Everybody needs something. Posted on 7.9.09, just saw it for the first time. It mostly works — a clean, fresh idea/story. Written & performed by Kres Mersky, directed by Theodore Gersten. I would have very slightly toned down Mersky’s performance as she’s clearly “acting” — she wants/needs the audience to take a certain emotional journey, etc., but the piece would have been stronger if she’d just told the story straight without concern as to whether her telling is sufficiently engaging.
“A dentist’s son who began his career as a radio announcer in Kansas City, Mo., Walter Cronkite wasn’t glossily good-looking in the starched, blow-dried way of so many of his successors; if anything, he was closer to homely than handsome. But behind a crisp speaking style, he had a natural, unaffected demeanor that made him more inviting than other television reporters.
“When he took over from Douglas Edwards in 1962, Mr. Cronkite would announce the day’s events, and then, as anchors do now, turn to correspondents in the field. Those reporters — and in the early 1960s the CBS A-team included Mike Wallace, Howard K. Smith and Morley Safer — often read their reports sitting at desks in front of curtains in out-of-town studios, as stiff and unsmiling as hostages in a ransom tape.
“Mr. Cronkite, who sat at a desk next to a typewriter in what at least seemed like a bustling newsroom, would fiddle with his earpiece, move his chair and glance down at his notes; he looked like a kindly newspaper editor interrupted in the middle of a big news day, busy, of course, but never too busy to explain the latest developments to out-of-town visitors.
“He made history just by rising from that desk to check the wires. Every [John F.] Kennedy documentary includes the clips of Mr. Cronkite announcing that the president had been shot and removing his thick black glasses for a pause after stating that Kennedy was dead. Those live moments of television news are as embedded into the tragedy as John-John’s salute and the Zapruder film.
“No account of Lyndon B. Johnson‘s presidency leaves out the night in February 1968 when Mr. Cronkite concluded, on the air, that the Vietnam War could not be won. He had a toehold on the first manned lunar landing and a hand in the Begin-Sadat Middle East peace talks.” — from Alessandra Stanley‘s N.Y. Timeseulogy, titled “Cronkite’s Signature: Approachable Authority.”
If you see this look on the face of a woman you’re seeing, the relationship is as good as dead. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it except pack your bags. I know it well. It’s the look of a lady who hasn’t yet said “we need to talk” but is definitely working her way up to that. Except there’s no need. You’re history and that’s that.
Guys don’t use this look because they don’t tend to call things off (although sometimes they do). They just keep nodding and smiling as they try to figure if it makes sense to start seeing someone on the side, or if they should try to be a bit more constructive and conciliatory.
“An Evening with Judd Apatow” has been scheduled for next Wednesday, 7.22, by the Museum of the Moving Image. Florence Gould Hall, 55 East 59th Street at 7 pm. A screening of Funny People will follow. Apatow will discuss his career in a conversation with clips moderated by chief curator David Schwartz.
The man is a conservative snapping turtle. It’s partly what he says on the show but also that repulsive-looking 1955 flat-top haircut. I wrote months ago that he’s like some kind of snorting hot-breathed wildebeest — an animal. I love the part when he screams so loudly that his voice goes into falsetto mode.
Robert Rodriguez will he doing the old film-buffy genre-wallow later this month when he begins shooting Machete, a feature inspired by a mock Grindhouse trailer. The film will star Danny Trejo (Heat) and will reportedly use Austin locations. It’s being reported that Robert DeNiro, Jonah Hill and Michelle Rodriguez might be cast, but that sounds a little dicey. Steven Seagal and Lindsay Lohan could also be involved. What was it about the failure of Grindhouse that Rodriguez didn’t understand? Genre spoofs are only for film snobs.
The witty David Rasche (Sledgehammer!) talking to a couple of grinning ABC news guys about the real-life political parallels in Armando Iannucci‘s In The Loop. (I hate sites that don’t offer easy-to-grab embed codes.) “Trust me — I know what I’m doing.”
During her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Judge Sonia Sotomayor “took refuge in the impenetrable language of the law, and in what seemed (and this is becoming a regular strategy in politics) to be the deliberate jumbling of syntax, so people at home won’t be able to follow what is being said,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonanwrote today.
“To be clear and succinct is to look for trouble. Better to produce a mist and miasma of jumbly words, and sentences that do not hold. You’re talking, so you’ll seem alive — in fact people using the syntax dodge are often quite animated — but as to meaning, you can leave that to the TV producers, who’ll wrestle around trying to get something that makes sense and then settle for the Perry Mason soundbite. (Well, in truth the Perry Mason soundbite is pretty much what they want.)”
I don’t mean to make light of Mischa Barton‘s sad situation, but what do you have to do or say to persuade the authorities that you’re a “5150” and need to be placed under involuntary psychiatric hold? Someone’s misery is not a joke and I’m not looking for laughs, but I know that all my life I’ve held onto a single concept of what it means to totally lose it and be seen as someone who needs a straightjacket. And it comes from a specific movie. And it involves heavy traffic on a busy city street.
The most vivid way of freaking out, I believe, is running out into traffic like a crazy man and shouting excitedly, like Kevin McCarthy did at the end of the original cut of Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’56). The effect is intensified if you run out and slap the hoods and trunks of cars in your underwear, like Phillip Seymour Hoffman did at the finale of Love Liza. Or if you run into traffic wearing clothes but while waving a gun around, as Martin Lawrencereportedly did in ’96.
The fact that McCarthy’s Body Snatchers theatricality has been twice imitated tells you there’s something about running into traffic that registers on a primal level with Average Joes. Can’t take it anymore? Doff those duds and head for the nearest major intersection! Except what do you say once you’re running from car to car and knocking on car windows and all that? It would be tough dialogue to write.
Summit’s gradual Hurt Locker rollout is more or less patterned after the successful territory-by-territory, word-of-mouth-building expansions that resulted in big returns for Slumdog Millionaire and Gran Torino, reportsForbes‘ Laura Myers. She states that Kathy Bigelow‘s film “may become the year’s independent breakout by combining early box-office success with critical acclaim.”
But the proof will be in the chocolate pudding as the film expands to 93 siutations this weekend and then to 200 situations on 7.24. The key, of course, given the general laziness and scattered ADD mentalities out there, will be TV advertising. Word of mouth is well and good and vital for success, but you also have to grab people by the lapels and go “hey!”
In a N.Y. Times profile published today, David Carrwrites that with the sale of Deadline Hollywood Daily to Mail.com, Nikki Finke “stands to make more than $5 million in the next eight years, and her deal could go as high as $10 million, according to one of the people involved in the deal who declined to be quoted citing the private nature of the negotiations.” So much for the $14 million sale figure reported by The Wrap on 6.23.
I love the following passage at the end of Carr’s piece, by the way: “If the deal works out, Ms. Finke’s probing phone calls will continue to panic the suits in Hollywood for some time to come. Without saying who it was, she gave a recent example of someone who ended up as a pelt on her wall. ‘I implored him to talk to me, and he did a little, but not enough,’ she explained. ‘He should have protected himself.'”