Streaming video killing Hollywood's middle class

An interesting article on streaming video's effect on Hollywood's petit bourgeoisie. Show produced for streaming video don't pay residuals, network series have fewer and fewer episodes per season and networks are showing fewer re-runs. 

Last year there were 487 scripted series. Is that possible? And if it is possible, is it necessary?

"This year alone", the article reports, "Netflix is launching 80 original movies and will have 700—no, that’s not an extra zero—original shows on its service."

If there are seven hundred, they can't be THAT original.

Maybe the thousands of film majors graduating every year aren't insane after all. And here I was calling for half hour TV shows so they could have twice as many. I guess it would mean we could WATCH twice as many which would be a good thing under the circumstances. There are a lot of shows I could force myself to watch if only they were shorter.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90250828/the-death-of-hollywoods-middle-class

A brief Halloween tale

This must have happened twenty years ago. In town here, a couple got into an argument. The husband went to take a shower and while he was in there, his wife came in and attacked him with a butcher knife. He fought her off picking up the scale to use as weapon.

And that couple's name was------HITCHCOCK!

It's true. Some poor guy was almost murdered, of course, and reporters had the good taste not to make light of it.

It's like when Macaulay Culkin got divorced. I was a little disappointed that there were no jokes about him being HOME ALONE.

A guy I knew slightly in school and Hitler's class photo

I once read this book on the psychological analysis of photographs. It wasn't scholarly and it warned not to read too much into the pictures, but I found it interesting at the time.

One was a school photo of Adolf Hitler's fourth grade class. And where do you think Adolf Hitler placed himself? Next to the teacher? Holding the sign? No. He's in the very center of the top row, slightly higher than the rest. See him there? He looks like a little Hitler.

So there was a guy I knew slightly in junior high school. I'll call him "X".

I never spoke to X in high school, but I had a small circle of friends who really, really hated him. One was an actor who appeared in two school plays but was never part of that group. He didn't socialize with other actors. They were all rich kids and he wasn't. He didn't like the fact that X got his choice of roles in every play. X didn't even have to audition. He and his wealthy family were on vacation in Europe during try-outs for one play. Kids auditioned for roles thinking that maybe they had a chance this time, then X came back and took what he wanted. He appeared in local theater. There was a photo of him outside Oregon Repertory Theatre for years and he appeared in an industrial film telling new employees how to make bagels.

X went to Northwestern University, studied theater, directed Steven Colbert in a play and is apparently still friends with him. He hit it big when he wrote adaptations of those terrible Chaim Potok novels. This automatically made him a major figure in Jewish theater and he's been working as director in regional theater for years around the country. If you want to build a career in something like that, you have to keep moving. You don't want to become too closely associated with one place.

So. Here are some pictures of X from junior high. Where do you think he placed himself in the group photos?

Boy's soccer team. Which one is he? Where would be place himself? How would he make himself stand out?

Boy's soccer team the next year. He's again not in uniform which makes him stand out. There's an even number of kids on the front row so he has to be off-center, but he has the ball between his feet. Why is he bigger than the others?

And here's one that might throw my theory off. X is in student government. He's in the back row. Again, there's an even number in that row so he's off-center. He would have done better in the front row. Interesting that it's all boys in front and the girls are all in the back.

I liked him well enough when I was acquainted with him. One time, he came over and read me a monologue he wrote in creative writing class. I could have made the same observation about the photos of him without bringing up Hitler.

It's nice that he's doing well, but it bothers me if arrogance played some role in it.

Ken Russell, The Devils (1971)

You know the main thing I got from Ken Russell's movie, The Devils? The movie was about a case where a large gaggle of nuns fell victim to demonic possession. Oliver Reed plays a priest who is put on trial for witchcraft. At one point, the prosecutor reads to the court love letters Reed's character had written.

How's he going to get out of this one, I thought. He's supposed to be celibate, isn't he?

Oliver Reed brushes it off. Love letters aren't a crime. He was a young fellow when he wrote them. How is that evidence of anything?

I saw The Devils in a university classroom one night probably around 1980. It was before home video had taken over. University groups would show movies every weekend. You could get in for a dollar or a dollar fifty, or free if you got there late after they stopped selling tickets.

Ever since then, I stopped seeing the otherwise ordinary sex lives of clergy as news. When 20/20 or ran a long story on a priest who had a secret family, I wondered how a man having a wife and children was news. Why was a TV network enforcing Catholic church discipline on its priests?

How was it news that a gay priest was hanging around in gay bars? At one point during the PTL Club scandal, Ted Koppel grilled Jim Bakker about claims he was gay. Bakker finally said that, even if he were, how is that an issue? If he was gay, good for him.

The press does that less than they used to.

I didn't realize how controversial the movie was. Even Roger Ebert gave it "zero stars". Wikipedia reports that in 2010, Warner Bros. made it available on iTunes then pulled it three days later.

It's now available on Filmstruck which is shutting down November 29th. See it while you can.

Hamsun (1996)

I knew nothing about Knut Hamsun before seeing this movie. A major figure in literature. He won the Nobel Prize in 1920.

According to the description, Hamsun was a revered in Norway until he and his wife expressed unpopular political views. They didn't say what those views were. I assumed it was some noble cause.

It turned out that Hamsun was pro-Nazi even after Norway was invaded and occupied by the Nazis. He was anti-democratic and anti-Communist and was glad that Norwegian collaborators are serving in the Nazi army invading the USSR.

He didn't come across as an enthusiastic Nazi like his wife. She was unhappy being a helpmeet to her arrogant big-shot husband The Nazis flattered her with talk about the importance of women in National Socialism.

The movie covers the war years and their aftermath. It was over two hours long. There are several places where the movie might have ended, but it was a true story and people's lives don't come to an end just because they reached a logical end point to a narrative arc. The movie starts with him at 75. He's waiting to die and expects to at any time. He might have laid off the treason if he had known his life was going to drag on another seventeen years.

Available on Filmstruck which will be no more after November 29th.

Filmstruck going the way of the dodo

This is how I get much of my news. A comedian makes a joke on Twitter. I think, "What? What's he talking about?" I google it.

This how I found out that Brian Williams falsely claimed to have been in a helicopter crash. And some other things I can't remember off hand.

But I just read Josh "Elvis" Weinstein's tweet: Filmstruck was the "healthy snack" of streaming services.

Turns out that Filmstruck is shutting down.

I probably shouldn't care. I signed up for it and didn't watch that much. I'm paying for three or four streaming services now. I was going to get rid of one or two.

Sayoc

Amazing what one moron can do. The guy is dumb as dirt. They've reprinted some of his internet postings in the press. They were written in an odd mix of sentence fragments and misspelled words. He's facing 48 years in prison. I'm sure his lawyer will argue that none of the bombs could have gone off proving he wasn't actually trying to murder anybody, but with someone that dumb, I don't know how you can tell if it was intentional.

He's of Italian and Filipino descent but he keeps claiming to be Seminole Indian. He has a criminal history including a charge that he altered the date of birth on his driver's license because he wanted to convince women he was younger than he was.

False Flag?

Keep it short and don't try very hard

For several years there was a glut of books on zero-budget filmmaking. I guess it was a bigger deal before digital video took over completely. Now it's perfectly obvious how to make a movie with no money.

Cinema has become a true art form. Almost anyone can do it, but almost nobody can do it very well and even fewer could earn a living at it. We don't need books on how to cope with lack of money. It's lack of talent we need to worry about. How does a person who's not very good make a passable movie? There are styles that seem like they might lend themselves to this. "Slow cinema" for example or minimalism, although they might just make it worse.

There's been a lot written about how to get good performances from non-actors, but what if you have non-actors working with a non-director? How can a non-director succeed without having to learn a bunch of stuff?

I like "wooden acting". You know that scene in Rebel Without a Cause where James Dean screams, "YOU'RE TEARING ME APART!!!"? I would have had him simply say, "You're tearing me apart." Of course, audiences might not appreciate it as much as I would.

You can avoid a lot of that and just do a silent movie. All you need is for the actors to behave naturally. Use intertitles to explain what's going on of it's not obvious. If you have the voice for it you can narrate.

Sit-coms are 21 minutes long when you take out the commercials. They generally consist of a main plot and two subplots. Some shows like Modern Family try to give the three storylines equal time, so each plot gets 7 minutes. Which means each one is very sketchy. You know the expression "Show don't tell"? With sit-comes it's "Imply don't show." If you can write three 7-minute sketches, you can write a 21 minute movie. You just have to cut between subplots to gloss over the huge gaps in the stories.

Some kids on YouTube compressed a Hardy Boys book into a six minute movie.

In the fifties, most shows were half an hour whether they were comedies or not. The Twilight Zone is probably the best know example. We could have twice as many TV dramas if they were all half an hour. There was one season where The Twilight Zone was an hour long and that wasn't an improvement. The same with Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

I like The Rifleman. I hate Wagon Train and Have Gun Will Travel, but at least they were short.

And if you look at B movies from the '30's, '40's and '50's, they were all quite short, usually around an hour. I've seen a couple that were less that 45 minutes. And they were all long enough. Nobody left wishing they had dragged on for another half hour.

Feature-length zero budget movies, 70 to 120 minutes long, are murder to watch. In this age of streaming video, nothing needs to be that long. Nobody's going to see your movie in a theater----there's no need to make it worth their while to go out to a movie.

Man with a Rifle (USSR, 1938)

I'm watching a 1938 Soviet film set in 1917. There are no subtitles. I can understand a word here and there but that's about it. An actor plays Lenin in it.

It LOOKS good. The scenes are all nicely lit. The shots are nicely composed. Mostly static camera but there are some tracking shots. It's hard to tell when it's in a language you don't understand, but the acting seems okay. There was a scene with bourgeoisie playing with a sort of Ouija board.

Other than a couple of bourgeois women, it has an all-male cast.

Directed by Sergei Iosifovich Yutkevich (1904-1985). He went on to win Best Director at Cannes in 1956 and 1966.

Here are stills from the movie. I swiped them from a website that was only interested in the guns they used so they're grouped by gun and not in chronological order.

Guy with a Mauser in a holster behind him.

Guy on the left with a Mauser holster.

Guy with a Mauser on the right.

I don't know. A Mosin-Nagant carbine?

Mosin-Nagant carbine again.

Another Mosin-Nagant carbine.

Mosin-Nagant rifle.

You can see the guy's Nagant revolver sticking out.

You can see the revolver again.

I'm not sure what gun we're supposed to be marveling at here.

Grenades.

Grenades and an armored train.

I think we're supposed to be looking at the grenades again.

Conduct Unbecoming (1975)

Michael York was huge back then. I remember the promos for this on HBO in the '70's, but I never watch it. The promos played up the "mess game" where officers run around with swords chasing a stuffed pig on wheels that Michael York pulled around on a string. I assumed THAT was the "conduct unbecoming" they were talking about, but it turns out that was one of the regiment's traditions.

It's one of those movies where someone is assigned to act as defense counsel in a court martial and discovers that he's expected to not interfere with the defendant being convicted. Other examples are Breaker Morant, The Winston Affair, and Paths of Glory. 

Young officers Michael York and James Faulkner arrive in India to join a regiment of the Indian Army in the 1880's. Faulkner's character, the son of a general, wants out and intentionally antagonizes the other officers so they'll get rid of him. York is given the job of defending him in an informal court martial when he's charged with assaulting the widow of a captain. The captain was killed and mutilated years earlier. His tunic and pith helmet are kept on display in a glass case.

There are things about the ending that didn't make sense to me and wasn't entirely plausible. 

The movie didn't want to condemn the British Army so the officers intent on railroading a new officer in order to maintain the traditions of the regiment are interested in the truth after all. 

The movie reminded me of is the Japanese samurai movie Hara Kiri. The samurai have a suit of armor displayed as a shinto idol, they have an exaggerated concern for the honor of their clan and the way the trial in Conduct Unbecoming was arranged, with the witness sitting in a chair facing a row of judges, the prosecution and defense reminded me of Tatsuya Nakadai sitting in the courtyard with rows of Samurai. 

With Michael York, Susanna York, Richard Attenborough, Stacey Keach, Christopher Plummer and Trevor Howard. Directed by Michael Anderson, based on the play by Barry England.

No more Comcast

We're going to do it. Get rid of cable. The digital TV antenna will be here tomorrow. We have about two thousand channels now on Comcast and it's all crap. There's pretty much nothing to see on network TV anymore so the antenna won't do us that much good, but I'll fire up the Roku and everything will be fine.

I remember the old days. Even with cable, we only had about six channels and they all went off the air by one AM, but not only was there more to watch, but I think there was more nudity on TV back then. PBS had all kinds of stuff. One time, my father was watching some sports thing. They were showing an auto rally in Europe and there was a brief shot of a sinewy French driver naked on a massage table after a long day of driving. And it wasn't just Frenchmen. There was I, Claudius. One evening, PBS showed what French TV was like and it included an indecent French bra commercial. The ad jingle went, "Whose breasts are those...whose breasts are those..." over and over.

There was far more violence and some shows were surprisingly lurid. The Adventures of Johnny Quest was on every Saturday morning and was essentially an R-rated action film for children. Every episode attacked a different ethnic or racial group. What on earth did they have against Pygmies?

They don't have Saturday morning cartoons at all anymore. What do children do now?

Lee Israel biopic

I never heard of this person before.

They're making a movie about Lee Israel, based on her memoir, Can You Ever Forgive Me? She was a writer who had published several successful celebrity biographies. But she went into decline after an unsuccessful book. She was an alcoholic and being abrasive and unpleasant to begin with didn't help things. Getting a regular job didn't work out, so she began forging and selling letters by dead writers and actors.

She was convicted of some of her crimes, got six months house arrest and five years probation. She later published a memoir gloating about it. Some questioned whether she should be allowed to profit from her crimes in this way. She died a few years ago so the movie's not doing anything for her.

If you're going to resort to crime, it seems like this would be the way ago. Never commit a crime where your victim could legally shoot you.

Viva Max (1969)

I'm sitting here watching a DVD of Viva Max (1969). I lived in San Antonio when it was filmed and for some reason my family felt some connection to it although we never felt the slightest connection to Texas. I haven't seen it in years. It seems rather racist now which may be why it's rarely shown anymore. I don't think this is even an authorized DVD.

A Mexican Army general (Peter Ustinov) leads his a small number of troops with marching band to Texas to retake the Alamo. With John Astin, Alice Ghostly, Kenneth Mars, Jonathan Winters, Keenan Wynn, Harry Morgan. I don't know who else. Paul Sand. They probably should have used at least a few Latino actors.

San Antonio was full of military personnel but they call out the National Guard. It was the second biggest city in Texas and the seventh biggest city in the United States, but it was presented as a hick town with Harry Morgan as chief of police wearing one of those stupid-looking bow ties they wear in Westerns.

Based on the novel by Jim Lehrer.

DNA, ancestery, Elizabeth Warren

I supposedly have an American Indian ancestor, my great-great grandmother. She was Cherokee, although, back then, I hear it was common for white Southerners to claim an Indian ancestor to conceal a Black or Melungeon ancestor. My sister got a DNA test and proved to be 6% Neanderthal. They didn't indicate any American Indian ancestry but that doesn't mean we don't have any.

I haven't had a DNA test myself. I not sure how I should feel about it. A large majority of white people in the US can now be traced by DNA. They caught a serial rapist that way and figured out who a long-unidentified murder victim was. Barry Scheck worked to free the wrongly convicted, but he also called for DNA samples to be taken from anyone convicted of a crime. There were serial rapists and murderers they could be catching.

You know the guy who played Random Task in the first Austin Powers movie? He's in prison. He plead guilty to vandalism. Then he found out he would have to provide a DNA sample. It turned out that he and his friends had kidnapped, tortured and raped a woman 18 years earlier. The statute of limitations ran out on the kidnapping and rape charge, but he was convicted of torture and sentenced to seven years to life in prison. Later, he murdered his cellmate.

So, Elizabeth Warren had a DNA test. Like a lot of whites, she had an Indian ancestor. Donald Trump said he'd donate a million dollars to charity if she proved Indian ancestry, but, not surprisingly, he's refusing to do it. She's somewhere from 1/64 to 1/1024 American Indian. I don't think 1/1024 is possible since her European ancestors wouldn't have come into contact with Indians that long ago.

Someone said that she's not Indian "in any meaningful way", and that may be, but that reminds me of people who said that O.J. Simpson wasn't really Black because he had white friends.

I saw two old white guys on TV who were early rock-and-roll record producers. One of them said, Our friends were Black, our girlfriends were Black, we lived in a Black neighborhood. We thought WE were Black. Then he added, We were mistaken.

I think you have to actually be Black to be Black. And you have to actually be white to be white. And if you have an Indian ancestor you are part Indian.

I'm amused by my Neanderthal ancestry. Of my modern human ancestors, some of the good ones fought for the Union and the bad ones fought for the Confederacy. I have evil ancestors who owned slaves which means I probably have a lot of distant Black cousins somewhere.

Look at this lovely boy. What man wouldn't be proud to have him as a son? His name was Charley. He was a slave. He and his mother were the property of his father. His father sold him. The man who bought him sold him to another guy. He was freed at the end of the Civil War.

These photos were taken by an organization raising money for education for freed slaves. They thought they could raise more money using pictures of white-looking former slaves.

DNA testing is taking a toll on Neo-Nazism. They get DNA tests thinking they're going to prove their racial purity and they keep being surprised.

Space: 1999

I loved that show when I was a kid. Now they're showing old episodes on TV. Like most TV shows, it didn't live up to its opening credits. Had great theme music.

The special effects were 2001: A Space Odyssey-ish---at least it seemed like that at the time. I read the Space: 1999 comic books. I played with a staple gun because it was shaped kind of like the laser weapons they used.

It didn't make complete sense. The moon flies out of orbit. Instead of evacuating the base and getting back to Earth before it's too late, they decide to go hurtling through space and assume they would find another planet to colonize. It didn't take them long to start running into other planets.

It bothered me that, if I was going to live in outer space like the guys on the show, I would probably have to join the Air Force. There's no way I was doing that.

But I watch it now and it seems really slow. Like I had a longer attention span when I was 12 than I do now.

It seems strange that Martin Landau is willing to sacrifice the lives of everyone on Moonbase Alpha to save his girlfriend, Barbara Bain. Captain Kirk would never do that. I wouldn't mind it if their uniforms left more to the imagination. One season, they added collars. They looked better, but they're out in the space cut off from the Earth. Where did the collars come from?

It was British. Only the two stars were American. In one episode, an alien asks one of the guys why he had a different accent than the others. He explained that he was Australian. I couldn't distinguish an English accent from an Australian accent---how could a space alien tell them apart?

Kanye West: Dumb as a post

I'd heard of Kanye West and heard he was supposed to be some kind of genius. Then a guy I worked with played some if "his" "music". It was West's version of "Diamonds are Forever" where he just plays the Shirley Bassey version then blathers over the top of it. His big contribution was "For ever ever. Ever ever. Ever ever. Ever ever. Ever ever." What a genius.

I liked it when he ad libbed on that fund raiser for hurricane Katrina. "George Bush doesn't care about Black people." But then he started doing it all the time for no reason. He lumbered up on stage and took the mic from Taylor Swift at the MTV music awards. It's thanks to him that everyone knows who Taylor Swift is. Didn't he do it again to someone else?

“He can’t write, sing, or play at all. He is an egomaniac, he is dumb as a post, he creates nothing, helps no one,” tweeted David Crosby.

Kanye West met with Donald Trump. He inadvertently revealed that the password for his iphone is 000000.

So what made Kanye West switch sides, to go from attacking Bush to fawning over Donald Trump? See video for answer: