Fame High

I'm reminded of what Charles Grodin wrote. He went to acting school. His teachers told him that no one would ever hire him talking the way he does. This is because he didn't speak in an English accent. Their idea of good acting was to speak in a British accent.

There was Spike Lee who talked about film school, how the student films that the professors praised were just terrible.

There's that screenwriting guru who's never had a single script produced who charges hundreds of dollars for seminars which completely mislead students.

I'm sitting here watching Fame High, about kids in some sort of "arts" high school in Los Angeles. The teachers berate the students, telling them how to be professionals. But----can they be trusted? Are they miseducating these poor students? Every few minutes, we see some teacher telling them what they have to do to succeed and warning them that they'll fail miserably if they don't do exactly what the teacher demands.

I know people who've succeeded in music, art and acting, and they don't say any of this stuff.

I notice what the kids are studying----classical music, ballet and jazz. Is there money in that?

I think they should teach a course in becoming a YouTube celebrity and then parlaying that into some kind of career.

Moses Farrow speaks out

Moses

People Magazine talked to Moses Farrow, Dylan Farrow's older brother who was fourteen or fifteen when Mia and Woody split. Moses and Dylan were adopted by Woody.

From the article:

"My mother drummed it into me to hate my father for tearing apart the family and sexually molesting my sister," Moses, 36, tells PEOPLE in the magazine's new issue. "And I hated him for her for years. I see now that this was a vengeful way to pay him back for falling in love with Soon-Yi." 

 ...

"Of course Woody did not molest my sister," says Moses, who is estranged from Farrow and many of his siblings and is close to Allen and Soon-Yi. "She loved him and looked forward to seeing him when he would visit. She never hid from him until our mother succeeded in creating the atmosphere of fear and hate towards him. The day in question, there were six or seven of us in the house. We were all in public rooms and no one, not my father or sister, was off in any private spaces. My mother was conveniently out shopping. I don’t know if my sister really believes she was molested or is trying to please her mother. Pleasing my mother was very powerful motivation because to be on her wrong side was horrible." 

...

Moses accuses Farrow of bullying him as well. "Our mother has misled the public into believing it was a happy household of both biological and adopted children," he says. "From an early age, my mother demanded obedience and I was often hit as a child. She went into unbridled rages if we angered her, which was intimidating at the very least and often horrifying, leaving us not knowing what she would do."  

...

Moses, a family therapist, says that his own life has been made better by spending time with Allen.

"I think my sister is missing a great deal in life in not reconnecting with her father, who had always adored her," he says. "It’s important that she assert her independence from our mother and not go through life with the false impression that she has been molested by my father. I am very happy I have come into my own power, separating from my mother, which has led to a positive reunion with my father."

People got Dylan's reaction, which I thought was bizarre on a couple of points:

"I will not see my family dragged down like this. I can't stay silent when my family needs me and I will not abandon them like Soon-Yi and Moses. My brother is dead to me. My mother is so brave and so courageous and taught me what it means to be strong and brave and tell the truth even in the face of these monstrous lies."  

Her family needs her? I thought she was supposed to be the victim and they were all doing it for her. Mia and Ronan needed her to repeat the accusations against Allen? Why?

Michael Wolff in The Guardian wrote:

Indeed, the larger context for this rehashed scandal is not a pattern of abuse or the ongoing dysfunctions of a celebrated family but rather the demands of a publicity rollout. Twenty-one years after the event – all parties long quiet – a story is revived. It is an old scandal for a new generation.

The impetus seems to be to establish Mia Farrow as a celebrity activist worthy of the world stage, and, as well, to launch a public career for her son Ronan.

The campaign began in the November issue of Vanity Fair in a profile of Mia Farrow by Maureen Orth, a long-time friend (Orth is the widow of NBC's Tim Russert), in which Farrow offered the headline grabber that Frank Sinatra, rather than Woody Allen, might be Ronan's father. In a demonstration of Farrow's famous media acumen, that's all she said, Sinatra "might" be – worldwide titillation followed.

The terms of the article would have been negotiated beforehand. Mia Farrow is, at this point in her career, not a Vanity Fair worthy subject. Hence, in return for laudatory press coverage of her charitable work, and near sycophantic treatment of her yet-to-be-employed son, she would have had to agree to revisit her legendary scandal. That, and then some. The price of publicity for her and Ronan was, in effect, Allen.

Read Wolff's entire article here.

Mia, Woody, Dylan, Alec Baldwin, et al

Mia Farrow and Nicholas Kristof

Years ago I was working a job in Boston. One of my co-workers got called for jury duty. She said her brother was a cop so she wouldn't get picked anyway, and she said she couldn't serve on a jury in any sort of child sex abuse case because she was so outraged that she would convict anyone accused of it.

"Even if they're innocent?" another woman said.

She didn't see why the defendant being innocent should quell her outrage. She said she would still convict him.

How is convicting an innocent person, or deciding that someone is guilty when you know nothing about it, a sign of how outraged you are by sexual abuse?

There's a woman who claims that Bill Clinton raped her. I don't know anything about her. I know Clinton was never accused, charged or investigated for this. Am I cruelly indifferent to rape victims if I don't blindly believe it's true?

Al Gore was asked somewhere if he thought Clinton was a rapist. He said he didn't know, which was honest but unnecessarily open-minded. He should have said, "I don't know. How do I know if YOU'RE a rapist. Why ask me?"

Which was essentially Alec Baldwin's response when Dylan Farrow wrote her "open letter" calling on movie stars to attack Woody Allen. He tweeted, "What the f[uck] is wrong w u that u think we all need to b commenting on this family's personal struggle?"

He continued, "So you know who's guilty? Who's lying? You, personally, know that? You are mistaken if you think there is a place for me, or any outsider, in this family's issue."

(He clearly wasn't addressing Dylan directly. If he were, "What the fuck is wrong with you" might be a bit harsh. The tweets have since been deleted.)


The tide may be turning. I'm not seeing any more items about how wonderful Ronan Farrow is and I'm starting to see articles raising doubts about the attacks on Allen.

Reading Dylan's open letter, I have more doubts now than I did before. Is she claiming that Allen sodomized her? A seven year old? And a medical examination found no evidence of this? Allen was at Farrow's house with her huge family and two or three nannies whose job it was to keep track of the kids. He disappears with her, sodomizes her, then they both come back ten minutes later, both acting as if nothing had happened? Maybe I'm naive about these things, but is that possible?

It's been pointed out that the "open letter" was posted on Nicholas Kristof's personal blog which doesn't have to meet any journalistic standards. Kristof has been a close friend of Mia Farrow's for years, traveling with her. There are pictures of them together at awards ceremonies. Since he's Mia's friend, it's clear that she's orchestrating this.

Mia has her Depends in a bunch because Allen's movie Blue Jasmine is getting more Oscar nominations. Her last "big role" was a small part in a trashy 2006 remake of The Omen.

It's been brought up that Mia has never commented on her brother pleading guilty to child molestation. He'll serve at least ten years in prison. He isn't estranged from Mia. He presumably had access to her children. I don't know if it means anything that Mia and Ronan have nothing to say in support of his victims, but there is Mia's total support for Roman Polanski.

Dylan Farrow's open letter

I read Dylan Farrow's "open letter" attacking Woody Allen and there wasn't much there. I assume she believes what she was saying. But she was examined by a doctor at the time. There was no medical evidence and investigators believed that her story was untrue.

Dylan wrote:

What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin? What if it had been you, Emma Stone? Or you, Scarlett Johansson? You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?

But she must be aware of her mother's friendship and total support for Roman Polanski. What does she think about that? She must be aware that her uncle--Mia's brother--is in prison for child molestation. Unless he's been completely estranged from Mia for the last 44 years, he must have had contact with her children. Does Mia Farrow have anything to say about that?

And, again, why did Mia sign a release allowing the Golden Globes to use a clip from Purple Rose of Cairo in their tribute to Woody Allen if she thought the tribute was an insult to all abuse victims? Does Dylan have any thoughts about that?

Philip Seymour Hoffman RIP

Philip Seymour Hoffman died today apparently of a heroin overdose in his New York apartment.

From Twitter:

"RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman. An all-time great. He added at least 20 Tomatometer points to anything he was in."
---J. Elvis Weinstein

I had to break the news of his death to my mother. She was a fan since she first saw him in Scent of a Woman. I looked at his filmography. I see so few new movies I was surprised at how many I had seen.

Well, poor guy. A terrible loss.

Can't watch Breaking Bad again

I loved Breaking Bad. But I'm finding I can't re-watch the series. Some of it's too painful to see again---there are people you don't want to see die. At least two children were killed in the series not counting the airline disaster.

There was an article listing plot ideas they never used on the show. One was this: Walt, Jr, comes home with a black eye. He's being picked on at school! Walter finds out who the other kid is. He plants drugs in his locker and the kid is arrested. Later, it turns out that Walt, Jr, is the bully, the other kid is the victim.

They decided not to use it because the stakes weren't high enough and they wanted to keep Walt, Jr, innocent.

But there---see----high stakes.

You had The Talented Mr Ripley. The stakes started out rather low. Mr Ripley faces social embarrassment and an obnoxious rich guy dumps him for an even more obnoxious rich guy. It's as if George Costanza resorted to murder then spent the rest of the series doing horrible things to avoid being caught.

There's the key. Make the stakes really high. Either have someone face execution, life in prison or acute embarrassment.

Werner Herzog, Juliana Koepcke, Wings of Hope

When I was a fourth grader, our teacher read an article to us about a girl who was the only survivor of a plane crash in a South American jungle. I remember some details. She came across a stream or river and knew to follow it down stream and it eventually brought her to a logging camp several days later.

I didn't know that the girl survived, strapped in her seat, after falling two miles when the plane fell apart in a storm after being struck by lightning.

I remember the part about how she got the maggots out of her wounds by pouring gasoline over them when she found a boat sitting unattended. She stayed there and waited for the loggers who owned it to return.

Turns out that Werner Herzog was supposed to be on that flight. He canceled his reservation when his itinerary changed. He was about to start shooting Aguirre, the Wrath of God filmed not far from where the girl would be fighting for her life.

For years he wanted to make a movie about her but was unable to contact the girl, a German named Juliana Koepcke. He finally contacted her through her priest.

Here is the documentary, Wings of Hope, on YouTube.

In German with voiceover English translation.