Family Feud goes blue

I can't watch live TV. There are things I've seen that have haunted me for years. I don't like talking about it.

There was one case--and this wasn't live TV, but it was live on tape. It was an episode of Family Feud. The question was, what's the first things husband asks the doctor after his wife has given birth. There were two possible answers. The first one was "How is the baby?"

The grandfather had to give the second answer. It was pretty obvious what it was. But he said, "How soon can I have sex?"

There was an awkward silence. Then, well, of course the answer was wrong. The other family won, and the family with the idiot grandfather left in disgrace. There was money involved, and you know that everyone those people knew were watching the show.

I thought maybe the guy was making a joke figuring he could change his answer. Like people who stage UFO hoaxes thinking they can pull it off then reveal that it was all a joke---they quickly realize that they're in too deep and there's no way out.

Now I read that this has become the norm on Family Feud.

The question: "Name the first part of a woman you touch to get her in the mood."

"That would be the lower front or the vagina," the contestant said.

Viewers are increasingly annoyed as well they should be.


I'll tell you one other thing that bothered me for years. I saw it as a child. The Muscular Dystrophy Labor Day Telethon---Jerry Lewis would periodically wade into the studio audience with a bucket to collect money. Once, a woman tried to embrace him and he said in a funny voice, "Get your hands off me, you oversexed broad," which I thought was funny when I was ten.

But then Jerry had just done this, just waded into the crowd collecting money. Then he was speaking to the camera, making some heartfelt statement, when a young man with a beard standing near him said, "Excuse me." He said that he just gave him some money, and it was money his father had given him, so could he have it back?

Jerry was aghast. I'm trying to entertain all these people, he said. No, you can't have your money back!

At the time, I imagined that this idiot really needed that money, that he was caught up in the moment and gave it away, but, realizing what he had done, he acted out of sheer desperation, feeling he had no choice but to humiliate himself in front of millions of viewers.Like I said, I must have been about 10. I thought Jerry should have given him his money back, although how would anyone know how much the guy stuck in a bucket?

Now, of course, I think he was just stupid, that he mentioned that his father gave him the money to make it sound like it had sentimental value.

It's also possible that the guy just saw his chance to make his time in a studio audience even more memorable. He'd be in his 60s now. He may be bragging about it to his grandchildren.


And there was this other time. A local TV station would show movies and they had an old guy I never heard of hosting it. A local business sponsored it one time and the old guy interviewed the employees on live TV. One guy, the son of the owner, was extremely nervous. He could barely speak, but the old guy kept talking to him anyway. He finally moved on to the other employees. Then he turned back to the nervous guy and asked him how many Valium he took a day.

"Uhhh---uhhhh," the poor guy said.

He was young and I realize he would live with that memory for the rest of his life.

Why is anything on live TV? Videotape is cheap and plentiful. The potential for disaster is so great. What's the point?

By the way---I always give people this advice. If you're being interviewed either live or on tape for TV or radio and it's going badly, just start swearing so they can't use it.

Devil Girl From Mars

A British science fiction movie. A Martian woman in black leather, invulnerable to weapons, terrorizes people at a rural inn when she comes to Earth looking for men she wants for breeding stock. She has a big robot with her. A little like The Day the Earth Stood Still. The robot was impressive but a little cartoonish.

According to the opening credits, it was based on a play. British theater isn't quite what I imagined.

When I was a kid, I did see a production somewhere of Help, Help, the Globolinks, which, it turns out, was a German opera. I can't even remember what state I was in when I saw it. Texas? Oregon? I don't remember it being a musical much less an opera.

Matt Damon, apples

You remember that stupid movie, Good Will Hunting? When Matt Damon shouts through a window to the wealthy college student, "DO YOU LIKE APPLES? DO YOU LIKE APPLES? WELL, HOW DO YOU LIKE THEM APPLES!"

What if he didn't like apples? I've never liked apples. What made Matt Damon think he liked apples?

If they guy had yelled back through the window, "I CAN'T EAT THEM. THEY HURT MY GUMS," what would Matt Damon have said then?

And I see that Matt Damon is a racist now.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, 1976

I saw this on Home Box Office (now HBO) when I was 14. An semi-arthouse movie set in England based on a novel by Yukio Mishima.

With Sara Miles, Kris Kristofferson and Jonathan Kahn.

Jonathan Kahn as Sara Miles son. He runs around with a gang of tweens led by a sadistic tweenage Nietzschean (Earl Rhodes). Jonathan discovers a knothole in the wall between his room and his mother's and starts spying on her which is every bit as perverse as it sounds. She starts sleeping with Kris Kristofferson who plays the first officer on an ocean freighter.

The kids drug and dissect a live cat. A disclaimer at the end assures us that "no living animal" was harmed in the making of the movie, and watching the scene again, I'm sure that was true.

Sara Miles and Jonathan Kahn won Golden Globes for their performances.

Critics at the time complained that the thing with the kids was implausible. I don't know. Weren't there a couple of episodes of Dragnet where teens are led astray by a charismatic classmate?

It might make a double feature with Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, another movie about a boy with mixed feelings about his widowed mother dating Kris Kristofferson.

Available on Fandor.

George Clooney, Up In The Air

I don't think I've seen George Clooney in anything before.

Watched Up In The Air on Netflix only 6 years after its release. Pretty good for me.

I once heard the director, Jason Reitman, interviewed on NPR. He said that his father, director Ivan Reitman, advised him not to try to make a scene funnier or more dramatic. He said it was almost impossible to do. Just stick to the script. You picked it for a reason.

I like advice that tells you to do nothing.

This movie wasn't very funny or very dramatic which is probably fine, but I didn't especially like it. George Clooney flies around the country firing people for companies that don't want to perform this unpleasant task themselves. He brags about his lack of commitment. He has no family and few possessions. All he wants is frequent flier miles. But, as you might imagine, he grows and changes as a character.

$50 thousand-a-year film schools

I was looking at a list of the top 25 film schools. Not sure what their basis was, but okay. Most charged around $50,000 a year tuition. A few state schools were much cheaper, around $17,000.

You could make a pretty good movie for $50,000. Some people in the comments section made that point. In fact, they said that successful film school alumni who returned to speak at their old school told students to drop out and "go make a movie!"

I don't know if that's good advice. It sounds good, but student films are notoriously bad, and I don't know that a film made by a film school drop-out would be much better. You should be able to make a pretty good movie for $50 thousand, but the fifty grand you pay in tuition is going to be in financial aid and massive student loans. If you quit, you won't be fifty thousand dollars richer, you'll just have that much less debt.

I don't know why I'm discussing it. If you have that much money, do what you want. It doesn't matter.

Filmmaking is an old person's art anyway. 80-year-olds make better movies than 20-year-olds. That may only be because the 80-year-old has been working at it longer. I don't know if a FIRST-TIME 80-year-old director with no experience at all in film would make a better movie than a first-time 20-year-old director.

Breaker Morant (1980)

I saw the movie Breaker Morant only 35 years after its initial release. Starred Edward Woodward just a five years before The Equalizer.

The movie was set during the Boer War in South Africa. Some Australian soldiers are court martialed for murdering prisoners and a German missionary. And, of course, they were guilty. Their defense was that they were only following orders. They were being prosecuted because the German government objected to the missionary being murdered and there was a danger that they would join the war against the murderous Brits.

It might make a double feature with Judgement at Nuremberg or The Winston Affair.

The Winston Affair starred Keenan Wynn as an Army lieutenant charged with murdering a British officer during World War Two. The Army wants to convict him quick to smooth things over between the British and American troops so they can get on with the war. But defense attorney Robert Mitchum has different ideas.

But movies like The Winston Affair and Judgement at Nuremberg were less ambiguous than Breaker Morant. In one, the defendant was clearly insane, in the other, the defendants were stinking Nazis.

We sympathize with the defense in Breaker Morant, but the defendants were horrible people. The Boers were no picnic either and their being murdered by the Brits shouldn't have bothered me. They were all colonialists, all racist scum.