General Hospital vs Scientology

Michelle Stafford

I watched General Hospital for a week when I was in high school. A (female) nurse named Bobbie was pretending to be pregnant with Scottie's baby to stop his marriage to Laura. Several months later, I tried to watch it again and was shocked that Laura and Bobbie were now friends and Scottie was nowhere to be seen.

Bobbie and Scottie

Later still, of course, Lara fell in love with Luke even though he raped her. The two frolicked on a tropical island where a mad scientist had a device that controlled the weather. He was going to use it to freeze Port Charles.

I'm not kidding.

That was the first I had heard of how strange soap operas were. They had alien abductions, demonic possession, spy rings, mafia hits.

And now Scientology

Showbiz411 is reporting that Scientologist Michelle Stafford is leaving General Hospital over its barely disguised attack on her "church".

...a few months ago, “General Hospital” started a story about a cult called Dawn of Day. (Dawn of Day, not coincidentally, is an 1881 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that would drive Scientology creator L. Ron Hubbard crazy.)

The soap cult is very similar to Scientology: members are being roped in to pay big fees for “classes,” they have a charismatic leader who’s insinuating himself into various characters’ lives. This isn’t the first time “General Hospital” has attacked Scientology. For several years they featured a clinic for the criminally insane called Miscavige, obviously named for David Miscavige, the real life Napoleonic leader of Scientology. There are no coincidences here.

The article suggests that it was a ploy to get Stafford to quit. She's going back to her old job at The Young and the Restless which means they'll have to can Gina Tognoni who had taken over her role when she left five years ago. Tognoni had won an Emmy for it 2017.

Gina Tognoni

If you look on YouTube, you can find old episodes of soap operas from the '50's. A lot of them were only fifteen minutes. Don Knotts was in one. It was interesting to me that most of them consisted of scenes with only two people carrying on long conversations. They don't do that now. I turned on an episode and it was all crowd scenes.

I might be less impressed if I actually watched them, but I don't know how they do it, making an hour show five days a week.

What happened with Jed Rubenfeld?

With wife, Amy Chua.

Hey! Whatever happened with the investigation of Jed Rubenfeld at Yale?

From an article published in September of last year:

[Yales Law School] seems to be pretty concerned about what it’s been hearing about Professor Rubenfeld’s conduct, especially (but not solely) with respect to female students. This is conduct that seems to date back decades but that has persisted into the just-concluded school year. YLS has hired an outside investigator, Jenn Davis, to try to put together a more comprehensive account of that conduct and its effects on the environment at YLS. One Dean Gerken receives this account, a determination will be made about what steps to take with respect to remedies.

Scope and process: Jenn’s jurisdiction is over issues regarding female students as well as other types of behaviors that have given rise to concern over the years. It seems she’s been tasked with understanding whether Professor Rubenfeld contributes to a hostile environment for students, generally. There is an understanding that certain behaviors might well not be unique to him or to YLS, but that does not make them OK.

More specifically, it seems Jenn is interested in hearing about, among other things:

· Disparate treatment of, or boundary crossing with, women in the YLS community. She is interested in hearing from subjects of, or witnesses to, that treatment. (E.g., comments about female students’ physical appearances or relationship histories, conversations that seem designed to “test the waters,” intimidation or efforts at manipulation targeted at female students, etc.).

· Conduct related to excessive drinking with students (driving with students while drunk, etc.).

· Inappropriate employment practices relating to RAs or Coker Fellows.

· Retaliation against students who do not show sufficient loyalty.

I don't see anything more recent.

Agnes Varda RIP

Agnes Varda has died at age 90.

The first movie of hers I saw was Kung Fu Master, aka Le Petit Amour. Siskel & Ebert liked it and it was playing one night at the university, so I went. Starring Jane Birkin, her two daughters and her parents, and Agnes Varda's son, Mathieu Demy. 40-year-old Birkin and 14-year-old Mathieu fall in love.

I said on here long ago that if it had been about a middle-aged woman hitting on a bewildered tweenager, or about a delusional fourteen-year-old going after a grown woman, it might have been more plausible, but their attraction was mutual.

I've only seen a few of Varda's other movies. One was an autobiographical documentary. Enjoying little success in life myself, I was interested in how she became a photographer and filmmaker. The Beaches of Agnes, Jane B. to Agnes V. and Kung Fu Master are available on Fandor.

Subtitles can be an improvement

I never understood the French New Wave and its admiration for American B movies. Then I watched one and thought, well, maybe if it were in French with English subtitles I would like it better. You have to look at things through other people's eyes.

I was talking to a friend, a Russian woman, online. She told me she was making borscht and started trying to explain what it was. I said I knew, that it's called borscht here, too. We don't really eat it, but it has the same name. We even have a "borscht belt", I told her, and area in New York state with resorts aimed at Jewish vacationers who used to be barred from other hotels. I mentioned that the movie Dirty Dancing took place in the Borscht Belt. But I didn't want her to think I was recommending Dirty Dancing, so I advised her not to see it. Which I shouldn't have done because she said she had seen it a couple of times already and liked it.

Later, I found Dirty Dancing on streaming video somewhere. And, yeah, I'd like it if it were a Soviet movie, set at a resort in the Caucuses in the '60's.

Theater chains' treatment of workers

"So?"

An article from Variety on movie theater chains' treatment of workers.

Read the whole thing here: https://variety.com/2019/biz/features/movie-theater-janitor-exploitation-1203170717/

Filmmakers often speak of the magic that can happen only in a movie theater. As ticket sales have stagnated and Netflix has taken off, the industry has become increasingly protective of the “theatrical experience.”

But maintaining that experience depends on workers like Alvarez, who are grossly underpaid, overworked and easily expendable.

The major chains — AMC, Regal Entertainment and Cinemark — no longer rely on teenage ushers to keep the floors from getting sticky. Instead, they have turned to a vast immigrant workforce, often hired through layers of subcontractors. That arrangement makes it almost impossible for janitors to make a living wage.

Alvarez got hurt on the job, and a doctor recommended a lighter workload. When she made that request in April 2015, she was fired. The following year, she filed a California Labor Commission claim for unpaid wages, including overtime. The hearing officer awarded her $80,000 in back pay and penalties. But Alvarez could not collect. She did not work directly for AMC or its janitorial contractor, ACS Enterprises, which shielded them from liability. Instead, she worked for a couple — Alfredo Dominguez and Caritina Diaz — who had not even shown up to the hearing.

Even Dominguez and Diaz didn’t consider her an actual employee. In their minds, she was a contractor of a contractor of a contractor of AMC Theatres. AMC and ACS did send an attorney to fight her wage claim. In the end, the companies agreed to pay her $3,500 to go away.

Over the last eight months, Variety has investigated wage complaints from movie theater janitors across the country, reviewing class-action lawsuits, state labor commission records and investigations by the U.S. Department of Labor. A clear pattern emerged: AMC and other theater chains keep their costs down by relying on janitorial contractors that use subcontracted labor. Those janitors typically have no wage or job protections, toiling on one of the lowest rungs of the U.S. labor market.

"Russia and the Democrats"

Trump viewing the eclipse while crowd pleads with him to stop.

I assumed that whoever won the election, Trump or Clinton, would only last one term. If Clinton won we'd end up with Ted Cruz or some such monster in four years. Wasn't it better to have an erratic idiot like Trump who might do something good by accident, to have someone who was uneducated rather than miseducated? It was only four years. It'll be over before you know it. Then we could have someone decent.

But I was wrong.

I didn't vote for Trump. I've always been repulsed by that guy. Every other president has turned out to be far worse than anyone dared imagine. I thought Trump would be an exception to this. People thought he was Hitler, so anything short of actual Nazism would be a pleasant surprise. But I was wrong about that, too. He's so much worse than I thought.

And now he'll probably get re-elected because the Democrats clung to this anti-Russian nonsense.
 
Here's an article on the subject. I found it interesting.

"Russia and the Democrats".

Read it here:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/27/russia-and-the-democrats/

From the article:

The Clinton campaign’s decision to blame her electoral loss on Russian interference demonstrates why she was, and still is, unqualified to hold elected office. In the first, the U.S. – Russian rivalry is backed-up by hair-trigger nuclear arsenals that could end the world in a matter of minutes. Inciting tensions based on self-serving lies is stunningly reckless. In the second, the claim demonstrates utter contempt for her most loyal followers by feeding them purposely misleading explanations of the loss. And most damagingly for political opponents of Donald Trump, these actions give credence to the insurgent status of his retro-Republicanism against liberal and left defenders of the political establishment.

Most damaging to the burgeoning left in the U.S. is the deeply ugly character assassination of poor and working-class voters carried out by the urban bourgeois, many from the self-described radical left. People I know and like, but with whom I disagree politically but am working hard to convert, have spent the last three years being derided as traitorous, marginally literate hicks too stupid to know they are pawns of the Kremlin. The irony, if you care to call it that, is that they knew the Russian interference story was cynical bullshit all along while the graduate degree crowd was following every twist and turn as if it were true knowledge.

"Detectives on Smollett Case Have Troubling Background"

Read it here: https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/26/detectives-on-smollett-case-have-troubling-backgrounds-2/

From the article:

It must be remembered that Jussie did not want to call the police after he was attacked by two people yelling racial and homophobic slurs. His 60-year-old friend called 911 and convinced him to file a police report. This is written on the police report.

What kind of officer arrived? The three detectives on the police report – Kim Murray and Vincent Cecchin, and their supervisor, Joseph Considine – have 35 criminal allegations on their records from Chicago civilians. This data can be found in the Citizens Police Data Project created by the Invisible Institute who sued the city of Chicago to “reveal in-depth information on the complaint histories of selected Chicago police officers.”

...

The allegations against the three detectives include false arrests, criminal sexual assault, searching without a warrant, verbal abuse, a domestic incident, drug/alcohol abuse, use of force, neglect of duty, and allegations regarding personal property in prison, among others.

The civilians who reported the allegations are diverse: Black women, Hispanic women, White women, Black men, etc. Only two of the allegations resulted in discipline. Murray was given a 10 day suspension for driving under the influence while off duty. Notably, she was also accused of verbally abusing a Black man regarding his sexual orientation in 2008.

The other disciplined allegation was for Considine, the supervising investigator listed on Jussie’s police report. The first complaint of Considine’s career was for criminal sexual assault, but this was not the one that resulted in discipline. Instead, he was suspended for three days for neglect of duty. Considine’s complaints paint a harsh picture: he allegedly commits crimes in groups with officers who also have many civilian complaints. One of these officers had 30 people go to the police department to file a complaint against him – yet nothing was done. That officer now works as a ‘forensic services evidence technician’ with a colleague who has 34 complaints, and another who has 37 complaints. 

All charges dropped against Jussie Smollett

Why was I so quick to believe the Chicago Police?

All charges have been dropped against Jussie Smollett.

A statement from his lawyers:

"Today, all criminal charges against Jussie Smollett were dropped and his record has been wiped clean of the filing of this tragic complaint against him. Jussie was attacked by two people he was unable to identify on January 29th. He was a victim who was vilified and made to appear as a perpetrator as a result of false and inappropriate remarks made to the public causing an inappropriate rush to judgement.  

"Jussie and many others were hurt by these unfair and unwarranted actions. This entire situation is a reminder that there should never be an attempt to prove a case in the court of public opinion. That is wrong. It is a reminder that a victim, in this case Jussie, deserves dignity and respect. Dismissal of charges against the victim in this case was the only just result.

"Jussie is relieved to have this situation behind him and is very much looking forward to getting back to focusing on his family, friends and career."

Almost made my own Yentl

 

So, years ago, I got invited over to a friend's house. He had a roll of Super 8 film. He wanted to make a movie in his backyard. We were going to make a kung fu movie. They were big at the time and we weren't the brightest guys in the world.

My friend wanted to "strike a blow for ERA." The ERA was the Equal Right Amendment mandating legal equality between men and women. I can't remember what year the deadline for ratification expired, but my friend wanted to have a queen in the movie. I was anti-monarchy and didn't see how a movie with a queen in it would make people think better of the ERA. We didn't know any girls so one of us would have to be in drag, and no one else was going to see the movie so it wouldn't strike a blow for anything.

I talked him out of the queen idea. We made a straight kung fu movie. A guy is practicing his kung fu with another guy. And bear in mind that none of us studied any martial art of any kind. I was fat and weak. A couple of us were skinny and weak. One of us looked athletic but was completely uncoordinated.

So he was practicing kung fu with another guy who is shot with an arrow and killed, so he kills the guy with the bow and arrow and then fights to the death with the person who sent the guy with the bow and arrow.

It was one of our better kung fu movies, really. Although later, we made another one that worked around our physical limitations through editing. The editing was all done in-camera---we never edited film. You'd see one of us about to throw a kick and then it would cut to a close up of a foot hitting the other guy in the face.

Thinking back to it, a kung fu movie starring a teenager in drag might have had some weird appeal.

Separating the art from the artist

It's like friendship. It's often a question of how much you're willing to put up with and for how long. (I'm paraphrasing Alexander Cockburn.)

That's how it is with this question of separating the art from the artist. The answer will be different every time. It's entirely subjective.

It was once something you did internally. You didn't have to announce it to the world and you didn't have to make it sound like it was based on some universal principle rather than a vague preference. 

Clint Eastwood is a monster---look at how he treated Sandra Locke. It's amazing to me that people like that scumbag.

Woody Allen---he didn't molest Dylan. I'm on Soon-yi's side in HER conflict with Mia farrow. I think Woody's relationship with Mia had probably run its course. It was odd that he married her adopted daughter who she abused for years, but now that they've been together for twenty-five years, I'd say it was a wise move for both of them.

Mia Farrow---abuses her adopted children, apparently got Dylan to falsely accuse Woody Allen of molestation. Caused Dory Previn's mental breakdown, lied about sleeping with Frank Sinatra and about her son's paternity, thinks she's a humanitarian when, for the most part, she simply hates any country the US government tells her to hate (although she's pro-Palestinian). I don't mind watching her in movies, though, but I generally disliked her in Woody Allen's movies long before I knew anything negative about her.

Salvador Dali---a fascist. Excommunicated by the surrealists because he was pro-Hitler. Would congratulate Franco every time he executed a political prisoner. He and his wife were afraid they'd be killed when Franco died. I'm not that excited looking at paintings anyway.

Roman Polanski---he's a Holocaust survivor, he has a metal plate his head because he was beaten nearly to death in Poland by a guy who turned out to be a serial killer, then his pregnant wife was horribly murdered. He's a great director but his movies never did anything for the cause of mankind. Yes, he raped a child, but nothing can be done unless he steps foot outside France again. Even if he had gone to prison, he would have been released decades ago. I've watched his movies but I think it's crazy that people want to drop the charges so he can come back to the United States. Let him run out the clock in France. 

Klaus Kinski---even before his daughter said he molested her for years, he didn't seem like anyone you'd ever want to be around. I've only sat through two of his movies since I heard about that. I liked him in some of those Werner Herzog movies, but he was in all those bad horror movies.

Charles Bukowski---he seemed like a horrible person. I liked his writing but I would never go near him. I read a biography of him and in some ways he was worse that I imagined.

Bryan Singer---I can't think of anything he's directed that I'd ever want to see and he's a boy-hungry serial rapist. I hate that guy. Won't watch his movies.

Barbra Streisand---pro-Israel with a depraved indifference Palestinian suffering, egomaniac, she's in her seventies and still thinks she's so cute. I remember when I liked What's Up, Doc, but I didn't especially like her in it. Never cared for her singing and never bought her acting. So there's nothing really on the plus side with her.

Jerry Seinfeld---dated a high school girl when he was in his 40's. But they're happily married now so who am I to judge. He briefly studied Scientology, Spy magazine showed that his observational humor was sometimes indistinguishable from that of Andy Rooney. So, I don't don't really have anything against him. Why did I bring him up?

I don't really listen to music. I can think of a couple of popular musicians who married children, but I don't like them anyway.

I'd like Bing Crosby if he hadn't abused his children. We know he did because he talked about it in interviews at the time. Same with Jerry Lewis but I'm not sure how much I would have liked him if he hadn't been a horrible person. To hell with both those guys.
 
Phil Silvers was a devout Zionist and loved the Jewish mafia. I can still watch him. Liked him in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Martha Raye was a McCarthyite. I've only seen her in one movie and in Polydent commercials.

Shazam (2019)

It's a shame Michael Jackson didn't live to see this. He had a crush on Freddy Freeman who becomes Captain Marvel, Jr. It was suspected that Jackson had all that plastic surgery trying to look like him.

Larry Cohen RIP

Larry Cohen had died at 77.

My first memory of his work was when I was in junior high school. I was a seventh grader. I listened to some older kids talking about It's Alive, about a killer mutant baby. One kid had seen it and was regaling his friends with the plot. I was sitting across the room from him. He was talking loud. He must have wanted everyone to hear. But he turned and glared at me and wanted to know what I was looking at.

Yentl (1983)

Looks just like a boy, doesn't she?

Several years ago, a homeless young woman decided she would be safer on the streets as a boy than as a woman. She dressed like a boy and got picked up police who thought she was a homeless kid. They took her to a group home. A social worker talked to her and became suspicious. Her looks and her voice seemed more feminine than androgynous, but they took her into a room and the first thing she did was jump up on the top bunk of the bunk bed and that convinced them she was a kid. It wasn't until they took her to a doctor for check up that her ruse was revealed.

I was inspired to watch Barbra Streisand's Yentl after reading about her bizarre pro-molestation interview. Before that I had also read about Streisand's version of A Star Is Born, seen at the time as a vanity project.

Yentl was awful. 41-year-old Barbra Streisand plays a Jewish woman in "Eastern Europe" (that's as specific as it got although they mention Riga at some point) in 1904. She wants to study the Talmud for some reason but women aren't allowed into yeshivas, so she gives herself a stylish 1980's boy's haircut, puts on men's clothing and sets off to the yeshiva.

She looks, sounds and acts like a middle-aged woman. She also wears eye makeup and lipstick. I didn't realize she had such a high-pitched voice. But everyone thinks she's a boy.

At one point, her friend, Mandy Patinkin, wants to marry Amy Irving, but her father won't allow it. But he WILL allow Barbra Streisand to marry her even though they think Streisand is a prepubescent teenager whose voice hasn't changed and has no secondary sexual characteristics. The father wouldn't let his daughter marry Patinkin because of his family background, but he'll let her marry Streisand knowing nothing at all about "his" background.

So she marries Amy Irving. I wasn't clear on why. It was Mandy Patinkin's idea.

Yentl comes up with a religious reason why they can't consummate their marriage, but she was impersonating a male who hadn't gone through puberty. Did she really need an excuse?

At no point in the movie is Streisand believable. You never forget she's Barbra Streisand. The singing doesn't help.

One problem with it was that the stakes were so low. I didn't care if Yentl got to study the Talmud. What difference did it make? Was she going to make some startling discovery that would knock Judaism on its ear?

Streisand directed this thing. She's convinced that sexism was the only reason she didn't get an Oscar for it. 

A better movie was Yidl Mitn Fidl (Poland, 1936, in Yiddish). Molly Picon and her father are evicted from their home and forced to become traveling musicians. For safety, she disguises herself as a boy. 

Well, crap

Remember when Hillary Clinton needed a way to evade questions about the Podesta emails released by Wikileaks? When asked about them in a debate, she was beaming as she said it was all Russia's doing. She figured it went without saying that this meant she didn't need to answer any questions about it.

But Democrats took it to heart. Of all the thing you could attack Trump for, of all the things they could impeach him for, they latched onto that and that alone--the unproved and most likely false claimed of Russian "collusion". They kept talking about Russian "meddling" since the term could mean anything. They enthused over how honest Meuller was and how everyone should believe anything he said.

You think Trump will be re-elected now?

Roseanne is nuts

You might remember that Michael Moore came to Roseanne Barr's defense. He said that she had suffered a traumatic brain injury when was sixteen and got hit by a car. That might explain quite a bit.

Now she's blaming Sara Gilbert for ruining her life. She “destroyed the show and my life with that tweet. She will never get enough until she consumes my liver with a fine Chianti.”

Gilbert had tweeted her disapproval of Barr's racist tweet attacking Valerie Jarrett, the tweet that got Roseanne fired.

 “Roseanne’s recent comments about Valerie Jarrett, and so much more," Gilbert tweeted, "are abhorrent and do not reflect the beliefs of our cast and crew or anyone associated with our show. I am disappointed in her actions to say the least”

Did Red 11 need a better location?

The line from Variety's review that makes me not want to see Robert Rodriguez's Red 11:

...most of the film takes place in his nondescript production offices...

I don't want to see Robert Rodriguez's nondescript production offices.

I had these friends who made all their amateur movies in their backyard. Two doors down from their house was a huge underground reservoir which would have been a great location for so many things, but they wanted the back of their house in every film.

That's just the corner of it. The thing's huge.

El Mariachi was shot in Ciudad Acuña in Coahuíla, Mexico. You at least got to see someplace new.

I live in a middling city. They bulldozed anything old or interesting during the urban renewal craze. The university has some interesting buildings, but the rest of the city is of little interest visually. But I can drive half an hour in any direction and reach small towns that do look interesting. I can think of two off hand that look kind of like hellholes surrounded by mountains. The others look pleasant.

Of course, small town cops don't have much to do and you couldn't pass yourselves off as a harmless tourist with a camcorder like you can some places.

Thirty miles from here.

Barbra Streisand on Michael Jackson

She's a monster.

We had a molestation case here in town. It was a guy who had been twice convicted of sex crimes against children. He owned a music store which somehow stayed in business while he was in prison in the 1980s. He was the exclusive dealer for several low-cost brands of instrument, the brands parents buy for their children, and, if you bought your instrument from him, he'd give you free private lessons.

When he was arrested again in 1999, he was held without bail. Some parents of his students came to court to request that they release him on bail. One mother said she couldn't believe he would do anything like that because he was such a nice man and it was a joy to leave her son with him.

Well, yes, of course child molesters are nice to kids. That's how they get their victims. How is that not obvious?

Barbra Streisand was interviewed in The Times  of London and was asked about the Michael Jackson documentary Leaving Neverland.

“His sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has or whatever DNA he has,” Streisand said. “You can say ‘molested,’ but those children, as you heard them say [the grown-up Robson and Safechuk], they were thrilled to be there. They both married and they both have children, so it didn’t kill them.”

Well, yes, strictly speaking, Jackson didn't murder them. And yes, they were thrilled to be there. He was a rich celebrity lavishing them with gifts, praise and attention. So that he could molest them.

Asked if she was angry at Jackson, Streisand said, “It’s a combination of feelings. I feel bad for the children. I feel bad for him. I blame, I guess, the parents, who would allow their children to sleep with him. Why would Michael need these little children dressed like him and in the shows and the dancing and the hats?”

She didn't explain why she felt bad for Michael Jackson. He lived freely if not quite openly as a pedophile with a steady stream of victims and no real consequences.

Asked about the #MeToo movement, Streisand said it was "very powerful" but “Unfortunately, it’s going to cause a lot of women not being hired because men are worried they’ll be attacked.” By "attacked", she apparently meant "accused".

I don't know what's wrong with her. She's a Zionist. I read that she went to Israel and spoke out against "segregation" which I assumed meant discrimination against Palestinians, but, no, she meant Jewish women not praying with Jewish men, like this was the most serious injustice in Israeli society. It's not related to Michael Jackson, but it shows a tendency to willful blindness.

When Bill Clinton was president, Streisand couldn't understand why he met with Sharon Stone.

"What does she know about policy?" Streisand said.

She thinks politicians talk to her because they want to hear her opinions. 

Go ahead! Clutch at straws!

During the Great Depression, New York became the center of the art world. You know why? Because artists there realized they had no hope of making any money so they just did what they wanted. Unshackled by financial concern, their work blossomed.

Then there was the financial crisis. A vast number of people in the finance industry found themselves out of work and there was suddenly a glut of DJ's in New York. These unemployed banksters and stockbrokers were suddenly free to pursue their dream, and, not being the most creative people in the world, their dream was to play records.

Today, the economy stinks. How many decades has this dragged on? The only fields with any sign of job growth are bartending and waiting on tables.

So, go ahead! Movie-making costs nothing now. You're not going to learn anything in film school you can't learn listening to DVD commentaries and watching YouTube tutorials, so don't throw away money on that.

But we may be getting the worst of both worlds. Now you have people making a lot of horror movies either because they want to hedge their bets or they don't know any better.


The trouble with making a movie for a mass audience is that their tastes are, by definition, middle-of-the-road. The less it looks like a Hollywood movie, the more they'll complain, and they all think they're cineastes. I've seen zero budget movies I thought were brilliant, but then I read the outraged comments on Netflix or imdb.com. Angry customers stomped into video stores demanding their money back because The Blair Witch Project was part black & white and part videotape.

It's easier to publicize a niche audience.

A big fish is what you want to be. A great big fish.

Something about the admissions scandal

"To put it simply, we do not celebrate team players—we celebrate ball hogs. We celebrate people who would suffocate their own twin just so that they could emerge from the womb a little sooner. And when I say “we,” I am talking about everyone—even those of us who stand to gain nothing from this celebrity-obsessed culture except the juvenile diversion of vicarious living."

From "The Rich Are No Smarter Than You".

Read it here:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/22/the-rich-are-no-smarter-than-you/

On Chinese "intellectual property theft", American workers

Remember when Obama was threatening North Korea, claiming that they had "hacked" Sony, a Japanese corporation? There was no reason to think North Korea hacked them. If they did, they exposed racist emails between Sony executives mocking Obama.

Something from Counterpunch.org about the US attacking China over something that's none of the United States' business:

The US government is fighting with all it has to keep China behind in technology.  In his State of the Union Address, President Trump claimed this is to stop “the theft of American jobs.”  But in reality this war on technological advancement in China destroys American jobs and hurts American consumers and entrepreneurs.

The first indication that this is not a normal trade dispute was the criminal indictment of a Chinese corporation and three individuals for stealing technology from the “American”  Micron corporation.  Everything about this indictment is curious. The technology that was allegedly stolen was neither developed in the US nor ever put into production in the US.  Micron acquired the technology in 2012 when it acquired Elpida, a corporation that developed the technology in Japan and then produced it in Japan and Taiwan.  After Micron acquired Elpida, it did not move it to the US.  On the contrary.  Its strategy, its spokesman explained, was “to be a global leader…For this reason, Micron is establishing manufacturing, technology and business centers of excellence that will…optimize our global footprint”; to implement this strategy, it then fired hundreds of employees in Boise, Idaho,and opened an additional manufacturing plant in mainland China.

The technology that was allegedly stolen was developed and produced overseas and the workers who allegedly stole it were two of Micron’s former foreign workers who worked in one of those overseas plants–in Taiwan.   Under these circumstances the US government should not have intervened, and if it hadn’t Micron and other corporations might have had reason to rethink their strategy of producing overseas.  Instead, the indictment demonstrated to them that when the safety of moving jobs to foreign countries deteriorates, the US government will step in to restore it.  Doing so in the name of the American worker is a sham.

Robert Rodriguez again

One more thing about the new $7,000 Robert Rodriguez movie.

Well, a couple more things.

At this point, it's perfectly obvious that you can make a movie for $7,000. Making the money back is the hard part if you're not Robert Rodriguez. Earning a living at it seems impossible unless you can get a teaching job out of it.

The real questions now are, how do you get good performances out of inexperienced or non-actors if you're an inexperienced or non-director, how can you write a passable script if you're not a writer and how do you make anything watchable if you have limited experience and indeterminate talent?

I keep seeing movies that are bad but I can't put my finger on what went wrong. That's what I find alarming. That you can fail miserably and not know why.

Anti-vaxers are horrible, horrible people

https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/19/health/anti-vax-harassment-eprise/index.html

About on-line harassment of parents whose unvaccinated children died from preventable illnesses.

Nothing is considered too cruel. Just days after their children died, mothers say anti-vaxers on social media called them whores, the c-word and baby killers.

The mother in the Midwest, who wants to remain anonymous, isn't alone.

Jill Promoli, who lives outside Toronto, lost her son to flu. She believes the anti-vaxers are trying to silence the very people who can make the strongest argument for vaccinations: those whose children died of vaccine-preventable illnesses.

Robert Rodriguez, Red 11, $7000 feature

It's obvious you can make a movie for $7,000, but can you make a violent action/science fiction movie for $7,000?

Robert Rodriguez has made a new $7,000 feature, Red 11. It wasn't intended for public viewing, but it turned out well enough that he decided to release it. It hasn't been decided how it would be made available for public viewing, but making his money back shouldn't be a problem.

I just read the Variety review. It doesn't sound very good, but it should be interesting to see anyway.

Just how hard should critics be on a movie made for $7,000 (or less, according to the director’s final calculations)? If anything, it’s more tempting to scrutinize that budget claim, since it assumes that directors can borrow the cameras and equipment they need while convincing their actors to work for next to nothing. (Rodriguez paid his entire ensemble roughly $3,000, calling in favors from old friends like “El Mariachi” star Carlos Gallardo, who has a cameo.) Then again, quibbling over how he spent the money distracts from the purpose of the exercise.

Considering that Hollywood tentpoles cost somewhere in the ballpark of $25,000 per second to produce, and that even the lowest low-budget movies typically run well into the six-figure range, Rodriguez wants to show that being smart about the resources you have — which for him evidently includes a few trippy uses of the “Alita” set, even if most of the film takes place in his nondescript production offices — allows filmmakers to focus on problem-solving. Too many of his solutions involve quick cutting and canned sound effects (the fake punches are especially egregious in a fight scene between test subjects), and post-production color tricks actually make the HD footage look cheaper, instead of adding atmosphere. Another lesson: “El Mariachi” was aided enormously by the fact that subtitles covered the clunky Spanish-language line readings. Here, you get what you pay for, performance-wise.

It might have been more interesting to me if he had used a consumer camcorder and the complementary tripod that came with it. But what am I complaining about.

See HERE's the real lesson. He made the movie as an exercise. If it failed, fine, it's a failed experiment. What did you expect? He hadn't planned on releasing it anyway.

THAT should be the inspiration to impoverished filmmakers.

Rodriguez shot El Mariachi in Mexico. He wanted to be able to "fail quietly" out of public view.

Make your own experimental movie just to see if it's possible to do for a tiny sum, and if you fail, it was just an experiment. Nothing to be humiliated by. Try to do something good, but take the pressure off.

1930's film nakedness

I'll tell you one thing I noticed in junior high school. This was in the mid-1970's. We didn't have internet pornography in those days. We didn't have pornography of any kind that any of us got to see. I walked past an adult bookstore one day. I pictured it as being full of long literary novels that only an adult could manage to read.

But in junior high school, I noticed that Time magazine had exactly one nude photo in every issue. It had to have been a matter of policy. One had a woman getting a breast exam, some had naked hippies, some used stills from nude scenes in movies to illustrate their movie reviews.

I guess I was a pretty cool customer because I would look at the nude photo then say "Look at this" and casually hand it to some other kid and you'd be amazed at how excited they'd get. Even sophisticated theater types would go berserk.

Years later, I was hanging around in the university library looking through old bound copies of Life magazine, and it was the same thing. Even back in the '30's, each issue contained a single nude photo. I found some very weird and disturbing, like photographers back then could apparently walk into locker rooms and take pictures of the kids changing or showering. I guess people didn't object. There was a picture of high school boys in a shower and this was somehow supposed to make a point about democracy.

You get a distorted picture of the past when all you do is watch old movies and TV shows.

When you watch an old exploitation film from the '30's or '40's and you're startled by a nude scene, you wonder how audiences must have reacted back then. I always imagined them reacting like those kids in school, thrashing around in a nudity-induced frenzy.

The sulking rich kid's dilemma

I'm guessing that SOME of the rich kids whose parents bribed their way into college didn't know what was going on. That's what's been reported. They were too dumb to get into college, after all. They may have been too dumb to know they were too dumb.

But they're in an awkward position now. This would be a perfect time for them to sulk and whine that their parents had no faith in their ability. Their parents humiliated them in the national press. It's something some of them, like Lori Loughlin's daughter, Olivia Jade Guannulli, will never live down. They will be forever known for this scandal.

On the other hand, their parents spent, in some cases, millions of dollars and risked years in prison to get them into college.

So should the kids be sulking and trying to use this to their advantage, demanding cars, yachts, houses, etc, for what their wealthy parents did to them? Or should they be grateful? If you're a whiney rich kid who would use something like this to your advantage, you can't very well complain that they spent a fortune on a criminal conspiracy for your benefit.

Now, suppose you got into college through normal means, then your parents spent millions to get your younger sibling into an elite school. Or if they paid millions to get your older sibling into an "elite" school, then went to prison and you wound up in some middling state college. Then you might have something to hold against them.

Think of Falcon Heene. Thanks to his jackass father, he will forever be known as Balloon Boy. He could win a Nobel Prize and the headline would be "Balloon Boy wins Nobel Prize".

On the other hand, he sent his father to jail when he said on CNN, "You guys said we did it for a show," when he was asked why he didn't come out of the attic when he heard them calling him.

Did he ruin his father's life, or did his father ruin his life?

What did his jackass father think a six-year-old was going to say? Did he think a first grader would be good at thinking on his feet?

"I don't know, Father. Perhaps I was afraid I would be punished in some way. Of course, the longer I hid, the more compelling my reason to remain hidden. This entire episode could have been avoided if you and Mother had stopped spanking me, as I frequently suggested."

Rich kids again. Sorry.

There were two sad cases years ago. There was that drunken rich kid who got arrested when he demanded macaroni & cheese at a university cafeteria, and there was a young fellow who was an alternate on the Olympic ski team who, before flying home, was surprised that a bar would serve him drinks. He had several drinks which didn't affect him until he was on the plane. Then he drunkenly relieved himself in the aisle because he thought he was in the bathroom.

Both these guys were in the national news, and they both had gone to absurdly expensive ski academies---private high schools that emphasized skiing. How well do high school kids need to ski? How much money could anyone possibly make skiing? Because their parents were paying over $20 thousand a year for them to go to these schools. You think any of them made their money back?

Now with this college admission scandal, parents were paying vast sums---millions in some cases---to get their cretinous children into "elite" universities. You think there's any chance they'll make that money back? Will getting into those colleges boost their income enough to make it worth it?

I suppose it's possible.

I posted a rude comment to one of Olivia Jade's videos on YouTube before she shut down the comments sections.

"If this were YOUR idiot daughter, wouldn't YOU be so alarmed about her future that you would bribe her way into college?" I wrote wittily. 

That was unkind of me. The poor girl's parents are facing prison and she has been publicly humiliated herself. She said she wouldn't be going to class much, but she wanted to experience parties and game days, so that dream has been shattered. And her career as an "influencer" has been crippled. She still has her line of cosmetics, but her sponsors are dumping her.

I went to an Asian Film Festival here in town. There was a young film school grad from USC. He brought his TV pilot called ATF--Asian Tactical Force, about an elite SWAT-like team in the LAPD made up entirely of East Asian-Americans. It was ten minutes of drama followed by a twenty-minute gun fight. The guy produced it mainly to highlight his skills as a director. For what he spent on it, he might have made a passable movie.

But he spoke to the audience and commented that you're not going to learn much at film school. You really go there to make connections. 

So. If you want to figure a low cost alternative to film school, think in those terms. Try to figure out how to make connections without squandering a fortune.

Like, maybe just go long enough to make connections then drop out. 

Take a good look at your own personality. Are you a loner who nobody likes? You might not make any connections no matter how long you're there.

This is the last thing...

...about the admissions scandal unless there's actual news or I have something I think is intelligent to say about it.

Lori Loughlin and subnormal daughter at airport.

Since I keep posting about this college admissions scandal, here's from counterpunch.org, comments from Jeffery St Clair:

+ Most of the people implicated in the college entrance bribery scam are corporate executives, but the media has spent 98% of its time focusing on two B-list Hollywood actresses.

+ Why you should be contributing to Lori & Felicity’s Defense Fund: Their children cheated their ways into “elite” universities, so that your child wouldn’t be stuck with soul-crushing debt and forced to pay it off by taking a job at a hedge fund or oil industry lobby shop.

+ I was on a plane with Lori Loughlin in the mid-80s, during her first season on Full House. She was in the middle seat and sweetly said she’d love to see the Rockies. I gallantly offered her my window seat. I should have asked for money.

+ In the wake of the college admissions bribery scandal, it’s perhaps worth recalling the words of Antonin Scalia during oral arguments in an affirmative action case, where the justice advised that “black students should go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.”

Perhaps it is wrong to focus on the alleged wrong-doing of two B-list Hollywood actresses. I never heard of either one of them before now. How the hell did Jeffery St Clair recognize Lori Loughlin? Surely he wasn't an admirer of Full House. And you forget now what a crude racist Scalia was.

Paris Hilton, higher education

I remember when someone made fun of Paris Hilton for having a GED. A large percentage of high school graduates can't pass the GED, so she was probably smarter than a few of her classmates who graduated. But the thing that surprised me was that her wealthy parents cared at all that she had some sort of high school diploma. They were almost like normal parents.

Whatever happened to her, anyway?

I'm not sure if I graduated from high school. I didn't go through the graduation ceremony and I never bothered to pick up my diploma if there was one.  I couldn't imagine anyone ever asking to see it and no one ever did.

But that's one of things that comes to mind with this college admissions scandal. Were these rich, crooked but otherwise normal parents concerned about their below-average children to the point of committing bribery?

The celebrity college admissions scandal

"The best part about this story is that it gives any parent who didn't bribe their children into college (almost everyone) a chance to be sanctimonious."

--Josh "Elvis" Weinstein

I grew up a few blocks from the University of Oregon and never gave any thought about what college to go to. My brothers, both musicians, went there for a couple of years then transferred to better universities. One sent his tape to USC. He didn't hear from them for a long time. My mother finally called them to see if they were admitting him or not. It seems his tape and application got misdirected. They thought he was applying for graduate school and they weren't sure if they should take him. She said, no, he was an undergraduate. The guy was surprised and said he was definitely in. Our mother somehow managed to pay for it.

I never got anywhere in college. I'm sure that's a surprise to readers of this thing.

It's so easy for the rich to game the system legally. Imagine how dumb they have to be to do this.

Here's a tip: If you ever disguise a bribe as a charitable contribution, don't claim it as a tax deduction because they'll put you in prison for that. 

The children were scammed, too, apparently. One element of it was that the students would take their SATs at centers run by Rick Singer who was running the scam. They would hand in their tests, Singer would either trade it with one done by a smart person or he would correct the student's test before sending it in.

Singer told one of the parents, "It was so funny ’cause the kids will call me and say, 'Maybe I should do that again. I did pretty well and if I took it again, I’ll do better even.' Right? And they just have no idea that they didn’t even get the score that they thought they got."

Felicity Huffman had the idea of letting her daughter take the test for real, then she would want to take it again to improve her score and they would cheat on the second test.

I don't know how the rich kids feel about being duped by their parents. If you're rich, who cares about your self-esteem.

One of the daughters of one of the celebrities involved in this is a YouTube celebrity herself and has come under attack. I just watched a video of her, Olivia Jade Loughlin, talking about college. She wasn't sure how she would balance the demands of college with being a social media darling.

“I don’t know how much of school I’m gonna attend but I’m gonna go in and talk to my deans and everyone, and hope that I can try and balance it all,” she said. “But I do want the experience of, like game days, partying…I don’t really care about school, as you guys all know.”
 

Watch that poor dumb girl here:

https://youtu.be/lveMkZc-NRE

TV stars indicted in college admission conspiracy

Jodie Foster went, where---to Yale? Jonathan Taylor Thomas went to Harvard, Brooke Shields went to Princeton. Natalie Portman went to Harvard. Celebrities ALL go to elite schools. James Franco went to several at the same time. If he's really that smart, why does he waste his super-intellect on creative writing and conceptual art?

Conan O'Brien, meanwhile, noted that the education you get at Harvard really isn't that good.

When I was in high school, I started wondering how Thurston Howell III managed to graduate from Harvard. I knew how he got in, but did it make sense that he managed to get a degree? Then I look at Yale graduate George Bush, Jr, and it started to make sense.

I read a true crime book about Alex Kelly, the wealthy teen rapist from Greenwich, Connecticut. I finally understood it. One of the teachers from the high school there said that the rich kids had no intellectual curiosity whatsoever. They had zero interest in what they were studying. But they cared deeply about grades.

I was startled to read that rich parents used corporal punishment on their teenagers. Kelly's father would belt-whip him. Some parents had paddles. I guess you can get away with that if you're rich.

Actresses Lori Loughlin of Full House and Desperate Housewives' Felicity Huffman were among those arrested in a bribery scandal. Huffman is the wife of actor William H Macy who wasn't charged. They were part of a larger scandal involving rich people trying to get their unqualified children into elite universities for some reason. If you're rich, does it matter what college you go to?

They couldn't get their children in to college just by being celebrities? Couldn't they use their celebrity status to get their children into show business which, in turn, would get them into whatever university they wanted?

What do you think their horrible children wanted to major in?

You have to hand it to Rick Singer, parlaying his job as a college counselor into a vast multi-million dollar criminal conspiracy. You don't see that every day.

You think the federal prosecutors were snobs trying to protect their elite schools from the less worthy nouveau riche, or were they poor boys going after the rich bastards who looked down on them because they had to work their way through college?

The son of MOVIE star Rob Lowe took to Twitter. He was outraged, after all the hours of high-priced classes he took to prepare for the SAT's, that mere TV stars would think they could buy their way in with their dirty television money.

Jan-Michael Vincent RIP

Jan-Michael Vincent died February 10th. His death wasn't reported widely until Friday, March 8th.

His first role was playing Tony Prito, the Hardy Boys' friend, in The Mystery of the Chinese Junk (1967), made as a pilot for a TV series that never came to be. The first thing I remember seeing him in was "Danger Island" on The Banana Splits on Saturday mornings. A few years later, there was Disney's The World's Greatest Athlete. 

I heard that he was known for never flubbing a line. But alcoholism got the best of him.

Bryan Cranston told about appearing on Airwolf. He described doing a poor man's process shot. They would film Vincent in the helicopter as it sat on the ground with the blue sky in the background so viewers couldn't tell if it was on the ground or in the air. When they were ready to film, the director would gesture to Cranston. It was his signal to wake Vincent up so the they could shoot the scene. 

Spielberg vs Netflix again

So. Looking at that last thing I posted on here about this, going back over the decades---the seventy years of movies being shown in TV---is actually evidence on Steven Spielberg's side. Movies have ALWAYS been show on TV, so why should Netflix be any different?

And, really, I don't want Netflix taking over. Those bastards. You look at the crap they produce, like that Max Landis movie. They had nothing to do with the making of Roma. I've been thinking of cancelling Netflix because I can't find anything on there I want to watch. Anything they have that I want to see is available on Amazon anyway, and I hate Amazon, too.

I don't understand the Oscars. I was always surprised people in Hollywood are so desperate to win one. You'd think they'd be happy just to have a movie career.

Yeah, go ahead. Make it harder for Netflix. I won't stop you.

I know there are big budget movies like Reds that would only make their money back if they got an Oscar to bring people in, but, other than that, I don't know why anyone cares about Oscars. Movie theaters are all huge chains and I don't know why anyone cares about them. Netflix is a horrible business that wants to take over the movie business completely, so no one can watch anything without paying them. I've hated Spielberg for years.

So, in conclusion, to hell with every last one of them.

Woody Allen's Old Saybrook performed in Tehran

Iran isn't part of the international copyright convention and can do what they want, but I recall long, long ago reading a book by Woody Allen. It contained a short play he had written and it warned that you had to pay or have permission if you wanted to perform it, and they warned that this included people doing readings.

From the Tehran Times:

TEHRAN – A group of Iranian actors will perform a reading of Woody Allen’s “Old Saybrook” at Shahrzad Theater in Tehran on March 15.

Sajjad Qatei is the director of the reading performance in which he will also play a role, and Mahmud Rashidi is the producer of the production.

Bahman Vakhshur, Tima Pur-Rahmani, Ashkan Delavari, Hoda Fallah, Ramtin Meqdadi and Dorsa Hakimelahi are the other members of the cast.

The absurdist play is about Max, a writer who has left his play unfinished. Characters in the play finally get bored and a fight breaks out between the characters and the writer.

“In ‘Old Saybrook’, Mr. Allen indulges that side of himself that occasionally gets out of Manhattan like a Manhattanite with a summer rental,” the New York Times wrote in a review published in 2003. 

“Set in the opulent living room of a Connecticut beach house, the play begins with… the kind of literary, self-deprecating and neurotically screwy jokery that is pure Woody Allen. The clear reference is to Chekhov, whose bored, affluent characters, in Mr. Allen’s contemporary translation, are less pretentious than proudly shallow.”