1978 NBC news report on The Sex Pistols coming to America

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/28/1978-nbc-news-segment-on-the-h.html

There it is.

I was never into music of any kind and have no real opinion about it, but I find this amusing.

Things change over time in TV news. Morley Safer said he watched old episode of 60 Minutes and found them incredibly slow---he sat there wishing they'd get to the point. So this weird, laid back, slow-talkng manner of reporting was probably the norm back then.

The Nollywood model

Oscar Micheaux

Didn't I write something on here about Nollywood, about how independent filmmakers in the US should try the same thing? Did I write it or just think it? I could check and see but I won't.

Here's an article from a few years ago suggesting that African-American filmmakers try to follow the Nollywood model:

http://www.indiewire.com/2014/01/sa-2013-highlights-the-why-cant-black-filmmakers-in-the-usa-adopt-the-nollywood-model-question-162780/

I mentioned here before that I read an article in the '80s in a radical film journal (probably Jump Cut) about the complete lack of films aimed at Black audiences coming from Hollywood at the time and failed attempts by independent Black filmmakers to fill that void. It argued that Black American audiences are too visually sophisticated to accept cheap or poorly made films. It mentioned movies where the camera never moves----the camera moving constantly for no reason was all the rage in the '80s; every shot was a tracking shot.

But it seems like distribution is real key. Anyone can make a cheap movie. Nollywood sells thousands of DVD's of each movie for two or three dollars each. In the U.S., you'd have to get DVDs into stores and sell them cheaply enough that people could buy them on sheer impulse.

Melania's jacket

"Guys, stop making fun of Melania’s jacket. Those were their wedding vows."
--Jess Dweck

WIlliam at the Circus

I watched a British movie, William at the Circus, aka Willlian Comes to Town, directed by Val Guest. 1948.

In one scene, the kid, WIlliam, antagonizes a delivery driver who says, "If you were my son, I'd give you poison."

"If you were my father, I'd drink it," the kid says.

It was a line that was attributed to Winston Churchill. An anonymous woman supposedly said that, if he were her husband she would poison his coffee, and he says if she were his wife he'd drink it. The joke didn't work as well when it was about the hypothetical murder of a child.

But which came first---the movie or Churchill's alleged witicism?

According to the internet, the movie came before the joke's first attribution to the genocidal racist Churchill. But it turns out the joke had been around at least since the 1890's.

The movie was cute enough. About Little Rascal-like 13-year-old middle class English schoolboys who are always into mischief, part of a series.

Available on Pub-D-Hub.

What Peter Fonda said

Barron Trump may be cute now, but he'll grow up to be just like his brothers, Uday and Qusay. Locking the young fellow in a cage with immigrant children seeking asylum might be the best thing for him. He'd be like Freddie Bartholomew in Captains Courageous.

But Peter Fonda tweeted that Barron should be rent from his parents arms and put in a cage with pedophiles. And I know what he meant---let's see how Donald Trump and his horrible wife like it.

I don't know why Fonda threw pedophiles into the mix, although he may have had a point. You don't think all those children Trump locked up were going to preyed upon? They were making plans to hold over 20,000 children in prison camps.

And I think Fonda may have been giving the ghastly Trump "family" too much credit. You think it would especially bother any of them if they lost Barron somewhere? It's like the jacket the First "Lady" wore said, "I REALLY DON'T CARE DO U?"

How making movies with credit cards will ruin you

This article's a few years old:

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/movies/join-a-revolution-make-movies-go-broke.html

I don't think people pay for movies with credit cards anymore.Crowdfunding is the new thing. There are stories about crowdfunding being more work that people expected, but not that it ruined anyone's life.

I'd kind of like to hear if any film students' lives were wrecked by coaxing their parents into bankrolling their first movies. They all do it. John Waters seems like less of a rebel when you find out his father paid for his films. Better than Divine who used his parents' credit cards to pay for huge parties then hid the bills from them and ruined their credit.

Was El Mariachi revolutionary or did it just not cost very much? The 400 Blows was infinitely more political.

Koko RIP

Poor Koko.  The Talking Gorilla has died at age 46.

I saw Barbet Schroeder's documentary, Koko: A Talking Gorilla (1978). The gorilla's owner, Penny Patterson, does all the talking in her horrible, high-pitched voice. Patterson got use of Koko to see if she could teach her sign language, then claimed that their bond was so close that it would be cruel to send her back to the zoo. So the poor ape spent the rest of her life in a cage in a lab being screeched at to "Sign! Sign!"

They got a board. There were buttons for different words. Koko could push one and an electronic voice would say the word. She pushed "celery" and Patterson went to get her celery, then Koko pushed banana, and she rushed to get a banana. Then celery again so she hurried over to get celery again. Then Koko pushed "milk". Patterson rushed over to get her milk. Then Koko pushed "like". Patterson said, "That's right! You LIKE to drink MILK!"

I rented the movie because my mother wanted to see it. She had read an uncritical account of the whole thing, so I went and rented the movie. She went into it completely convinced. She was still convinced when it was over, but she now had doubts and then lost interest in it completely.

"Gotti" movie gets 0% on Rotten Tomatoes

No wonder they called him the "Dapper Don".

John Travolta's movie Gotti got a score of 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Viewers had a higher opinion of it than the critics, obviously---at zero percent there's nowhere to go but up---but we don't know how many of those are Scientologists rushing to Travolta's aid and how many are morons with a Trump-like admiration for John Gotti.

Anthony Quinn, John Amos and Mickey Rourke showed up at Gotti's trial to show their support. Anthony Quinn talked and talked to reporters about how, in his neighborhood, they hated rats. And by "rats" he meant squealers---people who reported crimes or testified in court. John Amos just liked the way Gotti dressed and "how he carries himself". Mickey Rourke dropped out of a movie about organized crime because Gotti told him to and he introduced his new Mafia friends to a restaurant owner who began using the Mafia to threaten Union members.

The poor FBI agents who had to listen to hours and hours of John Gotti's conversations attested to what an ape he was. I never watched the reality show Growing Up Gotti, but I'm sure it was like all the other reality shows about rich people who don't deserve to be rich.

Why can't we just send all these "people" to Guantanamo?

U.S. opening prisons for babies

In his documentary Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, Max Ophuls confronts a former Gestapo officer. He demands to know "WHAT CRIMES AGAINST THE REICH COULD A TWO-YEAR-OLD GIRL COMMIT?" The Nazi locks himself in his apartment.

I didn't believe it until now, but Trump really is Hitler.

Decades after the nation’s child welfare system ended the use of orphanages over concerns about the lasting trauma to children, the administration is standing up new institutions to hold Central American toddlers that the government separated from their parents.

“The thought that they are going to be putting such little kids in an institutional setting? I mean it is hard for me to even wrap my mind around it,” said Kay Bellor, vice president for programs at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, which provides foster care and other child welfare services to migrant children. “Toddlers are being detained.”

Bellor said shelters follow strict procedures surrounding who can gain access to the children in order to protect their safety, but that means information about their welfare can be limited.

https://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/Youngest-migrants-held-in-tender-age-shelters-13008778.php

I'm often appalled but never really surprised by any horrible thing any president does, but I never imagined this.

I'm pro-silent student film

I've watched student films and they're mostly awful. The better ones are silent, and the silent movies now tend to have voice-over narration rather than intertitles. I believe in a combination. When they rereleased the silent film Metropolis, color tinted with a rock soundtrack, it had a mix of subtitles and intertitles. Then there was Mike Kuchar's SIns of the Fleshapoids which had comic book-like dialog balloons along with voice-over narration. Guy Madden's first movie, "The Dead Father", was a voice-over with one scene where we hear one character say a line. He coughs and we hear it as if it were recorded on a record.

There was a Japanese silent film I saw made probably in the '80s in the style of an old silent movie. It had intertitles in Japanese that required subtitles in English, and it had the machines speak, like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. The heroes are hired to deliver a ransom---the people who hire them come in with a tape recorder---they turn it on and we hear a voice explain the job. Later, we hear the villain speak to them through a loud speaker.

There was Robert Rodriguez's student film "Bedhead". It won awards in film festivals across the country. THAT was his ticket to Hollywood, not El Mariachi. When he met with studio executives, they asked him if he had any ideas for a feature film he wanted to make. He said maybe a real version of the movie he just made. He showed them El Mariachi and they thought it was good enough to release theatrically.

A silent movies tend to require music. I've heard it argued that there are no public domain sound recordings in the United States while others think recordings made before 1970 are public domain, at least if the composition isn't copyrighted. There's Soviet music. The USSR wasn't part of the international copyright convention. Ethiopian music. I don't know.

There used to be a website attacking bad student films, listing student film cliches, such as slow-talking actors, smoking cigarettes to show how upset they are, and various artistic touches. There was an angry comment on the site from a film student who had maxed out his credit cards making a short silent film for $40,000. He correctly recognized that dialog was where student films fell flat. His film was about a girl preparing to leave home and it apparently had no soundtrack at all. He submitted it to film festivals and was infuriated when they would send it back with a note saying it had no sound. 

That was in the days before digital video. He apparently shot on 16mm. But----forty thousand dollars? For a movie about a girl preparing to leave home? For forty thousand dollars he couldn't add music? Back then you could buy four new cars for that. 

Then there were comments from film students who thought it would be HILARIOUS to make a student film using every one of the student film chiches listed. And, last time I looked for student films on YouTube, half of them seemed to be student films that were spoofs of bad student films. That became a genre itself, and not a very good one.

But---poor film students. They spend four years studying FEATURE films, then, for their final project, they get to make a SHORT film. They're two very different things. You don't even need a good idea to make a feature film. If you have an original idea, you're trying too hard. A short film requires far more thought if it's going to be any good.

Dennis Miller's podcast cruelly panned

I watched Dennis Miller's old latenight talk show. Here's the only joke I remember: "The French think Dan Quayle is a genius."

That was so long ago. When he expressed admiration for Ross Perot, I realized that he was basically apolitical.

Perot's supporters were people who didn't know there were political differences. They thought everyone wanted the same thing and that politcal debates were "bickering". "Why don't they stop bickering and do what everybody wants!"

Now Miller's just not a very convincing right-winger. And like some other right-wing converts, his verbal skills have gotten very bad. Long ago, I found his references easy to understand. They all seemed pretty straight-forward. On NPR, they interviewed some guy who wrote a blog researching and explaining his references, and he explained a few that seemed perfectly obvious to me. But now Miller's just blathering.

So, anyway, I haven't heard it, but here's a review of Dennis Miller's podcast.

Miller is 64 now. Reduced to podcasting, no offense to podcasters or their admirers. 

Sylvester Stallone's net worth

According to the article, Stallone made most of his money

from his movies such as The Party at Kitty and Stud's.

You know what Sylvester Stallone's net worth is? It's $400 million according to this.

That's an outrage.

He appeared in Woody Allen's Bananas, by the way. 

Romanian director's homage to Woody Allen

Variety reports that Romanian director Paul Negoescu made his new film, Summer Lover, as a homage to Woody Allen.

The eponymous anti-hero of “Summer Lover” is the philandering Petru, an adjunct math professor who splits moral hairs with mathematical precision when he justifies bedding co-eds half his age. (They’re not his students, he insists.) Content to continue reaping the benefits of an open relationship, his endless summer comes to a jarring end when his girlfriend suddenly announces she’s pregnant...

Though Negoescu’s original screenplay mined that unexpected pregnancy for all its dramatic worth, script doctor Jacques Akchoti steered him toward comedy instead, during workshops at the Jerusalem-based Sam Spiegel Intl. Film Lab. Studying the filmography of Woody Allen, Negoescu soon found himself channeling the neurotic protagonists of the director’s early works, casting Alexandru Papadopol – star and co-producer of “Lottery” – as Petru, a “hypochondriac, paranoiac [who’s] questioning everything around him. 

“I never thought I could make a film in [Allen’s] style,” Negoescu says, although he’d always admired the director’s movies. “[‘Summer Lover’] is not only inspired by Woody Allen’s films, but it’s an homage to him.”

Read it here: https://variety.com/2018/film/global/paul-negoescu-summer-lover-1202828820/#article-comments

How long do most movie careers last?

I was listening to the Thought Spiral podcast. Comedian Andy Kindler talked about his early attempts at being a singer songwriter. He seemed hurt that no one supported him in that endeavor. Josh "Elvis" Weinstein pointed out that Kindler has had a thirty-year career in comedy, something that rarely happens in popular music.

With movies, I've noticed, looking at imdb.com, how many people have one or two credits and go for years between jobs---people who made one movie in the '60s, one in the '70s, and that was it. Each is a major achievement no matter how inconsequential it seemed to everybody else.

Then there are the successful ones. I'm mainly interested in the extreme low end of cinema, like Ray Dennis Steckler who worked various jobs--he was a janitor at one point and was manager of a furniture store as I recall. Herschell Gordon Lewis quit film and went into direct marketing. Dean Stockwell was and still is a successful actor and has been since childhood, but I read that he gave up and became a realtor when was called back to star in Quantum Leap.

The sad cases are people like Ed Wood, Jr, who should have given up on movies but didn't.

Alfred Hitchcock told Francois Truffaut about the time he ran into his old boss, the guy who gave him his first job in the British movie industry, working as a location scout. They pretended not to know each other.

I've thought about all the film students going into debt to get a degree in film. Most want to be movie directors, but how many people in their 20's direct movies? They'll be forty before anyone trusts them with the amount of money that goes into a movie, but I didn't really think about the other end of it----it'll take decades to build a career if you can do it at all, then you'll find yourself washed up in seven or eight years.

That's not really true, of course. There are TV commercials, industrial films, TV shows. Do they still make After School Specials? But you don't have to go to USC to do that stuff.

But what do I know.

Andy Kindler just landed a big movie role, by the way.

North Korea

I saw a clip on YouTube of a North Korean martial arts movie. It seemed pretty good. I know next to nothing about North Korean viewing habits, but it's been reported that bootleg videotapes of South Korean soap operas are popular there. That was a few years ago. They may have switched to DVD by now.

This came up again when that pro-assassination "comedy" made by sex-offender James Franco and blood-thirsty Zionist Seth Rogen was made. The US government wanted the movie produced so copies of it would find their way into North Korea.

If you look at the RT website you may be able to find a documentary about North Korea that had some focus on their movie industry. The documentary followed North Korean rules----for example, any images of North Koran leader has to be shown in full---it couldn't be at the edge of the frame only half-visible. This meant that they couldn't pan away from a picture of him. If there was picture of the guy in the background of a shot, they couldn't pan past it.

I saw on one news report that children in North Korean schools were reading To Kill a Mockingbird. They're not Marxist-Leninist, by the way. The works of Marx and Lenin have been banned there for years. As I understand it, their national ideology is a mix of Korean mysticism and Confucianism. Mao Tse Tung denounced Confucianism as reactionary.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the North Koreans using old Lincoln limousines at Kim Il Jong's funeral. The North Korean auto industry exports cars, mostly to Vietnam, but it doesn't sound like they produce anything interesting or retro. If the US were to start importing North Korean cars, I'm sure I would be disappointed.

DA considering charges against Sylvester Stallone

He doesn't SEEM guilty, but he's an awfully good actor.

The LA County DA's office is reviewing a sex crime case referred to them by Santa Monica police against well-known pornographic film actor Sylvester Stallone. Stallone is perhaps best known for his starring role in 1970's The Party at Kitty and Stud's. He played Stud.

They won't say what the case is about, but Stallone was accused late last year of raping a woman in the 1990s. The victim filed a report even though it was way past California's 10-year statute of limitations.

We'll see how it goes.

Ray Liotta, Woody Allen

Ray Liotta said in a recent interview that he doesn't believe the accusation against Woody Allen and would drop everything to work with him:

Guerrasio: Who is the director you would drop everything right now and go work with, that you have never worked with yet?

Liotta: Woody Allen, I would.

Guerrasio: Even despite the allegations against him?

Liotta: I believe what he says. I don't think he did what they accuse him of. He's too — for his particular case I don't buy it.

Refreshing his simply dismissing the "allegations" without any nonsense about separating the art from the artist or not knowing what really happened. Anyone who cares to look into it has an excellent idea what happened, that the accusation was false.

Cinematic folk art

Soon after the US invastion of Iraq, Iraqis were producing DVDs which I guess had some popularity. They combined patriotic music and scenes of resistance to the U.S. occupation of their country. There was an Iraqi filmmaker with a camcorder who started production of a more conventional movie. I was always curious about those. I wanted to see some, some cinematic folk art.

Then there were Thailand and Burma. Thailand's capacity to make sound movies was snuffed out by World War Two. For years, the country's movie production took the form of silent 16mm films with live narration in theaters. Francois Truffaut mentioned this during his discussion of Psycho with Alfred Hitchcock. By the late '60s, spurred by the popularity of Indian musicals, all Thai movies were 35mm with sound and color.

Burma had a couple of major studios that produced only silent movies at least into the 1970s.

And there were reportedly 16mm silent films being made in San Francisco for audiences in Chinatown in the 1950's.

I'd like to see those movies. I've been curious about them for years. I might be disappointed.

I was disappointed by the few Nollywood movies I've seen. I have this fascination with "no budget" movies, but they're usually not that good and you don't really know what they mean by "no budget". I've heard of serious cinematic works made for $50, but some of these "no budget" movies cost tens of thousands of dollars. That sounds like a budget to me.

I did see what I thought were some pretty good movies made by kids on Community Access TV.

One was made during the Anne Rice craze. A silent movie. We see a high school student at his locker. He stands there. He looks around. The looks at his locker again. He looks around again. An intertitle tells us that he's planning to go out that evening.

We see him walking through a cemetery where he's attacked by several girls who are vampires who drag him into the cemetery. The last half of the movie (it was half an hour) shows the girls getting a celebratory tattoo, which made me wonder if they were high school kids or college kids, or maybe high school seniors, since I prefer to believe that children under 18 can't legally get tattoos.

There was another made by a middle school kid. It had little plot. It was done as a school project so there was nothing remotely rebellious about it. Something about a kid who's reunited with a friend at the beginning of the school year. There's a brief food fight. They're required to write essays about why fighting with food is bad. Some kids are confused by other kids who aren't part of any identifiable social group. The movie was an hour long but might have had twenty minutes worth of material, so they padded it with long takes of classroom scenes with pop music playing on the soundtrack.

And there was a movie I've only heard about made by a five-year-old. They used some sort of computer animation. The main character spends much of the movie fighting, then eats and takes a nap.

And there were movies that sound less interesting but I still wouldn't mind seeing.

Like, there was a married couple who Mike Kuchar discussed somewhere. They would go into the financial district in New York. If you go there in the early morning before places open for business, the streets are deserted. I saw this in the financial district in Boston. It's kind of cool.

But this couple would go there and make movies where the woman was walking down the street and a man would run up to her and rip her dress off. I don't know if there was any more to it than that. Kuchar mentioned it because the woman appeared in Sins of the Fleshapoids and she insisted on a scene where the Fleshapoid tears her dress off.

Roseanne: The Green Party really dodged a bullet

It seems like it might have been a good idea for the Green Party to have a big celebrity like Roseanne Barr as their presidential candidate. In 2012, she ran for the Green Party's presidential nomination but she was already known to have a couple of screws loose--she claimed in 1991 to have recovered "memories" if being sexually abused by her parents. She herself dropped that accusation and said it was the biggest mistake of her life.

Jello Biafra who failed to get the Green Party nomination in 2000, told her to use her humor. Biafra claims to somehow be both an anarchist and a Zionist--I didn't know he was in the Green Party, too.

The Greens are more serious-minded than these guys gave them credit for. Ralph Nader easily beat Jello Biafra and Jill Stein defeated Roseanne Barr.

Barr ran that year on the leftist Peace and Freedom Party ticket instead. I don't know if she actually campaigned.

So what's her excuse for suddenly turning right wing? As if the mainstream of the Republican Party (and, for that matter, the DNC) isn't bad enough, she became an ultra-Zionist Trump supporter.

Looking at her anti-BDS speech, she may be a pretty typical neo-con, a Jewish leftist turned violent right-winger in order to better serve Israel.

Woody Allen: The tide has turned

Moses at fourteen.

It turns out that Moses Farrow's timing was pretty good. He finally got his story out. I don't know if this is anything to go by, but, at least in the comments sections on the internet, the tide seems to have turned in Woody Allen's favor. Some even quit saying that Dylan believes what she's saying----they now think she's a conscious liar.

Almost nobody thinks Soon-Yi is Allen's stepdaughter or adopted daughter any more. Dylan going on TV has backfired in that people can distinguish her from Soon-Yi now.

The anti-Woody Allen crowd reminds me of the housewives in the studio audiences of old daytime talk shows. They thought all comic books were published for children and that all movies were made by major studios. And now they think Woody Allen operates a massive Spielberg-like publicity machine. "He's a movie director, ain't he!"

Of course it's hard to tell with any of this. People who post comments on the internet aren't necessarily representative of the general public, and even if they were, Woody Allen has a fairly narrow audience. There's no telling how any of this will affect his movies.

My impression has always been that people go to his movies because he made them, not because of who's in them. I don't think I've heard of half the younger stars who've appeared in his more recent films, so I don't know if the dim bulbs who swear they'll never work with him again matter.

If he starts working with unknowns, at the rate he makes movies, he would quickly build an army of grateful actors who own him their careers. He'd be like a high-brow Roger Corman.

The ethics of zero-budget film

Unpaid actor with plastic gun.

I always wondered about the cast of El Mariachi. It was Robert Rodriguez's $7,500 action film which made it into theatrical distribution. It was filmed on 16mm. Filmstock and processing cost $7,100, so, if it had been done on digital video, it would have cost only $400---probably less. Only one actor in the movie was paid, if I remember correctly.

So when this thing started making money, did Robert Rodriguez go back and pay the cast and crew? I have no idea.

One thing he did, by the way, which I found interesting, is, he didn't have any actor on the set for more than three hours at a time. This way, he didn't even have to feed them.

An article in Variety reports that "no budget" movies are becoming common in Japan and some filmmakers there are questioning the morality of it.

In recent years, increasing numbers of filmmakers have redefined low budget to mean next to nothing. That has widened the gap between major Japanese studio productions, and the independent majority. It may also have led to the disappearance of most mid-budget films...together with many of the companies that once distributed them.

A recent example from the ultra-low category is “One Cut of the Dead,” a zombie comedy scripted and directed by 34-year-old Shinichiro Ueda. The film premiered in April at the Udine Far East Film Festival, Europe’s largest showcase for Asian popular cinema, and finished a close second in the Audience Award vote.

Produced by Tokyo film school Enbu Seminar, of which Koji Ichihashi is president, and financed partly by crowdfunding, “One Cut of the Dead” was made for $23,000 (JPY2.5 million). Its student cast paid to participate in what was essentially a school project.

On social media, Ueda and producer Ichihashi expressed their joy at the Udine success. “That an extremely low-budget film with a cast and crew of no-names should come so close against such distinguished giants of the film world is a story that even (comic magazine) Shonen Jump would reject as impossible!”

But not everyone shared Ueda and Ishihashi’s glee. On May 10 Koji Fukada, whose “Harmonium” won Cannes’ Un Certain Regard jury prize in 2016, took to Facebook to air his dismay. “If you speak as though enduring poverty to make a film is somehow normal and positive, today’s excessively unfair industry will continue that way forever,” he said. “If you have the energy to make a film I’d like you expend it on raising money. Improve, if just a little, the industry system.”

Fukada is also co-founder of Independent Cinema Guild, an organization of film professionals that supports the indie sector with crowdfunding assistance, networking events and other initiatives. His retort to Ueda sparked many comments from filmmakers who shared his discontent with poor on-set conditions, and a dislike for those who profited from them.

...

Production budgets for films released by those leading distributors typically range from $1 million to $5 million, though the top end can be higher, especially for animation. Isao Takahata’s 2013 film “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” cost an estimated $46 million (JPY5 billion).

That then leaves the indies living on fumes. And, accordingly, they squeeze their production costs as close to zero as possible. While attacking Ueda, Fukada confessed to himself having a “criminal record” of making low-budget films that “take advantage of the cast and crew’s love of cinema.” Chastened, Ueda responded: “I can’t deny that such a small budget made it a bit harder for (the cast and crew) to survive economically.”

Ueda is unlikely to greatly profit from his triumph, save in more festival invitations and offers to make more films. As Fukada noted, Japanese directors usually only get a fee for their labors. No back-end participation. But it’s still better than the position of his cast, who paid for the privilege of starring in a hit.

Read the whole article here. 

There was one comment on the article I found interesting:

Variations on this problem exist everywhere these days it seems. ANYONE can make a movie now. And their mothers, too. Consumer-grade technology — even iPhones — can help create movies worthy (and just as often unworthy) of theatrical distribution and/or discs and streaming. The barriers to entry have effectively been lowered or removed and film school (snicker) and prior employment in a video store (chortle) are no longer the primary prerequisites to get your foot through a door that’s been taken off its hinges. Decades of DVDs and Blu-rays (and laserdiscs) put EVERYTHING you could possibly learn in either institution into the hands of anyone who cared to learn from it via commentaries, interviews, documentaries and more. Even YouTube has tutorials demonstrating how to do pretty much anything. There are no substantial trade secrets in filmmaking anymore, nor in many other industries for that matter. But since filmmaking is one of the less essential skills one could choose for a career, why not let the current market run its course? The studio system won’t die out completely. Audiences will still crave higher production value and established storytelling tropes. Eventually, these no-budget wonders, even in Japan, may tire of working for peanuts and increasingly NOT landing much-coveted “studio” gigs, and focus their careers elsewhere while the next wave of impoverished dreamers takes their chances. The biggest new barrier, I think, is that contemporary audiences only have so much time to binge on the current and vast oceans of filmic detritus to find the few rare gems with promise. The flood might abate in due time as all the wannabes grow tired of working solely for the love of it.

There was a documentary about Jim Wynorski called Popatopolis. He sets out to shoot an R-rated semi-pornographic horror movie in three days. He wanted to do it in two days, but his friends talked him out of it. But they commented on how the American film industry had changed. There used to be A movies and B movies---now there are A movies and Z movies. The middle ones are gone. 

In the '80s there was Rick Schmidt's book Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices which advised paying actors a $100-per-day per diem ($200-a-day in today's money.) Years later, I looked at Craigs List. There were people looking for actors for their zero budget movies. One or two may have offered $100-a-day, but most offered $50 or $20 a day. Then I saw one that didn't offer money but would provide craft services--they would feed you. Then some didn't offer food but would give you a DVD of the finished movie, which I wouldn't offer since I might start editing, realize it was no good and scrap it.

Now they offer actors nothing.

I have no suggestions. Let it all run its course, I guess. We have no power over these people. Think of the Communists. In Communist countries, a movie director made about the same money as a factory worker. They lived in apartments that were identical to everyone else's, and people still fought to work in the movie industry. Why should you get rich making movies? The world is full of people who would do it for free. Why should you be different from any other artist?

Daughter of Woody Allen and Soon-yi Previn defends her father

What Ronan Farrow will look like in forty years after cheek implants, a face lift, eye lift and hair dye.

Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn have two adopted daughters. One daughter, Bechet, 19, has come out in defense of her father from the abuse being heaped on him by the ghastly Farrow clan.

“I never wanted to involve myself in the social media debates involving my father, but there comes a point when I realize that I can either continue pretending that none of this is going on, or stand up for him,” she wrote on Facebook. “He has been nothing but supportive and loving, and now it is my turn to support him.”

She was born well after the accusation was made against her father but she's in a much better position to know whether it's true or not than Ronan Farrow is. Ronan Farrow was four when Mia Farrow falsely accused Allen of molesting Dylan in a single incident. Ronan has no personal knowledge of anything. And at this point, he's staked so much on attacking and smearing his father, he wouldn't admit it if he realized he was wrong. His mother could tell him directly that it was all a lie and he would stick with the story.

Ishmael Reed on Roseanne Barr

I was surprised when Ishmael Reed, writer and poet who taught writing at UC Berkley, wrote in a recent article posted on counterpunch.com, "Once in a while, I ran into a student who tried to get a rise out of me by writing a racist story or making a racist comment. I’d instruct the class that they could write all of the racist stories that they desired as long as they were fresh and original. That would usually end these clumsy efforts."

I don't know why it surprised me. Politically, the University of Oregon a few blocks from me might be the poor man's Berkley, and there are racist students there. There are some who I suspect consider "political correctness" to be phony, so they imagine that casual racism is a sign of sincerity.

Reed mentioned one case:

...I suspect that he, like many White students, who were raised in California towns, some of which were former Sun Down Towns, and like-minded people whom I have encountered Europe, Asia, and Africa, received all of his ideas about race from American film and television. Though ideologues might view Hollywood as “liberal,” the industry has produced a lot of films in which Blacks and Browns are dealt vigilante justice. One of the favorite genres is that of a detective who has to surrender his badge for using excessive force whereupon he’s free to go on a rampage of cracking heads. The much-admired film, “Crash” justifies police brutality and stop-and-frisk sexual molestation. 

...

But I find the hand-wringing from members of the Fourth Estate, the very ones who exhibit stereotypes of Blacks to hundreds of countries, to be hypocritical. Given the segregated media, most of the comments about Roseanne’s outburst were dominated by White pundits and reporters. On one panel, a smug Rich Lowry of The National Review became the judge of what constituted White Supremacy, when the magazine where he works was founded by an Anglo-Irish White supremacist. The few Blacks who were allowed on TV were preaching to what James Baldwin called “The Chorus of Innocents,” who, in his The Fire Next Time, were offered redemption. Mara Gay of The New York Times editorial board preached redemption as a possible deliverance for Ms. Barr and the next morning, Eugene Robinson, one of the token minority members of “Morning Joe,” used the same word.

Of course, Baldwin got tired of redeeming people and ridiculed “The Chorus of Innocents” in his best novel, Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone. He was deemed ungrateful by his former patrons, and Mario Puzo was chosen to do the Times’s hatchet job on the book, maybe because Baldwin’s Italians are more complex than his.

MSNBC, which did a lot of sanctimonious hectoring of Roseanne has a series called “Lockup” in which viewers are invited to gawk at prisoners who are exhibited like animals in a zoo. Maybe that’s where Roseanne Barr got her ideas.

Read the article here:

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/01/the-segregated-media-says-its-all-roseannes-fault/