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.