across the street. The landlady lived nearby and I signed a lease immediately. It was huge, on the second floor, and had a little balcony that overlooked this well-tended flower garden. Of course, this was pricey, $125 a month, and meant that I lost my $25 deposit to the Roach-and-Ripoff Hotel, but it was well worth it.

Around this time I took the bus back to Madison to pick up the stuff I couldn’t fit in the duffle bag. The plan was that my on-and-off girlfriend Barbara (referred to at the beginning of  this blog) was going to drive down to Dayton with me, spend some time, and then drive the car back afterwards. Unfortunately she took this time to tell me that she was breaking up with me. It was traumatic, but in retrospect she picked the right time. Very soon I was going to be in New York City and she was going to be on the west coast. But it was tough to forego the romantic trip I had in mind, and drive back to Dayton with my mom instead.

Sometimes Twyman would come upstairs and talk to me while I was working. Once he pointed out that there was a guy downstairs getting a blowjob in his car.  He went on to explain  that Dayton was considered the prostitution capital of Ohio and men drove there from all over the state to sample its delights. As I said in last week’s post, the hookers would stand by the bridge and wave at the cars. So you know what the city did while I was there? They outlawed waving in Dayton. I am not making this up. I remember reading a newspaper editorial saying that this law might make people think that Dayton wasn’t a friendly town.

One day, I was hauled into Harold Bowman’s office. He looked me up and down and asked me a ton of tough questions. I had no idea what I had done wrong. It eventually came out that Elva Mae, probably jealous, told him she caught me sleeping up in the PermaFilm room. I proclaimed my innocence, but it was my word against hers and she’d been there a hundred years. And who knows? Maybe I did conk out after breathing too many PermaFilm fumes.

Anyway, after that I was taken out of the rental shop and put to work booking movies at the spinning round table. Whenever things get so bad I can’t take it, I think of those days, renting Chaplin shorts to high school teachers. Show business is so exciting.

Twyman was always talking about “exclusive product.” We had to get some films that nobody else had. Eventually he bought a Mexican film called “Chac.” It was a good film, but I didn’t really see how it was going to make a lot of difference for Twyman. Having “Chac” didn’t seem like much competition with, for example, the entire Paramount library.

I had planned to spend the summer of 1975 in Dayton, but ended up staying until Christmas, as I wanted to save up a nest egg. As I mentioned before, the Twyman Catalog helped me score a freelance job at UA Classics and my eventual career launch at New Yorker Films.

A few years ago I read that Alan Twyman had died. It brought back a lot of memories and made me really sad, as I knew that Alan was a bachelor and the Twyman line would end with him. What happened to Twyman’s? While writing this I did some Googling and I couldn’t find anything except my reference to the company’s name in last week’s blog, and some quotes from Alan in tributes to Raymond Rohauer. As far as the internet goes, that’s it. Twyman Films is gone, aside from my memories and the memories of all the other people who worked there. Maybe little companies like Twyman’s aren’t the biggest stories in film history, but it did last through two generations and that should mean something. It should mean a lot. Alan Twyman was a good guy who loved and knew a lot about classic films and deserves better.

I close my eyes and I am up on the second floor in front of my drafting table. Behind me the PermaFilm machine clicks and hums. Downstairs, the film booking carousel is spinning. 16mm reels are packed into heavy duty boxes and prepared for mailing. John Geoghegan is writing something that amuses him. Tony is showing a school teacher how to thread a 16mm projector. Elva Mae verifies that the accounts are all in order. Alan Twyman is thinking about the future, and Mr. T. is in the parking lot reminding us of the passage of time.

Me during my summer in Dayton, Ohio . Was I ever that young?

Hitchhiking wasn’t supposed to be like this. In the movies you got out of one car, stuck out your thumb and before long the next car comes along, the driver says, “jump in!” and you’re Kerouac-ing your merry way. Yeah! That’s the glory of the open road! You weren’t supposed to be standing for three hours on some deserted highway at some unknown location outside Toledo.

I wasn’t supposed to be hitchhiking. Weeks before I had a ride set up that was going to take me right after my home in Madison, Wisconsin to New York City as soon as I graduated. Literally on Friday before the Sunday I was going, I got a call from a guy named Alan Twyman who I’d met at a Job Fair. He ran a film distribution company in Dayton and he was offering me a job designing his catalog. I knew his company but I had rarely rented from them. He didn’t stock anything I couldn’t get anywhere else. But he seemed like a nice guy and the company was reputable. I was really excited about going to New York, but I decided to be practical, take a few months and make a few bucks. And isn’t the mark of a middle class kid the ability to postpone pleasure?

My film grad student friend Serafina Bathrick knew some filmmakers in Dayton named Julia Reichert and Jim Klein. They had made a highly regarded documentary called “Growing Up Female,” thus hitting the jackpot feministically-wise by being one of the first films out of the gate on the topic. For some reason, they lived in Dayton, of all places. Anyway, Fina called them and they were nice enough to let me spend a few nights at their house until I found someplace to live. So I had an address and a phone number.

I asked my friend who was going to take me to New York to take me as far as Toledo. So there I was, standing in this Beckettian nowhere-land, it was all my idea, I was hungry, and it was going to be dark soon. I figured it was time to pick up my trusty duffel bag and start walking. Eventually I had to reach a town or a house, right?

Well, no. You can drive on a highway going 60 or 70 and sometimes you don’t see anything for a long time. I estimated I was going about 5 MPH. Every now and then a car would come by and I’d stick out my thumb, but nobody ever even slowed down. I was going to have to suck it up, be patient, and keep going.

It was then I saw the fire. Somewhere in the distance there was something on fire. Maybe a house burning down? That would be wonderful. There would be firemen and families crying. They could throw one of those big blankets around me like they do in the movies for some reason. Maybe the firemen bring them with them? I could sure use a blanket, because I was freezing. And maybe they would have something to eat? It wouldn’t have to be fancy, even a peanut-and-jelly sandwich would do. Maybe some hot cocoa or cider served up from a thermos? That would really hit the spot.

But you know the way it is when you’re walking on some highway in the middle of the night outside Toledo and you see a fire? It may look like that fire is right next to you, but if you really believe that, let me assure you: you are wrong. You can walk and walk and walk and you won’t get anywhere near it. If I didn’t get a move on, the fire could go out and the fireman could leave and the weeping families would head out to spend the night with friends or at a reasonably-priced hotel. They would definitely take the blankets, the sandwiches and the cider with them. It was time to start running. I was 22 and in good shape and this kind of thing was still possible, even while toting a duffel bag.

But it wasn’t a house that was burning; it was a bonfire. Three idiots were burning leaves and other crap in a huge pile. In the middle of the night.

They were two boys and a girl, younger than me, probably 18. Farm kids, for sure. “Who the hell are you?” one of the boys asked me, a very reasonable question under the circumstances. I dropped my duffel bag and sat down on the ground next to them. They offered me a beer and I told them my story. They were extremely impressed. By my stupidity. Apparently there was a lot more nowhere ahead of me on that highway than my pinheaded college-educated brain could ever imagine. What the hell did I think I was doing? I would definitely have spent the night in some ditch. Or worse. They were in a very isolated place and there was no way I would ever have seen them if they hadn’t been sitting out that night in that field burning trash. Just call me a lucky guy.

But they were nice, and one of the kids, the one who was with the girl, had a guitar. I played a few Dylan and Beatle songs and he decided I was okay. He and his girlfriend took me inside and got me something to eat. She was the nice one. She was the one who suggested that they drive me to the bus station in Toledo. Of course in the movies they let you stay the night, and then it either becomes a horror movie or a Sam Shepard play, or preferably, the girl (who was very cute, by the way) would sneak into my room in the middle of the night and tell me I had to save her and we must run away together immediately. But driving me to the bus station was still pretty cool. I could live with that.

They knew the schedule, so I got there not long before the bus left. And here was another movie: me bidding a fond farewell to my newfound friends who I would never see again, headin’ out on the lonesome road again—a ramblin’ guy.

It must have been about 3 am when I got into the bus station in downtown Dayton. I called a cab to Julia and Jim’s house. Before we drove across a bridge I saw a pack of prostitutes, waving at us (more about this next week). It was sort of like a Fellini movie, only in Dayton, not Rome, which made it less scintillating, and I’m sure, less worthy of subtitling.

Julia and Jim lived in this suburban house on this nondescript street. This is where left-wing filmmakers resided? This was the revolution? This wasn’t the kind of place a guy like me wanted to be. This was my parents’ house. This is the kind of place you wanted to leave as soon as you can and go to New York City. And it was a good-sized spread. Those two must have a houseful of kids. Yuck! I had to get my own apartment as soon as possible.

All the lights were off of course. I tap-tap-tapped on the door but nobody answered. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to wake them up, but I didn’t want to spend the night on the porch either. So I just kept tapping softly. This was exactly like the movie scenes where the guy throws pebbles at the upstairs window of his lady love. He wants her to hear him, but he doesn’t want her parents to find out he’s there. If you want to be a successful romantic guy in the movies you have to have the delicacy and aim of Mariano Rivera and know a little something about physics. Wind shear. Got to get it just right or you’ll be in an “Animal House” movie and break the window. Anyway, this was the kind of balance I was striving for, to get inside without being perceived as an asshole who thumps on the door like the Gestapo.

Finally the door opened and this guy welcomed me in. He was the kind of person you like the minute you lay eyes on him. “You must be Reid,” he said, extending his hand, smiling warmly. “I’m Tony.” He was fully dressed. I hadn’t woke him up at all. He had probably been up reading a book by some important woman writer like Kate Millett, or judging by the house, Betty Crocker.

“How long have you been sitting out here?” he asked. “Why didn’t you knock louder? ”

As I mentioned in last week’s post, I got to New York in the winter of 1975 with a duffel bag, a hideous suit, $2000, a graphic design portfolio, and high hopes built on a bedrock of terror, as in “what the hell would I do if I didn’t make it in New York and had to go back home?”

But I realized it would take more than money to keep me here. A town is never your own until you fill it with friends. I had to do that somehow. The obvious thing was to start with people I knew from home that were living here.

The first person I called was Pam, a good friend of my ex-girlfriend Barbara. Over coffee at Reggio on MacDougal, she told me she could never get the two of us together. “She was so beautiful, so glowing with life and wonder,” she explained. “And you….weren’t.” Ouch.

I was a little dumbfounded by the offhand cruelty of Pam’s remark, but on the long subway ride back to Park Slope, I realized that Pam had taught me an important lesson. Now that I was here, I wasn’t going to be held back by the way people saw me back home—I could be anything I wanted to be. It was square one. New York was just like Jewish summer camp.

I remember when I got to Herzl Camp in northern Wisconsin at age 16 with my long hair and red Gibson SG, that it didn’t matter what the girls back at Monona Grove High School thought of me. When I got up on the stage of the auditorium and started playing The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Younger Girl,” I was shocked to discover that I could be sexy. Being good at sports didn’t matter at Jewish Camp. Crooning pop songs, knowing a few Mickey Katz jokes, and being an intellectual poseur did. And after the few week session ended, I went back to Monona with a lot more spring in my step.

New York was going to be my new Herzl, my Aliyah, as it were. Nobody knew me in the Big City and therefore I could pretend to be anything and then maybe I’d really become whatever I was making up. Or maybe New York’s alchemy would wash over me and I’d just become something I wasn’t clever enough to think up by myself. If I willed it, it would be no dream.

But where to start?

That question began to be answered when I got the job at New Yorker Films. Even though I wasn’t being paid squat, I still worked at one of the leading companies distributing foreign films in the USA. I got invited to parties at places like the French Consulate, and Goethe House, and the New York Film Festival. All I needed was to look presentable and there were endless opportunities to meet all kinds of people. And the more people I talked to, the more lists I got on. After a few years I had a game to get through the entire New York Film Festival without paying for a single evening meal. I would have done it too, if it weren’t for those cheapskates from Senegal.

Clothes, of course, were the essential part of the disguise. Put good clothes on, you can kind of fit in, even if you’re a clodhopper from the sticks with a tendency to spill the canapés on your tie. I spent as much time at Barney’s, Fiorucci, and Charivari as I did at movie theatres. I’d like to pretend that I always waited for sales, but the truth is the deficit spending practices that went into on my clothing expenditures would give John Boehner a heart attack.

I met cinematographer Ed Lachman at a party that Dan threw in his apartment for Werner Herzog. Ed had just come back from shooting “La Soufriere” for Werner. Ed was fascinating to me because he had one foot in the art film world and one foot in Hollywood. He worked often as a “Standby Cameraman” on films shooting in New York. When a celebrated director of photography would come over from Europe, they often weren’t members of the New York union locals, so the union would insist that one of their guys would “stand by” (i.e. get paid for doing nothing). I thought that was a pretty sweet deal. Ed went to the world’s greatest film school, apprenticing with some of the greatest cameramen in the world… and got paid a ton of money for it! At the same time, Ed shot some independent films like “The Lords of Flatbush,” “False Face,” and “Union City.” As Ed’s career proceeded after “La Soufriere,” I worked increasingly on the films he shot. As our lives interweaved, Ed and I became good friends.

I started bringing 16mm prints from New Yorker over to Ed’s huge loft on 19^th Street every weekend. As the months went by, more and more friends began to turn up, and it became something like a salon. We’d watch the movie and talk about it for hours. Often the conversation would continue at Pete’s Tavern or some other local bar. There were regulars, but when filmmakers and actors came through town, they’d turn up, everyone from Fassbinder star Hanna Schygulla to Wim Wenders’ sound man Martin Muller, whose girlfriend, Fatima Igramhan (now Parsons), hosted a German TV show about New York City, that Ed sometimes shot for. Other frequent guests were photographer/filmmaker Elizabeth Lennard and her photographer sister, Erica, Philip “Philippo” Haas (later the director of “Angels and Insects”), the late Federico de Laurentiis (Dino’s son), the late writer Carlos Clarens, Werner Herzog hagiographer Alan Greenberg (“Land of Look Behind”), TV journalist/screenwriter Laurie Frank (“Making Mr. Right”), model/actress Audrey Matson, aspiring songwriter Tessa Marquis (now a successful businesswoman/political activist), Fassbinder editor Ila Von Hasperg, and as I mentioned in a previous post, Kathryn Bigelow. Sometimes it was a very relaxed affair, with ten or fifteen people, but on other occasions we would go all out, like a showing of Leone’s“Once Upon a Time in the West,” which was a huge party complete with rented scope lenses and pasta sauce served up for the crowd by “Philippo.”

A few months into our film club, I realized that I was surrounded by an exciting new community of friends, very similar to the one I had back in Wisconsin. I was doing well with my work and having a lot of fun. I wasn’t just faking sophistication any longer, I was legitimately gaining it. I didn’t have to worry anymore about making myself into someone good enough to survive in New York and not be sent home. These people knew me and liked me and it was time to relax. It was okay just to be me, because after all, like so many of my new friends who had come here from all over the world, I was now a New Yorker.

It was a little before the Christmas of ’75 when I first got to New York. My filmmaker friends Julia Reichert and Jim Klein had driven me from Dayton, Ohio and dropped me off at the West Fourth Street Station. Hugging my duffel bag to my chest—everything I had was inside it—I pushed through the turnstile and got on the downtown F. I had a buddy who had agreed to let me sleep on his floor in Park Slope until I could find a place to live.

I’d only planned to spend my first summer after college in Dayton, and get to New York by September.  I’d taken a job designing a catalog for a local film distributor called Twyman Films, with the idea of having a little more money in my pocket before I hit the big city.  Unfortunately, I was robbed the first day I got to Dayton. The guy cleaned out everything I had except my clothes, so I had to stay until December to make up for everything I lost on the first day.

In addition to my duffel bag, I had a check for $2000 in my pocket. I didn’t realize that Citibank was going to hold it for two weeks until they would let me get access to any of it. So I basically had the hundred bucks I had on me to pay for the next two weeks. But stuff was cheaper in those days. The cost of a subway token had just gone from thirty-five to fifty cents. My Park Slope pal thought that fifty cents was outrageous so he used slugs.

I had run a film club back at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, so I started my job hunt by visiting the offices of all the companies I’d been booking films from. The prize of my duffel bag was a pale blue denim leisure suit with ultra-wide lapels and huge white buttons, the kind of thing Fred Willard would wear on “Fernwood 2-Night.” Today you could get laughs just putting on this 70s atrocity as a Halloween costume, but I sincerely intended it as a classy presentation for job interviews. Luckily for me, on my second meeting, a guy kindly told me that it wasn’t necessary for me to dress up.

After a few meetings, I found my way to a guy named Josh Balgley, who was setting up a distribution venture called UA Classics. Unlike all the studio classics divisions that would follow it, Balgley’s classics division actually handled classics… as in Humphrey Bogart movies, and other treasures in the UA collection. Josh liked my Twyman catalog and hired me to design one for him.

In the coming months, I spent a lot of time at the UA building at 729 Seventh Avenue. It had its own ad agency, Carluth, and I was very intimidated by the hardboiled guys who worked there. They smoked cigars and said weird male things like, “you should move that logo a cunt’s hair to the right.” I felt like I’d wandered into an X-Rated version of “The Front Page,” and was totally cowed by the sexist smog of the place.  It was hard to believe that a few months ago I’d been in my Earth Shoes, spouting off on “Ruby Fruit Jungle” in Women in Literature class. 

Balgley wanted to have unusual stills in the catalog, so I was granted access to a room where the “Linen Books” were kept. These were beautifully bound copies of all the contact sheets from classic movies. I remember going through all the stills from “Some Like it Hot.”  That movie was an obsession of mine and I’d written a term paper on it.  Now I was following the whole history of its making as if it was a comic book. Maybe I had heard too many stories about its production, but I thought I could see how pissed off people were waiting for Marilyn to show up on set. I lost all sense of time down in the Linen Book room and I often had to be nudged when office hours were over.

As these were the days before computerized graphic design, I did this catalog old school: drafting table, t-squares and triangles, typesetting, photostats, technical pens, X-Acto knives, Best-Test cement, and pickup squares. You had to know what you were doing back then—you couldn’t futz around endlessly with the fonts and sizes--you had to make your choice in your head with no budget for second tries.

I shared a duplex apartment with five people on east 22^nd, near Gramercy Park. Rats scurried around under the floorboards under my head as I tried  to sleep. I put poison down there, which shut them up, but then I had to deal with the smell for a few weeks. Still, as roommates left I kept moving up into better bedrooms until I had one with four windows, a fireplace, and a breathtaking city view--the best New York City room I’ve ever lived in to this day.

As long as I had slugs, all the boroughs were mine, but I preferred to walk. The New York streets provided an endless source of free and illicit feasts for the eyes: the NYU girls of summer, who, luckily for me, cut the class on keeping breasts inside tank tops. the 3 card Monte dealers of Times Square, whose skillful and shameless fleecing of tourists provided excellent prep for the people I would soon meet in the film biz; the junkies in the east village with the razor blade necklaces circling their necks, the drag queens, magicians, the singers, the drug dealers, the hookers… particularly the hookers. It was so dirtily glamorous to be in a town that had so many prostitutes. “Wanna date?” That was always such a nice, friendly question.

Balgley kept making changes to my design, which was costly for me as I was on a flat fee. I kept struggling to find some rhyme or reason to his perverse decisions. His assistant had a very concise explanation: Balgley was an asshole. He called him “Bag-of-Shit.” When I would come home, my roommates would all laugh and ask me, “How’s Bag-of-Shit?” The unpleasantness of working for Balgley snapped me out of my reveries in the Linen Book room and I got the job done.

Around that time, an opening came up at Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Films. I went to their office in the Sofia Building on West 61^st Street. When I walked in, I was confronted with a brick wall painted “La Chinoise” red. This was it! The temple that housed all my favorite films! I was dying to work there. I was ushered by my longtime phone buddy Jose Lopez and introduced to Dan Talbot, the legendary crowned head of foreign film. As I nervously pulled my Twyman catalog and college film posters out of my portfolio bag, I was happy to see Dan’s eyes light up. I could do all the other work, and save him money on graphic design too!  As I would learn, any opportunity to not spend money filled Dan with glee. When he told me the job would involve working with critics, I started jibber-jabbering about how thrilled I would be to meet my idols Sarris, Kael, and the rest, until I saw his look of pity and shut up.

Once I had proved I was reasonably film-literate, knew how to thread a projector, and could save them money, there was one final hurdle—I had to submit a writing sample. Right after the interview, they dispatched me to the office screening room with a 16mm print of Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.” The next day I dropped of my “Petra Von Kant” blurb at New Yorker, so that the quality of my just-out-of-college prose could be adjudicated by Dan’s wife Toby. That night I splurged on a bottle of Mateus and tried unsuccessfully to not think about how badly I wanted the job.

The next day Jose called. I would start the following Monday. I had no way of knowing it then, but that phone call would, as the cliché goes, dramatically alter the course of the rest of my life.

But I was young and it was impossible for me to think too much about the future. I was just happy I didn’t have to work for Bag-of-Shit anymore.

 
There’s a pattern of critical judgment in festival reviews of Errol Morris’s “Tabloid” that is manacling itself to the film as tightly as its heroine, Joyce McKinney, trussed her Mormon ex-boyfriend to a bed. It’s the notion that because the subject of “Tabloid” isn’t a subject of monumental historical significance like “The Fog of War” and “Standard Operating Procedure,” then it is somehow a throwaway, a mere Snickers bar amidst the strong meat of his career. I can imagine two reasons why they might think this.

The first possibility is that they haven’t seen most of Errol’s films. This is borne out by the way some are surprised that Errol is funny, which is exactly like saying they’re stunned that Zach Galifianakis is funny. Despairing but still laugh-out-loud gallows humor is what made “Gates of Heaven” and “Vernon, Florida” controversial—“is he making fun of these people?”—and what made “The Thin Blue Line” hysterically funny to audiences, despite the Kafaesque tragedy it chronicled.

The second explanation is that these critics haven’t been curious enough or taken the time to think about why they like his movies. Even if they have praised him as one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, if they are honest with themselves, they just know that his films have an impact on them that they can’t exactly put their finger on.

For my defense of “Tabloid,” which, by the way, is my second favorite Errol Morris film, let me start with his debut, “Gates of Heaven.” The film was not about the Vietnam War, Enron, environmental catastrophe, or the struggle for civil rights,” it was seemingly about two pet cemeteries, one that failed and one that succeeded. Yet Roger Ebert considers to be one of the top ten movies of all time, along with films like “2001,” “Casablanca,” Citizen Kane,” “Raging Bull,” “La Dolce Vita,” “Notorious,” and “The Third Man.”

Why?

For starters “Gates of Heaven” is about a hell of a lot more than pet cemeteries. The topic is actually nothing more than an opportunity for Errol to let people talk about all sorts of things, beyond people’s relationships with animals, business strategies, and death. Before making his debut film, Errol had done numerous audio interviews and had discovered that people will often talk a very long time before he asked the first question, a method he has since described as “leave people alone, let them talk, and in two or three minutes they’ll show you how crazy they are.” As Roy Grundmann and Cynthia Rockwell wrote:

Morris uses the cinematic medium to seek realism in a philosophical rather than objective sense, by exploring the intersections of the “fictional” and “real” worlds we create and inhabit. In Morris’s world-view, people live inside personal story worlds that they construct for themselves about who they are and what they’re doing, worlds that may be divorced from reality and which are revealed by a person’s language, through the stories that they tell about themselves.

Errol elicits unexpected revelations about his subjects’ interior life through interviews that go far beyond two or three minutes, but more commonly six hours or more. One of his favorite starting gambits is to ask people about what they wanted to be when they were children. A crucial part of his aesthetic is what he calls his first-person visual style, where his subject speak directly into the camera eye—and to the audience—just as a TV anchorman or politician does. This is an artistic choice Errol made before he ever shot a frame of film. For his first films, he approximated it by placing his head as closely as possible to the lens. Unsatisfied, he invented a device which allowed his interviewees to see an image of his face in front of the camera lens. In addition to perfecting the First Person effect, this contraption, which his wife Julia dubbed the Interrotron, had the effect of taking him out of the interview room. This distance boosted the power of the effect, because, as he has said often, people will tell you a lot more on the phone than they will face to face.

Errol begins the process of making his movies with a complete openness to whatever happens once he starts listening. More than once he has begun a film on one subject and changed it to another. And his biggest process of discovery is in the editing room, which can take a very long time, even years. It’s not unusual for him to take a film to a level to a certain place, tear it apart and start over.

Standard documentaries tend to be jigsaw puzzle narratives constructed and solved by the filmmaker.They are filmed, written and edited to fit together a certain way. One by one, the filmmaker lays a puzzle piece down until an overall picture is revealed for the audience: Enron was a very bad company; the war in Iraq was mismanaged; our [health care, education, environmental, fill in the blank] system is a disgrace. The audience leaves the theatre with fascinating information that has been shaped by the filmmaker’s agenda for their benefit.

Errol makes jigsaw puzzles too, but they don’t function that way. He gives the audience pieces from many different puzzles, and he doesn’t solve any of them, he leaves that work to the audience. And then the audience has the even bigger task of uncovering what the connections are between the puzzles. I don’t actually think that Errol makes movies, rather he creates experiences that just happen to be movies—and going through an Errol Morris experience is an assignment for the impossible quest of connecting the dots.

This explains why Roger Ebert has shown “Gates of Heaven” dozens of times to people in all walks of life, and every viewer has something completely different to say about it. There is no possible way to watch “Gates of Heaven” without being forced to invent your own movie.

Four men with unusual professions are interviewed in “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control”: an M.I.T. robot scientist whose creations are inspired by insect behavior; a lion tamer, an artist/gardener who trims topiary into “Edward Scissorhands”-style giant animals; and a man passionately engaged in the study of the African naked mole rat. At first they might seem to have nothing in common, but as the film unfolds, certain similiarities emerge, from the comic absurdity of their obsessions, to themes like man’s attempt to control animals, and finally the melancholy understanding that some good and noble things are destined to fade away. The lion tamer is practicing a craft that he believes will die out soon after he does; the elderly gardener knows that a storm could destroy years of his effort and in any case, his sculptures will disintegrate when he dies; and the robot designer cheerfully talks about the future, when robots will outlive our species. Driven by Caleb Sampson’s wistful music, and a cornucopia of cinematic styles from slow motion, multiple film stocks, and offbeat angles, “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” is a film that is as easy to love as it is hard to summarize. The odd impact of “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control” is that nobody in the audience needs to give a damn about mole rats or animal topiary design before or after they see the film. It’s beside the point. The emotional power of the film comes from the connections that each member of the audience makes while watching it.

An Errol Morris film rests on the bedrock of self-deluded people. Some center on a single person, who has two strange moments associated with their life, like “Mr. Death”’s Fred Leuchter, Jr., who is a designer of humane execution devices and a holocaust denier, and “Tabloid”’s Joyce McKinney, an American woman in a 70s British sex scandal who later on clones her dog in South Korea. Films like “Gates of Heaven” and the under-rated “Vernon, Florida” feature an ensemble of eccentrics. For example, the residents of Vernon, Florida include a red wiggler worm salesman, a couple with a jar of sand they believe is growing, and my favorite, a turkey hunter with a plaque with three pairs of gobbler feet and their beards, who tells glorious stories of how he bagged each one. Put all that stuff  together, why don’t you? You’re on your own. Errol sure isn’t going to help you.

I can hear somebody saying, “What about ‘The Thin Blue Line,”? That has a wrap-up. Errol solved a murder! I think it’s wonderful that Errol got an innocent guy out of jail, but that’s only a distraction from what makes the film a masterpiece. It’s not that it finds the solution to a murder trial in Texas, but rather that it is an exploration of the mysteries of the human mind and its endless need for self-delusion. The “reenactments” in the film are said to have inspired everything from History Channel crime shows to “Man on Wire,” but in fact they the opposite of reenactments—they were illustrations the falsehoods and confused thinking behind what the eyewitnesses claimed to have seen.  The movie demands that the audience try to interact and make sense of it. “The Thin Blue Line” poster tagline is: a softcore movie, Dr.Death, a chocolate milkshake, a nosey blonde and The Carol Burnett Show. Solving this mystery is going to be MURDER.”

Errol told me when we were at the Toronto Film Festival that during the Bush/Cheney years he felt the imperative to make more political films. It’s understandable that when you live through a time when your Vice-President says, “Yes, we torture! We make no apology for that!” you might want to make a movie like “The Fog of War,” a film about the past which resonates so well with the Iraq war. I can obvious why he felt the need to make a movie like “Standard Operating Procedure,” that proves indisputably that the jailed servicemen and women who snapped photos at Abu Ghraib got a raw deal. Of course, in that film he does that by employing his current fascination with the battle photography and truth (as elaborated in his New York Times blog and his upcoming book), but to me, this kind of stuff is really nothing new for him. I admit I haven’t read it all, and I know I’m being laughably reductive of what I have read, but basically his point is that you can’t trust photos to be true because they are looked at by human beings, and the reasoning of human beings is subject to many variables, that distort judgment. He doesn’t believe that seeing is believing; he believes that “believing is seeing.” To me, this is a corollary to his notion that people live in the movies they have written, directed and starred in, and find distribution in the theatre inside their heads.

Even if you don’t agree with what I’ve written above, I hope you can understand why “Tabloid” is my favorite Errol Morris film after “Gates of Heaven.” My reasoning couldn’t be simpler. I find Joyce McKinney to be the quintessential Errol Morris character, a miracle find. If his stated career goal is “sick, sad and funny,” she is by far the sickest, the saddest, and--oh my God!—the funniest one ever. And like all his films, you have to connect the dots. What does a woman’s tabloid sex scandal have to do with her cloning her dog years later? (Errol thinks he knows and he answers the question in Q&A’s and interviews. I wish he would stop doing that, as I think it’s like giving away the secret to a magic trick.)

But there is more. For the first time in all of his movies, Errol hands over the camera to his main character. There’s a sequence of Joyce’s home movie footage that he incorporates into “Tabloid.” Joyce is videotaping her father sleeping and her empty yard. “Nothing is happening here,” she says. In a literal sense, Joyce is documenting that there is no reason for the dog to be incessantly barking next door, but when Errol runs it over and over the meaning is obvious. After all her Lindsay Lohan-style escapades on the world stage, this is where Joyce’s story ends.

I could never have written this without the book Errol Morris Interviews, edited by Livia Bloom. My thanks to all the authors of the interviews and essays within. If you like Errol’s films, this book is a must.

In all the coverage of the miracle rescue of the Chilean miners, one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned much is that President Piñera is a billionaire, one of the richest men in Chile.

Imagine if this was the U.S. and something really terrible happened. Let’s say there was a hurricane that hit New Orleans, or there was an oil spill in the gulf. If a U.S. President dashes to the site, and dedicates his attention every step of the way, he would be attacked from the moment of his arrival. No matter what happened, it would be spun into a negative by the opposition. In our current political/media culture, it would be exactly as if he was the one who caused the hurricane or the oil spill. To keep from committing political suicide he would need to keep a certain distance from something that nobody knew how to fix.

Fear drives all of current American politics. On the most obvious level, politicians use terrorism to manipulate voters, and fears about financial security make tax cuts and deficits into emotional buttons. But these uses of fear are just instruments of the actual fear, the terror politicians have of being out of office. So they pander to those who can give them the money to keep them there--the corporations, the unions, the churches, and the haters. They gerrymander. They think twice about taking actions that would look too good on an attack ad. As we have seen with John McCain, they will say and do practically anything, no matter how deplorable and against the principles they have fought for their whole lives, to hold onto power. Of course there are exceptions like my one-time Sunday School classmate Russ Feingold. Good luck to ya, Russ!

So who can afford to do and say what they really want to? Gazillionaires like Mayor Bloomberg, that’s who. He’s a Republican who stands up to the gun lobby, supports the right to abortion, has taken strong action on global warming, opposes the death penalty, thinks that illegal immigrants should be given permanent status, supports stem cell research and gay marriage, passionately supports the Muslim Community Center, and when asked if he smoked marijuana, said, “You bet I did. I enjoyed it!” Even if you think he went to far with his TransFat ban, smoking-in-restaurant ban, or muscling himself into a third term, you have to admit he knows how to get what he wants. Compare his political career to the dysfunction that permeates national American politics.

Bloomberg is relatively free from the predations of the corporations, the unions, and the special interest groups. If he’s gung ho Wall Street it’s because he’s gung ho Wall Street, not because he has his hand out for their money. What you see is what you get.

Even though I’m an admirer of Mayor Bloomberg, I find this absolutely terrifying.

To return to President Piñera for a moment, Wikipedia points out that “despite much goodwill in Chile following the mining rescue many Chileans are still waiting for him to rectify anti-terrorism laws in Chile which effectively mean the indigenous Mapuche people can be dealt with as "terrorists." This matter has led to hunger strikes which started before the mining disaster, and are set to continue afterwards.”

This week I received a call from Nina Barnett, in the office of Randall L. Stephenson, the Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer and President of AT&T Inc.

At no point in our conversation did Nina broach the subject of my anti-AT&T blog post going viral or my being invited by the FCC to speak at a press conference on “Bill Shock” in Washington, D.C.

She offered me a 50% refund on my bill and made it clear it was that or nothing. So I took it.

But, as I had her on the phone, I took the opportunity to ask her about the AT&T “My Wireless” iPhone application:

Me: The iPhone app can’t possibly work in real time—as we know, you don’t pick up this information until later. It can’t work in real time.

Nina: Right. And that is correct. So with you being advised that it would, that was actually misinformation and that will be addressed as well.

I then elaborated about how it wasn’t just that I was “advised” by an operator that it would work, the application itself indicated that it would work.

Nina: Right. That is correct, and again that’s something that I’m glad you did bring to our attention because customers are being advised wrong and we want to go ahead and address that, and make sure that no one else is provided with that misinformation.

So here we have someone from the office of the the Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer and President of AT&T Inc. stating that they have put out a product that they know doesn’t work, something that deliberately deceives and consequently increases profits for them. In my dictionary, that’s called fraud. They can’t claim they don’t know about it because someone at the highest level of the company told me on tape that they did.

Nina, who was very nice, says that they’re going to address it, which I suppose they think it will make it all fine. Except that they won’t give me a full refund and they won’t offer any refund at all to people who don’t know how to create an outcry on the web.

Incidentally, in addition to being the head of AT&T, Randall L. Stephenson is a National Executive Board member of the Boy Scouts of America and Chairman of the BSA's 100th Anniversary Celebration. As per Wikipedia, the Boy Scouts of America’s goal is to train youth in responsible citizenship, character development, and self-reliance through participation in a wide range of outdoor activities, educational programs, and, at older age levels, career-oriented programs in partnership with community organizations. For younger members, the Scout method is part of the program to inculcate typical Scouting values such as trustworthiness, good citizenship, and outdoors skills, through a variety of activities such as camping, aquatics, and hiking.

Is there a merit badge for hiking up prices?

This week I was a bit stressed out and I started thinking about the worst experience I ever had in the publicity business.   I wrote about a certain film and I thought it was really funny.  Lots of what I thought were amusing stories about depressed people doing absurd things they shouldn’t do. And me in the middle wallowing in all that delicious failure.  I took all the names out so it wouldn’t be mean of course.  The problem was I wrote it far too quickly and didn’t take the time to see how easy it would be for some film-savvy folks to identify the film.  Of course, someone figured out the title of the movie right away.

All of a sudden I didn’t think my post was funny anymore.   I felt like an asshole.  So I took it down.

That is the risk with blogging.  I try to come up with something entertaining and interesting each week, usually taking things from my life.  But sometimes  I’ve written complete posts that I’ve thrown in the garbage for one reason or another. For example, when Tony Curtis died, I wrote a post on him.  It’s a story about an encounter I had with him that I’ve told my friends for years. It’s a pretty good story.  But the timing was all off and I didn’t run with it.

I have a job that keeps me pretty busy.  Every Sunday I try to get another post up and in this case there wasn’t enough time to think it through.

I’m not going to say that I might not write something very similar to this story in the future.  But I will only do it when I have the time to disguise the characters so that no one could ever figure out who I was talking about.  

Some interesting developments since my last post. 

I was contacted  yesterday by Roger Goldblatt of the FCC, who asked to take part in a press conference  in Washington next Wednesday and speak about “Bill Shock.”  (There’s more information about the FCC event at the bottom of this post.)  I don’t think I’ll be able to go, but it’s fascinating—or scary?-- that my blog got into the hands of the FCC within days, don’t you think? I think it’s most likely because Andrew Sullivan linked it.  I hope that I will be able to contribute to the FCC’s effort in some way.  There should be laws against phone companies selling a few cents of data for thousands of dollars. 

I haven’t been near my computer lately so I wasn’t able to approve a lot of comments about my first post.  Apparently this was ALL MY FAULT. I could have found out all the info on the internet.  The fact that AT&T lied to me on tape is fine.  The fact that they only sell a maximum of 200MB of data in their international plan—nowhere near enough to have met my needs—that’s all fine.  Granted, my needs were very specific and few people would have my specific data requirements.  And if I had only been able to work in rooms that had wifi my bill would have been much lower.  But it would still have been outrageous.

Apparently if a multi-billion dollar corporation wants to sell two cents of data for hundreds of dollars that is peachy.  Let the buyer beware and do a lot of browsing.  Or stay home.

That same day I received a phone call from AT&T just as I was sitting down to lunch with a client.  The operator informed me that he was going to shut down my phone service that instant if I didn’t pay my bill immediately.  I said that was impossible, as I wasn’t anywhere near my computer.  He also said I had to pay the bill I hadn’t received yet in advance or he would turn off my phone service.  I said I’d pay everything  that night.  He wanted to know what time and how I would pay and how long it would take for the transfer to kick in, etc.   I thought to myself, okay, maybe I had forgotten the due date and, as I had to pay this bill anyway, I would do it tonight.   When I got home I discovered that my bill was due on October 11th, five days away.   Why was I being threatened with instantaneous  loss of service for a bill that wasn’t due yet?  Not to mention a bill I hadn’t even received yet?

AT&T confirmed that this call did come from them.  They had the name of the operator who called me at that time.  Of course his report on the call differed completely from mine. 

Am I paranoid or did this threatening phone call come because of the way my blog post has been tearing through the internet?  

Postscript: Here’s more information on the FCC Press Conference

Avoiding Cell Phone Bill Shock

October 13, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Click here to watch the event live.

About This Event

Cell phones, smart phones, and other mobile devices are increasingly an essential part of Americans' everyday lives. But as minutes, messages, and megabytes quickly add up, avoiding "bill shock"—a sudden, unexpected increase in your monthly mobile bill—can be a challenge. According to a recent survey by the Federal Communications Commission, one in six mobile users—30 million Americans—have experienced bill shock. More than half those consumers saw an increase of $50 or more, but few were alerted by their mobile phone company—before or after the bill arrived.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will join Sarah Rosen Wartell from the Center for American Progress to discuss his consumer agenda, including the proactive steps that the agency is taking to empower consumers with simple solutions for avoiding bill shock. At the event, the chairman will outline the findings of a new FCC paper on bill shock and hear directly from consumers who have experienced an unexpected increase in their mobile bills.

Featured Speaker:
Julius Genachowski, Chairman, Federal Communications Commission

Introduction by:
Sarah Rosen Wartell, Executive Vice President, Center for American Progress

A light lunch will be served at 11:30 a.m.

Click here to RSVP for this event

For more information, call 202-682-1611

Location

Center for American Progress
1333 H St. NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20005

Map & Directions
Nearest Metro: Blue/Orange Line to McPherson Square or Red Line to Metro Center

I’m sorry, but this isn’t a film post, a memoir, a musing, and it’s definitely not funny. 

I went to the Toronto Film Festival for 5 days and 4 hours and received a $1524 AT&T bill for data charges on top of the $199 paid for the first 200 MB. A total of $1723.

I am very angry about this and would greatly appreciate it if any of my readers would tweet this and post it on FaceBook.  

I’ve learned since that bills like these are a commonplace with AT&T. (See the videos below.)  Here’s why:The 200MB plan is pro-rated by the dates of the monthly plan, which in my case was Aug 17^th to September 16^th. In order to get all 200 MB I had to backdate to August 17^th  Otherwise I would have paid $199 for 50 MB.

I knew in advance I was going to use a lot of data because I was going to be working at the Toronto Film Festival setting up publicity for “Tabloid,” a new movie by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris. I would always be on the run, needing to receive phone calls and email everywhere and at all times.  Worse, when I got there I discovered there was no wireless—only wired—internet service in my hotel room and the interview suite that was used for Mr. Morris’s interviews.

I was told that the AT&T iPhone app worked in Canada by an AT&T operator. The application had a line graph that tracked international usage. But as AT&T cannot finish their accounting for international charges until 90 days after the data is used, it’s impossible for them to display charges they haven’t received yet. There’s no possible way it can work and they know that.

If AT&T hadn’t provided the app, I wouldn’t have been comforted by the low readings it was providing me.   I wouldn’t have had any idea how much data I was using, and that would have put the fear of God into me.  Still,  I did try to turn the data off—via “Airplane Mode” and changing the settings—but this shut off the phone too. What I didn’t know, and no one told me until afterwards, is that if I turned off “roaming” I could have had telephone service without data. I didn’t imagine that it was possible to use a phone in a foreign country without turning roaming on.

When I got on my plane in Canada, the AT&T app said I’d used 120 MB, but after I got home apartment in New York it was a heart attack-inducing 300+ MB.   20 minutes after I shut off my international plan, I received an email and text from AT&T stating that they were suspending my already canceled international data planAND domestic data plan.  The email falsely claimed that I had ignored an earlier text  and email about excessive usage sent to met while I was in Canada.  An operator later confirmed that no such email
or text had been sent.

Eventually I found a sympathetic operator who filed a 4-page application for a full refund.

On Friday I received a text saying  there would be no reduction of any kind.  An  operator confirmed that there would be no explanation for the denial or any possibility of reconsideration.

Last Thursday night there was a special screening at the Walter Reade Theatre in New York commemorating the 25^th anniversary of “Desperately Seeking Susan.” This film has always been dear to my heart, because it was the first film I ever did publicity on from before it started shooting all the way through release. Being on the set every day and going to dailies, was exciting, fun, and ultimately, life-changing. I liked the experience so much that shortly afterwards, I closed my first PR company, Reid Rosefelt Publicity, and became a unit publicist, working on movie sets around the world for the next seven years. But like any first love, “Desperately Seeking Susan” was always special. I’ll write about working on the film someday, but this post is about another film.

During the Q&A that followed the screening, screenwriter Leora Barish spoke about how she was inspired to write it by seeing Jacques Rivette’s 1974 film “Celine and Julie Go Boating.” This was news to me, because before that night I had never spoken or laid eyes on Leora Barish. At that point, after ten years of doing publicity, I had never interviewed a writer who wasn’t also the director. And as she never visited the set while I was there, I was focused on all the wonderful things that were happening in front of me. So many people got their film careers launched on “Desperately Seeking Susan”: in addition to Seidelman, who fought to bring in Madonna and gave the film an incredible sense of style and dynamism, there were producers Midge Sanford, Sarah Pillsbury and Michael Peyser, cinematographer Ed Lachman, casting directors Billy Hopkins and Risa Bramon (and Todd Thaler), composer Thomas Newman, and not incidentally, Madonna, Aidan Quinn, Laurie Metcalf, and John Turturro. The film was also driven by the veteran talents of Rosanna Arquette and production designer/costume designer Santo Loquasto, and Bramon and Hopkins found many talented actors like Mark Blum (who would later appear in one of my short films), Anna Levine Thomson, Robert Joy, Will Patton, and Peter Maloney, and gave cameos to an unbelievable list of downtown types, cult actors and up-and-comers, including: John Lurie, Richard Edson, Steven Wright, Richard Hell, Shirley Stoler, Ann Magnuson, Anne Carlisle, Rockets Redglare, Annie Golden, Airto Lindsay, Carol Leifer, Michael Badalucco, Giancarlo Esposito, and Adele Bertei and Tom DiCillo. And what I didn’t know then is that the New York City of 1984 was going to disappear and this film would both helped invent the fantasy of that moment plus serve as a time capsule.

Anyway, soon after Barish mentioned “Celine and Julie Go Boating,” I was struck by something. It was very possible that Leora Barish wouldn’t have seen “Celine and Julie” if it weren’t for me. And therefore… no me, maybe no “Desperately Seeking Susan,” and maybe no movie, no launching point for a lot of these careers. Of course, many, if not all, of these people were on their way with or without the film, but still… the fact was that I played a crucial role in bringing “Celine and Julie Go Boating” to the US, where it inspired her script.

Jacques Rivette’s “Celine and Julie Go Boating” had its US premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1974, while I was still a student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, so of course I didn’t see it. But when I got to New York a few years later, I got a job at Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Films. In those days there weren’t many distributors that brought out foreign films, and even fewer handled the kind of films with extremely limited commercial potential that New Yorker did. This gave Talbot enormous power, because if he didn’t like something, it probably wouldn’t get seen in this country. But his taste was exquisite, and he was an engine behind the US careers of such talents as Bertolucci, Fassbinder, Godard,Herzog, Alain Tanner, Claude Lanzman, and… Jacques Rivette. But “Celine and Julie” played the New York Film Festival and Dan didn’t buy it.

New Yorker Films was a very small company and I wore a lot of hats there: I was the publicist for all the smaller films; I designed and laid out the catalogs and all the mailing pieces; I sent materials to the theatres; and I watched movies that Dan was considering acquiring. Dan was a father figure to me. Not only was he teaching me the film business, he was giving me a crash course in world cinema. For the first years I kept my mouth shut and watched, but after a while I started to speak up about marketing issues and what films he should buy. As in, speak up very loudly. As in shouting matches. As I said, he was a father figure, and this kind of thing commonly goes on in families. Some people there thought I was way off base, but Dan never fired me, and crazy as I was, we are friends to this day. During all my tenure at New Yorker films I never got angrier with Dan than about “Celine and Julie Go Boating.” I flat out demanded he buy it. He refused again and again. Finally I screeched, “If you don’t buy this film, then you should shut this company down today.” He knew I wouldn’t stop, so he gave in. Still, he released the movie in New York with no time for advance screenings and it was pulled from the theatre before the rave review in the Village Voice appeared. That was a crushing disappointment, but the important thing for me was that “Celine and Julie Go Boating” was now in the catalog, where it would get a limited 35mm theatrical release and could be rented in 16mm for countless non-theatrical showings in years to come.

So it’s possible that Leora Barish caught the film at a film festival in 1974, but it’s more likely she did at one of the hundreds of US showings that came between the time New Yorker Films bought the film in 1978 and when she wrote “Desperately Seeking Susan” in the early 1980s

Of course a film as great as “Celine and Julie” would have come out one way or another in the US. A company like Rialto would have bought it at some point and it would have made its way to video. But at that point in time there was only one door, which was shut tight until I kicked it open.

I often wonder why I write this blog, but this week I believe that I’m telling an instructive story, regardless of when or how Leora Barish saw “Celine and Julie.” If you work in the film business and you are facing a situation where you can fight for what you think is right—or choose not to fight—let me guarantee that you will end up more successful and wealthy if you don’t fight. If you are seen as uncompromising, you will be judged “difficult” and a pain in the ass, and you will pay a heavy price. On the other hand, you will never find out what the impact might have been if you did stand up.

Last Sunday was the first time that I didn’t post since I started this blog. No matter how busy I was I always was able to make it work, but last week I was working on Errol Morris’s “Tabloid” at the Toronto Film Festival and the schedule was pretty relentless. Unfortunately, this blog was one of the few that was to be anchored to a particular date, in this case the anniversary of 9/11.

My idea was to tell an anecdote from my life that brought up a more innocent memory of the World Trade Towers, before it became an icon of horror and death, and more recently an opportunity for some to stir up ignorance, hysteria, and prejudice.

Here’s my story:

When I first moved to New York as a movie-mad Midwesterner, I’d never been on a Hollywood movie set. As you can imagine, I was thrilled to find out that scenes from Dino De Laurentiis’ King Kong remake were going to shot in New York. I sure couldn’t miss that! So the night of the filming, my friends and I headed down to the World Trade Center, not having any idea whether we’d get close enough to see anything.

Arriving on the scene confirmed our doubts – there was no place where we could find even the most distant vantage point. We were about to leave when my friend Gary suggested that we go around to the other side of the Towers. Maybe we’d be able to go inside, head through through the lobby and get really close. This was such a stupid idea that I thought it might work. In any case, we had come this far and we had nothing better to do.

Coming around the bend we discovered a line. So we went to the end and got on it. It turned out to be the line for “King Kong” extras. Once we got inside, we filled out the forms to be SAG Waivers. Not only were we going to get close—we were going to be paid $30! We were pros! Soon were outside staring up at the dizzying spectacle of Carlo Rambaldi’s 40 foot tall “mechanical” King Kong lying on his back, totally in scale with the Twin Towers looming above us. Unlike the original King Kong, which was a puppet, or the Peter Jackson’s CGI King Kong, both of which were highly animated, this Kong didn’t groan, grimace, exhibit convulsive death spasms, or really do anything at all --he just lied there like a ginormous slug. To paraphrase John Cleese, this particular Kong was CONVINCINGLY BEREFT OF LIFE and was giving an Academy Award worthy performance as an EX-GORILLA!

But can you imagine the wonderment for a kid making his first visit to a movie set? A forty-foot gorilla! What magic!

I was soon introduced to another astonishing marvel--the craft service table. You could fill your stomach with all the candy and junk food you wanted, totally free. Ho-Hos! Bagels! Coffee! Root Beer! And guess who came by for a nosh? Jeff Bridges, that’s who. I told him about my admiration for his performance in “The Last Picture Show,” and particularly “The Last American Hero” (which I had shown at my college film club) and that I totally agreed about what Pauline Kael said about him possibly being “the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor that has ever lived.” After a while I asked him if I was making him uncomfortable with all my exuberant praise, and he hugged me and said, “No man! I love it!”

I was soon introduced to the torpor of a movie set. You wait around for hours and hours and hours waiting for something to happen. Soon it is the middle of the night and absolutely nothing has happened. The only thing that was fun was the guy who went on top of Kong and spilled buckets of blood on him to the cheers of the crowd. Joel Siegel also climbed up on Kong’s chest and did his evening news report.

The director, John Guillermin (“The Towering Inferno”) seemed kind of puny amidst the huge crowd and ape, but from a distance I watched him work with the actors. (Years later I proudly told the late Claude Chabrol that I watched John Guillermin direct, and he said, “You watched him do what?”) I asked people who the pretty blonde was, and they said she was “some model,” and I said I thought she was pretty good. Which was a fair assessment since she was Jessica Lange making her screen debut. Still, most of what Lange did that night was run through the crowd towards Bridges shouting “Jack! Jack!” and getting all worked up. Over and over “Jack! Jack! Jack!”

I was determined to work my way into the shot, so I slowly pushed my way to the front. And when it came time for the final crane shot, I was pretty close to the action. My 22-year-old profile can clearly be identified in the lower right  by my Proto-Bieber 70s haircut and big shnoz, identical to photos of me from the time.

I’ve appeared in many films since then, but I think this is my best performance to date. I was supposed to playing a guy looking at a huge supine gorilla, and I look exactly like a guy looking at a huge supine gorilla, because of course I was a guy looking at a huge supine gorilla.  If you compare my work here to all the actors delivering their lines to light stands today, you’ll know that this is the real deal.  But I was a contract player then, part of the studio system.   Those were the golden days of the movies and sadly, they’ll never be back.

I usually write about my past with this blog, but this week I’m heading off to the Toronto Film Festival for the first time in many years, setting up interviews for Errol Morris for his new movie “Tabloid.”     So I’m about to have a real experience, not a remembered one.  I sure as hell won’t write about that!    What I’m going to do instead is write something about the World Trade Towers (not 9/11) that will appear when I’m at the Toronto Festival, just as I was on September 11th. 2001. 

I used to have a projector and a six foot by eight foot screen in my loft. I had a film club every Sunday night. It was heaven. I loved that thing.

Then I got married. Don’t get me wrong, she is the best woman in the world and I thank God every day that I found her. The only thing is, once we got together I couldn’t use my projector any more. You see, she likes to read magazines at home--and TV shows and movies are mainly background music. If I turn out the lights so that my projector worked, it spoiled her whole night.

.I knew I could buy a decent flat screen TV and we’d both be happy, but I just couldn’t. My six foot by eight foot was sort of like a shiny red Mustang sitting out in the driveway on blocks. It was something I couldn’t give up even though I rarely used it.

Eventually I realized how dumb this was. I gave in, sold the projector and screen and got a Samsung and my first Blu-ray player. For the first time I was introduced to this whole Blu-ray deal that I was introduced to this whole thing everybody’s been talking about. After a few dozen discs I’m still not sure what I think of Blu-ray. I don’t know if I want to see so much detail. Does that always make it better? Is “The Godfather” better when you can see all those people in the edges of the screen who were in shadow before? Jury’s still out for me.

But I have been knocked out by the splendor of streaming Netflix movies on my TV. I’m watching more movies than I ever have in my life. It’s an obsession. And I really like that there is a limitation to what’s available. It focuses the mind.

But then…this week Netflix introduced an iPhone application. This is NUTS. While my wife was sleeping Friday night, I watched the subpar Japanese gorefest “The Machine Girl” while lying beside her. And last night when I came to bed after a few “Mad Men” Blu-rays, she was in bed watching “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein” on her iPhone.

And Netflix just paid Epix a zillion dollars so that 1243 new movies will start streaming on Netflix in the next 30 days. That’s 1243 additional films next month on my TV, my laptop, my phone, and if I buy one, my iPad. Everywhere there is wi-fi.

This is going to kill me.

I haven’t seen John Lurie in years. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about that, as I’m out of touch with so many people I knew in the 80s. But when I read Tad Friend’s article in the August 16 & 23 New Yorker (subscription required), I realized almost no one has seen him lately: he has been in hiding since 2008. I could get into why that is so, but it’s such a good story that I can’t do it justice here. I recommend that you read it.

As the many dozens of people who read this blog know, I write about people that I’ve had personal contacts with—however fleeting. And therefore I have a bone to pick with Friend’s description of Lurie from the time I knew him, which started during the release of “Stranger Than Paradise” in 1984 and continued for a few years after. Here’ s how Friend describes the John Lurie of those days:

From 1984 to 1989, everyone in downtown New York wanted to be John Lurie. Or sleep with him. Or punch him in the face. Lurie, the star of the Jim Jarmusch films “Stranger Than Paradise” and “Down by Law” and the saxophone-playing leader of the jazz-punk group the Lounge Lizards, was intensely charismatic… He was young and cocksure and he wouldn’t truckle. Between Fourteenth Street and Canal—the known universe, basically—he was the man.

I would revise this slightly. “From 1984 to 1989, everyone who was in downtown New York knows the previous paragraph to be utter bullshit.” I mean, Friend is a wonderful writer and all, but he is around ten years younger than Lurie, and not to mention Jarmusch, Ann Magnuson, Kathleen Bigelow, Richard Edson, Richard Hell, Beth B, Lydia Lunch, Amos Poe and just about everybody else from those days, including me. This just wasn’t a time when anybody would say “he was the man,” let alone think it. Maybe young Tad Friend was lurking around the Mudd Club, and maybe there are people now who say that John was the man, but I doubt it.  Not that he wasn’t talented or good looking or anything. It just wasn’t that kind of culture.

And thank god John wasn’t an arrogant schmuck like that. What was endearing about John in those days was his vulnerability, his insecurity about the way people perceived him. I remember a Voice feature story that was written about John during the “Stranger Than Paradise” days. The writer said John had a propensity to pull a fish face all the time. He was really pissed off about that. What nerve saying he pulled fish faces, like he was some kind of poseur! It was just what came naturally to him. It was weird for John to realize that fame, even the modest fame that was starting to get, can have its drawbacks. People start picking away at things that are second nature to you, even the way you move your face.

John was something of a kvetcher, wondering whether he got his due. In his opinion, he was the author of “Stranger Than Paradise,” not Jim. Here was his argument: “Stranger” started out as a series of improvisations, which Jim would watch and take notes. In his opinion all his lines were invented by him. I said, “First of all, what you’re saying is nuts. There is so much more to writing a script than a few lines. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that Jim copied down a lot of things you said. But what would you have been doing that day when you did those improvs? Jim made it all happen. He got the money, made a brilliant movie and now you and your band are getting publicity, and you’re getting paid for the soundtrack.” John bought my argument and that was it. So John would definitely truckle if a situation was truckle-worthy.  He didn’t get in arguments for no reason.  (By the way I had to look up truckle in the dictionary. I learn something new every day.)

The last time I saw John was years later when I ran into him at a huge party for a Miramax movie. We were talking about the old days, when uber-publicist Peggy Siegel hurtled into our conversation, in breathless pursuit of a  photo op.

“Are you famous?” she asked John.

I readily admit that this is the oddest and most obscure video I have ever done.  Even if you were perplexed by my Sonya Thomas video, this has the most WTF of all.  

How did this come to be?  Basically, my friend Lee Levine is friends with novelist Gary Shteyngart, whose new book “Super Sad True Love Story” has just been published and is already on the NY Times Bestseller List. 

Mr. Shteyngart appears to be inordinately proud of his dachshund.   Felix is prominently displayed in his promo video for his book (as is James Franco).  Very funny video, by the way.  Check it out:

Felix is also pictured in the feature on Shteyngart in the current issue of The Atlantic. 

On his Facebook page, Mr. S. has written: "felix is generally considered the smartest dog on earth. but in this picture i can sense the pensiveness in his eyes. global warming, ongoing violence in uzbekistan, the stalemate in congress. it all takes a toll on this sweet, compassionate dachshund."

Anyway there has been Facebook correspondence about who will play Felix in a purported movie.  Somehow this connected with my love of Zach Galifianakis, and this video was the result.

Somebody left a DVD on my doormat this morning.  I realized immediately it was something too important to keep to myself.  So here it is, the video everyone has been waiting to see: 

Angelina Jolie in as “Acid Burn” in “Hackers” 

I had just flown back Saturday night from a week swatting mosquitoes on a movie set in Georgia, so I wasn’t  over-excited when a guy from my PR company called to tell me I was going to another movie set on Monday.

“What’s it called?”

“’Hackers.’ It’s about a group of young computer hackers, trying to stop a virus or something.”

“Who’s in it?”

“Mostly kids you’ve never heard of… Oh yeah, the female lead is Jon Voight’s daughter.”

The next morning at crew call I was upstanding in front of Stuy High waiting for things to get started. And then I saw her. She didn’t look like any computer hacker I’d ever seen.

My question to Andrew Morton, who has just written an unauthorized biography, “Angelina,” or to anybody, is: when did Angelina Jolie become Angelina Jolie? When did all the elements that make everyone so fascinated with her—her otherworldly beauty, her acting talent, her oddness, her instincts for marketing herself—when exactly  did all those ingredients stir up a superstar?

To put it simply, when did  this 14 year old

become this?

She was 19 years old when she made “Hackers,” but was very experienced in the world of showbiz by then.

She’d made her film her film debut at 7 in Hal Ashby’s “Lookin’ to Get Out,” which her dad co-wrote and starred in.

From ages 11-13 she studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, and appeared in several stage productions. But at 14, she decided she dropped out of acting classes, starting dressing goth and dreamed of being a funeral director.  Later on,while she was at Beverly Hills High she was teased for being thin, wearing glasses and having braces. She collected knives and cut herself.  But you would think she’d gain some self-esteem by 16 from the modeling work she did.  Of course, who knows?  Just because you realize you can turn men into quivering Smuckers, doesn’t necessarily make you happy or give you confidence.

A few years later, she did this video with the 47-year-old Meatloaf.  I don’t know what you think, but  I think it’s kind of creepy.

She’d starred in this straight-to-video-movie:

And played a supporting role in this one (despite the repackaged advertising)

“Hackers” was going to be her first theatrical release. She’d meet her husband, the pre-“Trainspotting” Jonny Lee Miller on it.

But none of this meant she could act.  Beauty and connections only get you so far.  Did she inherit acting genes from her Dad?   Because she was around the world of acting from childhood?  Her Dad wasn’t part of her life after she was pretty young.  Was it because she had put the time in acting classes?  What about her freaking weirdness? Funeral Director?   Knives?  Where did that come from?

Look at that picture above from “Hackers.”  She looks like she’s in a Godard movie, half Jean-Pierre Leaud in “Masculin-Feminin” and half Anne Wiazemsky in “La Chinoise.”   I think she had it by then, whatever it is. 19 years old and I will argue that she already booked her ticket on the Monica Vitti express.   Show me one 19-year-old actress today who can pull off that kind of attitude.

Somewhere in her late teens, I don’t know exactly when, she had put it all together from her beauty, innate talent, the hurt of her childhood, and who knows what else, and invented herself.  

By the time I saw her,  she had that whipsmart thing about her like she’d seen it all knew it all and wasn’t telling. It was just something she owned, it was all there, and it was unnerving.  Most people take a lot longer to find themself before they are able to find success.  She had the package and she knew it.  Let success find her.

A lot of the film involved the hackers rollerblading around the city, pursued by bad guys. We were able to block off traffic for many blocks for some of these scenes. One day I had “Entertainment Tonight” on the set and it didn’t make sense for Angelina to take off her blades for the interview. But when she tried to do the interview with them on, she couldn’t stay still. A good publicist has to be able to improvise. I put my foot out so she could lean her wheel on it and I tried to prop her up with the side of my arm, or anything I could figure out to do to keep her in place without actually touching her. Some of you might think I’d enjoy being that close to her, but I couldn’t wait for the interview to be over. Yuck!  It made me think of too many things I’d rather not think about .  What would my life have been like if I was  her?  Thinking about myself at 19 was surreal.  She was so young, and she already knew so many things I would never know, and would experienced so many things I would never experience. Even if I was young, this is not the kind of girl I would ever have approached. 

A few years later, I was waiting to meet a client in front of the Mayflower Hotel. Shortly after I got there, Angelina came out and lingered by the door.  Maybe she was being picked up to go to the set of “Gia,” which was filming at the time.  It was just the two of us, standing there for ten minutes.  But she wasn’t all made up, in costume, an actor on the set--she was just an attractive young woman, the kind you see all the time in New York.  She was anonymous as a  prima ballerina strolling down Amsterdam Avenue in sweats, knowing she had that power within her.   I was real proud of myself, thinking, “she’s going to be  a huge movie star, but right now nobody’s paying any attention to her.”   And it was true, nobody knew who the hell she was.

But she did.  Hell yeah, I’m sure she did.

i can’t get a carton of milk in my Brooklyn neighborhood (aka Dumbo) without a hike, but there are 10 places where I can get ice cream within a few blocks. (I am not including anything that can be bought in a deli or bodega as that wouldn’t be a big deal.)

1

Probably the most famous place is the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory, situated in a landmark former fireboat house on the pier at the corner of Old Fulton and Water Street.  Unlike the over-rated pizza up the street at Grimaldi’s, this is something worth waiting in line for.  If you have to stand in line, this is  a very scenic and historic place to be, as the Brooklyn Bridge hovers above you, the glories of Manhattan extend before you, and the flashes from Asian wedding photo shoots make every day and night sparkle.  It’s a great spot for people-watching.

2

And if you really enjoy people-watching, a few feet away is another stand  serving the same ice cream on the pier.  You can stand on your line and enjoy the sight of dozens of patrons as they order and finish their cones, before your line starts to move.

Personally I have never understood why people stand in that line when the fresh cones are beckoning so closely in front of them.  Maybe they think that ice cream tastes better if you wait?   

Just kidding. I know they are tourist losers.

3

Jacques Torres Ice Cream  (62 Water Street)  This is without question the best ice cream in the neighborhood, as it is part of the world-famous Jacques Torres gourmet chocolate empire, and next door to his factory and store. This is truly ice cream as a work of art. There is only one problem: they are almost never open, and the times when they are open are a carefully guarded secret. Pick any time when you think it would be a good idea to have an ice cream shop open. Say 7 pm on a Saturday night, or 12:30 on a nice Sunday afternoon. They’ll probably be closed. Even though the sign says they’re supposed to be open, they’ll be closed.  But if you happen to be walking down Water Street for some other reason, stop, because this is something you won’t want to miss.

4

At the southwest corner of new Brooklyn Bridge Park, to the left of the pier, you will often see a  lonely guy sitting next to his Blue Marble ice cream cart reading a book.  By the time anybody gets to him, they have probably already eaten their fill of ice cream elsewhere (although they do bang-up business when there is a special event in the park). That said, this is some of the best ice cream you can get in the neighborhood, and like most of the ice cream listed on on this page, it is MADE IN BROOKLYN, USA!

5&6

There is a war going on between two soft ice cream trucks on Old Fulton Street. Sometimes Mr. Softee has the spot and sometimes the fake Mr. Softee has the spot. If the fake Mr. Softee is there and you have a yen for this kind of thing, it’s worth heading a few blocks north until you find the real Mr. Softee, because the fake Mr. Softee blows.

7

Kosher ice cream at The Landing at Fulton Ferry, Old Fulton and Everitt.  When I  pass this sign every day, I always imagine a Rabbi with an apron scooping away , but this is just pre-packaged ice cream in a freezer, sold in a nearby courtyard, where hot dogs are offered for sale. For some reason, Brooklyn Bridge Park is very popular with Chasidim, who come in by the busload, so maybe that’s the reason for these products are being so prominently advertised in this way.

8&9

GELATO! There is excellent gelato in front of the new Italian restaurant /wine bar  at 7 Old Fulton Street and if you go a few blocks down Front Street to Rice (at 81 Washington) you can buy take-out gelato just like on Mott Street!

10

Maybe this is pushing it, but there is an unnamed tourist store across from our apartment called and they have a freezer full of stuff. It is no worse than what’s on display at the Kosher Ice cream store and they have gelato!

So tell me… anybody else have so many dfferent kinds of ice cream available within a few blocks of their house?  Comments???

Years ago, I wanted to make a documentary on the 105 pound competitive eater Sonya Thomas, aka “The Black Widow.” Here was a tiny woman who kept beating all these huge men in contest after contest.

Of course, the idea of me actually doing a movie about Sonya was preposterous. Who would ever give me the money to do it? And even if somebody did, I didn’t really want to spend a year or two of my life traipsing around to the world’s eating contests. But I felt there was a really good feature there if somebody else would do it.

But, believe it or not, I just made a short film about Sonya. Here it is:

Making films with no plans for festival play has liberated me. YouTube Cinema. The first one was my documentary on animator/artist Jeff Scher. I made that in a little over a week .

Early on in his career, producer Ted Hope used to say that the budget was the aesthetic. For me, my only aesthetic question is: are my subject and my treatment of it interesting enough for a ten minute video? So I don’t agonize over edits, picture quality, music, sound mix, etc. I have learned the hard way that you can spend months fiddling around with little details on films that ultimately suck.

Better, I think, to make more movies, and concentrate on who or what you choose to make films about and how you choose to do it, rather than striving for the kind of pristine polish required for festival play. Pursuing this has freed me.

Jean-Luc Godard once said that the Cinema is the truth 24 times a second. For me the cinema is now 640 x 480 and ten minutes or less. Please resist the button that makes the image bigger. See it in glorious Lo-Def! You don’t need to wait for the Blu-ray to come out.

Working quickly and cheaply means that I can make any kind of movie I want to. In this case, it is not intended as a bio of Sonya, although it has elements of that. I never tried to interview her although there is contact info on her website. I knew from the start it wouldn’t be about her so much as it would be about my thoughts about her and her world. A movie about the way I saw her world from outside, not the way she saw it from inside.

It began when I discovered all sorts of terrific web video on Sonya in every format you can imagine: on phones, home video cameras, local TV stations, shot off TV screens, etc. So I thought, “okay, I’ll just sling a few of these wonderful things together and I’ll have another one-week movie.” But as I got into it, I broke my rules and it became a massive three-week undertaking. In the future I’ll try not to go over my time allotment on my zero-budget movies.

I’d like to thank Melissa for not blinking when she  encountered me at  one a.m. singing “Black Widow, Sonya’s the Black Widow” into a microphone.

Postscript:  I sent the link to Sonya via her website and she loved it!  It turns out that today is her birthday and she saw it as a nice gift. 

I’m bewildered by all the bad press the iPhone 4 has been getting lately. Holding the phone in a certain way means that you get less reception? Less bars? It means absolutely nothing to me and I doubt that many iPhone owners give a damn either. Apple is offering a full refund to iPhone 4 owners who aren’t satisfied--let’s see how many people take them up on that offer.

I have never relied on my iPhone as a phone. Usually I can’t make or receive calls on it and if I have been lucky enough to get a connection, it cuts out right away. Once my wife and I were shopping in different parts of a store and she wanted to let me know she was ready to leave. So she called me. She would have had better luck tossing a paper airplane. When she finally found me and we left the store, she was pretty pissed off, but not as much as she was when my iPhone booped and told me I had received some calls. Using the iPhone’s amazing visual voice mail feature, I could listen to her calls in any order I wanted: for example, I could start with the angriest one first.

The iPhone does have email and it works serviceably. I’m sure that anybody who never owned a Blackberry would be very happy with it. But if you have had a Blackberry, the iPhone is a Ford and the Blackberry is a Lamborghini. My trained Blackberry thumbs could fly like the wind. I could type on my old Blackberry at a speed slightly slower than thought. Using my hunting and pecking skills on my iPhone, I am back to second grade, written communication-wise.

But I looooooove my iPhone. Next to my musical instruments computer and TV set, it is the object I get the most use out of and enjoy the most. To my mind it’s one of the most amazing devices ever invented. It tells me the weather, it helps me from getting lost, gives me news, information about movies, reminds me when I have appointments, records interviews, plays me music through Pandora when I’m exercising, takes excellent photos and videos, among of course, tens of thousands of other things. Of course I could probably get everything I need on an Android, but that would mean that people could reach me on my cell and I’d never get any peace.

With my iPhone I can go shopping any time I want and not spend a penny. There are tons of games and apps of all sorts that are free. And as soon as I “buy” something, Apple sends me a receipt so I will remember about the nothing I just spent. This makes me feel really good—like I got away with something.  I keep all of these receipts in a special folder so I can budget for more free purchases in the future.

My iPhone is so pretty that it makes me happy just to look at it, something I do often. I am so moony over it that my wife gets jealous sometimes, so I buy another fart application so she will recognize that there is something for her in it too. My iPhone reminds me of the vintage Rickenbacker bass guitar I once owned. I never played it much, as I have never liked the raspy way a Rick bass sounds. But I got a lot of pleasure just opening the case. Oh God, it was a great looking guitar! And after I finally sold it, I got much more than I paid for it. Likewise, I sold my iPhone 3G on eBay last week and got $190 for the phone I paid $199 two years ago for. Not as good a deal as the Rick, but still pretty sweet.

Anyway, as I said before, all this talk about bars disappearing when you hold the phone a certain way flummoxes me. Bars? I don’t need no stinkin’ bars!  I swear to God I never looked at the damned bars until everybody started making such a to-do about them.

In some places I have read that the iPhone 4 is better phone than my old 3G, as long as you hold it properly. A case too. People should stop whining and get a damned case!  One tech blogger said that he had used his for three hours, something he had never done since the first one went on sale. And I admit that I got a call from somebody at a doctor’s office when I was at my podiatrist this week. I thought it was one of the alter kockers who worked there. They had been extremely confused about my appointment, so I thought they might have been calling me from the other room to confirm. But it turned out it was a receptionist from a gynecologist’s office. I was able to stay on the line long enough to tell her I was a man. She wanted to know if that meant I wanted to cancel, but eventually we sorted it out. Mission accomplished! So maybe I shouldn’t be so negative about my iPhone. Maybe I will start getting lots of calls. But at this point they will be limited to wrong numbers, until I build up my confidence.

Still I am happy about this whole “losing bars” deal. Because of the phone’s antenna issues, Steve Jobs is going to send me a “Bumper,” a piece of colored plastic that costs him a nickel and he was selling for $30. More free stuff! Not only that, I get to choose the color.

After I get my Bumper, I hope Steve sends me a nice receipt.

I’ve been reading a lot of snarky blog posts and articles lately about my favorite film critic. I’ve heard these comments before: he’s just a knee-jerk contrarian who gets off on having the opposite opinion as everyone else; he can’t possibly believe what he writes; he’s just looking for attention, etc. One writer went to the trouble of going through nearly every paragraph in one of his reviews, searching for some nitpicky way to trick him up. Talk about snarky.

What threatens these haters is the possibility that he just might be right. If there’s anything we have learned from history, it’s that the conventional wisdom of today isn’t necessarily the way things will be perceived in the future. Who’s to say? Maybe recent buzzeroonie movies of the moment like “Toy Story 3,” “The Kids Are All Right,” and “Inception” will end up in the trash can of cinematic history, whereas “Marmaduke” will fascinate film scholars for eons to come. I’d be willing to wager that a lot of the people who are making these snap judgments haven’t even seen “Marmaduke.”

Why can’t an American critic write a great review without getting beat up?

His review of “Marmaduke” came out on the 4th of June, 2010, a day that I will never forget. The outraged response from the serious film academy—including nearly every member of “Rotten Tomatoes” who hadn’t had computer privileges taken away by their moms—was so virulently negative that it reminded me of an event that had happened six days and 97 years prior: the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Le sacre du printemps” at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées  on May 29th, 1913.

His first paragraph stirred my soul with its erudition, rigor and authority:

Unlike over-hyped time-wasting piffle like “L’avventura,” “Tokyo Story,” “Yi Yi,” “The Godfather,” “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” “The Hurt Locker,” “The Son,” “The Bicycle Thief,” “Grand Illusion,” “Citizen Kane” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Psycho,” “Raging Bull,” “Metropolis,” “Shoah,” “2001,” “The Searchers,” “Children of Paradise,” “Pather Panchali,” “The Seven Samurai,” “The Thin Blue Line,” “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” “The Rules of the Game,” “Breathless,” “Pulp Fiction,” “Caché,” “Talk to Her,” “Spirited Away,” “There Will be Blood,” “In the Mood for Love,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Taste of Cherry,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Blade Runner,” and “Stranger Than Paradise,” “Marmaduke” is a real film, a film for the ages. Tom Dey has reinvented the lovable Great Dane comedy. I must admit I didn’t think that Dey could ever surpass his work on the unjustly maligned “Failure to Launch,” but he has done it! (Matthew McConaughey gave the performance of his life in that film.)

I would like to reprint more and even offer a link, but his review has been taken down, and I only memorized the first paragraph.

Go ahead and scoff. I bet a lot of you haven’t even seen “Marmaduke.”

I enjoyed Tad Friend’s piece in the July 5^th issue of The New Yorker, “First Banana,” about Steve Carell and the new improvisatory process of film and TV comedy. In a nutshell, it’s about how contemporary movie comedies—made by filmmakers like Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, Nicholas Stoller, and Jay Roach, and featuring actors like Carell, Will Ferrell, Jonah Hill, Jason Siegel, Seth Rogen, and Paul Rudd—often find their biggest laughs through the adlibbing of the actors rather than through their scripted punchlines. So much so that it’s inconceivable that these kinds of movies could exist in their present forms if they were made any other way. In essence, the method of their creation equals the style of the comedy.

He contrasts this new approach to comedy with the “written” style, as exemplified by more classical writer/directors like Billy Wilder (who he reports as bewildered by an act of improvisation on his set) and Woody Allen (who actually encourages every actor to improvise freely, although few do). But I admit I was a little pissed off when he used this example to illustrate the stodgy old ways:

Traditional comedies have a sleekness that calls to mind the typewriter. Consider the moment in the 1980 film “Airplane!” when two passengers chat before takeoff: “Nervous?” “Yes.” “First Time?” “No, I’ve been nervous a lot of times.”

For one thing, I thought it was weird that he would use the movie that was such a dramatic break from the past in its day, and ultimately led to “Saturday Night Live” and ultimately the movies that Friend is describing. And the other thing, is as I mentioned last week, I worked on “The Naked Gun” and have a real soft spot for the guys who made that film as well as “Airplane!” and “Top Secret!”

But yeah, they were guilty of writing funny stuff, and staging it exactly as they wrote it. On the other hand, unlike Billy Wilder or Woody Allen, they were a team of three, brothers David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams. In fact there were four of them if you counted producer Robert K. Weiss, who was an equal player in the posse that constantly engaged in a Talmudesque debates about what was funny and what was not. Like the comedies described by Friend, it was very much a collaborative approach to making movies.

I remember one day we were shooting a scene where the film’s clueless policeman, Sergeant Frank Drebin, Detective Lieutenant Police Squad (played by Leslie Nielson), stuck on the high ledge of a building, slips and grabs onto the penis of an ornamental statue to break his fall. Numerous variations of the stunt were tried, as the team wrangled over the best way to execute the gag. The stuntman was tiring. Finally David shouted, “I’m the director, I’m the director! Two hands isn’t funny! One hand is funny!”

They were very influenced by Mad Magazine and in particular the little pictures that would be hidden in the magazine, funny stuff you might not notice the first time around. They wanted people to find things on second viewing that they might miss the first time. For example, Drebin’s cop car said “To Warm and Serve.” On each episode of “Police Squad!,” the cult TV series that “The Naked Gun” was adapted from, Drebin would stop his car and knock over a bunch of garbage cans. The number of garbage cans he hit corresponded to the episode number. Needless to say, he was hitting a lot of garbage cans by the time the movie came along.

There were rules. Driving home every day from work I would pass this sign that said “dip,” and it gave me a dumb idea for a joke. I asked Abrahams if he thought it would be funny if Drebin stopped at the sign, and dunked a corn chip in a jar of salsa conveniently waiting there. “We have found that there can only be a limited amount of puns in our movies,” he intoned earnestly. He wasn’t making any value judgment about my idea; it was just over the limit. On the other hand, I remember driving to a location for a week or so and passing a pair of odd-looking industrial silos. They looked like a giant brassiere. And sure enough, when I saw the movie, they turned up on-screen, underneath Drebin’s voice-over, “Everything I saw reminded me of you.”

While I don’t remember much improvisation on the set, their method was to shoot a lot more material than they planned to use. They’d see how funny it turned out to be at dailies. The final test was to screen the movie. If people didn’t laugh at a joke, I don’t think it made it in.

I have many warm memories of working on that movie: rich conversations with Ricardo Montalban, George Kennedy about their careers; many laughs with the late Nancy Marchand (so brilliant years later as Livia Soprano); hanging out with Reggie Jackson on the field of Dodger Stadium; going to Priscilla Presley’s house for a photo shoot. Leslie Nielsen had a piece of rubber that he kept in his pocket to make fart noises. He said that it changed his life; it made everybody think about him in a different way. He sure had that right. When my family came to visit the set, I tried to nudge him into action. “That Mexican food we had for lunch, Leslie… I don’t know…”

But O.J. Simpson? There wasn’t much depth to him, as far as I could tell. Generally he would say stuff like, “I hope shooting doesn’t go on too long tonight. I have a golf tournament I want to get to in Palm Springs.” Believe it or not, when he exploded onto the front pages of the media, I got calls from many major media outlets. Journalists were scouring for anybody who had any contact him and I suppose they thought, he’s a publicist. I told them all, “I spent a lot of time with the guy, but there is no one in the world who knows less about O.J. Simpson than me. He never said a single thing that was interesting.”

Recently, I ran into a Village Voice film critic Jim Hoberman at a screening. He hadn’t seen me in years, and he asked what I’d been up to. The truth is I’ve been doing all kinds of stuff: consulting, Oscar campaigns, unit publicity (where you handle press on films while they’re shooting), blogging –for-pay (not with this one, alas), teaching, interviews for electronic presskits or EPKs (those little docs that show up on Bravo or on DVDs), creating a website, even writing and directing a number of short films.

But my main bread-and-butter has come from writing movie press materials. For those of you that aren’t in the business, critics, editors, feature writers are all given little booklets when a film comes out, with short descriptions of the plot, essays on the making of the film, bios of the cast and crew, and other related tidbits. They are usually formulaic, but there is a lot of room for creativity.

You have real freedom to write whatever you want in these things because it isn’t journalism--you always know the talent will get to approve what you write after you turn it in. So it’s acceptable if you combine two words here with three words there and five words there. In fact, it’s fine if you make it all up. Some people are inarticulate, but if you listen to them ramble for a while, you can kind of get what they are trying to say, and then you come up with something short and snappy and quotable. Or they really don’t have a clue, so then you figure out an idea of what they might say if they did have an idea. The funny thing is that most of them actually believe they said it. Of course there are some people who are so well-spoken that they just say three sentences and stop—then you copy it and put it in. Still, knowing that they can change it, I have no concerns at all about polishing the prose from people who actually were extremely effective communicators. I remember showing Robert Redford his “quotes” for “The Milagro Beanfield War” and watching him roar with laughter.

Once I got a call from a distributor sent me a tape of a director’s Cannes press conference as he thought there was great material there. It was true that the things this director said were quoted a lot in the festival press. But I discovered that he didn’t say any of the things that were quoted so often during the press conference. I said them. In the notes.

When I did the notes for “The Naked Gun,” I pulled the whole thing out of my ass. I wrote everybody’s quotes without interviewing them and invented a completely fictional story of making the film. For example, Leslie Nielson was hired because he was the cheapest actor they could get. Then I brought the draft around and asked the filmmakers and actors to approve it. Most people chuckled and said sure, but it was ticklish with Priscilla Presley (a very nice person, by the way). I had to meet around a conference table with numerous reps and advisors and pitch Priscilla quotes. The rule was I couldn’t mention Elvis, which was a challenge. Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker loved it and my favorite moment came when a studio exec came to the set and congratulated them for writing it. (Afterwards it was rewritten by the studio, so I have no involvement with the version journalists actually read.)

For one movie, I had a series of meetings with the director and the screenwriter, a famous, award-winning novelist. The two of them would describe the movie they made and I’d do my best to convey that. Then they’d edit the film some more, decide it wasn’t really about what they’d told me before, and call me back in for another meeting. At one point, the novelist told me that the heart of the film was encapsulated by what a particular character said at the end. Later on, they cut that line out. I loved these meetings and was really sad when they ended. At the final meeting, the author handed me some stunning prose to use for the opening paragraphs, approved everything else, and that was that. It was a great movie. All of them were.

Sometimes books would be published that included Q&A’s I conducted. In one instance, I wrote the questions and a good portion of the answers too. Of course I wasn’t credited, and didn’t expect to be. Just for fun I called up the publisher and she said it never occurred to her that anybody actually wrote any of the materials she got from the studios. And it was at that moment that I realized the magic and glory of writing lowly production notes. You interview lots of people, transcribe it, write something up and turn it in. It can take weeks and there are often extensive revisions. It’s very much like real writing, except that once the job is completed, from that point on, nobody wrote it. And that’s what Hoberman said when I told him that I wrote notes: he had no idea anybody actually wrote them. (He was joking.  I hope.) I feel there’s something grand about the egolessness of the work, as I put as much effort and seriousness into it as I do with all my other writing, including the words you’re now reading. So when there is no credit, it puts me in the company of the artisans who built Chartres, even if it is an Adam Sandler movie. And that is wonderful.

But I understand why people think nobody writes production notes. Most of them total crap and my cat could do a better job, and thank God for that, as otherwise I wouldn’t get work. I have been able to make a living because the large majority of publicists have zero writing skills. 99% of them are sent out anyway as nobody wants to spend the money to make it better. I was in the running for one of the biggest movies of last year, and had half a dozen of the biggest stars in the business. Tens of millions of dollars were spent advertising and promoting it. They budgeted $1500 for the pressbook rewrite. This is for the sales angle—the so-called “positioning”--for the film to the entire media.

I’m not complaining. This is one of the greatest jobs you can get if you are a movie fan. I sit here at my desk in Brooklyn and phone up legends. I have written the notes for the last four movies by one of my favorite filmmakers, someone who has enriched my entire life. I doubt I will ever meet him and that is fine with me, as I consider it an honor to have any involvement with him, no matter how modest. And it is proper that he will never meet me because after his revisions are complete, I no longer exist, nor should I.

I do have a single regret from my years of writing pressbooks. When I wrote the notes for “River’s Edge,” Crispin Glover didn’t want to do the interview over the phone; he wanted me to come to his apartment. I just wanted to get the job done with the least fuss and refused his entreaties. It’s not productive to have regrets in life, but I think about that a lot, what I missed out on by not seeing Crispin Glover’s apartment.

I was stunned and saddened to read in indieW IRE of the death of my friend, film critic Peter Brunette.

I met him in the early 70s at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I was a wet-behind-the-ears undergraduate, and he was a wise and kind grad student. I had a lot of passion in those days but didn’t really know what I was talking about, and there were a lot of people senior people who never missed an opportunity to bring that to my attention. Peter was the opposite. He knew as much--or more--than many of my tormentors did, but he treated me with respect. When I look back, I can see that mentors like Peter changed my life in ways that, although I didn’t really notice them at the time, are momentous in retrospect. So it didn’t surprise me to learn that Peter the young scholar became Peter the professor, so he could go on and influence others.

Peter wrote or edited eight books on film, on directors like Rossellini, Antonioni, and Wong Kar-wai, and Michael Haneke. I’ll let other people talk about Peter Brunette the writer and critic, I’d like to talk about the human being.

What is the mark of a man? What does he leave behind? Everyone is remembered by their family and in their inner circle. Some people become famous and have followers and fans. Other people, like Peter, have an impact that ripples out to the countless people he helped, through an ego-less decency that was second nature to him. His was a lifetime of quiet generosity.

Recently I was reading about a legendary Hollywood director that I knew in passing. His work will live forever I suppose. But I was at the tribute to him shortly after he passed, and let me tell you, there were very few people there, and there was nobody there that had met him more than a few years before he died. He had napalmed every bridge in his life.

On the other hand, read some of the things that people have written about Peter. There are some in Eugene Hernandez’s IndieWire story above and here and here and here. Note that there are people who have known him since his youth and some people who met him weeks ago. I’m sure there are hundreds of people who are thinking about him now, but are too numb to figure out what to say.

It doesn’t matter if you never met Peter, people’s memories of him are worth reading, as they are instructive: they are a testament to a life well lived. No matter how old you are, there is still time to be like him and help a young person get a foothold  in life.

A few weeks ago, I read the New York Times obituary of Callie Angell, the former adjunct curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project at the Whitney Museum, who had been had been researching and cataloguing Warhol’s films since 1991. I had no idea that this ambitious project was being undertaken, and I wasn’t sure what I thought about it.

It flashed me back to my college days at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, when I was a huge fan of Warhol’s films, despite the fact that I had never seen a single one. Most, if not all of the films had been withdrawn from circulation, or very rarely shown, certainly not in Madison. That didn’t stop me. I read everything I could about them, and I was totally fascinated.

One night in the late 70s in New York, I spotted Warhol at a party. I was dying to ask him about his films, but I couldn’t work up the nerve, so I just stood there watching him make his way down an appetizer table. He had occupied so much of my thoughts that it was weird for him to just be there, a plastic cup of wine in one hand and an hors d’oeuvres plate in the other. I realized it was now or never. He was as easy prey as he was ever going to be, so I pounced.

“Excuse me, Mr. Warhol, may I ask you a question?”

Warhol looked at me with his trademark languid affectlessness—a pose or really him?— the ultimate in coolness. He didn’t say anything.

“I’ve read all about your films, but I can’t see them.”

“Oh…” he said.

“Are they in distribution somewhere? Do you have any plans to bring them out?

“Not really.”

“You really should. A lot of people want to see them and they can’t.”

“Isn’t it better that way?”

“What do you mean? It’s not better at all--“

But he was gone, leaving me to wonder about what he meant by “Isn’t it better that way?” The hell it was! He was a very important artist and it wasn’t acceptable for him to keep his work all to himself.

I wanted to see “Sleep,” a single shot of a guy sleeping. I knew exactly how long, too. Five hours and twenty minutes. What a concept. I was of the age where my God was Godard. The thing that fueled so many late night discussions at the Plaza Tavern was “What can the Cinema be?” Godard told me that the Cinema could be anything. No limits. That’s why reading about this movie was so heady for me. I knew that most people would find it laughable and dismiss it, but that happens regularly with the most important things in art. But I wasn’t going to be satisfied with reading about “Sleep,” I wanted to see it for myself. What would it look like? Would it be funny? Would it be trance-like? Would it be boring? Would it put me to sleep too? I wanted to know.

“Isn’t it better that way?” Hell no. Drop that canapé and release your movies.

I didn’t think I could get through all of “Empire,” though--eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building is a bit much, even for me. But it was known as a movie designed to be impossible to watch. I wouldn’t turn up for that screening, but I still wanted it shown. Scholars have written about it and they should be able to study it because it has such historical importance.

“Isn’t it better that way?”

“Blow Job” was only a half hour long, and the concept was really interesting. You don’t see the blowjobber, you only saw the blowjobee. You didn’t know if it was a man or woman administering the BeeJay, or even if it was happening at all. I believed that Warhol would insist on the film being real. Would the guy on the screen be self-conscious? Would you be able to read what was going on? “Blow Job” is a silent film, which might give it a feeling of gravity. Would it be like a low-rent Dreyer movie or would it be banal? Warhol was refusing to let me see a movie where I wouldn’t see anything.

His intransigence was forcing me play out all these crazy scenarios in my mind, without knowing anything about these movies except their concepts.

“Isn’t it better that way?”

Like a lot of people, I was hoping that Mickey Rourke’s job at the deli in the film “The Wrestler” was going to work out for him. I didn’t want him to be picking out staples out of his back—or worse. This job was humiliating for him, but I thought he was pretty good at it. Maybe he could have become manager or whatever.

But I have found this footage, which may explain why that didn’t come to be:

Full disclosure: I think this is funny, but no matter how many times I cut this, PEOPLE PERSIST IN THINKING THAT IT’S JUST A CLIP FROM THE MOVIE! This in spite of the fact that "I'm an old broken down piece of meat, and I'm alone...and I deserve to be all alone…" is arguably the film’s most famous line and IT'S IN THE TRAILER which I saw over a hundred times on TV. Mr. Rourke’s character, Randy, did not ONCE use that phrase to refer to deli meats! And when people asked him for smoked ham or egg salad or chicken--he politely gave all of them exactly what they wanted, no matter how rude or obnoxious they were. He did not serve anybody an old broken down piece of meat. And each person who came to his counter had a remarkably developed character, like the woman who asked for "a little more" and "a little less…" Arrrgggh!

Here’s why I think people think my crappy mashup is an actual scene from the movie? I think it's because Darren Aronofsky is such a brilliant director that he makes everything seem absolutely real. No matter what you do with his shots, they seem authentic. You can't take the realness out of his images, no matter how stupid you try to make them. The actual deli scenes are so filled with humor and frustration and pain that they vividly call up the feelings that everyone has who have ever had to work this kind of job--as I have--has felt intensely.

Aronofsky’s talent is such that these scenes are as alive as any of the more emotionally charged scenes, like his clumsy courtship of Marisa Tomei’s character, and he painful attempts to reach out to his estranged daughter, played by Evan Rachel Wood. And obviously I realize that screenwriter Robert Siegel didn’t choose a deli job for Randy arbitrarily. It is metaphor and a good one, particularly when you get to the horrifying moment that really marks Randy’s exit from his deli job in the story.

“The Wrestler” is a great film that will reward multiple viewings. And if you haven't seen it yet... rent it

This week marked the end of Simon Cowell’s reign on “American Idol.” Everyone says that the show will be over without him, but the truth is, it’s been losing audience size, excitement, and relevance over the last few years, even with him there. He just knows when it’s time to leave the party.

Most of the conversation has been about who could replace him, which is not a difficult to figure out—no one can. No matter who replaces him, or how many people replace him, it will be a disappointment. So this is a really good time for the producers to rethink the whole concept, rather than just sit back as it slowly sinks to the bottom.

The truth is, watching unknown young people attempt to sing their parents’ songs is looking pretty tired in the age of “Glee,” and the show no longer has much to do with finding American Idols either. The concept of the show was pretty exciting at the beginning—the first season launched a bonafide pop star in Kelly Clarkson. Since then, aside from one true superstar in Carrie Underwood, for the most part the Idols have been pretty lackluster. Meanwhile, the internet gave us Justin Bieber, who, like him or not, is a true pop star in a way that Taylor Hicks, Jordin Sparks, David Cook, Kris Allen, or the current Idol, Lee DeWyze, will ever be. Bieber performed on the show, as did Perez Hilton’s internet “discovery” Travis Garland, and Hillary Scott, the lead singer of the chart-topping country music trio Lady Antebellum, who tried out for “Idol” twice and never got on the show. Another YouTube wonder, Greyson Chance, was signed by “Idol” judge Ellen DeGeneres to her new record label. I hope DeGeneres will also sign a few “Idol” rejects, but it is still more than a little ironic that a judge of America’s leading talent competition will make the first artist on her label someone who never tried out.

The failure of “American Idol” is based on the lie that Simon or the judges or the TV viewing audience have anything to do with who wins. The real choices are made by the producers of the show. They’re the ones who listen to the tens of thousands of people who crowd the stadiums. They make their selections, and make sure that half of them are tone deaf, so we can all enjoy laughing at them. Simon, Ellen, Randy and Cara just choose from that group. Who knows who never gets the chance to enter their audition room? And after that, there is all the nonsense of forcing everyone to perform music that they are unsuited for, and letting 8-year-olds text the most talented ones out. A lot of people watch and enjoy the program, but if the idea is to find the best , then it doesn’t seem to be working.

On the other hand, any kid who puts up a series of videos on YouTube, has the chance to get noticed for being a good singer with charisma. It’s a long shot, sure, but at least they can play their own kind of music--they don’t have to make an ass of themselves on Sinatra or Country nights.

The internet has plenty of its own competitions. Singer/songwriter Kina Grannis made a video of her song “Message From Your Heart” and entered it in a YouTube contest. A few months later, it aired during the Super Bowl and she got a record deal. Having begun her career through a contest, Grannis is now doing a contest of her own: “Cowrite with Kina,” a chance to contribute lyrics to one of her songs.

For the hell of it I decided to enter Kina’s contest and sent in a first verse for her song. To do this I had to listen to her sing her lyric-less first verse over and over, as I made numerous revisions. I knew I could never write anything that would suit her style, but it was an interesting exercise, one of those oddly personal-but-not-really experiences that only the internet can offer.

While the “Idol” contestants are thrown into the media mosh pit with photo shoots and interviews and then tossed out once the show is done with them, people like Grannis are cultivating the tools that will enable them to build and hold onto a fan base.

If “Idol” wants to stay current, it needs to do more with the internet than to have YouTube pop stars play on the show—they need to integrate YouTube into the show. Perhaps there could be two roads to getting on “Idol”: one would be the traditional way, and the second would be through the kind of internet contest that Kina Grannis entered. An internet contest would give an advantage to the people who have been making videos for years and who have developed followings. If they achieved that, they will have earned that advantage. 

Simon Cowell is irreplaceable, but what needs to be revived on “American Idol” is the belief that winning the show actually means something, something that is slipping away year after year.

I don’t think there is anybody around who is more of an Apple admirer than me. I’ve owned four of their computers, three iPods, one iPhone, Final Cut, Logic, and lots more. I pressure everybody I know to make the Apple switch, because I think that would make their life better. When Bill Maher recently said on his show that what this country needs is Jobs, as in Steve Jobs, I called out “Yesss!” But then I thought about it. Really? Would our government be better if it was run by a genius like Steve Jobs? It sure would seem that way. But still, Steve Jobs? The man does have has a few pesky qualities, to say the least.

1. Secrecy: Guarding against industrial espionage is a high priority for all sorts of companies, as is controlling the timing of new product announcements until the most advantageous time. But I believe it is fair to say that no company protects its secrets more than Apple. Workers are forbidden to talk to outsiders about what happens at work, including relatives. In Cupertino most Apple employees aren’t allowed to go to other areas where other projects are in development.

Today, North Korea is one of the most secretive countries in the world—it guards its borders tightly and no travel is allowed without a Soviet-style “escort.” People from South Korea are rarely given visas and no journalists are allowed in on tourist visas.  Still, you’d have to score this one for Kim, because there are North Korea tours and no Apple office tours, even for the people who work there.

2. Antipathy to Journalism: When secrets are vital, then journalists must always be the enemy. There can be no other way. Within what is possible in your world, you must do everything to stymie them or stop them outright. The North Korean Constitution theoretically protects freedom of the press but only if serves the interests of the government. Journalists aren’t allowed into North Korea with tourist visas. Despite this some western journalists have managed to cover the country. Laura Ling and Euna Lee were only near North Korea when they were jailed, setting off an international incident. The point that Kim was making was to set an example and discourage others.

Nearly all requests for interviews with Jobs are refused, and it’s fair to say that the ones that are aren’t particularly hard-hitting, and Time Magazine sent a non-journalist, British actor/writer Stephen Fry to cover the iPad launch. Apple super-fan Nicholas Ciarelli created a website, “Think Secret,” a website dedicated to finding out about Apple’s hidden plans, when he was 13. Over the years, Ciarelli received numerous cease-and-desist letters from Apple, until they filed a lawsuit against him and he was forced to shut the site in 2005. As has been widely reported, Gizmodo did a story revealing the new iPhone when an Apple employee left it in a bar. Days later, California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team entered editor Jason Chen's home without him present, seizing four computers and two servers. So what we have is a journalist who has presented all his information in a public way to the world, being treated in the same way as a hacker, a terrorist, a collector of child pornography—all people who are engaged in heinous illegal activities. The point is to make an example.

3. Cult of Personality: Per the current North Korean constitution Kim is now the “Supreme Leader,” although he is also referred to as the “Dear Leader” and the “Great Leader.” He receives the standard totalitarian dictatorial goodie bag enjoyed by Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, Hussein, and so many others—giant posters, massive statuary, military parades, the whole shebang. His image is familiar the world over: big glasses, “Eraserhead” haircut, and Mao-chic matching gray pants and shirts.

Jobs’ personal power comes first from being brilliant and creating some of the most wonderful products ever. He has an adoring following because he totally deserves it. As far as I’m concerned, anybody who disagrees with that is either uninformed, a moron, a jerk, or all three. I am not joking. Bart Simpson deserves a spanking:

Secondly, you don’t see or hear from him much and that adds to his mystery and our excitement when he does appear. There are very few photos of him for a man of his stature. We generally see him when he’s onstage presenting a new Apple product, which he does with such skill that you want to sign on to all the secrecy that enabled the show. His uniform is a black turtleneck, jeans and sneakers, which he wears at every Apple presentation, and legend has it, every day period. But I’m not trying to make cheap shot, comparing his outfit to totalitarian garb, as it is not an unusual thing for highly focused creative types--Stanley Kubrick did the same thing.

4. Affection for 1984 Iconography:

5. The Will to Go it Alone: Kim Jong-il created devastation, including a terrible famine by cutting off relationships with long-time trading partners like China and Russia (and obviously, South Korea).

Steve Jobs has a tendency to create his own standards rather than use the ones that have been established by others.  Legal MP3 downloads from all other companies will play on an iPod or iPhone, but nothing that’s downloaded from the Apple store can be played on a non-Apple product. The iPhone only is available from AT&T, so if I talk really fast, 5% of my calls don’t cut out—but that’s okay, I love my apps.  Anybody can have a phone that makes calls.     Currently, he denies users of the iPad access to nearly all the video on the web, by making it unable to function with Flash. It has been reported that he is developing a Flash alternative called Gianduia. Unless he budges on Flash, iPad users will go to their graves without ever having access to the web that every computer has.  But  if any of them want to call me to complain about it, they should make sure they use my land line.

6. Hard-Knuckled Management Style: Both are pretty tough cookies.  Suffice to say, neither of them have seen much point for carrots when there are so many sticks lying around.

The Contrast: Despite the six points I have enumerate above, there is an important difference between the two of them. Kim is a psychopathic monster who has brought devastation on millions of people, and with his nuclear arsenal, is one of the biggest threats the world currently faces. On the other hand, Jobs is a super-talented guy who has brought much wonder and joy into the world.

Despite everything I’ve written in this post,I wish my life had gone differently and I had had the chance to work for Steve Jobs. He might have yelled at me but that wouldn’t have bothered me one bit.   I’m a big boy, and I’ve worked in the film business for thirty years, for Chrissakes. But all my best teachers in school and life have pushed me to do my utmost. They accepted nothing less.  I know that he would be just like that.  I’m sure I would be a much better man today if I had worked for him, and it would give me a lot of pleasure to know that I had played a role in Apple. 

I started this post attempting to sort out in my mind whether it is better to have democracy, or to have an effective, superb leader, even if kind of autocratic. You can disagree with me, but I’d go with Jobs any day. Democracy, as it currently exists in this country is  an abject failure.  What is going on in Washington today bears the same relationship to what the founding fathers created as of acts of child rape do to Jesus’s words. Every single one of these “politicians” is corrupted by their weaknesses--for power, for money, for the adulation of the crowd, for the childlike need to have their egos constantly buffed, and increasingly, to manipulate their staff members to have sex with their ugly-ass selves.  That is to say, they are all too human, and it just makes everything worse to have a big f*cked-up porridge of them.   But how about one benevolent king? 

Imagine going into the House and Senate and throwing every single one of the bums out.  Then let Steve Jobs come in with his crew. I bet that in no time at all he’d have cleaned up the BP oil spill, provided Health care with a public option, provided real reform for Wall Street, and eliminated global warming.  Plus there would be apps!   Maybe he would be mean sometimes and make inexplicable decisions, and probably it would be arduous for everybody, but at the end of the day you know what?  He would be right most of the time.  And our country would be in much better shape than it is today.

It sure as hell would look better.

It’s hard to believe there have only been 118 hours of “Lost.” Considering how many episodes I’ve watched repeatedly, I’ve spent at least 250 hours watching the show. That’s just a smidge over eight days. But as every die-hard fan knows, watching the show is only part of the fun. You have to discuss it with your friends, read about it online, come up with theories, and so on. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been introduced to a stranger at a party, and before I know it the two of us are talking about “Lost.” Talk too loud at a restaurant and somebody at the next table chimes in. “Lost” is ultimately a social experience. I’ve probably spent over 500 hours on my obsession with the show. That still doesn’t seem like much, so I’m probably estimating it on the low side.

Now there are only 3 ½ hours left, and there will be no more new episodes. Of course people will continue talking about what the finale meant, but that’s just not the same. After the hoo-hah about the inconclusive conclusion of “The Sopranos,” it gradually receded in memory and people went on with their “Soprano”-less lives.

As this is my last chance to prognosticate about the show, I’m going to use this blog post to express my current theories. I hope that some of them will be right, but I know that a lot of them will be wrong. That’s what I love most about the show, the way it continually surprises me.

Anyway, if you don’t want to think about what might happen, then you should stop reading right now.

The story is shaping up as a pretty simple battle of good versus pure evil. So, good has to win, right? The producers aren’t going to send us away with all our characters dead and the world coming to an end, right? On the other hand, having goodness prevail is a little too easy, and the writers have never taken the easy path. And that is why I believe they have introduced the so-called “Sideways World,” the one where flight 815 didn’t crash, and where certain details were different, as for example, Desmond was on the plane.

We know a few things about the Sideways World. Number one, the island is under water. To me, this means that in the Sideways World, The Man in Black has won, the island is gone and he is now off the island and about to wreak havoc on the world. Number two, the Sideways World is “real,” in the sense that the people in the Sideways World have awareness of their lives on the island.

So I think good and evil both win. There is the world on the island where evil loses, and there is the Sideways World where he wins. But after The Man in Black is beaten on the island does that mean that the Sideways World will dissolve into pixie dust? I don’t think so. Again, it’s too easy.

I think The Man in Black has to be beaten twice.

But who is he in the Sideways World? Ben and Locke are too obvious. Will The Man in Black look like himself or will he take the form of one of the other characters? And who’s going to beat him? Well there is one main character we haven’t encountered yet in the Sideways World, and that is Juliet, who will be revealed as—BIG SURPRISE!—Jack’s wife. I think she’ll play an important role.

And obviously Desmond will be vital to the defeat of the Man in Black on the island. No way did Sayid kill him. And a lot of members of the main cast will walk the plank soon, but that’s not exactly a big deal when there’s only three and a half hours to go. And even if they die, they still got another life in the Sideways World, so it’s not like they’re off the show or anything.

Finally, I believe the show ends as it began, with Jack’s eye opening and him lying on the back on the woods…and him running to the plane crash on the beach. I have believed this since the producers started messing around with time and space on the show. I have believed this as soon as the characters began waking up in some other time zone or place with a close-up of their eye, that was it for me. I had no idea how the producers would get us there, but it always seemed the most poetic way to end the show. So now I know what the deal is: this time Jack won’t get to the woods via flight 815 of Oceanic Airlines, he’ll get there because he is now Jacob’s successor and the new protector of the island. And we’ll understand that everything that is about to happen to the characters on the plane from this point forward will be different. This will leave the continuing story open, but our understanding of the overall meaning of the series will be satisfied.

Another bonus will be that most of the cast members who were off the show will be back for this scene, which will be great news for all the Ian Somerhalder and Maggie Grace fans.

I realize that there are countless story issues with my theory—Jack was on the plane, for one thing—but it is the richest and most poetic resolution for the story. The writers will provide explanations for all the inconsistencies in order to make such a beautiful conclusion possible.

What do you think? There’s only a few days left for you to tell me I’m wrong, before Sunday comes and the producers prove I’m wrong.

Still, my fingers are crossed for a spin-off. I’ve heard that ABC is talking to Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson about “Ben and Jerry,” where O’Quinn reprises his best-known role before “Lost,” Jerry Blake in “The Stepfather.” (What is it about O’Quinn and knives?)Imagine the havoc those two could wreak if they came to a small town!  Ben would betray everybody and Jerry would kill his family. And then they’d move on to a new town and a new cast for every season! That would be a pretty good show. I know I’d watch it.

POSTSCRIPT:  Well I actually got the close-up of the eye part right, even though I missed how it would be closing, not opening.  Aside from that the only thing I picked right was Juliet as Jack’s ex-wife, a commonplace prediction on the web.   I knew my prognostications would be wrong, but it was nice to have one final chance to make a prediction before the show’s beautiful conclusion, which I am still thinking about, and I’m sure will think about for a long time. It was great to witness what is certainly one of the great events in TV history, and maybe the first time something like that was followed in such a worldwide communal way through social media.

Yesterday I went to see “Iron Man,” and as usual—SLAM!—there were -- BLAM!—a lot of—CRASH!—trailers. It was almost a relief to see the “Grown Ups” trailer. At least the lame jokes weren’t ear-splitting.

As assaultive as it can be to watch a string of these cacophonous trailers, they have to be effective or they wouldn’t be used on nearly every film. So it got me wondering if these kinds of sonic explosions might pep up the trailers for more subtle fare. And maybe some synthesizer music beds wouldn’t hurt either.  By the time I got home I had devised an experiment.

I was going to create a new soundtrack for an art film trailer and I was going to do it in the most slapdash way possible. If I worked on it for days, it wouldn’t really prove anything, as my natural instinct would be to keep polishing it and polishing it and making it as good as possible. In order to find out what the result would be if a bunch of noises were thrown together without any serious consideration, I set myself some rules. Number one, I would only spend an hour or so on it. Number two, I would only use the sound files from two sample sets I bought years ago from film composer Jeff Rona, out of a series he created called “Liquid Cinema.”  One is called “Cinematic Ambiance,” and one is called “Cinematic Impact” (It appears Rona doesn’t sell them anymore.) I wasn’t going to hunt through my sample library looking for the perfect sounds or create any of my own, I was just going to quickly audition the samples on Rona’s discs, drag them into my music program, Logic, and see what happened. Mostly I did it right on the cuts, or as editors say,  “Mickey Mousing” it.  I didn’t have time to do it any other way.I chose Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry” for my trailer re-mix, because it is one of my favorite films and it was the most unlikely film I could think of for this kind of thing. I didn’t look at a single other trailer.

Of course the impetus for this project was easy mockery, but at the same time the process surprised me. Although my booms are intentionally dumb, sometimes Jeff’s music beds and ambient noises sounded really good to my ears. It didn’t matter which ones I used, they all did, particularly one at the end that sounded vaguely Middle Eastern to my ears.  If you took out the booms, it might have even been pretty good, but booms were the whole point of this exercise.  Here’s the original Zeitgeist trailer:

And here’s my remix.  PLAY IT LOUD!

By this point I’m assuming most people are sick of hearing about the new “Show Me Your Papers” law in Arizona, so I thought I would annoy you with it one more time. (If you are just coming back from a long hike in the Adirondacks and don’t know what I’m talking about you can get a roundup here.)

The thing that fascinated me about this is that everyone is looking at this law from the perspective of WWII Nazi movies. This idea was popularized by Seth Myers of SNL’s “Weekend Update”:

I couldn’t help thinking, that WWII Nazi movies aren’t the only ones where they ask you to show your papers. A recent one that came to my mind was “Amreeka,” about a Palestinian family. In that movie, I felt not just the humiliation of going through a checkpoint, but made me think about the hassle of it. Checkpoints mean traffic jams. You’re going to get home late. You are going to sit in a sweaty car. And there is always implicit danger if you happen to get a hot-headed soldier or one who has had a bad day.

Imagine you are Latino citizen on your way home from a Cinco de Mayo parade. You may have all the ID in the world, but you aren’t going to get home in time to watch “Lost.”

The whole idea of being asked for my ID makes me sick to my stomach. Cops have always unnerved me. They make me stupid. I remember once being interrogated by a customs agent. He asked me what I did for a living, and I said I was a film publicist. So he asked me what movies I was working on and I had no idea. If I lived in Arizona and they asked me for my ID, I would probably get so nervous that I would give them my Banana Republic charge card. “Wise guy, eh? We know what to do with wise guys like you.” I could have my passport and driver’s license in my front pocket and I’d get tasered anyway.

Anyway, I was thinking, why not a “Raising Arizona” film festival dedicated to the best “Show Me Your Papers” movies? What are your favorites? Please put them in your comments.

I don’t remember if the aliens in “District 9” had to show papers. If they had papers, I don’t know where they’d put them, as they didn’t wear pants. But I doubt they would have let those gross-looking guys out, even with papers.

Any fondly remembered apartheid movies? I don’t remember if anybody had to show papers in “Cry Freedom.”

Berlin? There must have been a lot of people who had to show papers at Checkpoint Charlie.

Help me out here, folks.

Anna (Morena Baccarin), leader of the visitors in “V”

I never miss an episode of “Lost,” “Fringe,” or “V.” Although my wife and I are both left/liberal, we watch both MSNBC and FOX News. Melissa thinks it’s important to listen to the other side.

It can get tiresome because “Lost,” “Fringe,” “V” and MSNBC vs. FOX are all the same show: they’re all about two radically opposing forces gearing up for war, and possibly the apocalypse.

“Lost” is hard to summarize, but in very, very general terms it involves a mysterious island, and there is a guy named Jacob (who is now dead, don’t ask) and another guy who dresses in black. If the Man in Black leaves the mysterious island it appears that the universe is going to go kabluey. So all the stars and co-stars of the show, living and dead, are choosing up sides and war is approaching soon, because there are only five episodes left (out of 121).

“Fringe” is a tale of parallel universes. There are two worlds with the same people, cities, buildings, landscapes, etc. But things don’t happen in exactly the same way in the two universes, for example, there is still a World Trade Center in the other universe, and Leonard Nimoy has a great office in it.

One of the regulars on the show is dead in the universe he lives in and alive in the universe he doesn’t live in. We’ve known this a long time, but he just found out about this last week, and boy was he pissed off! Anyway, a lot of jerks are messing with stuff they should leave alone and it seems likely that the two universes are going to smack against each other and everything is going to go kabluey. As there were two Leonard Nimoys in the last “Star Trek” that means there are four Leonard Nimoys and that is just too many, no matter how much you like him, and probably too many even for him.

In “V” a bunch of huge flying saucers hover over many of the world’s leading cities. The aliens, who are called V’s are presenting themselves as visitors who want to share their technology with Earth because they are nice, but actually they are planning world domination and human annihilation. They all look great, but underneath their human exteriors, they are actually disgusting lizard-like creatures. There is a growing resistance called the Fifth Column (I’m not making this up!) and they are led by Elizabeth Mitchell, who perished in “Lost” along with her reputation as a good actress, a priest, a turncoat V, and a terrorist. A battle is heating up between the Fifth Column and the V’s and things are about to go kabluey.

On Fox News there is a guy named Sean Hannity and he honestly believes that Barack Obama doesn’t have the credentials necessary to be President, as he was only a community organizer with ten minutes of governmental experience. Sarah Palin, who dropped out of various schools and one governorship, has what it takes. And he, Hannity, who dropped out of NYU and Adelphi to become a general contractor and a bartender in Santa Barbara, has what it takes to make these kinds of profound socio-political judgment calls. And of course, Obama is a radical socialist terrorist communist who wants to take away all your money, your freedoms, your right to bear arms, arm bears, leaving you totally broke and forcing you to ask the government for permission to do anything you want to do with the money you don’t have, because you paid it all in taxes. Now this is a bit odd, because Hannity seems like a very smart guy who can throw a football really well.

But Hannity’s behavior makes perfect sense if you pay attention to the name of the weekly show he had until last year: “Hannity’s America.” You see, Hannity is in America, just not the SAME America that, say, Rachel Maddow lives in, i.e., the one with facts. He is in the other, parallel universe, and in that one, there is another President Obama, who is a total moron and the chairman of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin fan club. If you find this hard to believe, let me PROVE it to you.  If you watch the end of every episode of Keith Olbermann’s show on MSNBC, you will notice that it ends with breaking glass. Olbermann pretends to be tossing his papers at the screen, but he can’t mask what is really going on--Hannity is throwing one of his footballs at Olbermann from his parallel universe.

The leader of the V’s is an incredibly beautiful woman named Anna, who comes out of nowhere, and becomes the most famous woman in the world overnight. She gives hypnotic speeches that dazzle the faithful. Anna gives special media access to TV journalist Chad Decker, with the proviso that he not ask any questions that would put the V’s in a bad light. Although Anna is pure evil, trying to destroy the world and every human being on it, Decker doesn’t see any reason to nose around, and he readily agrees. (Note: Chad is played by Scott Wolf, who was on “Party of Five” with “Lost” star Matthew… FOX! Coincidence?)

One of the most popular characters on “Lost” is John Locke (Terry O’Quinn). Locke is a man of faith, an inspirational character. But this season, the Man in Black is using Locke’s body. He looks exactly like Locke, but he is a very scary guy. Sometimes he turns into a black smoke monster and murders people by the gross (as opposed to Jacob’s benevolent white tornado, which only kills grime).

From their vantage point in Hannity’s American parallel universe, Mitch McConnell and the Tea Partiers have correctly identified Barack Obama as the Black Man who is actually the Man in Black—he may look just like Barack Obama, but he is actually Osama bin Laden. This is why people often seem to slip up and call him Osama. These aren’t slip-ups so much inter-reality flare-ups between parallel worlds, similar to what we are seeing more and more in the sideways world of “Lost” in Season 6.

Osama/Obama has slipped through a “Fringe”-style cosmological wrinkle between the other universe along with the other Nancy Pelosi, who was really getting a lot of stuff done on that side. The Republicans were stunned by their sudden ability to round up votes as well they should have been. THEY WEREN’T THE SAME PEOPLE!

Another continuing trope of “Lost” is the idea of “others.” First you meet others that are the people like you who were in the back side of the plane. Then there are some other others, that are different from the first others. In fact there are some other other others, and this season we found out about some other other other others, that live in a temple, and possibly some other other other other others, that whisper. Anyway, you get my meaning: there are so many others, it’s hard to figure out who you can trust. The only thing that’s clear is that there are lots of people that are not like you, they are heavily armed, and you don’t know what the hell is going on.

And that’s as good a description as any of the America presented every night on MSNBC and Fox News.

Once I got a job writing the press materials for a movie made by one of my favorite filmmakers, but he was known as a stickler, so I was worried there were going to be a lot of rewrites. In the end he just said, “It’s fine. But take out all the exclamation points. I don’t think I’m the kind of guy who talks in exclamation points.”

I thought of this when I heard that Film Forum is putting on a retrospective of the films of the Scottish writer/director Bill Forsyth, maker of “Gregory’s Girl,” “Local Hero,” “Housekeeping,” and “Comfort and Joy,” among other films. Forsyth is as good an example as any of someone who doesn’t speak in exclamation points. He makes what most people would call “small” movies, but they are anything but. They are unostentatious, certainly, but they have a peculiar humor that sneaks up on you. Elements of his films are so absurd, bizarre and unexpected, and often mysteriously enchanting, particularly “Local Hero.” 

If you don’t know his work, take a look at this “trailer” for “Gregory’s Girl.” It’s not a trailer in the ordinary sense, just one scene, and it’s by no means one of my favorite Forsyth scenes, but it will give you an idea. Don’t look at the “Local Hero” trailer unless you have already seen the film and want to see how a trailer can convince you not to see a great movie.

Years ago, I did the publicity for a Forsyth’s, debut feature, “That Sinking Feeling,” which came out in this country after the success of “Gregory’s Girl” and “Local Hero.” The Film Forum festival is not meant to be comprehensive, but I was disappointed that this movie wasn’t included, as it isn’t available on DVD here, and can only be seen on a PAL import or by paying $40 for a vintage VHS tape. Perhaps it plays on cable, but as far as I know, the movie mainly exists here in the memories of the people who saw it, and that’s too bad because it’s a gem.

The story is about a bunch of unemployed teenagers in Glasgow who decide to steal sinks from a local plumber’s warehouse. The plan is extremely intricate, involving, among other things, having two of the boys dress up as women to distract the guards, and a drug that will knock out a driver so they can use his van for their getaway vehicle. The boys rehearsed elaborate semaphore-like arm gestures, so they can communicate soundlessly during the heist. I have fond memories of them practicing the one for “Start Loading” (it sounded more like “STAHRT LOH-dn”) over and over and over. (Of course the joke was that when they actually executed the caper and did the “STAHRT LOH-dn” gesture, one kid had no idea what it meant). There was also the boy who brought out a toilet instead of a sink and is sternly told that “We agreed we wouldn’t take these as they’d be too easy to trace!” I love his response: “But it would be a pairfect gift for me mum!”

Fencing the sinks turns out to be a bit harder than the crew had planned, however one did find a home at an art gallery as a Duchampian found object. The sleeping potion worked a little too well on the driver, and a doctor predicted he wouldn’t wake up for decades. The nurse becomes very excited, noting that the driver would be a billionaire after all those years of sick pay.

I miss this movie. I hope someone gets around to putting it out on DVD here. When technology shifts from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray and beyond, there are too many movies that get left by the wayside, and that’s a shame.

But it’s “Local Hero” that is most people’s favorite Bill Forsyth films, and as great as it is, I think one of the major reasons people love it so much is that it ends in such a stirring way, with Knopfler’s “Going Home” theme. It sends you out of the theatre with this intensely bittersweet feeling of sadness and elation.  The movie is funny and enchanting all the way through, but I think it’s the ending that sticks with you the most. None of the other Forsyth films have anything like this. Forsyth told me that it was producer David Putnam who said the movie should end with a “happy song.” I think Forsyth was ultimately very pleased with it, but I don’t think it’s an idea he would have come up with on his own. It’s his one exclamation point in a career without them, but in this case, I’m glad it’s there.

Here’s a wee video recently done about Bill for his Scottish Lifetime Achievement Award.

EMBRYONIC CELEBRITY: The fame of a pre-born child of celebrity parents begins after the pregnancy is announced in the mass media. This is the only celebrity cycle without a name requirement.

NEONATAL CELEBRITY: Once the children of the very famous are born and named, their fame shoots off the charts. Extra credit for cool names like Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt and Suri Cruise.

FAMOUS IN YOUR OWN MIND: Each journey must begin with the first step.

CULT CELEBRITY comes from being unknown, aside from a small group of adoring cognoscenti. Cult Celebrity is precarious, as it often can drift upwards into actual fame, disqualifying cult status.

EARNED FAME: Years of training, hard work, persistence, talent, and good luck that pay off.

OVERNIGHT CELEBRITY: With a little bit of luck you can hop on the express train from no-name to instant acclaim.

SOPHOMORE SLUMP FAME TRIAL: The first test of a celebrity’s staying power. Repeating the work in “Overynight Celebrity” or “Earned Fame” will tag the celebrity as a one-trick pony. Change things up and some may say they preferred the first album/movie/performance/show/novel/vice-presidential candidacy better.

GOLD STANDARD FAME: Examples include Meryl Streep, Mariano Rivera, Martin Scorsese, Stephen Sondheim, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob Dylan, Mikhail Baryshnikov, and Joey Chestnut.

SHAPE-SHIFTING FAME: Just when you’ve had it up to here with Madonna, she serves up a new and improved model.

REALITY SHOW FAME: Eat rats, lose fat, sing pitchy, act bitchy, skydive, exchange wives, design clothes, give a rose, eat a cookie, grope Snookie.

WEIRD FAME: I don’t know who Heidi Montag is but she had ten plastic surgeries at one go.

REFLECTED FAME: If you be someone that they love… love someone who is.

BREAKDOWN CELEBRITY:  Drugs, alcohol and bizarre behavior are usually forgivable, and can be plusses. Not so spousal abuse or using the “N” word, and Anti-Semitic slurs, or child abuse (unless you were Michael Jackson). Other negatives include robbing a gas station, public masturbation. Murder is probably the worst.

BREAKDOWN COMEBACK: In America, we believe that everybody deserves a second chance. Even total assholes.

RELAPSE FAME: What goes up often comes down again. And up again. And down again…

COMEBACK AFTER NEVER GOING AWAY: You’ve been working steadily and doing great work all these years? Really? We forgot all about you. Welcome back. Oh and… here’s your Oscar.

LEGEND: After enough Lifetime Achievement awards, people stop paying much attention to what you do, because they already know it’s sublime. (Remember last week’s post? Just like pizza from Grimaldi’s.)

DECEASED CELEBRITY: You may be gone, Elvis, Marilyn, and Bogie, but your brand lives on.

POST-DEMISE COMEBACK: That James Cameron sure can do anything.

As I’m sure most of Brooklyn pizza-lovers have heard, Patsy Grimaldi will be returning in March to his coal-fired oven at the site of the current Grimaldi’s pizzeria.  He’s going to call it Juliana’s after his late mother.  With such a happy ending to a sad story,  I thought it was worth a reprint of my blog post from April of 2010.  Now if only the tourists will keep lining up for the Grimaldi’s next door (although I’m not so sure they’ll be opening too soon), so that we can get our old neighborhood joint back!

Some might say this story  is just a real-life version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It is that, but to me it is more about the question: “What’s the value of a name?”

This question has a lot of resonance for the movie business, and I’ll get into that next week.

My apartment building in Brooklyn is directly across the street from Grimaldi’s, one of the most famous Pizzerias in the world. People come from all over the globe to stand in long lines. (I took the above picture through my window yesterday afternoon.) Once inside, they put up with the rude waiters and uncomfortable seating for the opportunity to dine on pizza that is considered one of the best in the city, if not everywhere. Last week, no less than Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama ate there, setting off a tabloid controversy over whether Michelle said that it was better than Chicago pizza. (She didn’t.)

Even though it’s only a few yards away, my wife Melissa and I almost never patronize the place and neither does anybody we know in the building or neighborhood. Take a look at the reviews from locals on MenuPages, and New York Magazine’s 2009 list of famous New Yorkers choosing their favorite Pizza; only one, John Turturro, picks Grimaldi’s. If Melissa and I want take-out pizza, we get it from Fascati’s, on Henry Street.

Patsy Grimaldi learned how to make coal-fired brick oven pizza from his uncle, Patsy Lancieri, at age ten. Lancieri, who himself had trained with the man credited with opening the first pizzeria in America in 1905, opened Patsy’s Pizzeria in East Harlem in 1931.

Sometime in the early 90’s, I’m assuming after Lancieri retired, the name “Patsy’s” was sold to a company who set about franchising it, and Patsy Grimaldi felt it was time to set up a restaurant of his own. I watched excitedly as the construction proceeded, and the bright green “Patsy’s” awning go up. One day, I peeked in the door and saw Patsy and his wife Carol inside, so I went in to welcome them to the neighborhood. Patsy told me proudly about his brick oven and its importance for pizza: it gives it a unique flavor and a crisp crust. I think there were only one or two other ovens like that in the city at the time. (Now they are ubiquitous.)

When I showed up on opening night I was impressed to see it was already packed. Patsy had a good mailing list. It was full to the brim with his friends--pure, glorious, pizza-loving Brooklyn people, the kind of folks who wouldn’t be caught dead in it today. He greeted me like a son and he personally brought over my first pie. I won’t try to describe that night, but I think you all have vivid sense memories of the great sensual experiences of your life. I lost my virginity that night, pizza-wise.

The Patsy Grimaldi I knew in those days was an artist. His artist’s materials may have been humble tomatoes and dough rather than paint or celluloid, but his approach was not that different from what other Italian-Americans like Scorsese or Coppola, or any artists do. I am not being flippant here. It is about being an artisan, knowing your craft, expecting the best of yourself, and respecting your audience. Remember that Coppola is a winemaker too—and his wine is very highly regarded.

Soon after he opened, Patsy was sued by the people who owned the “Patsy’s” franchise. They didn’t think he had the right to use his own name for a pizza place. He gave in and changed his green awning to “Patsy Grimaldi’s,” but even that wasn’t good enough for them. He had to put up a third awning, “Grimaldi’s,” before the bastards left him alone.

As the fame of the restaurant grew, it was often profiled on food and travel shows, and got in a lot of international guidebooks. That’s when the long lines of tourists started to form. It didn’t matter what how cold it was or whether there was a storm, they waited outside patiently. After all, if you have taken a subway ride to Brooklyn to have an experience, you’re not going to go back to the hotel without having it. And for anybody who happened to come to the neighborhood, the perpetual lines were the best advertising a restaurant could ever get.

Patsy sold “Grimaldi’s” around 2000, when he was just shy of 70. Running a restaurant is grueling work, and I’m sure the offers he was getting were pretty high. So he decided to retire, and sold it. From that point, all the people who worked there were Russians, except for a charming gentlemen who dealt with the lines. Having Russians run Grimaldi’s wasn’t necessarily a travesty. A large part of the Italian restaurants in New York today are run by Albanians, and many are quite good.

Unfortunately, the pizza changed utterly under the new ownership.  The whole point of brick oven was the crispy crust, and you couldn’t even hold this pizza properly in your hands: the liquidy glop drooped over the sides of your fingers.

As many people have written in the reviews of the site, the waiters are as hostile as prison guards. The tables are crushed so close together that it’s hard to sit in the place. One person wrote in his MenuPages review that after he told the waiter he couldn’t pull his chair out enough to sit down and wanted to move to one of the other tables, he was told “take that table or else get out of here!”  Perhaps some tourists think that rude waiters are part of the authentic New York dining experience. They are wrong about all the other restaurants in the neighborhood and they are really wrong with the place that Patsy Grimaldi ran.

Why is the pizza soggy at Grimaldi’s?  Call me cynical, but you can move people in and out of the place faster if you don’t bother about whether the food is perfect—or even fully cooked.  And as your customers are nearly all tourists, they won’t know the difference. In fact, they will rave about it.  And not just tourists--many of my New Yorker friends love Grimaldi’s pizza.

Every time Melissa and I pass the long line across the street, she starts shouting, “Bad Pizza! Bad Pizza!” Even I get embarrassed and shush her. One time a young woman happened to be walking by and asked in this sad voice, “Really?” and I was ashamed--it was if we’d spilled the beans about Santa Claus to a little kid.

Like the “Patsy’s”-owning bullies who made Patsy Grimaldi change his awning twice, the new owners of the Grimaldi’s name are franchising it far and wide: there are now Grimaldi’s in Garden City, Hoboken, Douglaston, as well as Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Texas, and soon, the Limelight Marketplace in Manhattan.

In 2006, Patsy, then 75, told Jeff Vandam of the New York Times that retirement had been a mistake. He set up shop in a food court at Aviator Sports and Recreation in southeastern Brooklyn, as part of the “Brooklyn Food Hall of Fame,” which also included offerings from Junior’s and Jacques Torres. He told the Times that training young people in the art of making pizza wasn’t easy, and that he was urgently looking for a new pizza man, telling Vandam: “I did take one day off, and somebody else made the dough,” which they shouldn’t have done.”

When Vandam’s article was published, Patsy’s food stand still had no name.

Last night I was at a party and I glanced at the TV, playing at the other end of the room.: there wasmontage of old end credits, one “The End” after another. I don’t know if it was a commercial or something else. But it got me thinking. All old movies used to end with a title card that said “The End,” and now they end by telling you the names of the grips and gaffers and who did the craft service. I don’t know how you feel about it, but I miss “The End.” And it got me thinking about when and why filmmakers stopped using it. Somebody had to be the first one, right? Maybe it took a while before it got to common usage, but it had to start somewhere.

The first thing that came to my head was some studio exec or producer deciding it was stupid. “Hey buddy, the curtain’s closed, the lights are up, and the ushers are sweeping up the popcorn. What do you think this is, the Macy’s Parade? Go home!” Whoever got rid of “The End” was probably a philistine who didn’t appreciate the poetry of “The End.”

When I got home, I did some googling and I found out the answer wasn’t very interesting. The turnover happened in the 70s when certain directors decided it would be better to start their movies with minimal or no credits and put the rest at the end. One reason might have been the increase in power of the unions, which meant that the credits got longer and longer, but largely it was an aesthetic decision by the filmmakers to get the movie going quickly or immediately, for example, the opening of “Manhattan” and “Apocalypse Now.” George Lucas was fined by the DGA for putting director Irvin Kershner’s credit (and everybody else’s) at the end of “The Empire Strikes Back,” and quit the Director’s Guild and the Writer’s Guild soon after.

Nowadays, it’s not unusual to see end sequences that are as amazing as the greatest opening credits sequences. The one for “Wall-E” comes immediately to mind. On the other hand, the logos for TV production companies that make up the last few seconds of most TV shows are usually annoying.

Most people would probably laugh if they saw “The End” on a Hollywood movie these days, even if all the characters are dead and there is a “Final” or “Last” in the title.

But there are lots of reasons why “The End” should be taken out of mothballs. I would appreciate it if some “The End” music would come on after an endless stream of TV commercials--signaling you need to finish making that peanut butter and jelly sandwich pronto as “Lost” is coming back on. Even if you were on the couch it would be a reward for getting through that Shoedini commercial for the hundredth time. Some might find it in poor taste but it would be a totally cinematic way of doing the “Tribute to Departed Stars” segment at the Oscars. There is potential for the digital age. How about a nice “The End” when you finish an eBook or make it through all the levels of a video game?

But I’m realistic. It’s unlikely that anybody is going to start up “The End” again. I miss it. Thank God for Netflix.

By the way, last week marked “The End” of SpeedCine. The old URL address will continue to work, but if you bookmark me, you can update it to http://my-life-as-a-blog.com

The first time I encountered Jay Leno, I was with Werner Herzog.

We were in the green room of Letterman Show back in the days when it was at NBC. I had booked Werner there for “Fitzcarraldo.” There were four of us in the room: Leno, Herzog, Letterman regular Calvert DeForest* (aka Larry “Bud” Melman) and me.

The pint-sized DeForest went out first, followed by Jay. I was dimly aware of Leno as an up-and-coming standup guy working the clubs. He was sweet as a choirboy and I introduced him to Werner, who I doubt he had ever heard of. Leno had brought along some wacky props, and I remember thinking, “this guy sure works hard.” After being warmly greeted by Letterman, he did his funny business with the props. “He’s good,” said Werner. I agreed: Jay was good.

The only thing was, DeForest, who, as Melman, appeared to be a genuinely oblivious-to-everything man, had killed.

The second time I saw Leno I was with Roberto Benigni. Through a recommendation from Jim Jarmusch, I became Roberto’s publicist when he was doing publicity for Blake Edwards’ “Son of the Pink Panther.” Roberto was given his own little waiting room, and Leno (or his producers) had thoughtfully provided Roberto with a big basket of Italian food and wine to make him feel more comfortable. It was a nice touch, and I thought, Leno is still making the extra effort, just like he did with the props.

Soon after we arrived, Leno himself turned up in the room. “Wow,” I thought, he’s really making the extra effort. He told Roberto that he wanted him to feel totally free to do anything he wanted. After he left, I told Roberto, “I think he wants to make sure you walk on the auditorium seats like you did on Letterman.”

I’m sure most of you know how talk show producers prep a host like Leno for interviews. They call the “talent” in advance, fishing for surefire anecdotes, so the host knows he can ask the set-up question (usually on note cards) and wait for the surefire anecdote to unfold: “I heard a funny thing happened on the set… etc.”

The test of a talk show host lies in how little they rely on the cards. For the good ones, it’s just a fail-safe. If you watch Leno, you’ll see that he’s a note cards kind of guy. And when he does respond in a spontaneous way, he never goes for the jugular, like Letterman often does. Leno is always at his best if he is familiar with the guest, and at his worst if he isn’t. For example, Gabby Sidibe went on Conan, and the blogosphere went crazy, calling it one of the most hysterical appearances in the history of the show. Gabby went on Leno and it was (sorry Gabby) snore-inducing.

Roberto’s note card fodder was solid. He had recently leapt on top of a top female Italian talk show host. The way it was explained to me is she was a very dignified, Diane Sawyer-type talk show host. As I understood it, Roberto somehow got her down on the floor—how?—and he was on top of her. Don’t sue me if this isn’t completely accurate. Whatever happened, it caused a big to-do and got in all the papers.

So the first card on Leno’s table was: “So Roberto, I heard you had an incident on a talk show in Italy…”

“What?”

“You know, that thing that happened with the talk show host…”

Roberto looked at him blankly. “Talk show?”

Leno was confused. “Well, you do have talk shows in Italy…”

“No, we don’t have talk shows in Italy.”

“So what do you have, Roberto?”

“We have [something in Italian].”

“And what are they like?”

“Exactly like this,” said Roberto.

It was now the Roberto Benigni Show. There was nothing that Leno could say that Roberto couldn’t run rings around. Whether you like Roberto’s comedy or not, his mind works at warp speed, spinning out absurd statements in a tide of illogic. Leno doesn’t possess that kind of brain. He is an amiable man who works like a dog with a staff of writers to come up with great material for an opening monologue, heads out in the street to do formulaic routines, and so on. In this case, he wanted to make sure in advance that Roberto walked on chairs, and then sat down on a couch to tell his story about the Italian talk show host and set up the clip from “Panther.”

Letterman, like the only other undeniably great talk show host, Johnny Carson, is always on his game. Whatever you do, you are on his show. Even when Joaquin Phoenix did his dead fish routine on Letterman, Letterman rolled with it and made it funny. And he is never afraid to make a guest uncomfortable, whether they’re Paris Hilton or John McCain. Letterman is a spontaneous improviser with impeccable instincts and he always drives and puts his stamp on whatever happens.

What is the most memorable moment in Leno’s career? Without question it is the “What were you thinking?” query to Hugh Grant, after the actor was caught with a hooker. First of all, this was something obviously concocted in advance by the writing staff, and archetypically Leno-like in its warm-hearted lack of judgment. And that’s why Hugh Grant chose Jay’s house to make his apology to America and get his career back on track.

It’s the gap between Leno and Letterman that may account for why millions of people adore Leno and many comedians despise him. They’ve felt that way for a long time; the Conan debacle just pulled the gloves off.

Leno simply isn’t funny. Not in the way that Letterman or Chris Rock or Woody Allen or Ricky Gervais or Larry David or Joy Behar or Craig Ferguson is funny. Being funny is their essence. It just flows out of them—they don’t need jokes, props or preparation, they just need to be. Conan and Kimmel play it way safer than Ferguson (who has no written monologue, just an outline) but they sure as hell are a lot funnier people than Leno.

Everybody has their own list of funny people and it can change at different points in their lives. Not every comedian has staying power. Early in his career, on “Mr. Show,” Jack Black did things that I found breathtaking; now, everything he does falls flat for me. These days, Zach Galifianakis absolutely kills me. The cast of “30 Rock” is all brilliant, but if I see Jack McBrayer in a shot—even in the background, doing nothing in particular—he not only makes me smile or even laugh out loud, he makes me really happy.

Personally, I could care less that Leno isn’t funny, and neither does most of America. He’s given me years of joy as the friendly and reliable postman, punctually delivering the canned zingers with timing honed over decades of club work. The truth is, he probably works a hell of a lot harder than many of the naturals.

I believe so many people who were born funny resent Leno’s success is because each night, as he enters the “Tonight Show” stage, the supreme gig for a comedian, he reminds them that this is an unjust world.

* Calvert DeForest was discovered by Letterman in an NYU student film called “King of the Z’s” (a mockumentary about a notorious low-rent film producer), written and directed by Stephen Winer and Karl Tiedemann, two former classmates of mine at the University of Wisconsin, who became Letterman staff writers.

Early in my career, I found out that a respected New York film critic had plagiarized part of one of his reviews.

I discovered it completely by chance. I was reading a review in the New York Times Magazine of a lengthy collection of reviews by a legendary playwright and critic. Out of all the writing in this very long book—which I never would have read in a million years—the reviewer chose to quote two sentences. I recognized those two sentences immediately as they had appeared verbatim on the ads for a film I’d worked on. I had personally underlined those words off the critic’s review, typed them up and presented them to the client.  They ran regularly at the top of the newspaper ads.

It was hard to believe that anybody would pull such a brazen stunt, least of all this brilliant writer. I couldn’t figure out why. And then I thought a bit more and realized he’d been going through some hard times. It was hard not to see that he had a drinking problem. I decided it was unintentional. Perhaps he had read the playwright’s review at some point, the words stuck in his mind and he just used them again without knowing. It would be crazy otherwise to choose lines that were penned by one of the most renowned playwrights of the twentieth century. I imagined the critic would be horrified if he found out about it. Of course, it was conceivable that he did it on purpose. If that was the case, it was very sad.

Aside from a few close friends, I didn’t tell anybody. It never occurred to me to do anything else. What possible good would it have done to reveal this unfortunate action? The critic wasn’t a fraud; he was the real deal, with decades of accomplishment. Was the deceased playwright going to feel ripped off?  It’s a secret and it will stay a secret.  I pray that everyone else who knows will refrain from divulging it.

Nowadays it’s doubtful that a publicist would keep a story like this quiet. After all, plagiarism is a terrible crime! We must all decry it! And of course, it’s great fun to see a person of achievement humiliated. It would sell a lot of newpapers, fire up countless blog posts and make great fodder for TV shows. What fun!

It’s a cliché to say that malicious joy people take in the pain of others is part of human nature. That’s why there are so many words for it, including schadenfreude (German), Greek (epikhairekakia) and in our mother tongue, snarky blogger.*

Still, I think most people would agree with me that schadenfreude has never been as brazen and crowd-pleasing a pastime as it is today. There’s a previously unknown mode of cruelty, unleashed by the anonymity the internet provides. Anybody who’s well-known is fair game. It’s the foundation for a high percentage of pointlessly cruel blog comments, Tweets and Facebook posts.  I’m not saying that the pre-internet days were a Golden Age of civility and kindness—there has always been backstabbing gossip--but the internet has sunk things deeper into the sewer. And I think we are all diminished by this ugly trend in our culture.

I know I am going to get emails after this from friends wanting to know the name of the critic. I suppose that says it all.

*I plagiarized much of this sentence from Dictionary.com and Richard C. Trench’s On the Study of Words.

Last week, the organization behind the Tribeca Film Festival announced it was launching a for-profit distribution company, Tribeca Film. Seven of the ten films they’ve acquired will be viewable on Video On Demand (VOD) during the April festival and for at least 60 days, available to a potential audience of over 40 million TV households.  They also announced that they’d be offering online access to many of the movies screening in their festival through their website.

“I think festivals need to reinvent themselves,” Tribeca’s Chief Creative Officer Geoff Gilmore told IndieWire.  “The old model of a customary promotion needs to be amplified.” Will the other major film festivals quickly follow Gilmore’s model?  Sundance Pictures Classics?  Cannes Searchlight?  TorontoFlix?  If initiatives like this catch on, could they become the trusted brands that the serious moviegoing public turn to when they look for good films, in Eugene Hernandez’s words, “The New “Miramax”?  Or, as David Poland has suggested, is this just another way to screw filmmakers?

Day-and-date online video or VOD screenings at festivals aren’t unusual, but they’ve been put on by outside companies like IFC and Cinetic’s Filmbuff.  But the most celebrated example is this year’s presentation of a few Sundance movies on YouTube.  

Unfortunately, the reason the YouTube experiment is so well known is that the media pronounced it a failure.  The general perception was that very few people watched the Sundance movies on YouTube. 

So how is it going to be different this time?   Apparently, this time American Express is going to be spending tons of money promoting this. I’m sure that they have a lot of stuff up their sleeve that will do the trick.  But I have my concerns, and I know I’m not the only one.  As producer Ted Hope pointed out, “a media launch does not translate into immediate audience want-to-see.  Without want-to-see failure is a forgone conclusion.”  

So what to do?   Here are my thoughts:

Film festivals are not just movies—they’re full-out experiences: the chaos of the red carpet; the scramble to get tickets to the hot movie; the Q&A’s; the contentious discussions in the lobby…

I don’t think that giving people access to just movies is enough.   If you expect somebody in Des Moines to tune in, you’ve got to give them a little something extra--a taste of what it’s really like to be there.   In as near to real time as you can get it. 

How about streaming the Q&A’s live online and on VOD?  Raw footage from the red carpet? Why not hand out Flip Cameras to the actors and directors in the green room?  

I’ve been with dozens of directors as their film was unspooling for the very first time.  This is very dramatic stuff—they are rarely calm.  They’re thinking, “Will people like my movie?  I’ve spent three years of my life and I’m totally in debt.  I guess I’ll find out soon…”   And after that, there is applause. 

Give people watching from home the feeling of what it really is like to be there, right as the festival unfolds.   Not in some polished promo video, but rough-and-tumble, the way a festival is.  Give them an emotional investment in the human beings behind the movies.

What is a festival?   Seeing “Precious”?   Anybody can see “Precious.”  But few can be on the scene the first time a “Precious” is shown.  That chance only comes once. 

Give people an online and VOD inside experience that they will tell all their friends about.  They’ll tell their friends about the movies and they’ll tell them that virtual film festivals are amazing. 

Isn’t that what it’s all about?

This week is going to be absolutely nerve-wracking week for a lot of very talented people. And the just the ones who are contending for the big prize, but their families, friends, journalists and all their fans.

Some of these people have prepared for this moment for their whole lives. Some have no training at all. It doesn’t matter.  They all want it.

Some have been through this competition before. That doesn’t make it any easier. The way they train that camera on their faces when they lose in front of millions of people?   That can’t be too pleasant the first time. And then you have to repeat it?  But you don’t mind.  It’s an honor to be in that group. Right.

You try not to, but of course you can’t help reading the magazines and the blogs. Some people think it’s all over and you don’t have a chance. That’s kind of dispiriting. Thanks a lot, guys.

You cling to the idea that there are always upsets.

But you have to look at the positive side. Getting dressed up? Posing for major magazine photos? Hearing the paparazzi shout your name?

How many people get to have an experience like that? It’s all pretty scary, but you know there are millions of people who would kill to be in your shoes.

Still, you know the truth.

On Thursday, Seacrest will ask you to stand up. He’ll screw with your head just for the fun of it. He’ll make you sweat.

Has he forgotten that you’re only doing this for your family? Has he forgotten that they’re all going to starve if you don’t at least make it to the top twelve?

Will you be “safe”? Or will you have to sing the same damned song that got you voted off? Who came up with that idea? It must have been Simon because it’s just plain nasty.

As far as you’re concerned, Ryan can just kiss your butt, go straight to hell, and he can take Simon and Kara and Ellen along with him. Pitchy? More like bitchy. What the hell do they know, anyway?

What’s that?  You made it to the top 16?

Never mind.

As a publicist, I’ve taken my clients to thousands of photo sessions. Most of the photographers were technically proficient, and many were extremely imaginative. You’d show up and there’d be this wild set that had been constructed.  They’d take an actor who starred in a gritty realist film and make him up Ziggy Stardust-style. Often there’d be loud music, giving the session the feeling of a club.

I’ve been lucky enough to watch a lot of talented photographers at work, from Richard Avedon to David LaChapelle, but most of the photo shoots I went to were deadly dull.   After a lot of waiting around and hair and makeup, the “talent” would be positioned in front of a seamless background. The photographer would have a lot of equipment. And then: “snap&strobe-Turn your body to the left!-snap&strobe-Look at me!-snap&strobe-Move your face a little to the right!-snap&strobe-A little more to the right!-snap&strobe-Too far!-snap&strobe-Hold It!-snap&strobe-Yeah!-snap&strobe-That’s so good!-snap&strobe-I like that!-snap&strobe-Woohoo!-snap&strobe-Oh that’s good!-snap&strobe-One more!-snap&strobe-Just like that!-snap&strobe-Love it!”

It was like someone struggling to have sex with a partner who needed a lot of directions.

After what seemed like months, they were done. With the first pose.

Regardless of whether the photo sessions were generic or wildly creative, nearly all of them had one thing in common: they were planned out before you got there. You could customize it in small ways, like picking clothes from a rack, but the conceptual stage was set.

Of all the photo sessions I’ve been to over the years, two stand out. Both of them were with Duane Michals. Each time he turned up at a hotel room, accompanied only by a Nikon.

The first one was Brazilian actress Sonia Braga. He came in and started talking to Sonia. I decided to leave them alone. I went into the bedroom and made some phone calls.  After about ten minutes, I came back in. Sonia was nude by the window and he had wrapped her in the window curtain.  He was lighting her with the available sunlight and a hotel room lamp.  He positioned where he wanted her to be and took a picture. It was plain as day he was making a choice--that’s what I want, I want that image. that image… and no other.

This is a pretty interesting way to do it, I thought. Walk in the door with no expectations, no plans. Make use of whatever is there. And then stand by each of your images. Each one is a choice.

Like all exciting things, the photo shoot was over before I wanted it to be. The finished picture was extraordinary.

The next time I saw Michals was when he came to photograph Werner Herzog in his hotel room.  But we didn’t stay at Werner’s hotel for very long long. Michals told us that he had passed a parade on his way over. We left immediately. Michals and Werner raced up the street until they caught up with the parade. They talked some paraders into positing. I remember being struck by one shot where Werner stood ramrod straight as a soldier in the middle of a bunch of costumed guys from the parade. Years later, I found it in a book.

Was Michals trying to make Werner look like a character in a Werner Herzog movie?  I don’t know.

But he knew he had to grab that parade.

I only encountered Duane Michals for a few minutes, but he taught me lessons about art I will never forget.

As everyone knows, James Cameron has taken movies to a whole new level with the technology behind “Avatar.”

Still, Cameron hasn’t exactly been sitting on his hands waiting for Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin to strike up their opening monologue. Having taken motion control and 3D to previously unimagined levels, he’s hard at work reinvigorating some other filmic devices.

Here are a few of the ideas he’s polishing up for the new century:

Sensurround was a rumbling theatre-shaking sound created by Universal Studios for the 1974 film “Earthquake.” Anybody who was around in those days remembers how stupendously entertaining it was. But there were some drawbacks: some customers puked into their popcorn bags and products rattled off shelves in nearby businesses. It ultimately was seen as a failure and faded into film history until recently, when Cameron took on the task of resurrecting it. “In no way did Sensurround give the feeling of being in a real earthquake,” he says. “You need to have stuff falling on people’s heads. And that’s what I’m going to do. Nothing very heavy, but even a good-sized piece of Styrofoam can really get your attention if you’re not expecting it. Combine that with 3D boulders and it’s a truly immersive experience.” He expects to have 352 CameronQuake™-ready theatres set to go by 2013.

Smell-O-Vision. Any regular movie-goer knows that smells in movie-theatres have never been limited to popcorn. But it took producer Mike Todd, Jr. to add this essential third sense to the movie experience with “Scent of Mystery” in 1960. At key moments in the narrative, various fragrances were pumped under the theatre seats. Smell-O-Vision faced competition from the copycat Aromavision and, as with Sensurround, there were numerous technical problems. People in the balconies complained that the smells reached them too late, so their whiffing wasn’t synchronized to the story-telling. Some found the smells too faint, so there was a lot of loud snorting and sniffing, which other patrons found distracting. The problem wasn’t solved until John Waters developed Odorama technology for the release of “Polyester,” starring Divine and Tab Hunter, in 1982. The genius of Odorama was its simplicity: scratch and sniff cards with colored dots. “Citizen Kane” was my favorite film until “Polyester” made it possible for me to smell Divine’s farts.

“I don’t want to criticize John Waters,” says Cameron, “but just thinking about snatch and sniff cards makes me madder than I am at Meryl Streep for thinking that voicing ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ had anything to do with motion capture.” While Pixar and Dreamworks have been testing smell-equipped 3D glasses, Cameron opted for transmitting aromas directly through the synapses into the brain. “The nasal passage might seem the obvious route,” says Cameron. “But what if somebody has a cold? My films are for all audiences, and that includes people with stuffed-up noses. CameroScent™ will give the audience such an immersive experience that they’ll be reaching for their virtual hankies. Which will seem to be there.”

Percepto was developed by famed producer/director William Castle for the film “The Tingler.” During the climax of the film, the lights would go black and the voice of Vincent Price warned the audience, “The Tingler is loose in THIS theatre! Scream! Run for Your Lives!” At this moment, the projectionist would trigger buzzers in some of the seats. “Percepto was no more than a cheesy gimmick,” says Cameron. “Trust me, when I zap the audience in the ass, it will draw them into the story, not send them running out of the theatre!”

Looking Ahead As recently reported in The New York Times, some people have complained that watching 3D movies give them headaches, nausea, blurred vision, and other symptoms of visually induced motion sickness. There are also potential problems from falling debris from CameronQuake™ as well as allergic reactions, seizures and strokes from CameroScent™, and various butt-related ailments from CameroCepto™. Cameron feels that he will have all the bugs worked out in time for the 2014 release of his next film, but just in case, he has a backup plan. “I have taken .05% of my profits on my films and given a $2 million contribution to each and every member of the House and Senate,” says Cameron. “We need to have a better health care system in America so that the viewers of my films will have access to affordable care when my movies make them sick.”

I was really enjoying the scene in “Up in the Air” where George Clooney’s character meets Vera Farmiga in a hotel bar. But as soon as she introduced herself, I went right out of the movie.

Why did she have to be called Alex?

For me, “Alex” is Hollywood screenwriter code for a post-feminist archetype: an empowered woman who can do anything a man can do—but is also smokin’ hot. The male characters sense that Alexes might turn out to be stronger than them and that cuts into their confidence and sense of entitlement. Alexes scare men, but they also give them boners. Out of this primal conflict, Academy Award nominated screenplays and books by Camille Paglia are born.

The mother of all Alexes is Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals) in Adrian Lyne’s “Flashdance” (1983). Like most women I knew at the time, Alex works as a welder by day and an exotic dancer by night. But Alex doesn’t take off her clothes, because she considers stripping to be exploitative—instead, she wears skimpy outfits and drops a tub of water on herself in front of boozy schlunks in a bar. Even though Alex displays a remarkable talent for taking her bra off without removing her shirt, her dream is to be a ballet dancer. But when her boyfriend (Michael Nouri) tries to pull a few strings to get her an audition, she dumps him and sets him straight: sisters are doing it for themselves.  She also throws a brick through his front window, but I don’t remember exactly why.

ALEX LESSON #1 – Alexes don’t need men to help them reach their dreams.

The next Alex didn’t come along until 1987 but she was a doozy: Glenn Close’s Alex Forrest in “Fatal Attraction,” once again directed by Adrian Lyne. Happily married Michael Douglas has what he assumes is a momentary affair with businesswoman Close, only to find out to his chagrin that he has messed with Medea. Alex becomes a fearsome stalker, willing to do anything to possess Douglas, even if it involves heinous acts on bunnies.

ALEX LESSON #2: Alexes do need men--to do whatever they want or else!

So I couldn’t help flashing on those two Alexes when I heard that Farmiga introduce herself as Alex. For me, this was too much information before the story even got started. Oscar-nominated screenwriters Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner aren’t at fault, as the name came from Walter Kirn’s book. Still, I think the three of them should wise up and emulate a real writer like Joe Eszterhas, who co-wrote “Flashdance,” but learned his lesson and used the name Catherine Trammell for his next Alex, Sharon Stone in “Basic Instinct.”

ALEX LESSON #3  Alexes need men, but only now and then. 

While Clooney and  Farmiga came on to each other with their frequent flyer cards, I tried to remember other notable screen Alexes. I could only remember the late Brittany Murphy in “8 Mile” and the great Tori Spelling in “Scary Movie 2.” Murphy’s Alex reprised the tough-talking street girl with higher aspirations portrayed by Karen Lynn Gorney in “Saturday Night Fever.” She didn’t take any crap from Eminem, that’s for sure. But Murphy wanted to be a model, which sealed the deal on the go-go dancer aspect of being an Alex.

ALEX LESSON #4: Alexes don’t let men stand in front of their career plans.

In “Scary Movie 2,” Tori Spelling’s Alex is asleep in bed when she starts to be fellated by a phantom. Instead of being frightened, her Alex takes charge right away. “Bring it on, bitch!” she shouts, as she spider-f*cks across the ceiling. “You want me!”

ALEX LESSON #5: Alexes need men—for sex!

After a few moments of thinking about this, I tried to warn Clooney about what he was getting into, but the woman ahead of me kept shushing me. I went back to watching the movie, which incidentally, I liked.

NOURI/DOUGLAS/CLOONEY/EMINEM/GHOST MESSAGE:  Ouch! 

Am I the only one who thinks that this whole Alex deal isn’t about opening up the definitions of sex roles but of trying to jam them back into the bottle?  Even in really good movies like “Up in the Air”?  Are we so married to traditional notions of men and women that if a female character is ambitious or independent or even a little cold it’s time to slap a male name on her head?  

Just asking. 

Also, anybody else have some other screen Alexes they’d like to contribute?

A week ago, Sharon Waxman wrote the following item in her Report From Sundance in The Wrap.

Steven Soderbergh, a filmmaker who may well be synonymous with the Sundance brand (“sex, lies, and videotape” put the festival on the map in 1989), gave his latest film to Slamdance.  “And Everything is Going Fine” is screening at the rival festival. I asked Sundance executive director John Cooper about this slight, and Cooper told me that the director never brought the film to his attention. When he did, Cooper said, the director responded that he was trying to “share the love, babe.”

I wrote a comment suggesting what the reason might have been.  In 1995, Soderbergh submitted a film he co-produced, "The Daytrippers," to Sundance and was turned down.  After the rejection, “The Daytrippers” went to the 1996 Slamdance, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, followed by awards at Toronto, Athens, and the National Board of Review, among other prizes.  When it finally came out in 1997, it became one of the most commercially successful independent films of the year.  He returned to Slamdance the following year with “Schizopolis.”

Personally, I think that Soderbergh isn’t spanking Sundance, he’s thanking  Slamdance for giving “The Daytrippers” such a successful launch, not to mention the advantages of  World Premiering his Spaulding Gray doc, “And Everything is Going Fine” at Slamdance, where it would be the Big Fish.  That’s how I take his  “share the love” comment.

Also, I was the publicist on “The Daytrippers,” and I don’t remember Steven cracking a sweat about the film not getting into Sundance.  He was busy with two other films of his own (“Schizopolis” and his Spaulding Gray performance film, “Gray’s Anatomy”),  he wasn’t petty, he believed in the film and moved on.

The one who got worked up into a self-righteous fury was me.

As it happened, in 1995, I wasn’t just the publicist for “The Daytrippers,” I was also the publicity consultant for the Sundance Institute. Not just the festival, but the whole kit-and-kaboodle Sundance, with all its programs.  Maybe someday I’ll write about my ill-fated year with the Institute, but I will say that when Redford offered me this resume-embossing gig, I suspected it wasn’t something I’d be a wizard at. I’m not saying I don’t have confidence in my abilities as  a publicist, just that institutions aren’t my strong suit as I don’t have an instinct for politics.   But how could I say no?  My vanity shook up like a snow globe when Redford expressed his faith in me.  

One of the ways I proved I wasn’t worthy of the consultant job was to harangue Geoff Gilmore about how he was making a huge mistake by turning down “The Daytrippers.”  It never occurred to me that it wasn’t right for me to use my access to Gilmore to lobby aggressively for another client.

Geoff and I often got into, shall we say, spirited discussions.  He wasn’t afraid to have an argument.  We’d have it out, but there’d be a resolution and the next day it was forgotten.

I tore into Geoff about Steven and what the festival owed him.  I said that Greg Mottola, the future director of “Superbad” and “Adventureland,” was a big talent and that Geoff would regret not having launched him.  I said that this was Parker Posey’s best role to date, and that people would see her in a new way after they saw it.  I said that two of the other lead actors, Hope Davis and Liev Schreiber, were going to be big someday.  I said that the movie was in the spirit of what Sundance was supposed to be all about.  Greg had written a script and couldn’t get the money to make it, so Steven and co-producer Nancy Tenenbaum  had said something like here’s 500 bucks, make it for that. The number was somewhat bigger than that, but Greg wrote a movie that could be made for very little.  Among the people who signed on to play cameos in this labor of love were Campbell Scott, Marcia Gay Harden, and Stanley Tucci. And I kept on going, hoping to knock down his resistance with the sheer quantity of my arguments.

“You through?” Geoff asked.  “Reid, nobody liked it. We all watched it and nobody liked it.” 

That shut me up.

The Sundance programmers pick the films they like.   It’s something so simple that it’s easy to forget.   If Geoff responded to a heavy-duty lobbying effort like I was trying to make, he wouldn’t be doing his job.   Because his job was… being Geoff. 

Once I accepted that, all my arguments shrunk faster than George Costanza’s shmekel in the swimming pool. There was nothing left to say except:

“You are totally right.”

Gilmore, John Cooper, Trevor Groth, or any festival programmer at any festival, can’t presume to know how their tastes will stand up to history.  That’s a weight others put on them and one that they don’t ask for.  They have their tastes and they exercise them.  Ultimately, the success of any festival rests on the foundation of the programmers’ tastes. Sundance is a very successful festival.   Nothing more to be said. 

“The Daytrippers” did just fine without getting into Sundance.  It got a lot of great reviews, but they weren’t all great.  It’s always that way.  You can’t expect everybody to love you all the time if you want to make movies.

Getting into Sundance is an honor. Not being accepted is just a difference of opinion, and should be taken as such.  People make a big mistake when they inflate a Sundance turndown into some kind of ultimate judgment.  Real talent, if it persists, will out.

I think it’s good for the Sundance programmers that Soderbergh supports Slamdance.  It takes some heat off them if Slamdance continues to exist.  At a moment when some filmmakers might be standing in front of the Egyptian Theatre, brooding in the cold, it’s a blessing there’s a place where they can find shelter from their stormy thoughts:

The Treasure Mountain Inn.

Like a lot of guys who played in garage bands when they were teenagers, I’ve kept playing and writing songs. I’ve forgotten the lyrics and the melodies to most of them years ago, but lately I’ve taken to recording a few.  So, without further ado, here is:

Indie Film Man

I was inspired to write the song a few years ago when I was packing my suitcase for Sundance and Roger McGuinn’s “So You Want Be A Rock n’ Roll Star” happened to be playing. It occurred to that the world of independent film was ripe for parody. I used the word “Indie” in the title because I’ve always detested it for corrupting the word “independent” into a candy bar.

If you want to be an INDIE FILM MAN
Get yourself a Handicam
Read the manual if you can and then
Grab yourself a bunch of friends
Tell a story about an indian
Who was a Native American
And he’s dealing with being a lesbian
With his mama on the juice
And his daddy in the can
But damned if he don’t find redemption in the end
With love and mercy and a truck-driving nun named Dan

Soon you’ll be at Sundance
Snow bunnies begging to get in your pants
Agents trying to be your friend
And you’ll never go back to Teaneck again.

Gay or straight, a woman or a man
You get laid, it’s really great to be an INDIE FILM MAN.

Your film gets shown at a sidebar at Cannes
Where the French girls take off their tops as they tan
Jerry Lewis and you loved by Parisienes,
’Cause you
Are a true-blue INDIE FILM MAN

Soon you’ll be back at Sundance
You’ll meet Bobby Redford and you’ll piss in your pants
‘Cause you can’t believe you got this chance
To be an INDIE FILM MAN.

Why should you have a rock & roll band
If you can
Be an INDIE FILM MAN

Soon you’ve got another feature in the can
Starring Harvey Keitel and a chick from “Friends”
This merry-go-round will never end
You can depend
You’ll always win you’re an INDIE FILM MAN

The publicity man and the various brands dine and wine you
Movie stars try to get you on the phone
And all your best friends hit a big dead end trying to find you
But in your hotel room you’re even more alone

When you can’t remember when anything made sense
You understand
You little lamb
You’re an INDIE FILM MAN.

While Eric Rohmer began making films in the 1950s, he had only broken through as an internationally famous filmmaker the year before, with “My Night at Maud’s” in 1969 which won numerous critics’ prizes, was nominated for Oscars for Best Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film, and was his first feature film to be shown in the U.S. He was 49.

“My Night at Maud’s hero, Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an uptight Catholic, decides to marry a blandly pretty young blonde, a total stranger he sees at church and is too shy to approach. Through a friend, he meets and ends up spending the night at the apartment of Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorcee, religious  skeptic, intellectual, and to my 17-year-old eyes, overwhelmingly sexy woman. Through the course of the night they have a lively discussion that contrasts her freewheeling attitudes to life with his more ascetic, religious, and to his eyes, less superficial, disciplined and scrupulously ethical ones. While Maud’s stories were earthy, their discussion was often very bookish, with much talk about Blaise Pascal’s “Pensées.”  Despite Maud’s attempts to seduce Jean-Louis, nothing happens. (It doesn’t take much imagination to see “Maud”’s influence on “My Dinner With Andre.”)

I had never seen anything like “My Night at Maud’s.” To me it was utterly captivating… and sensual in every sense of the word.

Obviously I was incredibly excited to see his follow-up, “Claire’s Knee.” Once again it was a story of a guy who is attracted to a beautiful woman, but for various reasons, is unable to follow through. I would learn later that these two films were part of a series called “Six Moral Tales,” each of which were variations of this same basic plot: a guy aching for someone, but not being able to do anything about it because of his social situation, or conflicted sense of morality. This kind of thing is extremely rich soil for story-telling, and has fueled not only Rohmer’s early oeuvre, but also much of Jane Austen’s and Ang Lee’s film careers.

In his tribute to Rohmer, A.O. Scott wrote in the Times that the subject of Rohmer’s work was passion. Perhaps so, but I believe that the Moral Tales are the films most people think about when they think of Rohmer--and they are more precisely about thwarted passion, and conflicted feelings--not passion per se.

Anyway, in “Claire’s Knee,” this time it’s Jean-Claude Brialy who gets to play the guy who’s about to get married, when he’s tempted by a looker. While on holiday before his wedding, he meets Claire (Laurence de Monaghan), a 16-year-old girl, who is beautiful, but not tremendously fascinating. Rohmer shows us that by giving her a far more interesting teenaged sister, Laura (Beatrice Romand), who has a crush on Brialy’s character. But when Claire goes up a ladder and Brialy locks eyes with her knee, he becomes consumed with the idea of caressing it. But how? What possible excuse could he find to do that?

In my high school art class, I was given the assignment of taking a small image, marking it up in squares and squaring up a much larger piece of paper to blow it up into a watercolor a few feet wide . Of course I used the ladder shot from “Claire’s Knee,” which encapsulated everything I loved about Rohmer, and was irresistibly timeless. There was nothing about the luscious landscape, Brialy’s hat, beard, sweater draped over his shoulders, or de Monaghan’s legs that would have looked out of place in an impressionist painting.

One thing people toss off as an anecdote about Rohmer is that he hid his identity as a film critic and director by using Eric Rohmer as a pseudonym. Even the name he was born with is subject to discussion – it was either Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer or Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer, depending on who you talk to. Scherer published a novel under the name Gilbert Cordier in 1946, and later took the name “Eric Rohmer,” from Erich Von Stroheim and Sax Rohmer, author of the “Fu Manchu” stories.

Generally it’s said that he didn’t use his real name for some undisclosed family reasons, but I was told by someone who should know who exactly it was in his family he didn’t want to upset. (I’m just going to say Freud and that’s all you’ll get out of me.) And he didn’t just change his name either. I once saw a hilarious photograph of him decked out in an obviously phony beard, although if memory serves, it was closer to a Van Dyck than--thank heaven!--a Fu Manchu.

Just stop for a second and think long and hard about being in the closet for most of your life about the thing you love the most. The Cinema was his Grand Passion, and his early writing was dedicated the proposition that it should be taken as seriously as any art form. But presumably, there was somebody that mattered to him who would be very disappointed to discover he was married to a vocation so far beneath him.

His life might make a good movie, don’t you think?

Maybe that’s why he made it so many times.

.

Postscript: Years later, I was the publicist on his 1978 film “Perceval le Gallois,” when he came to New York to promote it during the New York Film Festival. I was told then that the disapproving family member was no longer with us, but I don’t know for sure whether this was his first NY press junket.

Reading it over, I see that my previous blog post ended up achieving the opposite of what I wanted it to, when I began writing it.  This is probably because it was written in haste, but that’s no excuse.

I had no idea what a hubbub it would cause and how much my intentions could be misinterpreted.  If you read it, you will see it begins by paraphrasing Paul Simon in “The Boxer” and saying that we all believe what we want to believe and disregard the rest.”

And the point I was trying to make with the blog was: maybe we should stop and not do that for a moment. 

Now I agree with the MPAA that file-sharing hurts the industry.  Most studio executives and producers and journalists think the same way. It’s common sense.  I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for people who defend file-sharing.

After all, why on earth would I spend a year and a half of my life working 24/7 to create SpeedCine, which is devoted to fostering legal online movies if I thought that file-sharing was good?

But none of us in the industry are interested in a study that looks at what’s really going on.   What we want is a study that quantifies how much we are losing. To say that file-sharing hurts the industry and then estimate how many people do it and calculate the damages is not a study.  You cannot study a phenomenon if you begin with the conclusion.

And an attempt at finding the truth—whatever it might be--is a handy thing to have in a time of crisis and change and opportunity.

Where I know I went wrong is that I made my opinion all too clear that file-sharing might have worked to the advantage of this one film.   Millions of times things that are generally not good have worked in an unexpected way to someone’s advantage.  I was making no generalization statement about file-sharing.

What has happened in the blogosphere has been a lot of shouting.  People who are against file-sharing say it that I’m wrong and I can’t prove it. Of course I can’t prove anything.  People who are for file-sharing say that this is just more evidence that file-sharing is good for the industry. Which is total bullshit.

It’s not evidence of anything at all.  It’s just data.  Data doesn’t prove anything one way or another.  

What I’d like to see is a real study.  Where you poll people, and ask questions like these:

Did you watch the copy of “Wolverine” on the net?   Did you ever pay for the movie in any way afterwards?  Theatre? DVD purchase? Rental? Netflix? Redbox?

For non-file sharers:  How did you hear about the film?  What made you want to see it?

I think it would be interesting.  Again, it wouldn’t “prove” anything absolutely, but it might raise the level of the discourse.

Now for my readers:  Do you like the idea of a poll like that?  And if not, why not?

There is a mind-blowing cover story by Jonah Lehrer in the January 2010 issue  of Wired that suggests that scientists, instead of being neutral observers searching for objective “truth,” actually conduct experiments to prove that their preconceptions are right.  When they find contrary evidence, they either ignore it, or figure their equipment or methodology is faulty.  To paraphrase Paul Simon in “The Boxer,” they see what they want to see and disregard the rest. 

The article made me think:  is this the way so many of us in the industry think about file-sharing?  Are so many unable to see what is really going on because we don’t want to?

So I thought, “How can I be scientific about this?”  After all, there is no way to prove the impact of file-sharing on the business. It happens, and it’s common sense that it’s bad for people to get stuff and not pay for it.

And then I thought about “Wolverine.”  To my knowledge, “Wolverine” is the ONLY big-budget epic film that has been available on the internet weeks in advance of its opening.   Its singularity makes it a particularly intriguing subject for study and debate.

So what happened?  Despite the file-sharing and poor reviews, the film opened  to an $85 million first weekend gross.  Not too shabby.  As file-sharing is known to be detrimental, there was much chatter about how much more the film would have made if over an estimated million people hadn’t seen it on their computers in advance.

Matthew Belloni hypothesized the possibilities in an article in the Hollywood Reporter:

$00  you can mention and  reject.  But only if it’s right on the nose--$00 and not a penny more. 

Now that 2009 is over, let’s see how that opening weekend of “Wolverine” stacked up against other films that were very highly promoted in advance:

As Mr. Meloni pointed out, “Wolverine” might have made $15.75 million more because it was the latest installment of a very lucrative franchise. Let’s look at the other prominent sequels of 2009, in addition to the ones listed above.

As I said, not one of the films listed above were shown online before their release.  Of course the first weekend’s gross isn’t about the ultimate popularity of a film, it’s just a rough measurement of advance excitement.  A lot of people just couldn’t wait to see them.

Afterwards was a different story for “Wolverine online.  Then “Wolverine” was only the ninth most downloaded after five of the other box-office triumphs of the year, as per Torrentfreak: “Tranformers” (#1 on the Torrenfreak list) “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” (#2), “Twilight” (#4), “The Hangover” (#5), and “Star Trek” (#6).

Of course you can say, this is just another huge opening weekend in a record-breaking year that was full of them--the real issue is DVD sales, which are dropping precipitously.  But less publicized is that, per the Hollywood Reporter,  DVD rentals were actually up by 8.2% in 2009.  People may be getting their movies through Netflix and Redbox, but those are totally legit ways to pay for movies.  So people’s desire to pay for movies in theatres and on home video is on the upswing.   Purchasing DVDs may be down, but the fact is that with every new home video medium, people go on a buying binge to get all their favorite films at the start.   Eventually they own the movies they want and the pace slows.  This is natural.  Blu-ray sales (up over 83% in the first nine months as per the article linked above from the Reporter) will increase for years.  But someday people will have the core Blu-ray library they want and their purchases will slow. Or they will be affected by the guaranteed arrival of The Next Big Thing.  By the way, what is the reason for an avid  DVD collector to buy in bulk now that Blu-ray is here? 

What do you think about all this? 

Please leave your comments. 

Filled with holiday spirit, I’m re-running my Chanukah/Christmas post from 2009, one of my favorites.   It’s my gift to my new readers who’ve never seen it  and it’s my my gift to me, as I’m feeling pretty lazy at the moment.  For everyone else, I apologize and hope your friends and family took care of you. 

Let’s face it, Chanukah is a really lackluster Christmas substitute. For one thing, very few of us can even pronounce “Chanukah.” While both holidays start with the same two letters, their “Chr” sounds like “Cr” but our “Ch” sounds like a cat getting rid of a hairball. Nobody in my family knew exactly how far to go with their “Ch.” One aunt got so enthusiastic with her “chhhh” that she chhh-ocked a loogey right into the Kugel.

While Christians had scientific evidence that Jesus was born on December 25^th, even though that date had been a pagan celebration centuries before his B-day, Chanukah was based on a totally made-up event: Judah Maccabee’s alleged candle miracle. In case you haven’t heard, this myth was invented hundreds of years after Mr. Maccabee was pushing up the daisies. Even my esteemed Rabbi, Manfred Swarsensky, more or less admitted to me that we picked our holiday out of a hat. I’m sure we Jews would have turned Yom Kippur into a high-flying jubilee if it was in December.

No, Purim is the real gift-giving holiday for Jews, but it comes near Easter, when there are less sales. From a kid’s point of view, Purim kicked Chanukah’s ass. For my goy readers, on Purim you get these noise-makers called gragers that you swing around during the Purim service, every time the rabbi says “Haman” (the Dick Cheney in the Purim backstory). Of course my good friend Mark Harris would pretend he heard wrong and swung his grager every time Rabbi S. said “Esther,” which was a lot. This became contagious, and before too long, we were all giggly, and the Temple was filled with grager-delic pandemonium. As punishment for our horseplay, Swarsensky made us all stay late in Bar Mitzvah class and miss “Batman.”

But as much as I love Purim, I know it wouldn’t have held up against Christmas any more than Chanukah because it has no tree.  Many of my fellow Hebrews coped with tree-envy by getting what they called a “Chanukah Bush.” For me that was like a bad toupee… who did they think they were fooling? Just show me one bush that looks like that…it’s a tree. And if you want to do anything Chanukah-related with it, you should buy nine and use one to set the rest ablaze.

If we had had a Chanukah Bush at our house I know it would have been lame. We would’ve trimmed it with all these Jewish chatchkes, little Menorahs, and six-pointed stars. That’s like putting Billy Graham’s picture under the Mezuzah on the door. If you’re going to have a Christmas Tree, don’t pussy out: go to K-Mart, get some Angels, Rudolphs and Frosties, and be done with it. Snowflakes would be nice. Snowflakes are non-denominational.

But the thing that gives most Chanukah-boosters an inferiority complex is our pathetic holiday music. There are a lot of good Yid musicians, but I guess that they couldn’t get worked up enough about Chanukah, aside from Adam Sandler. The Christians had all the best songwriters, like Irving Berlin. They had Mel Torme singing “The Christmas Song,” we had Allen Sherman singing a parody of “I Have a Little Dreidel.”

But don’t get me started on Dreidels. Am I the only one who thinks this is the dumbest game ever invented? You spin a four-sided top that has the first letters of the Hebrew alphabet on it. And then? How do you win? How do you lose? The game was too damned existential for me. Why was I was spinning the Dreidel? To learn how to spin a top better? That’s not exactly Monopoly. And in any case I had Dreidel-spinning mastered by the time I was five. Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing anybody over five engrossed in a scintillating game of Dreidel. Perhaps that’s why there are Chess tournaments, but no Dreidel tournaments.

So this year I was planning to celebrate Christmas the way Jews have done since ancient times—going to a Chinese restaurant. But my wife—the former Melissa Goldberg—is dragging me out for a hearty Christmas dinner with friends. Bah humbug, I say. I sure as hell hope that the occasion isn’t too jolly or merry or overloaded with a surfeit of good tidings. I don’t like to have Christmas shoved in my face.

But I am bringing my guitar and my Reader’s Digest book of Christmas carols. I sing Christmas carols all year round, not just because they are so beautiful, but also because so many of them are about people who can’t make it home for Christmas. I can relate to that. The only one I refuse to do is “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” I can’t get through that one without busting out bawling.  The song is a wholesome Norman Rockwell portrait of a little kid who comes downstairs and is so sweet and naive that he doesn’t know what the f*ck is going on. I grew up in the Midwest and there was a time when I actually was like that kid, until I got to be nine and started getting neurotic. But little kids today will never have the opportunity to ever experience that kind of purity, the way I did. Instead of hiding down in the living room watching Mommy kissing Santa Claus, they’re up in their bedroom downloading porn.

But as you can tell, I love Christmas for it’s own sake and not just because Chanukah blows. Even when I was alone, thinking of suicide, drowning my troubles in Mogen David, “It’s A Wonderful Life” came on TV to brighten my perspective and make me understand what really matters.

Obviously, Frank Capra was not a Jew.

In 2000, there was a highly-read Oscar website written by someone named Zeusifer, that charted Oscar nominees and potential winners. Zeusifer didn’t evaluate actors’ chances based on the quality of their performances, or prognosticate with the usual “Oscar voters traditionally go for…blahblahblah”—he rated people solely by the amount of press they were getting. A noteworthy media booking, like a magazine cover, The New York or LA Times, The Tonight Show, could move a contender higher on the chart. Zeusifer—who I assumed was a guy--didn’t explain his methodology and he didn’t make any claims that more press would definitely lead to a win. But obviously that was the idea.

Because the ratings were constantly moving, it was really addictive to read Zeusifer. I can testify to the fact that some very big stars with Oscar chances tracked the thing constantly.

As you might imagine, Zeusifer was a nightmare for publicists who had clients who read him. If it wasn’t all our fault already, here was this dude to shove it in our faces.

But who the hell was he? Was it someone big shot or little shot in the industry? Or was he just some nerdy high school student in his basement with a stack of magazines and the TV on all the time?

I liked the name a lot: a combination of Zeus and Lucifer, God and the Devil. Zeusifer was God because he had given himself the power to make people in high places pay attention to him. And our curiosity was intensified because no one ever saw him, like the Wizard of Oz, J.D. Salinger or Nikki Finke. But he was the Devil because he played into our basest instincts—our belief that the Oscar, our holiest sacrament of true cinematic genius, can be bought by hiring a good PR firm.

Zeusifer didn’t  reject potential names like Zeusan or Zeusil just because they sound like decongestants. He purposefully picked the blend that rhymed with the Dark Angel’s moniker. For me, “Zeusifer” has the ring of evil laughter from the bowels of hell: “Hahahahahahahahahaha! I took your Almighty Soul when you placed that “For Your Consideration” ad for Michael Bay!”

But one day, when I wasn’t paying attention, Zeusifer quietly closed down the site and was gone, leaving his identity a mystery For me, it was like losing a good friend. Although in many ways he was a thorn in my side, I enjoyed reading him and I thought it was a big waste of talent. After inventing himself and making himself matter to big names, he just retreated into obscurity. Or maybe not. Maybe he’s now a blogger with a loyal following. Maybe he’s taking over a PR agency or even a studio.

Or maybe he’s just taking out the garbage.

Fame, it’s not your brain, it’s just a flame that burns your change to keep you insane.
--David Bowie, “Fame”

Recently, “Ally Sheedy” has been turning up as a “Suggestion” in my Facebook page. For those of you who aren’t on Facebook, this means that enough people I know are “friends” with “Ally,” and the computer has decided that she might be my buddy too. And as it happens, I do know Ally. I know her well enough to know she’s not on Facebook.

Ally and I started talking about Facebook some time ago when a previous Sheedy impersonator turned up on Facebook. This one had a lot of elaborate made-up details in her profile, including Ally’s favorite hangout in LA (as anyone with the slightest curiosity about knows, she lives in NY). Despite how preposterous this was, lots of seemingly well known people had befriended this “Ally.” Of course, some of the celebrities who were friends with the fake Ally might have been impostors too, but others were definitely people I knew.  My official Facebook “Mutual Friend” list confirmed this.

This new “Ally” is more sophisticated. She doesn’t share any details. All this person had to do was put up a picture and wait for Ally’s friends to get in touch. I can imagine the notes. “How are you! It’s been ages. We should really get together!” or “I have loved you with all my heart since ‘The Breakfast Club. How could you let Molly Ringwald give you that horrible make-over?”

Facebook has a system for dealing with this type of thing. You tell them what the real profile is and they’ll take off the phony one. Apparently, if you don’t want to be on Facebook then you are out of luck. Now perhaps I’m wrong about this, and if you have any suggestions let me know. But if I am right, then Facebook is both enabling and protecting fraud. 

Every time I go on Facebook and see “Ally” it makes me mad for some reason. I don’t know exactly why I care so much but I do. Once I friended a singer I know and sent him some personal messages. Was it really him? He didn’t respond. When I wrote about the Ally thing on Facebook, another friend commented that someone was tweeting in her name. It’s all very weird and makes me insecure about the whole thing, and takes a lot of the fun out of it. If I’m going to be friends with someone I don’t know, I want to feel confident that I don’t know them. They could be one of my closest friends masquerading as a stranger just to mess with my head.

Which leads me to the question: “Why do people do this?” Do they need to feel famous but don’t want to do the hard work of abusing their child on TV, gate-crashing a Presidential event, or sleeping with Tiger Woods? No, all they do is make a profile, put up a picture, and presto—they’re famous! To me, this is extremely unfair to all the reality stars who expose their personal lives, eat cow testicles, and jump off buildings in order to fulfill their destiny as celebrities. They have earned their right to be nobodies who become somebodies fair and square. But not these bozos. They want to be famous without getting out of their Snuggies. They are couch potato poseurs.

Do they worry that they might be friends with too many of the other Facebook pretenders? Would that take the fun out of it? Maybe they think that’s a good thing. Maybe they are all part of a fellowship like people in the game room of a mental institution. “Howdy, I’m Napoleon. Don’t play Boggle with LL Cool J over there… he’ll take your money!”

Of all the changes the internet has wrought I’m sure no one predicted that the price of fame would become so cheap. Enough to make Andy Warhol’s head spin. 15 minutes of fame? Are you joking? That’s enough time for a career to rise and fall with two minutes to spare. You’ll be negotiating your deal with “The View” after 15 minutes. I guess that after enough time goes by, everyone in the USA will be famous except for me, because I don’t want to be. But then I’d probably get famous anyway for being the last holdout.

The irony of all this is that I actually think that Ally should go on Facebook. I think she’d enjoy it. Perhaps she’s not too thrilled about the day the other Ally turns up as a Suggestion. It would definitely happen. After all, they have so many friends in common.

I must admit I’m stunned.  This Comcast deal will have a huge impact on American culture, but so far the media has only provided us with useless details that shed no light, The New York Times being the most prominent offender.  But today The Times ran a front-page story that clearly explained what the deal is about: fear of cutting the cord, or cable castration or whatever you want to call it.   Of course, the article only regurgitated the industry’s talking points. and did not mention the gorilla in the room: piracy.  Perhaps the studios think that because they have successfully shut down The Pirate Bay and scared Mininova to going legit, that piracy is a thing of the past.  That’s like saying that if you bust a pot-smoker’s dealer they will never smoke pot again. No, it just means that that he or she will have to find another source.   Piracy is here to stay because people like doing it and a lot of people don’t have money now

I wrote in my last post that Comcast might screw around with Hulu.   Soon after, NewTeeVee ran a story quoting Comcast COO Steve Burke suggesting they had no major plans to change Hulu--that it was “complementary” with cable:

“Right now, NBC Universal is distributing a lot of their broadcast content on Hulu, and they have been quite careful not to put too much of their paid-for-cable content out for free over the Internet,” Burke said. “We think both those strategies are smart and appropriate… and we would see after the deal closing, lots of broadcast content going to Hulu and being available for free, and cable content that cable customers pay for, that cable companies and satellite companies and telcos pay for, being on TV Everywhere.”

But soon after, he called to refine the quote, leaving himself a bit more breathing room.  And in today’s Time story leaves no doubt that things are indeed going to change.  They quote Hulu’s Jason Kilar saying that all options are on the table.

Read my lips: Hulu is going to change.  A lot.

This is going to backfire.  People like Hulu exactly the way it is.  If anything, they want more movies and TV.

This is war.  This is a war against what consumers want.  This is an attempt to forestall the new business model which will eventually come no matter how hard they try to stop it: which is that people will be willing to pay for things they want, as they do with HBO, rather than forcing people to pay for what they don’t want, as cable plans do.   Premium plans on Hulu?  I think a lot of people would be happy to pay for that if they could watch without ads. I sure would.  I can pick up the phone right now and tell Time Warner I want Showtime and it’s there, and my bill goes up accordingly.  Or I can cancel. 

Why can’t I watch a few free episodes of “Glee” or “30 Rock” and decide if I want to subscribe to them?   I go on my computer, select them and am billed. 

The possibilities opened up by such a system are unbelievable, if you just take a moment to think about them.  No one would have to program anything against “American Idol,” because all the shows that aren’t live can be watched at any time.  More cult shows could stay on the air.  Channels could decide to give up censorship and not let HBO take all the Emmys year after year.    There could be revenue-sharing between the festivals and the filmmakers.  And on and on.  

The thing about this system is that it gives people a motivation to pay for culture. 

It’s hard to imagine the opportunities of the future if all your energy is spent trying to keep it from happening.  And that’s what wrong with the media’s stories.  The journalists write them by interviewing the people who lack imagination. In fairness, Steve Jobs doesn’t give interviews.

I wonder why.  I realize that secrecy is vital to the way Apple operates, but I’m not talking about giving away details on specific products.  Jobs could talk about his vision of the future until he was blue in the face and no one in the industry would listen to him.

Now that their deal seems to be going through with NBC-Universal, Comcast is in a position to screw with Hulu.  If they want to, they can remove or provide less access to “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock,” and other shows.  They could change the setup so that you can’t see as many NBC shows or Universal movies for free.  Or they could set it up so that it’s only available on Fancast.com or Comcast.com.  Regardless of what they do, they are in a position to slow Hulu’s growth. 

Or they could just leave it as it is.  Maybe they just spent all these billions of dollars for fun.

If they mess with Hulu, it will instantly move the free-with-ads stuff underground where Comcast and GE won’t  won’t get  any money for them.   This maneuver would give an advantage to the new programs from other networks who use free online video to market their news and strengthen their existing ones.  Of course they will damage “Saturday Night Live” and “30 Rock” too.  I hadn’t watched “Saturday Night Live” for years until the videos started turning up on YouTube and eventually on Hulu.  In Ross Perot’s words, you would hear that big sucking sound.

A weakened Hulu would be a big gift to Sony, as their Crackle site is terrific, and hopefully, will remain free.   Hulu is the brand to beat now, but the public is fickle.  If Hulu expanded its content into HBO, CNN, ESPN, no one would ever be able to touch them.  They could easily lead us to a  new media age where people would happily pay a monthly fee for the content they want without ads.  An HBO model for everything.   Guess what?  You want people to pay to see your show?  Make something that’s good.   Don’t expect to have companies like Comcast make people pay you for your shows whether they want to watch them or not.

Of course in a world like that, many people would cut their cable cords.  But I doubt there would be a mass exodus for a long time.  Most won’t want the hassle of fine-tuning what they want to see, and connecting the computer to their TV, so they’ll keep paying for cable for the convenience. This is the way it always goes.  Some folks keep using VHS tapes and audio cassettes long after the new thing is introduced.

But eventually the day will come when the cable cord is only for internet connections.    It’s just a question of how much Comcast is willing to devastate their stock price and commit fiduciary hari-kari in a dubious attempt to forestall the inevitable.

The New York Times reports today that everybody in Hollywood thinks that Jeff Zucker is responsible for the failures at NBC, and that Comcast plans to keep him.  Probably it’s one of those articles that will help  convince Comcast to fire him if they haven’t made that decision already, but the whole deal (see below) suggests they are just dumb enough to do that.  Stick with the guy who moved Leno to prime time and has the NBC affiliates outside his window with pitchforks.

I don’t want to be callous about all this.   I feel sorry for all the people at Comcast and NBC and Universal who will lose their jobs because the people on top are so arrogant and foolish. But ultimately this is like the forest that must burn down so that the new growth can begin.

Unless you are a follower of the technology websites and blogs, you may not know that the cable industry has come up with an idea to combat the practice that they call “cutting the cord.” This initiative, which is being pushed by Jeffrey Bewkes of Time Warner, is called “TV Everywhere.” In a nutshell, it allows all of us to access the very desirable content we haven’t been able to get for free online yet—HBO, Showtime, etc.—but only if we have a cable subscription, as in any cable subscription.

To accomplish this, Bewkes needs to get all the cable companies to work with their competitors, as in sharing customer data. While this isn’t going to be easy, it’s already raising a lot of red flags from people with concerns about privacy. And then of course, Bewkes has to get all the content providers to on board, although he himself brings Time Warner’s HBO, CNN, TNT, TBS, etc., to the table.

Comcast’s pared-down version of this concept substitutes “Comcast” for “Everywhere.” All you need is a Comcast subscription to get connected to the Premium video content from their Comcast or Fancast site. They have been testing it for a while and plan to roll it out sometime in December.

All of this is being presented as if Bewkes and Comcast are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but it’s pretty obvious what this is about. Hulu-phobia. Netflix-phobia. Redbox-phobia. But most of all, Apple-phobia. You could just as easily sum it up as future-phobia.

Why do we enjoy free-with-ads sites like Hulu and Crackle? THEY HAVE FEWER ADS! And we can watch what we want whenever we want to.

What do we like about Netflix? For a fraction of the cost of cable, it gives you DVDs by mail plus the ability watch a lot of movies instantly, either on your computer or with their many compatible set-top boxes.

What do people like about Redbox. One buck! Pick it up and return it to the supermarket!

What do we like about cable?

Ummm, cable is a monopoly.  You only get one store. You may only want a pair of socks and a shirt, but you are forced to buy a Yankee cap (even if you are a Mets or a Sox fan), cufflinks, perfume, towels, ladies underwear, two ties, a bedspread, low-slung hip-hop shorts, and a lamp. The kicker is that the price goes up all the time and the Calvin Klein shirt you actually came to buy costs extra. And of course LOTS AND LOTS OF ADS!

It’s not that we don’t like cable any more—we’ve always  hated it!  Cable is like the bully who beat you up in the hallway in high school.  It’s college time now, baby!

But Comcast isn’t just experimenting with a flavor of “TV Everywhere.”  They are also to merge their existing cable channels with NBC. They want to lock up all those amazing NBC Universal shows unless you subscribe.

There’s one tiny hitch though. Every single TV show and movie from NBC and Universal is available for free to anybody who has ten seconds to look for them. So what exactly is Comcast locking up? This isn’t 1995, you know. Either you just shrug your shoulders about file-sharing or you start offering some alternatives that have benefits that people are willing to pay for like Hulu, Netflix, Redbox, and iTunes. Or maybe you work a little and come up with something new?  Bill Maher said recently that the Republicans looked into the future and saw…  radio. These entertainment giants are looking into the future and they see… cable.

Also, as Martin Peers wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “There is little evidence that owning both content and distribution increases strategic value. Time Warner, in fact, only this year split its cable systems from its vast content operations.”

Wait a second!  Mr. “TV Everywhere” Bewkes got rid of his cable system? I thought you sold stuff when you thought they’d be worth less in the future, not more.

Peers also pointed out that Comcast itself had prior history it might consider, including its “unsuccessful bid for Walt Disney in 2004 and the value-destroying $250 million investment in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2005.”

This is the kind of Masters of the Universe mogul-think that gave us the Time Warner-AOL deal, Detroit and the SUV, and sub-prime loans.  

There’s a lot of panic and desperation these days. Everyone says they don’t know how they are going to monetize this content when people are stealing it.  Where’s it all going?

They  know very well where it’s all going--they just don’t like it. It’s going to Hulu. To Netflix. To Redbox.

It’s going to Steve Jobs. Apple has lately been floating the idea of a $30 a month subscription plan to the networks. That sounds a lot like--

Run for your lives!

One of the biggest events in the history of the internet happened this week. After six years, The Pirate Bay, the website most responsible for people watching movies without paying for them, has closed down, after numerous unsuccessful attempts to scuttle their ship. For example, in May of 2006, Swedish police raided the Bay, arresting the operators and confiscating their equipment. The Pirate Bay found a new home in 24 hours and was fully functional in three days. In fact, the international publicity generated by the Pirate Bay raids gave a huge boost to the site’s traffic, forcing the company to hire new workers.

Earlier this year, there was a much publicized trial where the four people who ran the site were convicted in April and sentenced to one year in jail and fined three and a half million dollars. But the four remained unrepentant and the site stayed open for business until November 17th, when it permanently shut down.

How big an operation was The Pirate Bay? Last year they approached the Guinness Book of Records to recognize it as the world’s largest illicit trafficker with 22 million users. The year before that they had eight million users.

When the Pirate Bay was in action, the practice of file-sharing increased at a staggering amount. Now that they are gone, I believe that the practice of watching films for free will continue to increase by a staggering amount, using the many other tracking sites that are still open, trackerless technologies like DHT and PEX, streaming video sites, and free file-hosting services like RapidShare.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way. People will continue to watch movies without paying for them because people like to do it and they haven’t been given a compelling argument that it is wrong for them to do so. And there are many serious people who believe that there isn’t one, and that file-sharing can even help the industry if they learn how to harness it to their advantage.

Can you persuade young people to stop by telling them they are car thieves? They will laugh at you.

Do you grab a 22-year-old at random and ruin his life? You don’t reach out to people and make them see things your way by showing that you are despotic and cruel.

File-sharing is not going to stop. Deal with it.

People who run media companies have got to learn that their job is not to stop people from stealing from them--their job is to increase profits. No store ever made a penny with anti-theft tags. You make money by providing a great product that people are willing to pay for. You can whine about the thieves who pillaged your store, but down the street somebody else is cleaning up.

You may love your cable TV dollars and be wary of trading them for internet pennies, but let me give you the news: cable is over. People have never liked being strong-armed to pay for a service that is 95% stuff they don’t want and never use. The internet and Netflix has shown them that they can have choice and you will never be able to put that genie back in the bottle. That’s the direction things will inevitably go. People will pay for the things they want, just as they now pay for HBO and ShowTime, and they will watch them whenever they want on any device that they want.

DVD sales are down?  How can you say that your world is undone by slowing sales of a format that only nudged ahead of the last one in 2003?  DVD players were first offered in 1997, and most studios resisted putting their films in the format for years, just as they had earlier fought against the VHS. Former Motion Picture Society of America head Jack Valenti likened video recorders to the Boston Strangler, but the VCR laid the foundation for the entire DVD business.  Valenti went to his deathbed decrying the VCR, despite the tens of billions of dollars that home video has showered on the industry.

Technology comes and goes and the only constant is that media companies will always fight the new.

Do you think Steve Jobs wakes up every day and cries, “Oh my god! The sky is falling!” Does he go on “60 Minutes” and despair that file-sharing is destroying his business?  He just keeps adding more international iTunes stores, offering more and more people a convenient, easy-to-use and safe method to pay. He demonstrates that there are advantages to paying.

Innovate. Compete. Have better ideas than the other guys. Take ideas that other people have done and do them better.

Believe it or not, this is a time of great opportunity.

Recently I was talking to a friend of mine who works as a cop in a suburban town. “How’s business?” I asked. “Business is booming,” she said, sadly. She felt crime had changed in her community after the economic crash. In the past she had dealt mostly with petty crimes that were easily solvable: a bunch kids broke into a house, amateurishly leaving evidence behind. Now she was encountering more sophisticated criminals. One of her colleagues found a house that had a multitude of TV’s in every room. This wasn’t some hole-in-the-wall “fence”-- this was a store. .

In her opinion, people were getting worse, and it was depressing her.

We live and die in America by the stories we are told us and the stories we believe. These stories fuel religion, politics, work and love and war. They are the firmament of who we are.

Once upon a time, we were told, there was a country in the Middle East that had had the bomb, and was intent on using it on us. We had all seen the movies, we all knew what had to be done. We had to shoot Lee Marvin so that our little town on the prairie would survive and prosper.

Recently the mushroom cloud came in the form of certain entities that were TOO BIG TO FAIL. It may have been an economic mushroom cloud this time but it was no less deadly. And the fact that things that were TOO BIG TO FAIL existed, meant  that there were other things that were small enough to fail. In fact,calamity fit them as snugly as an alligator in an Everglades python.

So two fearless Sheriff-Presidents rounded up a posse of guys from Metro-Goldwyn-Sachs and set out to save the town. And even though there were some close calls that left us breathless, we never really worried. We knew that they were going to save the things that were TOO BIG TO FAIL, because otherwise they wouldn’t be heroes and we wouldn’t go to their next movie.

And our confidence was well-founded. The things were TOO BIG TO FAIL not only did not fail…they flourished.

But what about the things that were puny enough to fail? Didn’t they deserve movies too?  This is America, and there is a lush bounty of stories for all. The New York Times has been a veritable Sundance lately. It seems that when jobs and homes are lost, families break apart. AIG divorce! More kids run away from these stress-filled homes and live on the streets. Goldman Sachs Teen Prostitutes! Sometimes people to succumb to utter despair. Citibank Suicides!  There’s enough material there to keep Endeavor busy for a long time.

Reading those tales in the Times, I thought a lot about what my friend the policewoman had told me. There was an independent film in there somewhere. The protagonist could be a regular Midwestern guy.  In Act One, he’d never consider buying a stolen TV set—he’d just put down his credit card and pay the price. Sure he’d be taking on debt, but it was debt that he took responsibility for, responsibility built on the foundation of having a job and savings to pay off that card. But then along came Act Two and the arrival of the thing that was TOO BIG TO FAIL--in his case, the thing that failed was his soul. In the meat of the narrative, we learned that there was just so far a face can be ground into the dirt, how many kicks it can take, how much humiliation it can weather. In screenwriter-ese, this was our protagonist’s “story arc.”

So by the time Act Three rolled around it turned out he was that guy who would buy a TV for a $100 that he knew cost $1500. Maybe he had always been that guy. He just didn’t’ know it until hard times revealed it to him.

Admittedly this is a pretty slim premise for a movie. It’s unlikely it would ever get into competition at Sundance, let alone make it to a theatre.

It’s too small.

Recently I worked on a low-budget film with a script that was so bleak it was kind of scary. We shot in the grimmest locations all night in freezing cold. There was one location that was covered in so much dog poop that you had to hopscotch your way around it. It rained a lot. It was not glamorous.

But it was the happiest and best experience I ever had on a movie set. I’ve never met so many great people who pulled together so well. I’ve never felt so welcome or laughed so hard. Up until then, I never felt that working on a film ever changed me…but this one did. And it is fitting that this very modest film, this total labor of love, is shaping up to become the biggest movie I have ever worked on in my life.

When I told my friends that I was going to be the production publicist on a movie called “Push” (now called “Precious”) written by an author and poet named Sapphire, none of them had ever heard of it. In fact, I couldn’t even find it under “S” in the literature section at Barnes and Noble. I was directed to a special table, where important black-themed books were laid out. Later on, the star of the film, Gabby Sidibe, told me that “Push” was a book that every black girl read. So when Anthony Lane in the New Yorker wonders why the movie is called “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” instead of just “Precious”—there’s your answer. “Precious” is an adaptation of what for many people is a classic.

Lee told me that a lot of people had tried to make the movie in the past, but that Sapphire trusted him. That made sense. The director, Lee Daniels, has a personal history of abuse is well-known and it’s driven the storylines of every single movie he’s made. And he was fearless enough to adapt “Push” without compromising it, and more importantly swing it into LeeDanielsWorld, a very peculiar and wonderful place I had been privileged to spend a bit of time in. Lee likes to dive into the pool without knowing for sure if there’s any water in it. My type of guy.

Lee said I should come by the production office and meet Gabby. With another director, I might have asked “Why? I’ll see her on the set,” but with Lee you just do it. Anyway, I’d been knocked off my feet by Gabby’s audition tape (I was hoping to put it here, but it’s been taken off YouTube.) There’s really no way I can describe the way Gabby’s audition punched me out emotionally. “What the hell?”-- I couldn’t stop watching it over and over, gushing tears--“That poor woman. That poor, poor woman.”

I found Gabby sitting placidly against a wall in the office while the three-ringed tumult of low-budget preproduction swirled around her. What struck me immediately was her sunny calm. She was easily the most relaxed person in the room. She told me the story that she’s repeated over and over in the press recently, how she wasn’t even planning to go to the audition—and only did so at the last minute, after a friend kept bugging her about it. I sat there trying to connect the dots between the woman in the tape and the woman in front me. She just strolled in and did that audition? She just had to have prepared. And if it was true that she didn’t, then didn’t it have to be the obvious thing, that this seemingly happy person with the impish sense of humor, had dredged up some extremely dark things from her own life?

On the first morning of shooting, we were in Harlem doing the scene where Precious steals the bucket of fried chicken. The location happened to be very close to where Gabby lived. So there she was, sitting in a director’s chair with her name on the back, when a guy who lives in her building walks by without noticing. If this was me it would be off -the-charts surreal, but Gabby was acting like she’d been on a movie set her whole life. “Aren’t you at all nervous?” I asked her. “I have something to do,” she said. “I’m here to please Lee.” “Come on,” I said, “don’t tell me this whole deal isn’t a huge surprise for you.” She shook her head. “There were signs,” she said. It seemed that in an early attempt to film Sapphire’s novel, Gabby’s mother was considered for Mary, Precious’s mother. The role was way too much for her to handle, but it led to Gabby reading the book for the first time, and I bet a lot of intense discussions around the dining room table. Gabby had also heard an interview with Lee on Wendy Williams’ show that she never forgot. Most importantly, Lee’s debut film as a director, “Shadowboxer” was her favorite movie—she’d watched it over and over. That didn’t seem all that surprising to me. After all, Lee had cast Mo’Nique to play Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s girlfriend, a role that was written for the typical Hollywood blonde. This was a very Lee Daniels thing to do—casting against type, using black entertainers not previously known for dramatic work—but mainly Lee was just being real: women who look like Mo’Nique have hot boyfriends too. It wasn’t hard to guess why this movie was at the top of Gabby’s playlist. (By the way, Mo’Nique’s character’s name in “Shadowboxer” was....drum roll….Precious.)

Gabby told me that she was a singer—mostly gospel and R&B--and had performed Ella Fitzgerald songs in musical revues at Lehman College. Her mother, Alice Tan Ridley, was also a singer. “Look her up on YouTube,” she said. So I did:

Alice Ridley used to have a regular job at the school Gabby attended, but she left it to pursue her dream of being a full-time singer. She made enough singing in the subway so that Gabby always lived in nice apartments and had everything she needed. She went to very good schools. Gabby loved her mother very much, but she worried: you don’t get health insurance or a pension from singing in the subway. What was going to happen when her mother wasn’t able to do that anymore?

Gabby knew quite well she had a gift; she just knew there were a lot of risks in that kind of life, and she wanted no part of it. She wanted a real job, one with health insurance and a 401K.

So on that Monday in September, Gabby was starting her first semester of college and just getting into the rhythm of it. Auditioning for the movie would be a distraction and a waste of time. She wouldn’t get it anyway. But there was a friend of hers from the drama department at Lehman named Henry Ovalles. He knew she wouldn’t be wasting her time; he knew the part was hers if she would only try out for it. So he didn’t let up on her until she did.

After astonishing the casting directors on Monday, Gabby had a callback on Tuesday, and was dispatched to Lee Daniels’ office on Wednesday. She sat on the couch and listened to Lee talk about everything under the sun in his loony-glorious Lee Daniels way—I’ve seen a video of it--and Gabby sat there, more than a little overwhelmed by her first shot of Daniels--“He was ten feet tall,” she told me later—and preparing herself mentally to read for him. And then—abruptly--Lee stopped his shenanigans, turned to her and said in a quiet voice: “I want you to be my Precious.” This caught Gabby off guard, so she said, “but--” and Lee said, no ‘but,’ I want you to be my Precious.” And then it was Gabby’s turn to cry.

I understood everything now. I understood why Gabby almost didn’t show up for the audition. I understood why she was so incredible in it. I understood why she was so relaxed about playing the lead role in a movie, and why she was so comfortable in her own skin. She was a born natural. She had what it takes and she knew it, so she just had to go out and do it. What’s the big deal?

I read an interview with Lee saying that Gabby had to reduce her natural confidence to play Precious. It’s an interesting notion, but in my opinion it was because she thought so highly of herself that she could take the character to those scarily low places. (I’m sure it was that way with Mo’Nique too.) And I think it’s the briskness of the intelligence that Gabby bestows on Precious that makes her such a winning character. Precious may be illiterate, but she’s nobody’s fool.

There’s lots of waiting around on a movie set. One night, to pass the time, Gabby and I, who share the same twisted sense of humor, improvised a story about her supposed addiction to NyQuil for the benefit of a pair of production assistants. She kept pushing this narrative to Dickensian or at least VH1-ian levels, until: “It all bottomed out for me when I had my head in the toilet in this bar in Tijuana.” I studied the faces of the P.A.’s: were they buying this nonsense? Maybe not, but she sure had their attention. “I knew that I had hit bottom,” she said, “and it was time for me to do something to change my life.” Then she added ruefully: “But even today, as I walk through the aisles of Duane Reade—her voice cracked—“it’s so hard for me.” (I know there’s Oscar talk about Gabby now, but the voters should have seen this!)

Lee made Gabby do some of the most intense scenes over and over. People were worried about her but she was very matter-of-fact about it—she just wanted to give Lee what he wanted. Maybe lying on her back in the street for a few hours in the rain and cold wasn’t her favorite thing, but if Lee wanted her to cry a dozen times, that wasn’t a big stretch. “You’re going to have a career,” I told her. “No matter what happens with the movie, once people discover what you can do, and then they find out you’re so funny, so easy to work with, and the world’s greatest auditioner?” Definitely some people listening in to these conversations thought I was filling her with false hopes, but I thought, ‘Okay, maybe there aren’t any roles right now for someone who looks like her, but when they see her coming—they sure as hell are going to write some.” 

Watch out world! Lady Gabourey is in the building. She is precious, she’s always been precious and she will always be precious.

.

I’ve been typing movie info into SpeedCine six days a week since May.

Believe it or not, it’s not so bad.

For me, it’s like wading through my life in the cinema. I’m amazed by how many of these films have such direct connections to my life. Talk about “Six Degrees of Separation”? That film isn’t in the SpeedCine database, but I was the publicist on it. Typing this stuff is very dramatic for me: here’s a film I took to some festival long ago, it played badly and the director screamed at me; here are several that won the top prizes at Sundance; here’s one that was directed by a legendary director who canceled all the interviews I had spent weeks arranging; here’s one where I gave some comments to the director in the editing room, he took them and now they are in the movie; here’s the one that sold for an insane amount of money, and didn’t make any: here’s the film I smoked very potent weed every night with the star; here’s a film where the star complained about me to the studio and tried to get me fired; here’s the film where I actually did get fired; here’s the one where I met someone who became one of my best friends of my life: here’s the film where I made a super-colossal enemy;  here’s the one where the director fired somebody every day, and after he fired me, we went out to dinner that night:  here’s the one where I broke my foot; here’s one that features an actress I went out with for a while; here’s the film the studio decided to dump, I conspired with the director and producer to rescue, and which was dumped anyway, as was I;  here is the presence of all the glorious people I worked with who are no long here; here’s the film that was the biggest success of my career, and which bankrupted me, broke my heart, and shuttered my company.

After a day of this, I need to take a moment to clear my head, and it’s not because my hands are tired.

When you go on Amazon you see either the trailer or the first two minutes of the film. So I have seen either the trailer the first two minutes of over ten thousand films within a few months. How many people can say that they’ve seen had so many bite-sized samplings of so many movies in such a short time? The films I’ve loved, the ones I hated, the ones that were “eh?” have been parked in my head for ages, and watching all these cinema-bites has opened the garage door wide. With 100,000 films available on Netflix, it’s just too overwhelming to think about which one I might ever revisit, but I found time to watch the first two minutes of “Killer Klowns From Outer Space.” In case you’re wondering, there’s nary a trace of a Killer Klowns in the first two minutes. But I wait out the clock, hoping I will see at least one Klown, even if he’s a red herring, non-deadly Klown. Many directors can be very sly about not showing their hand in the first two minutes. But nothing will deter me from watching the entire two.

Often it’s the exploitation films that grab my interest, not the classics. Some of them have such great titles that I laugh out loud. Having been burned by my 2-minute sampling “Killer Klowns,” I eagerly watched the trailer of “Cannibal Killer Clowns on Dope,” which I found wonderful in a self-consciously-trying-to-be-so-bad-it’s-good kind of way. Of course when I got to “L’avventura,” it was “Next!” I’ve seen that film three times, and I doubt I ever will again, and certainly not on my computer. But I may check out a dangerous clown movie at some point.

What’s much more dangerous are free sites like Hulu and Crackle. I can get hooked on pretty much anything. Recently, Hulu put up an Israeli film without subtitles. I couldn’t believe that they would have the chutzpah to do that—they didn’t mention it anywhere. So I watched it for a while in Hebrew, but nobody said anything I’d heard in temple like “Baruch, Attoh, Adenoi, or sang“Adon Olom,” so I turned it off.

And the comments! Before I started this I didn’t know there were so many ways to say that a film was the worst ever made. Netflix is my go-to place for angry consumers. You will find as many good reviews as bad there, but I love the anonymous ragers. I find the emotion that gets stirred up by bad movies to be exhilarating.

Also the world of online video is dominated by films that are in the public domain and which anyone in the world can download a legal copy of from the Internet Archive. Hulu doesn’t have any more rights to “Night of the Living Dead” than you do. But people sell this stuff! It’s a very high percentage of what’s for sale and rent online. I’m not talking about when a company like Kino does a restoration.  Some of the public domain prints are pretty good, but most are scratchy, grainy, faded,and blurry, with barely discernible sound. And I speak with authority, as I have seen the first two minutes of so many of them. I’m just starting to go to where they got them and index the Internet Archive too. Let’s just say that Criterion shouldn’t lose any sleep about them.

By the way, a big Hollywood studio was launched by a public domain movie. In 1971, Keith Stroup from NORML went to the library of Congress and for $297 bought a print of a 1936 film with a lapsed copyright called “Tell Your Children.” A guy named Bob Shea marketed the film, retitled “Reefer Madness,” to every college campus in the country. Convincing people pay oodles of money for something Shea got for free gave birth to the mighty edifice that is New Line Cinema. It is indisputable that pot-smoking paid for “The Lord of the Rings,” just as pot-smoking increased the enjoyment of watching “The Lord of the Rings.”

There are many versions of “Reefer Madness” available online. There is also a company I found that will sell you a DVD for $19.99, along with a full catalog of $19.99 other DVDs that they got from Internet Archive. It’s a very surreal world, public domain. I can kind of understand why Roger Corman wasn’t paying attention to the paperwork (there’s a Corman festival going on now at Anthology Film Archives, but you can program your own here), but not William Castle—he was a master marketer, why would he give away the store? Another public domain film you find everywhere is “Carnival of Souls.”  I’m always intrigued by the movies that make it to the archive.  There’s a glorious arbitrariness to public domain and it’s always a delight to discover that the rights to some of these wonderful films are free for everyone. There are a zillion things you can use, video mash-uppers! Head to the Internet Archive right now and stop fighting lawyers.

Strangely enough, inputting all this data input has refreshed my enthusiasm for movies and every kind of movies.  I’m no longer numbed by the overwhelming glut of movies available on video. I am compiling a list of must-sees, and someday I will watch them all.

If I can ever stop typing.

“I love acting.  It is so much more real than life.”
--Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“We're actors - we're the opposite of people.”
--Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I was once photographed at an extremely dramatic occasion in my life. A host of emotions were roiling inside me, but when I saw the picture later on, there was… absolutely nothing there.  I might as well have been thinking about lunch or what was on TV that night.

Now imagine if Marlon Brando had been portraying the character of me in a film, living through that very instant. His expression wouldn’t have been banal like mine, it would have been extremely moving. Because Marlon Brando was one of the most remarkable and charismatic men who ever lived, he would have been able to imbue the fictional character of me into something profoundly greater than the less than the fireworks-free real-life me.

But the way I looked at that moment was the truth. What Brando would have done wouldn’t have been the unadorned truth but rather an elevated representation of “truth” that surpassed the ordinariness of what actually happened. In other words: it would have been art. The plain truth is usually boring, or if it happens to be exciting, it’s exciting in a clichéd way that wouldn’t get good reviews for its “screenplay.”  To portray life in all its complexity, art must fly above it,  like a bird. If you get too high, you lose it; if you’re too earthbound you’ll never get there.  Hence many actors study their craft in a class rather than standing on the street corner.  Which isn’t to say that actors they can’t and don’t do both, just that there is an understanding that acting is different from real-life, and you need a coach to help you fine-tune the distance that must exist between life and its poetic imitation.  

Which leads to the two big questions, so often posed: Can acting truly be taught? Or can it only be developed? 

Often when you watch a film you will see people who have spent a lifetime studying acting at the highest level working alongside someone who just got lucky. But some people who are highly trained are painful to watch and some, like Gabourey Sidibe of “Precious,” can give an inspired performance, despite having next to no training.   Can Cate Blanchett (one of my very favorite actresses) ever give me an experience like that any more?   Blanchett has been brilliant so many times that I assume greatness from her. That’s my fault, but that’s the way it is.  I don’t think it’s possible for me to experience her in the way I am hyper-alert to what Sidibe does. 

It was Louise Brooks who said that acting was one of the most difficult arts to explain. We all "know" it when we see it, but how can we describe it?  And what is there to describe?

When our defenses are battered by something fresh and unexpected, we forget that anything called “acting” exists.   We plummet into something like love.  It is anti-logical.  Critics can search through the Thesaurus trying to tame that feeling but it’s futile.  You can’t suture ineffable joy with words, critical theories or competitive awards. The power and wonder of acting lies in its unquantifiable beauty.   It’s something that the actors don’t necessarily need to know how they do, and its something that we shouldn't attempt to measure, because in doing so we lessen our own pleasure.  When we seek to reveal a magician’s tricks, we deprive ourselves of magic. 

River Phoenix once told me that he was sure there were a lot of people out there in the world who felt the same way he did. When he acted, he said he was trying to form a connection to these strangers he saw as friends.   And he knew that if he sent that message out there with a pure heart,  they would receive it.

“The acting occasionally rises to the level of adequacy.”
--from A.O. Scott’s review of “Paranormal Activity” in The New York Times

What are the criteria that critics and audiences use to praise actors’ performances?   When we notice that someone is giving a good performance while we are watching a movie, is this necessarily a good thing?  If we are multi-tasking, and calculating Oscar odds mid-story, does that mean we are not fully immersed in the experience and are removed from it?

So what is the purpose of film acting?  

I was a huge fan of the movie “Once,” and so I recommended it to an acquaintance, as something she might like.  She hated it.  As she was a serious student of acting, she found the performance of Markéta Irglová portraying Markéta Irglová to be so inadequate that she couldn’t enjoy the film.  I conceded that perhaps someone else could have played the role of Markéta Irglová much better than Markéta Irglová did, perhaps a trained actress or someone who was naturally more relaxed in front of the camera. But her character had a lot to be tense and uncomfortable about, and so I interpreted the behavior as being the character’s, not  an inexperienced real-life person struggling to act.--and anyway I was too moved by the entirety of the experience of watching the film to be distracted about whether Irglová deserved a Golden Globe or would make a good Lady Macbeth.  She broke my heart within this story and it didn’t matter to me if she ever got in front of a camera again.

Was Philip Seymour Hoffman brilliant in “Twister”?   Or maybe the right question is should he have been?  He had a dinky role, and he came in was nondescript and pretty forgettable and got paid.  He wasn’t “Philip Seymour Hoffman” yet.  Would he have been as creepily unsettling in “Happiness” if he already had his Oscar for “Capote”?  

Harrison Ford has often told a story about when he was a contract player playing a tiny role in “Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round.”  A producer told him that when Tony Curtis played a bit part like that he made you know that he was a star. And Ford said, “I thought I was supposed to be a waiter.”

It is a good thing that we try to recognize, appreciate, encourage and reward talent of all kinds. And actors deserve it, whether they have trained their whole lives, or just have an extraordinary natural gift.  They give us so much. But there are times when we just need an actor to be a waiter. 

Which brings me to “Paranormal Activity,” a movie I admire.  I generally agree with A.O. Scott, but I think he missed something important about the film in his casual put-down of the actors (above). I get the point that he thinks the film isn’t very good, but it is attracting huge audiences, and that’s intriguing. Why is that happening?

I believe the most important reason is that the film convinces audiences that the characters are real.  I have no idea if this is due to the talent or lack of talent of the director, Oren Peli, and his actors, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat,  whether they did this purposefully, or whether they were trying for something else and achieved this effect entirely by chance. The result is the same:  the film makes a direct connection with its audience. Perhaps it has to do with the character’s essential ordinariness.

From the audience’s point of view, Featherson and Sloat aren’t perceived as unknown actors—they are seen as  “Katie” and “Micah,” real live people.  You can say that the audiences are dumb to believe this, and you can say that I am dumb to believe this, but that’s one of the main reasons I go to movies, to get hooked by stories, however preposterous.  And that’s why I was frightened, and that’s why the people in the theatre around me were watching while holding their hands in front of their eyes. 

“The acting occasionally rises to the level of adequacy.”   That’s it exactly!  Nobody is noticing any acting going on at all.   Sometimes you just need a waiter.  For a film like this it’s better to have Katie and Micah playing these roles than to have stars.  And this was the conclusion that Paramount came to when they abandoned their plans for a remake with “names.”

So what is the best acting in film?  Sometimes it’s the kind of thing you want to give an Oscar to. 

And sometimes you only know it when you don’t see it.

You feel so good

You grind out an at-bat
against one of the best closers in the game
and you get a favorable count
and you get a pitch in your wheelhouse
and obviously
you don’t want to miss it

and the fun part is
I was just thinking
base hit
hit the ball hard
somewhere

--Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez

The voice on the phone was oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Who is this?”

“I’m the guy who changed your life.”

“No, seriously. Who is this?”

“Seymour Cassel.”

Well he played a role. But the guy who changed my life was named John Cassavetes.

I was a very pretentious, insufferable teenager. I loved Bob Dylan and played in a string of rock bands. I would devour writers—I read every word that Tolstoy wrote. I flirted with “radical” politics. But my big passion was the theatre, in particular Eugène Ionesco, Alfred Jarry, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, and Samuel Beckett. I wanted to be an actor and a playwright. I wrote horrible poetry and Theatre of the Absurd plays and still shudder at the memory my performance of “Krapp’s Last Tape.” My love was for Art-With-A-Capital-A,; movies were just TV distractions or handy venues for making out with my girlfriend in the back row.

I grew up in Monona, Wisconsin, a suburb of Madison, site of the State Capitol and the University of Wisconsin campus. Hanging out by myself in downtown Madison one Saturday, I happened to pass by the Majestic theatre, our local arthouse/grindhouse theatre. It was fun to look at the cheesy exploitation movies that often played there, but this week the window of the theatre was plastered with reviews for a movie called “Faces.” They weren’t blurbs, but in-depth essays. It was as if the film’s director, John Cassavetes, could be mentioned in the same sentence with the novelists and playwrights I admired. It was ridiculous, but I was intrigued. I decided to go in and see what all the fuss was about.

It was black and white. It was about unhappy adults behaving badly. It didn’t possess much of a plot, more like situations: a man (John Marley) breaks up with his wife (Lynn Carlin) and spends the night with a prostitute (Gena Rowlands); his wife’s friends come over to support her and she ends up meeting a free-spirited guy (Cassel) and taking him home. There was a lot of talking, a lot of it uncomfortable and very sad. These were very, very sad and lonely people, aside from Seymour Cassel’s character who provided glorious energy and high-spirits.

It didn’t seem to be written and the actors—if they were in fact actors—didn’t seem to be acting. Was Allen Funt hidden behind the wall with his “Candid Camera?” I didn’t know what it was or what I thought about it. But it had my attention. And then it ended. I didn’t know if it was a really sad ending or a sad ending that might have some hope in it, even if that hope meant that you accepted that life sucked instead of trying to run away from it.

When I left the theatre I had to walk around for a few hours to shake it off. I realized that the artlessness of the movie was in fact where its art was located. Once I understood that, I started thinking about the over-the-top Theatre of the Absurd acting styles I was so enamored of. I loved acting where everyone in your zip code knew you were acting and how fantastic you were.

I kept acting and I did have a lot of conversations with my high school director and advisor, Donald Robinson, about “Faces” and other movies, in particular “Five Easy Pieces.” I suppose I could have set my sights on becoming another kind of actor, a more realistic one, but as time passed I became focused on movies themselves. I skipped school every afternoon and went to film classes at the UW campus. At night, I went to the university film clubs. I saw Bergman, Fellini, Godard, De Sica, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Satajit Ray, Antonioni, Billy Wilder and Orson Welles. I kept a notebook on every film I saw. I also starting driving around town with my Dad’s Super-8 camera, stopping to record anything that caught my interest.

One day I set up my tripod at a big hippie party that was going on in Mifflin Street. All these long haired tie-died t-shirt wearing people were dancing with wild abandon to the sounds of a local garage band. A big breasted girl got up on top of a truck, took her shirt off and started flopping around. This was meant to show that we were all innocent and free and nudity didn’t matter. She drew a big crowd of leering guys, including 16-year-old me. I didn’t have the guts to film her though. After a while I noticed there was a pair of dogs fucking nearby. I set up my tripod behind the dogs and composed an image with the dogs in the left foreground and the debauched hippie revelry on the right. After getting about thirty seconds of pure gold, I looked up from my eyepiece to see this college girl standing above me, smiling sweetly. Without a word, she kneeled down, took my head in her hands and kissed me—a real kiss, on the mouth and everything. Then she got up and walked away. As I watched her disappear, I realized I had made her day.

But I hadn’t been attempting to use my composition as satire--I totally bought into the hippie ethos. I just thought dogs fucking was hilarious. But whether I meant to or not, I had created a cinematic metaphor, and not unimportantly, one that a pretty girl who was older than me liked a lot.

The passion for movies that Cassavetes had set in motion was picking up momentum.

Addendum: Why did Cassel call? I told my “Faces” story to Alexandre Rockwell, when I was trying to work on his film “In the Soup,” which starred Cassel and Steve Buscemi. Rockwell told Cassel, who ambushed me. I didn’t get the job, by the way.

This week is a change of pace for me.  Instead of writing a blog, I’ve made a video.  It will be the first of many SpeedCine Videos.

This one is about experimental filmmaker and painter Jeff Scher.   I’m fascinated by the various ways that filmmakers and other artists have used the internet to market their work, and Jeff is certainly a sterling example--but that’s just a pretext for why I made this. 

The real reason was that I have known Jeff for decades and I have always been awed by his talent.   If you don’t know him yet, I hope that this video will send you scurrying to Jeff’s New York Times series, “The Animated Life,” for more.   You can also buy  a DVD that has a selection of his “Animated Life” films in full quality on his website, and some of his other movie can be seen on YouTube (with Jeff’s permission).  I also recommend the website of his wonderful collaborator, composer Shay Lynch, where you can full versions of of Lynch’s music cues for Jeff’s films and those by other filmmakers, as well as  all-too-brief clips from songs like “Stand By Me.” (Probably a rights thing. Our loss)  While Shay provides “Noises and Knobs” for the band The Problems, he hasn’t brought out his own CD, which is too bad.  Hopefully that will change.

I wanted to get more into Jeff talking about Shay’s contribution, as well as the fact that the Times gives him back full rights to the film after a month, but a six minute video is already pretty long.  It was hard enough to give a thumbnail portrait of who he is and show how having his films on the Times web page has changed his life. And Jeff said some interesting things about his process in creating “Summer Retreat,” which can’t be shown anywhere but the times until October.   So I plan to make a slightly longer version and put that up in a few weeks.

The guy on the phone wanted to know if I could set up a private screening for Jacqueline Onassis. I said sure, but why does she want to see Werner Herzog’s “La Soufrière”? Is she a Herzog fan? “Mrs. Onassis recently traveled to Guadeloupe and went hiking on La Soufrière, the man said. “When she heard about the film, she was very interested to see it.” Wow, I thought. Jacqueline Onassis is coming to New Yorker Films. Better tidy up the screening room.

At first it seemed an odd conjunction to me, Jackie O. and Werner H. But when I thought about it, who was more marginal than Jacqueline Onassis? She pushed the outer limits, just like his characters, albeit on the luxe side of the cosmos. There were all the people in the world, from the homeless and the untouchables to the heads of states and movie stars, and then there was Jackie, a universe of one, floating above them all. It wasn’t far-fetched at all that they would turn up in the same place, like Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca.” They both had damned good reasons to get as far away as possible from densely populated areas.

La Grande Soufrière is the tallest mountain on the Island of Basse-Terre (in the cluster of islands that is Guadeloupe), as well as an active volcano. When it was set to blow in 1976, the entire island was evacuated, but reports came out that one man refused to go. Recognizing a kindred spirit, Herzog—with his typical fearlessness-- went there to talk to him. He did interview the man (and two others!), filmed the spookily empty streets, and he and his crew, including my friend, cameraman Eddie Lachman, journeyed up to the open mouth of the volcano. I don’t know what Ms. Onassis had heard about this eerie and powerful film, but she was certainly going to get her money’s worth.

When the day came for the screening, something very peculiar happened. Our doorman, who had never previously displayed any signs of insanity, got into the elevator with her and started following her. I was so focused on escorting Ms. Onassis and her friends to the screening room that I didn’t notice him tagging along behind us. Before I knew it, he brushed past me and went right up to her. And there he stood, tranced out like a Val Lewton zombie, his glassy eyes trained on her face. Her fame was so overwhelming and irresistible to him that it short-circuited any sensible judgment he might have had before she turned up. It seemed to me he stood there for quite a while, but I realize we must have pulled him away pretty quickly. Seeing a previously sensate man suddenly thrown into hypnosis is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen but what was even stranger was that the sheer weirdness of it all didn’t throw Mrs. Onassis a bit. I guess people turning into zombies in her presence wasn’t all that unusual. Hence the appeal of a place like an isolated archipelago in the eastern Caribbean sea.

She immediately started telling me about Guadeloupe and asking me questions about the film. I gave her a little background on Werner and his other movies. She definitely knew how to set you at ease. I was particularly struck by the sound of her voice. It seemed girlish to me, something I didn’t remember, and found totally disarming. In fact, I couldn’t remember anything at all about what her voice sounded like. In retrospect that’s not so strange--I was eight years old when she was conducting those TV tours of the White House—but I was couldn’t stop thinking, “I’m chatting with the most famous woman in the world, and this is the first time I’ve ever heard her voice.”

Also, when you think about it, while the Jackie O image was as iconic as Mao’s or Che’s, whether captured by Avedon or Galella or silk-screened on a Warhol canvas, it was largely a silent, frozen one. We didn’t hear her voice nearly as often as we looked at her. In a sense, she was our last great Silent Film Goddess, a startling achievement considering her heyday was a time as clangorous as the sixties.

And what a voice! As I said, it sounded girlish to me, and I couldn’t place the accent. Southern? (Maybe now, with a few productions of “Grey Gardens” under my belt, I might just have called it Bouvier.) Despite all the incredible accomplishments she had achieved in her life before she ever set eyes on Jack Kennedy, Jackie had learned how to project that debutante thing and baby, she still had it! I don’t know exactly what I was expecting from her, but definitely not that. I flattered myself on not letting celebrities intimidate me, but I had prepared myself to meet somebody regal and what I got instead was somebody who was--I don’t know how else to say this--fun.

While I’m sure she would have liked nothing more than to continue her conversation with me for hours, out of politeness to her friends, I begged off, dimmed the lights, started the film, and went back to my desk to work. Hello, Real Life. Later on, as I brought the lights up after the screening ended, Ms. Onassis asked if it would be okay if they stayed and ate their lunch in the screening room. I said, “No problem, just don’t leave a lot of crumbs.” (No, I didn’t say that, I said something like “it would be my pleasure.”)

After watching them whip out their brown bags for their “picnic,” I walked away contemplating the exorbitant operating costs of fame for someone on her level. The things we all take for granted, getting something to eat when we are hungry, going to the bathroom when we want to go to the bathroom—none of these things are easy or even guaranteed for someone like her. A restaurant visit takes some planning: a special reservation, a private room, transportation arrangements. Everything she did, no matter how banal, was newsworthy. And of course, as confining that was for her, it was nothing like it is now. These days reality stars need three-person security details, but Jackie O. strolled into New Yorker Films in the late 70s with two friends.

A few days later, I received a thank you note. Realizing that it was the kind of thing you need to hold on to, I promptly lost it. It’s out there with my original Spiderman #2 comic, my lengthy correspondence with Louise Brooks and all the other intensely eBay-able items that might have gotten me through some tight spots. All I have left is the memory of my extremely brief meeting with her, which has been rejuvenated through the process of writing it down.

There was a Citibank MasterCard bill in my mailbox on Monday, August 31st,  When I took it upstairs and opened it I saw that I had been charged a $39.00 fee for late payment, plus some interest.  While checking my records showed that I thought I had paid the bill, going online proved that I hadn’t. Something probably distracted me.  Maybe the phone rang.  Anyway I plead guilty to not going on the site and making  the payment.  But I figured I was a good customer and I thought maybe they’d give me a break.  Here’s my record of payment to MasterCard, as provided by TransUnion--48 Months of payments made on time:

As I went through the various voice menus to find a human voice, the computer informed me that my credit card had been shut down and I was in big trouble.  As I had only found out about the problem a few minutes ago, and Citibank hadn’t made any attempt to reach me by email or phone, I thought this was kind of harsh.  So I wasn’t in a good mood when I finally was transferred to the calm out-sourced customer service rep.  He didn’t respond to my anger, and just told me  that my good payment record wasn’t an issue and in any case, all I had to do was go to the website, pay the bill and then call them back.  Citibank would refund the $39 penalty and any interest charges. When I got to the site, I saw this:

On the next page were a series questions that I had to answer before Citibank would allow me to pay my bill

Either I had to lie and say the statement wasn’t received or I was traveling (that’s an excuse?) or I had to say that I was in deep financial trouble.  Their point seemed to be that I could pay all my bills in full for four years (at least) until once I couldn’t come up with $20 for a minimum payment?

Here’s the next dropdown menu:

As I was hoping to be allowed to pay the bill in a few minutes, I estimated that my current financial situation would last  0-6 months, although quite a bit closer to 0 months than to 6 months.

As it was currently  8/31/2009, my ballpark estimation was that I could resume making my regular monthly payments in 08/2009.

I had to really study this one for a while. 401(k)?  Disability Checks?  Life Insurance Policy?  Liquidated Assets? Public Assistance? Student Loan?   I couldn’t put in “Paycheck,” as I’m a freelancer.   Even “Savings” seemed a bit dirty, like I was raiding my nest egg for a $20.00 minimum payment.

Finally, it looked like I was going to be able to set up my bank transfer and pay my bill.  But:

Wow!  I transfer money all the time, but I’ve never received a warning like this.  Any problem and they were going to assess me additional fees!  I was trying to pay them because they assessed me ridiculous fees.  But if there’s any hitch I would be assessed more ridiculous fees!  Worse, I would not be eligible to enroll in another plan. I assumed that by “plan” they meant a way to renegotiate my payments and get out of penury, but I could forget about anything like that if something went awry with my transfer from my Citibank Checking account to my Citibank MasterCard account. If there were any glitches, there might not be a second chance for me.  Soon I would have to sell my home and live in a van by the river.

I called again and went through the voicemail system again, until I reached someone who identified that the payment had been received and that I would be notified soon about my refunds.  And sure enough, when I checked my account online the next day:

Soon after that, the refunds were visible on my account!

I got my $64.60 back!  It would seem that Citibank had accepted the notion that forgetting to make one minimum payment didn’t necessarily put you millimeters away from homelessness. But then I got this:

This is a lie.  I had never inquired about them increasing my APR for a very good reason.  They had never told me about it before this.

It was time to break out the scissors. Citibank had finally convinced me--after over 35 years of using their card—to cut it up.   It felt good.  As you can see above, I recorded the occasion for posterity.   But then I got another email:That was it!   If you want to get email notifications from Citibank, you must face up to the “Sophie’s Choice”  of Paper versus Paperless Statement.  On one hand you have something that you generally receive and find handy for balancing your checkbook;  on the other hand is something that might go into your junk mail box.  But if you choose Paperless, from their point of view you would “eliminate the risk of statements being lost or stolen in the mail.,” and thus triggering their rip-off scams. But Paperless would be good for the environment and it makes me feel all toasty inside when I think about Citibank saving money on postage. Had I not cut up my card, what would I have done. I think $64.60 would have sealed the deal with me.  This was a protectionist racket for Paperless Statements: Give up your envelopes or empty out your pockets, muthah!

At this point you’re probably thinking that I have a lot of nerve kvetching about this.  Don’t I know that other people are getting really screwed by the credit card companies?  People who are actually in financial trouble?  But that’s the whole point.  Citibank and companies like them have brought this country down by their greed and incompetence, forcing us to bail them out with our tax money.  Now directly because of their actions and those of people like them,  people are losing their homes and their jobs.  So Citibank steps into the fray to steal money from the very people whose lives they have ruined.  But that isn’t sufficiently cruel for them.  They want to humiliate people too.  Where is the fun in pushing people to the ground if you can’t kick them too?

My understanding of  the credit card business today is that it operates like a partnership: one partner is a drunken driver that mows down pedestrians each day; the other one is an ambulance chasing lawyer pushing business cards into bloody hands.  Nice work if you can get it.

To my friends at Citibank, thank you for asking for my feedback.  Here goes:

You are causing more harm and more agony and more destruction to America and our way of life than Al Qaeda ever has done and ever will.  You are traitors, and I don’t care how many congressmen you pay off so you can make your sociopathic attacks on America legal. 

I’m about as religious as Bill Maher, but this almost makes me want to be. Then I could believe that all of your executives would burn in the fires of hell for eternity.  That would be a start.

Have a nice day. 

Reid K Rosefelt
Chase Visa Cardholder in Good Standing

ADDENDUM. 

One more chapter in Citibank’s never-ending correspondence:

ARRRGGGGGGH!

In the early 80s, I was convinced that the next big thing in home video was going to be Widescreen TV.

But how to do it? Instinctively, I thought of the 16mm anamorphic lenses I used for my college film society screening, and I start fiddling around with ideas about how that could be transferred to TV. Making anamorphic VHS tapes didn’t seem to be an impossible task; it would actually be cheaper to transfer an anamorphic film directly than to pay to have someone pan and scan it. But how to spread the images out?

My solution was to get someone to create a round sheet of a specially-made plastic that could be mounted in front of any TV. When you adjusted the wheel, it would spread out the VHS tapes into widescreen images. That was the plan. But the more I thought about my stroke of genius, the more impractical it sounded. I realized the only way to make a proper Scope TV was with a wide screen tube—a niche product for rich people. As I would have to raise millions to manufacture something like that,I gave up on the idea.  Some might say that my idea is now a reality with HDTV, but not in my book. Not even with letterboxing. But it does seem that, after over 20 years, Philips has finally done something closer to the original Rosefelt specifications. Last August I discovered another movie thing I wanted that didn’t exist. When I wanted to watch a legal online movie, I looked it up in Google, and discovered it really wasn’t much help. You might find out a title was available on Amazon on the first page and from a second company on the third page, but it could be available on a lot of sites that Google wouldn’t find at all, the most notable being iTunes. (I figured it was hard for search engine crawlers to find films that were hidden inside software like iTunes.)

So you wouldn’t know if you could rent it or not unless you looked it up separately in Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Jaman, EZTakes, IndiePix Films, Hulu, SnagFilms, Fearnet, babelgum and all the rest.

The only way to quickly find any movie you wanted to see on Google was to not pay for it. Google made locating Torrent files a breeze. This seemed crazy to me. How were we ever going to get people to pay for movies online if we couldn’t do something as basic as show where they were?

As with widescreen TV, it was something I wanted, so I thought there would be others who would want it to. But this time I didn’t need millions of dollars and a factory to create a product. The internet had changed that. But still…you needed some money. And I didn’t have it.

I called up my friend Bob Harris in San Francisco. Bob and I had been good friends in Madison, Wisconsin as teenagers, and we had re-established our friendship in recent years. I knew that he was very successful working with computer databases, but I hardly thought he would want to get involved in something as speculative as my idea, and certainly not without getting paid for it. But he saw the potential in the idea too, and despite his heavy workload, he signed on. By the time Labor Day weekend was over, he had created a functioning prototype of SpeedCine. I figured we could get it online by October, or maybe November at the latest. It took eleven months.

SpeedCine was created by two guys working in their home offices in their spare time from their day jobs. We never once laid eyes on each other during the entire year. While most movie sites are Hollywood productions, created with tens of millions of venture capital, ours was a no-budget independent, made with sweat equity and less than ten thousand dollars.

Bob devoted an entire year of his life to helping me realize my dream, while also doing extremely demanding work on his other projects. Obviously, without him, SpeedCine would never have happened, but he contributed so much more than programming. The site might seem ridiculously simple today, but it emerged from literally thousands of hours of discussion. It didn’t start out simple; it started out very, very complicated. Early on, SpeedCine had so many features and options that for all practical purposes it was worthless. It took a long, long time for us to realize that it got better every time we took something out of it. Generally it was Bob teaching me these lessons. I started out the movie and graphic design guy; he was the technologist and philosopher. Gradually, these roles blurred. I’m not going to say that it was always an easy collaboration, but I learned a lot, and I think he did too.

As we got nearer the launch, we hired a second programmer, Ben Amada, to assist Bob. A few weeks ago, Bob decided to leave SpeedCine to focus on his other business responsibilities. Only when he knew that I could carry on without him did he allow himself to bow out. It’s a big loss to me personally that he’s no longer with the site and it’s a bigger loss to SpeedCine.

This might seem like a very odd analogy, but lately I’ve been thinking about that story about late-career Dietrich, working on one of her post-von Sternberg movies. Leaving the set, she was once heard to say, “Joe…Where are you?” I feel like that a lot.

Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich

Zhang Yimou is one talented guy. He’s directed everything from “Raise the Red Lantern,” “Ju Dou,” “Hero,” “The House of Flying Daggers,” to the whiz-bang opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 China Olympics.

Knowing his accomplishments, it’s surprising that he can’t get a simple thing like his name right:  in all his movie credits, posters, ads, trailers, reviews, articles, and photo captions—his name is always written incorrectly. 

Just check out IMDb.com. His name isn’t Zhang Yimou: it’s Yimou Zhang.

And he’s not the only one. One of my favorite directors is South Korea’s Park Chan-wook, maker of “Oldboy” and his amazing new film, “Thirst.”  As per IMDb, his name is actually Chan-wook Park.

Other Asian filmmakers that IMDB flags for their flawed nomenclature include Kaige Chen, Ki-duk Kim, Hsiao-hsien Hou, Woo-ping Yuen, Hark Tsui, and my personal favorite, Kar Wai Wong.

It is part of the language and culture of countries like Russia, China, Korea, and Singapore, to put last names first. But screw ‘em. We are the west and we know how to fix their mistakes. Let’s not mince words—this is cultural imperialism.

On one hand it’s an unwillingness to respect the way people in other lands prefer their names to be written. On the other it’s an insult to the users of IMDb: it makes the tacit point that they won’t be able to make use of these names otherwise.

I recognize that it is much more complicated than this. Not all Asian countries do this. And within cultures, some people flip their names around themselves, and some don’t. There’s no clear logic for it in every case, and many people have struggled with it. Some sought clarity through a consistent use of capital letters for the surname, as in ZHANG Yimou. That allowed the name to stay the same, but only worked if you were in the club that knew what the capitalization meant.  I assume the rationale behind the IMDb name switcheroo is to keep everything consistent, with first names always first, and thereby assist the user. But this strategy isn’t something that would ever occur to any film professor, museum curator or serious critic.  It’s much more like the thought process Internet Technology departments use when they create forms to input data: Put your first name in blank one and your last name in blank two.

Before IMDb “solved” this problem, it wasn’t a problem. Everybody used the name they saw on the screen, the reviews, and the ads.   Nobody needed to know what the real last name or first name was, any more than they were required to have any other knowledge about the culture of the film they were watching or reviewing. While it’s true that you come off as more sophisticated if you say Mr. Zhang rather than Mr. Yimou, you aren’t going to get into a lot of hot water unless you are a critic or attend a lot of parties at the Asia Society.

My question is: “Who is this for?”  The meaning of the order of the first and last names of an Asian film director or actor is something nobody needs to know unless they play roles in film culture like film critic, festival programmer, or museum curator, i.e., people who already know this stuff.  Everyone else could soldier on with the names on the prints of the films, as they always had done. 

Why am I making such a fuss about this? Names are very important things. Most people are very touchy and proud about their names—they could be named aftere a relative, or their name could have other resonances. They might want it to stay exactly the way it is. On the other hand, Zhang Ziyi starred in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon;” lately she has taken to calling herself Ziyi Zhang. But that is a choice that she made for career or other reasons, whereas Gong Li and Bai Ling have chosen not to. It’s Ziyi’s real name now, at least as far as the movie business goes. But reading Li Gong and Ling Bai in IMDb makes me nuts.

The distinction is vital. It’s wrong to rob people of their right to change or not change their names as a crutch for lazy movie fans. Some do and some don’t, for cultural pride or for whatever reason, just as some women keep their names after marriage. Some keep their Asian names and then invent one for Westerners like Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh or Joan Chen. Whatever each human being’s personal choice is, it should be respected.

It doesn’t make sense to me to have 99% of the information wrong to eliminate “confusion” that wasn’t confusing anybody pre-IMDb. What they are actually doing is manufacturing linguistic mayhem in a sweeping intercontinental way, as so many of us have come to rely on IMDb, even if we often discover errors there. I doubt I’m the only film person who’s knocked for a loop every time they go to an IMDb page and are confronted with these topsy-turvy names.

This is something that is of particular concern to me lately as I’m trying to make SpeedCine a good reference and there are now untold mashups of Asian director names in it. That bothers me, and it will take me a long time to get it straightened out, if indeed I ever can. This bizarre decision they’ve made has seeped like sewage into Netflix and all sorts of online references, where it flows into our DB.

I do admit that when I was working on “Crouching Tiger,” a journalist requested an interview with Mr. Ang. He was attempting to be polite and got it wrong. I set him straight: Ang is in fact Ang Lee’s first name. I don’t think that situations like this will be improved by IMDb’s approach. In fact, I think exactly the opposite: people who are interested in Asian cultures often know about the naming syntax, so they will instinctively turn an IMDb name around. So if they see Yimou Zhang in big type at the top of the page, they will make the logical assumption that his last name is YIMOU. 

The only way you can find Asian names correctly using IMDb is if you happen to know the way it should be and ignore what’s there.

But if you don’t feel confident enough to do that…look it up in Wikipedia.

There have been a lot of changes made at SpeedCine recently.  Most of the iTunes titles are already in and they should all be in by tomorrow.  We now have 16,000 films in our database and the Search Engine has undergone a lot of improvement.  There is now a Directors’ Search function in the box that was formerly for movie titles only.   Also, when you search for a favorite director, not only do you find out what he or she has available online, you also find out whether there are any free titles from that director (try it out with Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman and Roger Corman).    We will keep adding features and films in the months to come. We are actively seeking to form relationships with more downloading and streaming websites.   If anybody reading this has relationships with the operators of downloading and streaming websites, please tell them about SpeedCine and encourage them to get in touch with me at  business@speedcine.com.  

The first thing you learn when you go on Twitter is that nearly everyone onthere is a Social Media Marketing Expert. There are literally millions of them. I realize that being a Social Media Marketing Maven on Twitter is commensurate to writing that you savor long walks on the beach in your Match.com profile, but it got me thinking: if each one of these geniuses could generate a thousand dollars out of their social media skills, we are talking billions of dollars. And if there were ten thousand of them that were really savvy… that is trillions of dollars, my friends. That’s starting to look like some serious money. And it’s all from tweets.

My friends told me I would be insane to launch a business without taking advantage of this action. All I had to do was join Facebook and Twitter, learn about Digg and reddit and Delicious and StumbleUpon and I could sit back and people would link to my site in droves.

I probably spent over a thousand hours learning how to get the fullest use out of these things, and that doesn’t count the endless posting and tweeting. And these things were like heroin; they started to take over my life. I couldn’t look at a sunset without wanting to take a picture on my iPhone and post it to my FaceBook account. I would have serious anxiety about how many utter strangers I would allow to join my real friends on Facebook.

But I also used pre-social media skills, like writing a blog and sending out emails and press releases.

When I opened up SpeedCine a few weeks ago, I was very surprised when I looked at my analytics. There was no arguing with the facts. The links from my conventional marketing efforts were in the thousands; the links from Twitter were in the tens. For example, I wrote a blog post on John Hughes and posted a link on Twitter, and didn’t get a single retweet. But some people who got my email put a link to my post up on their blogs, which were seen by other bloggers until I got almost 4000 unique visitors in a single day.

Which leads me to Joseph M. Juran and his Pareto Principle, (aka the 80-20 rule) which he named for Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who noted that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the people.

As Anders Toxboe  wrote:

The 80-20 rule claims that for any large system 80 percent of the effects are generated by 20 percent of the variables in that system. The rule has proven true in all large systems including those in user interface design as well as economics, management, quality control, and engineering, among others.

Examples of the 80-20 rule include:

• 80 percent of a product’s usage involves 20 percent of its features.
• 80 percent of a town’s traffic is on 20 percent of its roads
• 80 percent of a company’s revenue comes from 20 percent of its products
• 80 percent of innovation comes from 20 percent of the people
• 80 percent of progress comes from 20 percent of the effort
• 80 percent of errors are caused by 20 percent of the components

I realized that I had just spent 90% of my time on something that got me 2% of my results.

Having previously run two PR companies, I learned how to think strategically and mobilize my staff in the most efficient way. I understood that making the best use of time was one of the most important things we could do. Not that it often worked out that way-- my staff was obliged by clients to burn though weeks on guest lists for parties, utterly hopeless awards campaigns, and chowder-headed stunts—but we strived for that goal.  And we made sure we got that 20% of stuff done that was going to have 80% of the impact.

So if you send out tweets to people who have 10,000 followers and some of them send them out to their followers,what is that all about, really?  

Let’s talk about one of the most widely-hyped uses of Social Media lately—the Obama campaign.  As a friend, an avid user of social of media, wrote me:

Of the online tools used to motivate that captive and motivated audience, social media was a very small, almost insignificant piece. By the Obama camp's own admission, email and the good ol' database were the most crucial tools used here, for organizing and for raising gajillions of dollars. And guess what they raised all those gajillions of dollars for? For TV ads. Radio ads. PR. Because that's where the big numbers are.

Why has usage of Social Media shot up so much in the last year?  Because the regular media has started to cover it more. 

Ashton Kutcher is one of the best-known people who use Twitter.  But obviously he got his success offline and before he started doing it.  In fact, he got leveraged more offline press because he was one of the first celebrities to get into Twitter in a big way.   Likewise for all the other actors, politicians, athletes, journalists, and porn stars you can follow there.  There is value and fun in the way they interact with their fans though this new medium.  But will you be able to promote your business there?  I’m sure you can.  But the Pareto Principle will get you.  You will waste time, a very precious commodity.

The only thing I know about marketing is that it’s about believing in what you are selling and trying to pass that enthusiasm on to others.  And it takes time to make an appeal like that—much more than 140 characters.   After you make your spiel, people will either buy what you’re selling  or they won’t. What social network marketing has to do with this I have no idea.  There is something missing in all those  mini-thoughts twirling around like maple tree seeds—and it is called authority.  Publicists know that the value of even getting a few words in a magazine or an important blog is that there are lots of people trying to get a spot in that same space.  It has been curated so that it has implicit value. Does that value balance on the scale with hundreds of mentions from  people who have ten seconds of time on their hands?   

To those who say that Social Media Marketing offers opportunities for people who have no access to traditional marketing methods, Papa Pareto says--get a book on publicity.  Or read about it online.  And then do the work.  Find the people you want to reach and get their contact information.  Write your press release.  It’s not brain surgery.  You will invest 20% of your time and you will get 80% of the results.  Which will leave you plenty of time to diddle around with Social Media. 

By the way, I would really appreciate it if you would push the Digg Button below to help me promote this splendid post.  You will have to take some time to register, but if you do I think I will get something or other out of it, and it might alleviate my curiosity about what that might be.

Also, if you are one of my 476 Facebook friends please check out my post on my Facebook Home Page, where I plug this post.  And on top of this very page is a useful link to help you follow me on Twitter.

Addendum:  Shortly after I posted this screed, SpeedCine got its best plug ever, on Lifehacker.   That mention scattered birdseed all over my TweetDeck.  Social Media, I love ya!