George Lucas's original Star Wars sequel

I came across this on cracked.com. I suppose it's true.

If it is, it's another Kurosawa rip-off.

The original script to Star Wars was a direct rip-off of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. There were changes as they rewrote, but there are still elements of it in the movie.

But this thing with Luke smacking Leia to prove she's his slave would be from The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail which Kurosawa made in 1945. There was a Noh theater and a Kabuki drama based on the same story. Retainers disguised as monks slip a prince past some enemy troops by pretending he's a slave. Rotten slave-owning monks.

Kurosawa threw in comic actor Ken'ichi Enomoto as a porter. A critic said it was like doing Hamlet and adding a role for Jerry Lewis.

I'm not sure when I saw this movie. It was at the university. I was probably in high school. Whatever I knew about Kurosawa at the time probably came from the movie flier.

I cut my hair

An artist at work has a second job at a huge hardware store. He said that a number of his co-workers there had come to work with their heads shaved or with very short buzzcuts. They tried to cut their own hair, botched the job, and were forced to shave their heads.

I think it's because these young guys had never had a bad haircut. I went from age 8 to age 26 without ever getting even one good haircut. Those were ugly years. Every haircut a humiliation. You'd have to go to school the next day. These guys today jump in and start cutting like they didn't know you could fail.

The first time I cut my own hair, I took it very slow. I did it over a period of days. When in doubt, I did nothing. I let it go and came back to it after giving it a day or two. And it came out perfectly fine.

This last haircut a few days ago, I tried to do the same thing. I had some electric clippers arrive in the mail. I knew how they worked. There was a one inch guide. You snap it on the thing and it wouldn't let you cut hair to less than one inch in length.

But I didn't entirely trust it and even if it worked, maybe one inch was shorter than I imagined. 

I tried to go at it slowly, but just had to go ahead and trust it. I cut off a huge amount of hair. I had a ponytail and my hair was very long. What was left after cutting it looked fine. Cut the back and the sides to one inch then used scissors to cut the top. I wanted some of it a little longer so there would be enough to cover two places where my hairline had receded. 

I gave myself a caesar. Even length all around, combed forward on the top without a part. A short fringe on the front pushed up to one side so it wouldn't look like bangs.

The haircut is named for Julius Caesar who cut his hair this way and combed it all forward in hopes of concealing his receding hairline. That was over 2,000 years ago and people still talk about the guy's hair loss.

I did a much better job than he did.

Cheryl Dunye, "An Untitled Portrait" 1993, 3 minutes 22 seconds

My attention span...I don't know what's wrong with me. I'm watching a lot of very short films.

"An Untitled Portrait" uses video, much of it appropriated, with narration that isn't directly related to the imagery.

I thought the movie was rather hurtful. Dunye starts by saying that big feet ran in her family. Her mother wore a size ten which is only a men's size eight, which might be a little large for a women but it's certainly not terrible. Then she says her father wore a size nine which isn't big at all. Her brother wears a size fifteen which sounds rather large although I can't visualize it.

There are people with modestly sized feet who may have questioned their physical proportions because of this movie.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Vanilla Sex (1992, 4 minutes)

A terribly uninteresting movie considering everything. It had naked ladies.

Still photos scroll past while someone, I assume Cheryl Dunye, says that she heard that sado-masochists refer to sex without "toys" as "vanilla sex", while she herself had been referred as having "vanilla sex" because she dated primarily white women.

Sorry. I've pretty much given away the whole movie here.

I didn't like it that well. Still photos and some video. Black & white. I didn't like the music.

I did an image search and found several stills. It's now available on the Criterion Channel and maybe on Fandor and it has an IMDb listing. It's probably a bigger deal than I realize.

Born Free (1966)

Sort of a bizarro Tiger King. A couple in Kenya raise a lion cub after killing her man-eating parents.

I haven't seen this thing in over 45 years. They used to show it on TV it seemed like every year. I don't know why my family felt compelled to watch it.  My parents must have thought it was educational. I always hated movies about animals. Didn't they notice this?

In the opening scene, a lion kills a woman washing clothes in a river. We don't see the attack. We just see her clothes floating down the river then the water full of blood. Either we had a black & white TV or they cut that scene.

It was a true story. The couple in it, Joy and George Adamson, were both murdered. Joy was killed in 1980 by a kid who worked for them who they had fired. He avoided a death sentence because he was a minor when he committed the murder. George was killed nine years later by poachers when he came to the aid of a tourist they were attacking.

Theme song by John Barry used to be included on collections of instrumental hits.

Available on the Criterion channel.

Anybody's Woman (1981) Bette Gordon

Twenty-three minutes, reportedly filmed on Super 8. It looked pretty good. Filmed in Times Square before they cleaned the place up.

A woman comes home. Answers the phone. It's an obscene phone call. She hangs up. It rings again. She answers. She's told to come to work the next day.

People talk about pornography. Monologue, not dialogue. Spaulding Gray tells a disgusting story about a filthy movie he watched.

It was all right, I guess, but I wouldn't go around recommending this thing to people.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Tarnation (2003)

Jonathan Caouette's autobiographical documentary about his early life and his mentally ill mother. Much of it was a nightmare. He was horribly abused in foster care. His mother's personality was destroyed by shock treatments in the Texas State Hospital.

As a thirteen-year-old, he would go to an 18-and-over club in drag. He got in by impersonating a young woman. He made friends who introduced him to punk rock and underground film.

A terrible sad story, but he didn't seem to be impoverished. His family had a camcorder which cost a fortune back then and he was shooting Super 8 film which cost ten bucks a roll ($20 in today's money) for three minutes and twenty seconds of footage.

He eventually fled Texas for New York City where he worked as an actor and where he made this movie for $218 on a Mac using free software. The distributor reportedly put in another $400 thousand to prepare the movie for release.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Alla ricera di Tadzio (1970)

I finally got The Criterion Channel again. Watched a short documentary of sorts about the search by director Luchino Visconti for a really good-looking kid to play Tadzio in Death in Venice. In the novel by Thomas Mann, the kid was twelve and was blond and blue-eyed, and they weren't going to find him in Italy.

The character was part of a family of Polish aristocrats. They went to Poland, but it was Communist and the kids there were proletarian, which is a good thing.

They went to Scandinavia. I don't know what it says about "social democracy" that they had such plausibly aristocratic children. Because the director was Italian, they couldn't communicate in their native languages.

"What?" Visconti said. "He's FORTY? That's incredible! He looks great for forty!----Oh. Fourteen."

The character only had a couple of lines in the script. They were casting strictly for looks.

They finally auditioned Bjorn Andresen who was too old and too tall for the part, but he was a very nice-looking young man. He seemed bemused by the whole thing. That may just be the way good-looking people react to things. The less attractive kids were apprehensive.

They made Bjorn smile at the camera and mince around the room and asked him to take off his turtleneck.

The whole thing turned out to be a bad experience for the kid which shouldn't be much of a surprise.

Sheila Kuehl on Bob Denver

I wrote a little about Bob Denver yesterday in For Those Who Think Young. Here is Sheila Kuehl, Zelda on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis talking about working with Denver including a run-in with racist trash in Alabama.

For Those Who Think Young (1964)

With Pamela Tiffin two years before Harper, Bob Denver and Tina Louise the same year Gilligan's Island premiered. They waste Paul Lynde a year or two before he became TV's Uncle Arthur .

A big budget comedy, not really funny, about wealthy college students who will go to any lengths to keep their favorite bar open, but that only happens in the last few minutes, so I'm giving away the ending.

Youth culture doesn't quite exist in this thing. It's not as bad as Otto Preminger's Skidoo, about hippies where the main characters are all over fifty, but the college kids hang around in a club also favored by the middle aged and elderly. Perhaps this is as it should be. They stick to their own age group on the beach. Cast is all-white except for Sammee Tong.

The girls are all in a sorority. Tina Louise as sort of a stripper who remains fully clothed.

They spike sociology professor Ellen Burstyn's drink. In a drunken state, she reveals that she's gathering information to shut down the club.

Denver sits in a lotus position and introduces Nancy Sinatra to meditation. He does that upside down chinface thing and performs a couple of spoken word songs. He has nice teeth. Later, he plays the bongos in a trio on the beach.

Sorry. The plot is kind of choppy.

George Raft appears briefly.

Free with Amazon Prime.

Trump in Tulsa

The thing was on TV in the living room. I was there doing something else so I was forced to listen to several minutes of it, then I wisely went to take a nap.

Maybe I should have watched. Because I just read this on the Guardian website:

Trump told the crowd at great length why he couldn’t possibly walk down a ramp unaided. He even re-enacted his walk down the deadly incline. He also treated them to a long excuse about why he couldn’t hold a glass of water with one hand. It apparently has something to do with protecting his expensive silk tie. Man of the people, that Trump guy.

I'm sorry I missed that. 

I'm actually kind of with Trump on the ramp thing. At least I would be if it were rainy and possibly slick. But using both hands to hold a glass looks weird and infantile and perhaps puts the lie to his claims during the Republican primaries about the size of his hands

The ramp thing made me think of Mitt Romney, the way he was always mincing around. I didn't notice it until an elderly relative pointed it out.

"I've never seen a man walk that way," she said.

State of Alaska finally gets rid of McCandless death bus

Chris McCandless, poor devil.

Two people have died and fifteen have had to be rescued while visiting the abandoned bus where Christopher McCandless died of starvation in 1992. He was the subject of the movie Into the Wild, based on the book of the same name. You just can't survive on your own as a hunter/gatherer. The poor guy was eating roots he found but digging them up burned more calories than he got out of them. If he had just brought a map of the area, he could have simply walked out. He thought he was trapped there. He died at age 24.

The Alaska Department of Natural Resources finally had the good sense to get rid of the bus, using a helicopter to carry it away.

The people who visited the thing called it "The Magic Bus" rather than "The Death Bus" or "The Starvation Bus".


I had a great uncle who was born in the 1880's. He was half Indian. He grew up among the Indians on the Oregon coast and had an uncanny ability find his way through the forest.

He was out in the woods one time with his nephew, my uncle. The sun set and they were in total darkness. He told his nephew to stay behind him and he walked in total darkness at full speed directly to their parked car.

The point here being that even my Great-Uncle George was afraid to go into the woods alone. That's why he brought his nephew.

His son, my first cousin once removed, got a degree in anthropology when he was in his 60's. I was sitting at a table with him and others at his graduation party. He was talking about Indian lore. I won't go into it, but he talked about what parts of a human body bears left behind when they ate somebody. It's terribly dangerous out there.

Danny Masterson, rapist: Variety interviews journalist Tony Ortega

Ashton Kutcher with  his rapist friend Masterson

An interview with Tony Ortega in Variety about the arrest of Scientologist Danny Masterson on three counts of rape and what this means for the "religion". 

https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/danny-masterson-tony-ortega-scientology-1234642021/

From the interview:

I think Scientology’s influence in general has been waning, particularly in Hollywood. Hollywood was terrified of Scientology, and more recently it seems like every other show has put some kind of a Scientology joke in their scripts in the last few years. Partly it’s to say “You’re not the big scary bully anymore.” However I think there is still plenty of fear in Los Angeles in terms of Scientology. But they have lost influence I think.

Asked about what took them so long to bring charges:

It was very clear that the managers in the office below Jackie Lacey were all for not only charging Masterson, but charging him with the most severe penalties. I reported in February 2018, more than two years ago, that the managers in the office had signed off on charging him under this California one-strike law that would carry a 25-to-life sentence.

Nobody else picked up that story. I think most people thought “Ortega must be exaggerating” or something. Now Jackie Lacey comes out and says she’s going for 45-to-life — even stronger than I had heard. It’s hard to know for sure. I had always been hearing for the last two years that the office itself was very strongly behind the idea of charging Masterson and charging him with very serious allegations and serious penalties, and it was just a matter of “When is Jackie Lacey going to make a decision?” 

... 

Scientology is really intertwined with Masterson in this case. There were some news organizations that reported the story yesterday and somehow managed not to use the word “Scientology.” I’m kind of amazed at that. Because not only is Danny Masterson a lifelong Scientologist — not only is he a faithful soldier for Scientology, and would show up at events and make strong statements in the press about Scientology — but all three of his victims, the ones that the charges are stemming from, were Scientologists at the time. And at least two out of the three I know of went to the church, who discouraged them from going to the authorities. 

So Scientology is very much involved in this story. My question for Rinder was, I’ve seen some things online, people were speculating that if Masterson was charged, Scientology would distance itself. But as Mike says, they’re so involved, it will be difficult for them just to drop him. Because he thinks Danny could cause them a lot of trouble. And I think he’s right. I think there are people that were helping him prevent this from being prosecuted earlier. That’s what I’m looking forward to finding out — is just how much of a liability Scientology has in all this, and how much that will be part of this case.

...

This is definitely one of the biggest legal milestones in Scientology history, there’s no question. As far as criminal cases, the biggest criminal case that Scientology has had to face was the Snow White prosecution in 1979, that ended up involving 11 top Scientologists who were convicted and went to prison. Since then there have been a couple of other Scientologists that were very notably prosecuted criminally. One was Rex Fowler, who was a Scientologist who killed his business partner and went to prison for it. Then there was Reed Slatkin, who was one of the largest Ponzi schemers until Bernie Madoff came along and made everyone look like pikers… 

This one is just sort of hard to gauge, because I’m not sure where it’s going. It’s a combination of really awful allegations. You combine that with celebrity. I know Danny Masterson is not the biggest celebrity in the world, but a lot of young people really remember him from “That ’70s Show.” You combine that with Scientology’s reputation for bullying and legal chicanery, and boy, what a mix. I think people are going to be really interested in how this turns out.

My God! She's a monster!

 47-year-old millionaire degenerate Gwyenth Paltrow appeared on The Tonight Show with her fourteen-year-old son, Moses, and promoted her new scented candle called "This Smells Like My Orgasm". This was a follow-up to another candle she dubbed, "This Smells Like My Vagina".

Turned out her tween son was there just off-camera when Fallon asked to talk to him.

https://nypost.com/2020/06/17/gwyneth-paltrow-hypes-new-smells-like-my-orgasm-candle-with-help-from-son-moses/?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_source=P6Twitter&utm_medium=SocialFlow

Soap operas back in production for some reason

I haven't watched a soap opera in decades. They say they're going to go back into production and they're talking about the precautions they'll take. Something about sex dolls.

Cracked.com reports that "sex scenes will also require a little creative finesse. Actors' spouses will act as stand-ins for sex scene scenes that require physical contact. In some cases, blow-up dolls will be used. Maybe there's a way to handle this elegantly..."
.
You can look at old soap opera episodes from the '50's on YouTube. In the old days, they seemed to have only two actors per scene. They'd talk and talk and talk. Then maybe someone else would come in and they'd trade off.

I noticed this watching old episodes of Dark Shadows from the '60's. I assumed it was easier on the writers to write thirty pages of dialog a day this way, but then I watched a couple of minutes of a more recent soap opera and was surprised to find that every scene was a crowd scene.

They could do it the way they filmed old episodes of Dragnet. In the '50's, they developed what came to be known as "Dragnet editing". There were no reaction shots---just close-ups of whoever was speaking.

Here's a video of Leonard Nimoy describing it. They would film the opening shot---the actors walk in and take their places---then they would shoot the final shot which was the same shot but with the actors walking out. Then they would film the middle part---each actor in close-up reading their lines from a teleprompter.

They didn't do all the scenes that way but that made an impression on Nimoy. Seems pretty safe pandemic-wise.

Serial rapist Danny Masterson arrested

That '70's Show actor, Scientologist and habitual sex criminal Danny Masterson has been arrested on three counts of rape. These were crimes he was accused of committing in 2001 and 2003. He could get 45 years to life.

Last year, Masterson and "Church" of Scientology leader David Miscavige were sued by Masterson's victims for covering up his crimes.

From Vulture.com, August 16, 2019:

The lawsuit, which stems from sexual-assault allegations made against Masterson to the LAPD in 2016, accuses the actor, Miscavige, and the church of stalking and trying to intimidate accusers who have gone public and/or reported accusations to law enforcement. 

At the time, four women accused the actor of sexually assaulting and/or raping them (three of whom were members of the church). One of the women, Marie Bobette Riales, says she began dating Masterson in 2002. She alleged that Masterson drugged her drinks on several occasions so that he could sexually assault her while she was unconscious. 

...

What does this new lawsuit have to do with the rape allegations? 

According to the new complaint: “This case is brought … for the Defendants’ conspiracy to cover up that Daniel Masterson sexually assaulted four young women. When those women came forward to report Masterson’s crime, the Defendants conspired to and systemically stalked, harassed, invaded their family’s privacy, and intentionally caused them emotional distress to silence and intimidate them.” 

The lawsuit goes into detail about the many different ways in which the accusers say the church, as well as Masterson, tried to intimate them into silence. 

...

So what is the church accused of exactly? 

Overall, the church faces 14 different accusations in the lawsuit, including but not limited to: 

• False imprisonment: Doe says her movements were restricted without her consent and that a combination of physical force and threat of force was used to physically detain her. 

• Kidnapping: She claims she was relocated to a different location, also without her consent. 

• Stalking: The church is accused of placing her and others under surveillance “with the intent to alarm, threaten and harass” on an ongoing basis. 

• Libel: After she says the church publicly called her a “paid liar,” “unethical,” and “rampant[ly] promiscuous,” her potential employment opportunities dried up. 

• Slander: Similarly, the church is accused of making statements about her that were designed to have a negative impact on her public image and employment prospects after leaving the church. 

• Invasion of privacy: She accuses church leaders of using her image (and the images of her family) to defame her/them publicly. The church allegedly created a series of blog posts and other online media that could be used in retaliation against anyone who went public with their stories about the church. The complaint says that Doe “reasonably feared for her safety and the safety of her family.” 

• Human trafficking: Doe say she was deprived of her personal liberty and subjected to “forced labor and/or services” by the church. 

• Workplace violations: The church is accused of failing to pay minimum wage and provide time off according to the California state code. 

The main focus of the suit, says Kent, is that church leaders and its members systematically silence and intimidate victims of sexual and physical abuse “by forbidding them from reporting their abuse to law enforcement and blaming the victims for the abuse they suffered.”

Pro-rape celebrity Ashton Kutcher with Masterson.

Ashton Kutcher, who presents himself as a supporter of #MeToo and a crusader against sex trafficking, is a close friend of Masterson and has been called out by Masterson's victims.

One of the women Masterson raped who has remained anonymous told The Daily Beast:

“Ashton personally knew each victim. I appeared on an episode of Punk’d, I rushed him in my car to make a flight after he finished a That ‘70s Show episode. And he knew the others as well. If Ashton doesn’t believe women he knows—we should think he really supports women? #IBelieveHer?”

Highway Patrol (1955-1959)

I fell asleep with the TV on again. Somehow slept through the night and slowly woke up listening to an episode of Highway Patrol with Broderick Crawford.

A late '50's series. Seemed to follow the Dragnet model, but instead of using real stories of the Highway Patrol, they used plots that were so unremarkable you assumed they were true. Which apparently worked pretty well.

Of course, I've only seen about three episodes. Maybe the others were way more dramatic.

Timothee Chalamet, lip gloss, Bob Steele

Not long ago, I mocked 1930's B movie cowboy legend Bob Steele for wearing lipstick.

So, to be fair, here's Timothee Chalamet (above) obviously wearing lip gloss. It looks like they touched up his eyebrows, too, and you just know his hair was carefully coiffed and sprayed into place. If his hair and make-up don't make him look enough like a middle-aged woman, get a load of his blouse.

And here, below, is Jean Seberg as a teenager playing Joan of Arc. Crew cuts were popular when I was a kid and I always hated them. But here was Jean Seberg with one and she looked like the prettiest teenage boy you'd ever seen. I thought maybe I was wrong about military haircuts. Then I realized she had on mascara and lipstick. Looks like they accentuated her cheekbones, too. It was the make-up, not the crew cut.

It didn't work nearly as well on Bob Steele as it did on the girl, but who knows what he looked like without it.

Speaking of crew cuts, I haven't had a haircut in at least two years. Once it's long enough to tie back in a ponytail, it's just so easy you stop thinking about it. But it's really starting to annoy me.

Apparently America is now overwhelmed with self-isolated people desperate for haircuts. I watched a few of them on YouTube. They all have what I consider short hair. It's not even medium length. But they're distraught and are willing to risk disaster either by going to get a haircut during a deadly pandemic or by using electric hair clippers on themselves.

The men cutting their hair annoyed me, so I watched a woman in her 70's use electric clippers. Her hair wasn't long to begin with, but she was distressed by it. She had never cut her own hair before which is something I thought all women did. She used a one-inch guide on the clippers, so her hair was cut to a uniform one inch length, and it looked passable, I guess. Didn't look great, I figured that was about how my hair would come out and it was good enough. At least it didn't look overly neat.

Like a Japanese tea bowl. Imperfection is part of the aesthetic.

I ordered some hair clippers. I had to find some that were cheap but with a guide so I could cut it one inch long.

Found some for $26 on Amazon, but they'll take a month to get here, so I'll have time to contemplate what I'm going to do to myself.

Walker Texas Ranger

Texas Ranger worship is just embarrassing.

It seems like a show about a sixty-year-old who used to be really, really good at karate who gets into fights with much younger men would be pretty good. But there's a channel on TV called Charge! that mostly shows old episodes of Walker Texas Ranger. I've never been able to sit through it, but I somehow managed to watch most of an episode.

Chuck Norris and his friends are on a fishing trip. They're in a lodge with some retirees surrounded by drug traffickers who want to kill them all. Chuck Norris and his friends are out of bullets. They mill around the house and occasionally look out through the curtains or open the door and look around. The criminals don't know they're out of bullets, but they stand around talking without any thought that someone might shoot them.

They stole a scene from the old Technicolor soap opera Violent Saturday (1955, Victor Mature, Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine). The criminals set a car on fire and send it racing toward the house.

Later, they stole a gag from Straw Dogs. Criminals climb in the windows. One gets his leg caught in a decorative antique bear trap. Chuck Norris punches him and knocks him out. The other  ranger sprays a criminal with a fire extinguisher which apparently renders him incapable of firing his gun, then knocks him out, too. In both cases, even though they're out of bullets, they walk off without picking up the criminal's gun and simply trust that they won't get up and shoot them.

In conclusion, it wasn't very good.

At least I'm eating cheap

The good thing about self-isolating and being afraid to venture out into public places is that I no longer feel the need to eat food that I like or want to eat. I'm saving a fortune. I've been eating salami sandwiches for lunch every day at work. And I don't mean high class gourmet salami. It's not even Oscar Meyer salami. It's some cheap brand of cotto salami nobody likes and it's one slice of that and couple pieces of white bread.

During the making of The Seven Samurai, the cast and crew began complaining that the studio sent the same lunch every day---a rice ball and a radish. They called and complained. "At least throw in a cabbage leaf!"

It sounds like a cruel Japanese stereotype, so who knows, but that's what I read.

Several years ago---almost twenty years ago, now that I think about it---the deli in a local supermarket started selling vernacular French cuisine. They sold baguettes with some ham stuck in them. They sold those everywhere the one time I was in France--the one time I ventured outside of North America. That was all those people ate over there.

And, finally, I'll tell you something disgusting. In grade school, they showed us this ghastly "educational" film of Eskimos butchering a caribou. We were horrified. The worst part was when they gouged out the eyes and tossed them to the children to eat. The class responded audibly to that horror.

The teacher became enraged. They don't have candy! They have to eat animal eyes instead! She thought we were culturally insensitive.

Alfred Hitchcock, Daniel Boone, tiny casts

They're starting to show The Alfred Hitchcock Hour on METV. They used to show two half-hour episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I saw what may have been the first episode, written by Robert Bloch, based on a story by Patricia Highsmith, starring Dean Stockwell.

It had a total of eight people in it. They could have cut it down to five if they wanted to economize.

Had a surprisingly grotesque shot of a strangling victim.

I watched another episode last night that had, let's see, seven characters including a child actor, plus several extras. The child did his own stunts.

In this era of COVID-19, work only with tiny casts. Maybe that's my point here.

They do that anyway. Unless it's a comedy about a giant family, every child on TV is an only child and most of the parents are single.

The TV show Daniel Boone was set in a time before contraception about a historical figure who had at least a dozen children in real life. On the show, he and his wife have only one son, Israel. The real Israel Boone died at a young age in a battle with the British. Maybe they picked him so they could kill off his character when he wasn't cute anymore. "We HAD to! It was historically accurate!"

Someone told me they watched an episode of Bonanza which detailed how each of the sons had a different mother. Ben Cartwright had only one child with each of his late wives.

I thought Bonanza was a little more plausible than The Big Valley. The family on The Big Valley was supposed to be so respectable and high class, yet the sons were always getting into fist fights and they killed one or two people every week. Bonanza was about a semi-degenerate all-male household who raised and slaughtered cattle for a living.

Pearl Jam's Jeremy

I never listened to music if I could help it. I didn't buy records or CDs. But, back when MTV got its start, I had friends who watched it all the time even though, at the beginning, they just played the same few videos over and over. It was all-white at that point. One video was an attack on the press by a rock star who thought that tabloid TV was "the evening news". They kept showing an interview with this imbecile sharing his deep thoughts about journalism.

Pearl Jam has posted the uncensored version of their "Jeremy" video on YouTube. I remember seeing it. Even back then it seemed like a terrible idea to show a shirtless teen model consumed with angst shooting himself in front of his class. Why romanticize that? 

The song was based on a real kid who did the same thing. There was no clear reason for him killing himself other than clinical depression. Doing a popular song and a music video about it was obviously a nightmare for his family. The kid in the video resembled the real kid to a degree.

When Stephen King published his first book, Carrie, he got the publisher to also put out his earlier, unpublished novels. They didn't want a sudden glut of Stephen King books on the market, so they were published under the name Bachman. One of them was about a kid who takes his class hostage with a rifle.

Some time after the book was published, a kid somewhere took his class hostage with a rifle. When he surrendered, police found he was carrying a copy of King's novel. 

King told the publisher to withdraw the book. He didn't need money that bad. And King is completely anti-censorship. He's defended writers like Salman Rushdie and recently Woody Allen when his jackass son helped stop publication of his memoir. In the case of Rushdie, when bookstores announced they wouldn't stock or would remove his book, King told them they wouldn't be selling his books, either, and they changed their minds.

Pier Paolo Pasolini, Oedipus Rex (1967)

I watched Pasolini's Oedipus Rex again. It has the COVID-19 tie-in. For some reason, it starts in semi-modern dress, apparently in Italy in the early 20th century, and it ends in the 1960's. The middle part was filmed in Morocco and was set in the ancient world.

It reminded me a little of Tarzan. They find baby Oedipus in the desert and the king adopts him even though he has several slave boys around him. The place was full of kids. Why didn't he adopt any of them? What made a random baby someone found so special?

I didn't really like the look of it when I watched it the first time. I changed the setting on the TV to "Movie" mode and now it looks great.

Available on Amazon Prime.

Pasolini's Oedipus Rex, another movie for the pandemic

From Jeffrey St Clair on counterpunch.com:

I watched Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex again last weekend. It was one of Cockburn’s favorite films and he often remarked that the greatest shot in cinema was the close up of Jocasta’s face (played by the wonderful Silvana Mangano) the moment she realizes she’s being having lusty sex with her son. I’d forgotten there was a plague in Thebes during Oepidus’ reign. The scenes of the parade of bodies to a funeral pyre in the film is very powerful. In Sophocles, the plague is the result, according to the Pythian Priestess at Delphi, of a miasma, a kind religious corruption. Instead of opening the temples, Oedipus demands that people stop their acts of worship until the cause can be found…The plague, as this intriguing study from the CDC, was almost certainly a zoonotic pathogen…

What kind of father is Steven Spielberg?

A couple of days ago, commenting on Steven Spielberg's daughter's foray into the pornography business, I posted:

I still say the poor girl could have a perfectly good career acting in regular movies. Everyone would want her in their movie. If Spielberg is any kind of a father, it would guarantee that he would see it. It could be their ticket to the big time.

On further reflection, what kind of father is Steven Spielberg? The asshole sent his daughter to boarding school. Why? What kind of "man" does that? She was abused because of her weight there which I would guess had something to do with her reported anorexia.

Long ago, I worked in a high end furniture store. Among our customers was a wealthy retired couple from California. The wife said they had been friends with cartoonist Charles Schultz. She said he was down-to-earth. Every time he had guests, he would serve tuna salad sandwiches. Every time. He was the son of a barber. But once he got rich, even HE sent his teenager daughter to a Swiss boarding school for not being docile enough. He wanted to ship his son off to a boarding school, too, so his daughter wouldn't feel singled out. What a nice guy.

Mia Farrow sent Moses to boarding school. He didn't want to go. But we already knew she was a horrible person.

Child murdering movie director John Landis send his degenerate son Max Landis to boarding school and look at him. Look at both of them

I don't know what's wrong with rich people. It doesn't matter what their background is, whether they're new rich or old. They're all horrible, horrible people.

George Kuchar, "Mongreloid" (1978)

The late George Kuchar's "Mongreloid", available on YouTube. A one person, one dog film. Something like it could be made while sheltering in place. A biography of the dog, Bocko, who belonged to George and his twin brother, Mike. He was Mike Kuchar's dog. He brought Bocko to San Francisco where George Kuchar lived and worked and left him with George when he went back to New York.

Bocko had a significant role in Mike Kuchar's "The Craven Sluck" which doesn't appear to be available on YouTube now. It's available on DVD along with "The Sins of the Fleshapoids".

Bocko lived an extremely long life for such a large dog.

"The MONGRELOID documents my relationship with my dog and parts of it were shot by an ex-student of mine so I guess you can look at it as him getting his revenge since I was photographed in my own habitat which makes me automatically look like an idiot." – George Kuchar

I don't know what to tell you. It's 4 AM. I'm getting ready to go buy groceries. The store opens at 5 AM and is open to the elderly and others at high risk from COVID-19. I'm neither, but I live with my mother who's pushing ninety and I'm afraid of bringing the virus home with me. I'll go in at 5 AM when the store will be nearly empty then come home and disinfect everything as I bring it into the house, then try to get a little sleep before I go to work.

I've really gotten used to never going anywhere.

[6:44 AM: I went to the store. There was an old guy wearing a mask that only covered his mouth, not his nose. For some reason he was digging though the packages of tortillas on the shelf. Really leaning in there, trying to get to any that were in the back. This is one reason you should disinfect your groceries before you bring them inside.]

Woody Allen may quit film-making

Woody Allen said in an interview with the Financial Times that he may stop making movies. He noted that he's quite old and could die any time, although his father lived to be 100 and worked a job when he was 90. He won't be directing anything until there's either a vaccine for COVID-19 or the pandemic peters out if that's possible.

Then there's the issue of movie theaters. The theaters in New York are closed at the moment and it's not clear how many will reopen. Allen said that people are getting used to staying home and watching their big hi definition TV's. He wants his movies shown in theaters,

I would imagine it's a money thing at least in part. He gets a percentage of the gross box office. He made a fortune off Midnight in Paris. If his movies go straight to streaming video, he'll be stuck with nothing but his directing fee, writing fee and acting fee if he appears in it.

He's like a low-level Spielberg. Spielberg rakes in a percentage of ticket sales. It's made him a billionaire. He attacked Netflix and blathered about the importance of seeing movies in theaters. He hasn't been to a movie in forty years. It's just the money he's after.

Allen's just like the rest of us. He thought he'd really get some work done while sheltering in place, but all he does is sit around the house.

I would imagine that Steven Spielberg's daughter has delayed starting her sex industry career although, out of some confused sense of sexual morality, she said she'll only do solo videos out of consideration for her husband or boyfriend or whatever he is. So she could start filming them now on her own. She could be a director as well as an actor. I hope she'll take time to re-consider her terrible choices.

I still say the poor girl could have a perfectly good career acting in regular movies. Everyone would want her in their low budget movie. If Spielberg is any kind of a father, it would guarantee that he would see it. It could be their ticket to the big time. She could be the new John Carradine appearing in movie after movie after movie.

Anybody see this?

What movie was this? I saw the beginning of it on a Roku channel showing only public domain movies. I've been trying to find it again.

Western made in the '30's. Had this horrifying opening. John Wayne (if I remember correctly) walks into the saloon and finds it strewn with dead bodies. It was bloodless and gore-free, like that episode of Dragnet where they investigated a mass murder.

John Wayne walks across the bar and shuts off the player piano.

I think he then cheerfully explains to the sheriff that they were already dead when he got there.

I never liked John Wayne. Didn't like his looks or his voice. Seemed like a big lout lumbering around in cowboy boots.

But now I've watched these other B westerns and I can see that he was better than the other cowboy stars back then. They were all terrible actors and they smiled too much as John Wayne did. But I think I could have beaten up half of those other guys and some were clearly wearing lipstick and eye makeup.

Herb Stempel, RIP

Herbert Stempel.

Herbert Stempel passed away at age 93 on April 7th. He had been a contestant on the quiz show Twenty-One and helped blow the whistle on rigged TV game shows of the 1950's.

Charles Van Doren, who replaced Stempel as star contestant on the show, died last year on April 9th, almost one year to the day, also at age 93.

Stempel was played by John Turturro in the movie Quiz Show (1994).

From Variety:

After the scandal, Stempel became a high school social studies teacher in New York and later worked for the New York City Department of Transportation. He assisted in a 1992 documentary about the scandal for the PBS series “American Experience” and was a paid consultant on “Quiz Show,” which also starred Ralph Fiennes as Van Doren. Stempel made a cameo appearance in “Quiz Show,” portraying a different contestant being interviewed by a congressional investigator, portrayed by Rob Morrow.

Charles Van Doren (right). "It's silly and distressing to think that people don't have more faith in quiz shows."