Joining a chorus formed by myself, Variety‘s Peter Bart and the Orlando Sentinel‘s Hal Boedeker, the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Debra J. Saunders is the latest to take offense at the treacly torrent of Tim Russert tributes.
“The hours and hours of tributes across the cable spectrum show the news media at their worst,” she’s written. “For me, the Russert weekend only served to confirm my suspicion that in 2008, cable TV stations can only do one story at a time — and then they overdo it, and beat it silly.
“Part of the Russert Weekend phenomenon can be credited to a profession’s prerogative. Figure that doctors receive the best medical attention, bartenders pour generous drinks for each other and mortuary owners rate posh funerals. Likewise, one of the perks of journalism is that when we kick the bucket, we get a nice send-off story. But there is another tenet of the profession that Washington TV news bureaus seem to have forgotten in the shock of Russert’s passing: We are not the story.”
I’d like to read John Ridley‘s Red Tails script if anyone has a PDF lying around. The film is in pre-production with George Lucas intending to direct sometime in early ’09, with Rick McCallum producing. It’s going to be a hope movie, an overcoming-racial-prejudice movie, a “boy, were those guys heroic or what?” movie.
Let’s face it — it has mediocrity written all over it. Unless Ridley has written a really fine script. In which case Lucas will find some way to screw it up regardless. I’m sorry, but is there anyone in the film industry who’s shown himself to have a deadlier reverse Midas touch?
Yesterday the New York Observer‘s Jason Horowitz reported that “a former bundler to Hillary Clinton just called in to tell me that Barack Obama‘s selection of Patti Solis Doyle as chief of staff to the campaign’s eventual vice presidential nominee is the ‘biggest fuck you I have ever seen in politics.’
“The donor, speaking on background, said that everyone in Clinton circles knows the two have hard feelings towards one another and haven’t spoken since Clinton removed Solis Doyle as campaign manager, and that Clinton loyalists view her with deep suspicion and believe that Solis Doyle is shopping around a book deal and acted as a background source for an extremely harsh Vanity Fair piece about Bill Clinton.
“‘Either one of two things happen,’ said the bundler. ‘Hillary is selected as vice president and they fire Patti, or Hillary is not going to be the vice president.’
“The bundler said that Clinton loyalists were livid over the pick. ‘You don’t hire Patti Solis Doyle for her operational expertise,’ said the bundler. ‘You don’t do that. This is someone who failed dramatically at her job. You only bring her on to fuck someone else.'”
Yesterday Variety‘s Peter Bart bloggy-blogged about Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato‘s Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal, which will have its world premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival on 6.26 and 6.28 (at the Crest and the Landmark, respectively). HBO airings will follow.
Heidi Fleiss, exotic bird.
I got to know Heidi somewhat during the Hollywood madam hoo-hah days of ’93 and ’94. I remember paying a visit at her home on Tower off Benedict Canyon, and Heidi asking me at one point if I was a cop. She’s running a place called Dirty Laundry in Pahrump, Nevada, these days. She’s a decent sort. She helped me in the ’90s with this and that story. It’s disconcerting to read in Bart’s piece that she admits apparently in the Bailey-Barbato doc) that she “still has a meth problem.” Jesus. As life isn’t hard enough on its own terms.
In observance of tonight’s final showing of Rene Clement‘s Is Paris Burning? (1966) at the New Beverly Cinema, there’s an underlying humor scene between Gert Frobe (as the good German general who defied Hitler’s orders to torch the city) and Orson Welles (as a Swedish diplomat) in the middle of this YouTube clip.
It was noted by a Time magazine reviewer that Welles’ concerned expression seemed to be driven by hunger for the cakes and pastries sitting before Frobe. Watch this scene with this interpretation in mind and it’s a scream. Welles does seem to be doing everything he can not to think of the food in front of him, his resolve melting by the second.
Is Paris Burning? is a ambitious but boring film that lost money. You can tell from the pacing and the cutting of the Frobe-Welles scene why it bombed. Kirk Douglas as Gen. George S. Patton?
That said, could the jacket art for the 2003 Paramount DVD be any more off-putting? It’s like the Paramount Home Video art director said to the artist, “I want you to create jacket art that will repel each and every prospective viewer. Not just the under-25s, not just World War II buffs, not just the cinefiles who may want to see this thing out of respect for Rene Clement. I want every last person on the face of the planet to look at this thing and go, ‘No!…I don’t want to see this.’ Can you do it?”
It was reported yesterday that Tony Schwartz, the creator of the infamous 1964 “Daisy” TV spot — the first ad to famously and notoriously trash a political contender (i.e., Barry Goldwater) based on slimey innuendo — has died at age 84. You could say that Schwartz was the Godfather of the televised smear ad and all the scumbucket political ads that followed in its wake — the Lee Atwater- Willie Horton ad, the 3 am phone call ad from the Hillary Clinton campaign, etc. The truth is that if it hadn’t been Schwartz it would have been somebody else.
Hired by the Lyndon Johnson campaign, Schwartz “collaborated with a team from the Doyle Dean Bernbach ad agency to create the spot featuring a little girl counting aloud as she removed the petals of a daisy,” says an AP obit by Deepti Hajela.
“The scene then changed into a countdown to an atomic blast. Johnson did the voiceover with the line, ‘We must either love each other, or we must die’ — a paraphrase of a famous W.H. Auden poem written to mark the start of World War II.
“The ad made no mention of Goldwater, Johnson’s Republican opponent, but the implication was clear. After public criticism, it was withdrawn. The spot has been credited with ushering in an era of negative political ads.
“Bill Geerhart, who runs a website called CONELRAD, a Cold War pop culture site, said the ad was a dramatic departure from the previous election cycle. ‘It’s light years ahead of that,’ he said.”
Paris hotel & casino exterior — Monday, 6.16.08, 11:25 pm
Cinevegas Film Festival director Trevor Groth, filmmaker and festival juror Morgan Spurlock (Where In Hell Is Osama Bin Laden?) prior to last night’s outdoor showing of Takashi Murakami‘s anime short Planting The Seeds at Wynn Hotel and Casino — Monday, 6.16.08, 8:55 pm
Poolside foyer booze schmooze inside Wynn Hotel following the Seeds screening — Monday, 6.16.08, 9:40 pm
It’s not like I didn’t put in my Cinevegas screening time yesterday, above and beyond the Get Smart screening. I saw a little bit of Ben Rodkin‘s Big Heart City (Italian asshole gambler in love with woman he’s gotten pregnant), about 60% of Josh Fox‘s Memorial Day (a party film that segues into an Abu Ghraib torture piece) and about 20 minutes worth of Nicola Collins‘ The End (doc about aging criminal types who hail from London’s East End). None rang my bell, at least to the extent that I was persuaded me to write something. Sorry. Trying again this evening.
Are Adam Sandler comedies gradually becoming a little too lengthy? I felt that Zohan was maybe a little on the drawn-out side. Not fatally but somewhat. Darth Mojo has posted a list that makes the case. Billy Madison (1995 — 89 mins.); Happy Gilmore (1992 — 92 mins.); Big Daddy (1999 — 93 mins.); Mr Deeds (2002 — 96 mins.); 50 First Dates (2002 — 99 mins); Click (2006, 107 mins); I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry (2007 — 110 mins); You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (2008 — 113 mins).
I’m dying, naturally, to see Albert Brooks in the debut episode of a new season of Weeds on Showtime tonight. He’s playing Len, the father-in-law of Mary-Louise Parker‘s pot-dealing Nancy in a new Southern California burgh called Ren Mar. Read Mary McNamara‘s L.A. Times review for a taste.
Does the Planet Hollywood hotel and casino have Showtime on its system? Of course not. I’ve been told that first new Weeds episode is viewable on Showtime’s website but I went to college and all I found was this little snip of a scene with Brooks doing his shpiel. I’m not saying it’s not there, but If they’re going to hide the link to the episode then the hell with them.
I guess I’ll have to find the Showtime publicist, beg for a few discs of the opening three or four episodes, and catch it back in Los Angeles. Another campaign, in other words. Never easy.
What a brave and courageous thing it is for Al Gore to stick his political neck out and endorse Barack Obama tonight. What cojones! That, ladies and germs, is why Al Gore is such a respected statesman. Because he’s not one to blow with the wind. Seriously, it’s all well and good to endorse but who respects Gore for having waited until Obama has the nomination all sewn up to make his move?
MSNBC’s video coding is so unstable and unreliable the above video clip could disappear in a blink of an eye, so here’s the URL in case it disappears.
One of the few things I really enjoyed about Get Smart was the apparent visit to Moscow. Apparent, I say, because Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway seem to actually be in Red Square, I mean, and not…you know, some seamless CG backdrop recreation stitch job. Which I half suspected it was.
I didn’t fully enjoy the Moscow footage, in short, because a part of me suspected it was fake despite what my eyes were telling me. I’ll say it again: Carell, Hathaway and the crew did in fact visit Red Square, unless the video is a put-on. Despite the IMDB’s location page saying otherwise.
Except it doesn’t matter because nobody believes it when a movie crew goes somewhere for real and uses real-life backdrops. Even if we’ve been repeatedly told on the entertainment tabloid shows they’ve literally gone to Moscow or Beijing or Paris, we still don’t believe it because showing realistic fake backdrops is a snap these days if you have the CG budget. And we know going in that Get Smart is a fairly heavily budgeted, big-studio package so who cares? They should have shot the actor footage in Burbank and made the Moscow part happen in post.
The only way I’ll believe that a film has actually shot footage in some exotic city is if the film is a lower-budget indie. I know those guys don’t have the money for CG budgets so I’ll believe that they sprung for air fare if I see, let’s say, Rome’s Piazza Navona in a scene. Otherwise, forget it.
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