I’m really going to miss those “Sweet Spot” pre- and post-Oscar chats between N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and the late “Media Equation” columnist David Carr. Scott should continue to do them with the current bagger, Cara Buckley, who today has posted a sad tribute piece to Carr. “Whatever ‘The Sweet Spot’ was, it had a much simpler reason for being,” Scott has written. ” It guaranteed that I would have a few hours a week in the company of David Carr. For anyone who cared about journalism, there was simply no better place to be.” And I’m really, really going to miss Carr’s wonderfully hale and hearty Oscar-race reports from Times Square….pure heaven.
For what it’s worth I’m sorry for the Amy Schumer sturm und drang of the last couple of days. She’s a first-class talent and deserves more respect than what I gave her. I know I’m not thinking wrong but I’m probably saying it wrong from time to time. ”It’s hard to grow up…it doesn’t stop when you’re 40…a hard row to hoe.” These words were shared a few nights ago by Ethan Hawke during a Charlie Rose interview, and they got to me. So I’m sorry, truly, for not dealing my cards with a little more compassion and gentility. I wasn’t incorrect in saying that social attractiveness standards have changed over the past decade or so, largely due to the creations of one Judd Apatow and those who’ve climbed aboard his ferry boat. But I could have put it a bit more delicately and diplomatically. Then again that’s not what the HE brand is about, is it?
It’s in my Hollywood Elsewhere nature or karma to get beaten up once or twice each year by the moshpit beasts of the Twitterverse. Long is the road and hard that out of darkness leads up to light — that John Milton quote has my name on it. Sobriety (my third anniversary is a month away) has bestowed a sense of peace and even serenity at times, and it has toned down or modified the ever-present anger in the belly. Which I’m not at all sorry about as anger has been the eternal fuel of my writing career, born of an alcoholic father, a bordering-on-evil public school system and the awful repression of a whitebread, middle-class suburban upbringing that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. Add to this a growing notion that I’ve learned a thing or two plus my natural inclination to shoot my mouth off first and think about it later, and wham…every now and then I poke a hornet’s nest or step on a landmine and the raptors parachute down upon Maple Street.
The great N.Y. Times “Media Equation” columnist and all-around sage David Carr died Thursday at age 58. Just like that. Collapsed inside the Times newsroom, found around 9 pm and pronounced dead at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. A Houdini punch in the stomach. Devastating. Words fail. Shocked.
Solemn, pained condolences are offered to David’s many friends and colleagues at the Times (particularly Tony Scott, with whom David taped several “Sweet Spot” video discussions) and especially his wife, Jill, their daughter Maddie and David’s twin daughters from a previous marriage, Erin and Meagan.
I became friendly with David during his run as the Times‘ Oscar-beat guy (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) from…was it ’05 to ’09? I know that Melena Ryzik took the reins in late ’09. Carr was taxed and tested by Hollywood, but he was absolutely the greatest at that gig. I loved his wit, his bon mots, his columns, his insights into the game, his Times Square video interviews. I loved his personality, his scratchy voice, his pencil neck, his laser brain. I loved that he found Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln tedious and said so during one of his “Sweet Spot” chats.
He treated me like a regular hombre colleague and took me to lunch once in Manhattan, at a haunt on West 44th. Or was it twice? We saw each other all the time at the same Oscar-season parties on both coasts, one after another after another. And he did a video interview with me on Park City’s Main Street during an ’06 or ’07 Sundance. But he was closer buds with Sasha Stone.
I only know that I worshipped the guy and that I felt duty-bound to plug the shit out of his Bagger columns during that four-year run, and I just feel awful…shattered. This is beyond any realm that I know. It’s almost like when Elvis died.
In order to compose a thorough, no-holds-barred saga of his drug-addled past in “Night of the Gun,” a riveting 2009 memoir, N.Y. Times columnist David Carr relied on the accounts of first-hand witnesses, gathered by diligent shoe-leather reporting, rather than his own memory. I’m mentioning this because a friend reminded me last weekend of an eccentric episode that happened, he said, in my early 20s. When, he also reminded, I was living a colorful, dissolute life. The story made an impression because I didn’t remember all that much. But then certain details began to come back into focus. My friend’s account was probably exaggerated, but I realized that if I ever write a history of my own wild tales I’ll have to get out the pad like Carr.
Here, in any event, is my best recollection:
I was crashing with a married couple, Frank and Karen, in a smallish Boston apartment in the general vicinity of Symphony Hall and Hemenway Street. They had a linebacker-sized friend named Eddie who lived nearby and was also hanging out a lot. Mainly the four of us sat around in the evenings and got high. I distinctly remember not rolling joints as much as tapping the tobacco out of filtered cigarettes and then-filling the cigarette with what I recall was low-grade pot. Moderately potent, lots of stems and seeds.
One night around 10 pm or so we decided we needed a straw. That may have meant we were looking to snort something but I really don’t recall what. Maybe we were looking to suck in hash smoke. (A tiny chunk of hash placed on the burning embers of a cigarette, etc.) No, I don’t remember why we didn’t just use rolled-up dollar bills. Probably because it would’ve been unsanitary. I recall that it was fairly cold out and that we were probably broke or close to it, and so going to a market and buying a pack of straws was out. So I decided to start knocking on doors and asking Frank and Karen’s neighbors if they had a straw to spare. It wasn’t just the vaguely strange notion of a long-haired guy in jeans and boots with bloodshot eyes looking to bum a straw from strangers, but that it was too late to knock on doors and bum anything from anyone.
President Obama “should convene all the players who make billions from the free and unfettered display of content and broker a deal that gives Americans the opportunity to watch The Interview. Put it on Hulu, on iTunes, on Google Play, on Netflix, on NBC and all the broadcast networks, on Showtime and all the cable stations, put it anywhere and everywhere that people can push a button and watch at the same time. Ubiquity and the lack of a discernible target would trump censorship.
“The industry, old and new, digital and analog, should step across a line together, holding hands with consumers and letting the world know that we prize our goofy movies, along with the important ones, and the freedoms that they represent. If disparate competitors managed to set aside self-interest and acted for the common good, it could be the social viewing event of the century. I’d do anything to do my bit for artistic freedom, including watching a buddy-movie comedy that stars Seth Rogen and James Franco.” — from a 12.21 David Carr/”Media Equation” column in the N.Y. Times.
For the last five years Melena Ryzik has been writing the N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” column, having inherited it from David Carr. But now Ryzik is bailing and handing the torch to Cara Buckley…congrats! It’s all a hustle for Oscar ad dollars anyway, but I’ve always found it irksome the way Carpetbagger columnists always jump into the award season in early December and go “tah-dah!…here we are!…let the games begin!” I wrote the following in response to Melena’s 12.4.13 piece called “Eyes On The Prize”: “Hardcore awards-tracking watchers and handicappers like myself and Sasha Stone and Scott Feinberg have been riding the rails for over seven months now (i.e., since the 2013 Cannes Film Festival) and humping it extra-hard since Telluride, Venice and Toronto (or for the last 13 weeks), and then Melena comes breezing into the room with her video crew and writes, ‘The Oscars are not until March but the jockeying for position has already begun.’ Early December is ‘already’?”
New N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Cara Buckley…tah-dah!
In a 5.25 article about Medium, a site/app for telling and reading stories, N.Y. Times “Media Equation” columnist and ex-Bagger David Carr has ignited a mini-Twitter shitstorm by calling the Evan Williams-led operation behind Medium a “platisher,” which Sulia CEO Jonathan Glick defined last February as “both a platform and a publisher.” The Twitter reaction to Carr’s mention of the term was instantaneous. No way, get outta here, shove it, etc. Why the hostility? I can only explain my resistance. A new term works or not depending on the sound of it. If it sounds fleet and cool, it’s in. If it sounds twerpy or dorky, forget it. Nonsensical as this may sound, platisher sounds to me like a mixture of platypus and phisher. Nuff said. Into the wolf pit like Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings…”Odin!!!”
Last night a Wall Street Journal story by Gautham Nagesh reported that recent widespread concerns about the end of net neutrality are being finessed to some extent. “The head of the Federal Communications Commission is revising proposed rules for regulating broadband internet,” Nagesh reported, “including offering assurances that the agency won’t allow companies to segregate web traffic into fast and slow lanes.”
“The new language by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is an attempt to address criticism of his proposal unveiled last month that would ban broadband providers from blocking or slowing down websites but allow them to strike deals in which content companies could pay them for faster delivery of Web content to customers.
N.Y. Times columnist David Carr has done more than just write about Jon Favreau, the director, producer, writer and star of Chef (Open Road, 5.9). He’s also eaten a Favreau-prepared meal. Chef is currently enjoying a 91% Rotten Tomatoes rating but it’s opening in less than two weeks and I’ve received no screening invites. (I couldn’t attend the 4.22 Tribeca Film Festival showing.) I’m on a plane to NYC next Thursday night and then I have a week at my Brooklyn rental before leaving for France. Friend to HE: “Dude, Open Road has had a TON of L.A. Chef screenings. I saw it here a month ago. I don’t think you are on their press list if you have missed it. Betting there’s probably another next week, Plus it’s really a fun movie. Best food shots ever!”
In the 32 years since Warren Beatty won the Best Director Oscar for Reds, he’s directed three films and acted in four — one film every 4.5 years. And if he could have written his life story with any candor or zeal he could have delivered one of the greatest Balzac-ian novels of the 20th Century because he knows (or knew) everyone and has been through and absorbed it all and has a million epic stories under his belt. But that’s water under the bridge. The visually dazzling Dick Tracy (’90) and the politically radical Bulworth (’98) are as audacious and well-crafted as Reds in their own way, and now he’s shooting his long-gestating Howard Hughes flick. Plus he’s acted in a notorious wipeout that eventually became a cult comedy (Ishtar), a riveting, highly intelligent gangster flick (Bugsy), a dud remake that also lost money (Love Affair) and a financially calamitous marital infidelity comedy (Town and Country) that was a lot better than most people remember and has at least one classic scene (i.e., when he’s confronted by Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn about having cheated and he goes through a whole irate “how dare you even ask such a thing?” rant.). Obviously too little activity, but Beatty has never aimed low (or even at the middle) or taken a straight paycheck gig. He even managed to perplexingly turn down the David Carradine role in Kill Bill.
“Once upon a time antitrust authorities…would probably have been trying to cut Comcast down to size. Letting it expand would have been unthinkable [as] Comcast perfectly fits the old notion of monopolists as robber barons, so-called by analogy with medieval warlords who perched in their castles overlooking the Rhine, extracting tolls from all who passed. The Time Warner deal would in effect let Comcast strengthen its fortifications, which has to be a bad idea.” — from Paul Krugman‘s 2.16 N.Y. Times column about Comcast’s purchase of Time Warner.
“For consumers, cable is not just television anymore, it is where the internet comes from. And should this deal go through, more people who want to cut the cable cord will still have to buy their broadband from a cable company where prices go only one way — up.” — from David Carr‘s 2.16 N.Y. Times column about same.
“Now that [Phillip Seymour Hoffman] is gone, much has been said about his failure, about his fall,” writes N.Y. Times columnist David Carr in a recent post. “I don’t really see it that way. He got in the ring with his addiction and battled it for two decades successfully, doing amazing film work for years and doing the hard stuff to keep ambitious theater alive in in New York.
“And then something changed and he used. Everyone is surprised when that happens to someone famous, but it happens routinely everywhere else. Rooms of recovery are full of stories of people with long-term recovery who went back out and some of them, as a matter of mathematics and pharmacology, don’t make it back.
“I have no certainty about what went wrong, but I can tell you from personal experience that what happened was not the plan. I have been alone in that room with my addled thoughts, the drugs, and the needle. Addicts in the grip always have a plan. I will do this, get this out of the way, and then I will resume life among the living, the place where family, friends and colleagues live. He didn’t make it back to that place.”
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