Rushfield Babylon
Month
All reporters/bloggers/editors/media folk in the nation need to read Dana Milbank’s column about how the annual White House Correspondents Dinner has become a journalist prom/getting chummy with your sources, corporate sponsored nexus of conflicted interests.
The key section:
“Is it Politico’s job to get Judd and Napolitano together? Is it with White House chief of staff Bill Daley or “30 Rock’s” Elizabeth Banks with national security adviser Tom Donilon? What’s the purpose of Fox News introducing actress Patricia Arquette to Rep. Michele Bachmann, National Journal presenting “The Vampire Diaries’ ” Nina Dobrev to Obama strategist David Axelrod, NPR introducing REM’s Michael Stipe to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, or The Post connecting Trump and House Speaker John Boehner?I don’t fault any one host for throwing a party or any journalist for attending. Many of them are friends. There’s nothing inherently wrong with savoring Johnnie Walker Blue with the politicians we cover.But the cumulative effect is icky. With the proliferation of A-list parties and the infusion of corporate and lobbyist cash, Washington journalists give Americans the impression we have shed our professional detachment and are aspiring to be like the celebrities and power players we cover.”
If this is bad in politics, where there are real things at stake and competing interests and watch dogs and all that, think how it has gotten in say, entertainment journalism where even the hardest story has a foot and a half in fluff and where someone let the watchdogs out long long ago.
If less is done in Hollywood to bribe and win over the journalists covering it, its because so many arriven boughten to the core of their souls and the industry doesn’t even have to try to win them over, just to dangle a set visit or a junket, or hint that somebody very very important would be really upset if a story turned out such and such way…
Of late, my corner of the journalism world has felt more or less like a prison where the inmates suddenly realize they haven’t seen the guards around in a long time and that the cells are all unlocked. I feel like I’ve heard in the past month of 150 examples of things that would have had someone fired, run out of the profession and humiliated just five years ago and today no one even cares enough to raise an eyebrow.
It’s not just wrong, it’s illegal. And it’s happening all over Los Angeles:
People sometimes believe that they are helping the animals by pushing them back into the ocean, Wallerstein said.
In reality, dry land is the only chance the animals have to survive, because a grand mal seizure in the water would lead to drowning.
That’s why it’s a $10,000 fine and up to a year in prison to push an animal back into the water, Wallerstein said.
I call upon the people of my city to try and pretend your brains are still attached to your bodies. If not for the sake of your own children than at least for our marine mammal neighbors.
1. Someone was stabbed. At a drum circle.
2. 82 sick sea lions and dolphins washed ashore.
3. People posed their children for pictures next to the dying dolphins.
4. Neighbor Lindsay Lohan agreed to avoid jail time by cleaning the morgue. Helicopters continue to hover sporadically over her condo.
No harbingers of the apocalypse here. Just move along everybody.
That I Haven’t Gotten Around to Writing Full Reports On
THY NEIGHBORS WIFE by Gay Talese: The complete history of sexual adventurers and sexual repressers in America. The same arguments have been happening in exactly the same way pretty much with exactly the same words since the nation began. More history of more forgotten morals crusaders and sexual utopians than one might want to read, but Talese is ever the clearest while the most sophisticated of writers. Remarkable how one can look over pages of his writing and hardly find a word longer than two syllables. The book gets a little weird in the very end as he himself becomes a character, hanging out at nudist colonies and in massage parlors. But not as weird as you might think.
HENRY THE SIXTH, by William Shakespeare: Scholars are divided over whether this actually was written by Shakespeare. I’m going to give the Bard the benefit of the doubt and say that it wasn’t. Or if it was, it was written for a school project or something. Not merely dull for Shakespeare, but tedious and ham-handed by any standards. Interesting though to see the British portrayal of Joan of Arc as a crazed, deceitful witch. Not to be attempted without a great working knowledge of and interest in early Tudor politics.
DARK TIMES IN THE CITY by Gene Kerrigan: A thriller of sad, post-crash Dublin. Kerrigan’s previous two have been as good as any of the genre produced in the past decade. In partic, a friend described Midnight Choir as almost a religious text, a description I agree with. This however does not quite rise to that level. The story told from multiple perspectives never quite builds a solid head of tension and the characters are rather forgettable in the end.
ROOM by Emma Donoghue: Just finished today and it’s still sinking in. Clearly a major book. Scary and then really touching, sad..knocks you down and lifts you up. Deceptively simple. A bit more child’s perspective on his toys than I really have an appetite for, but never thought I would be able to finish a book narrated by a five year old and I did easily. More thoughts on this TK.
(which opens with a rant about the terrible editors who want to use poor helpless Mel for his own purposes)
Aren’t you going to be hurt if people judge you based on what they believe occurred here?
What gets you to the point of ‘I don’t care’? I don’t believe you don’t care about people coming to see your work.
What did you think of Whoopi Goldberg going out on a limb and publicly defending you?
It seems like you’ve become really uncomfortable with your fame.
But your public persona is not really you.
Did you ever question that you chose the wrong occupation — especially when the tapes were released? Did you think that, 'I’m sick of this and I chose the wrong job’?
Do you remember where you were when the tapes scandal broke?
During the film, you actually find yourself looking at the puppet when it’s talking.
Is there closure in the movie?
Do you try to stay fit?
Another Nikki Finke produced masterpiece of hard hitting journalisms. Way to score the scoop!
(source)
Is Eric Snyder’s account of the otherworldly hellfires that were unleashed upon the arrival at AOL of the Huffington forces.
One tidbit, on the editor who was fired for writing an email to employees stating exactly what the company was planning to do before Huffington had had time to “package” the news properly:
Oh, but it wasn’t enough to fire her. AOL had to pull a “Mission: Impossible” and disavow all knowledge of what she’d said, and publicly shame her for saying it. My friend Kim Voynar has reliable sources who say that when this poor woman left the meeting in which her employment had been terminated, she saw her coworkers already reading about it on the Internet. AOL had leaked it to a writer for the Wall Street Journal, a publication that has never met a corporation whose B.S. it wouldn’t swallow, a publication that the very next day would run a fluffy piece about the awesome things Arianna Huffington was doing at AOL.
Around the LA internet world, the stories of Huffington’s monstrous treatment of her lackeys have been out legion for years. And still, people who fancied themselves on the side of the working people, kissed up to her, gave her free content, groveled for invitations to her home.
It seems, however, that the press on this merger has been so bad, that the mask is finally off. And even Hollywood won’t be able to look the other way and pretend…Oh never, mind. Of course they will.
The NY TImes points out the problem with this age of internet: comedians can just go and make jokes without their publicists vetting them first. They quote, without criticism or comment, Gilbert Gottfried’s publicist on the tsunami joke that cost his client his Aflac job:
“Hindsight being 20-20, I wished he would have run it by me,” said Mr. Honig. Sounding like a concerned baby sitter, he added, “But you can’t follow them around all day.”
What a wonderful world it would be if they could!
11:59 AM: I arrive at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf. Having about 30 things I’ve been putting off doing all week, I turn to the internet in search of something that will send me into paroxysms of self-righteous rage and thus allow me to avoid my work with a clean conscience.
Like an old but trusted friend, the internet provides. On my reader is see the headline from EW.com: "Transformers: Dark of the Moon new details: moon crashers, crushed skyscrapers, and flying-squirel soldiers.“ My problems are solved.
12:00 PM: I wonder if it is legal to use two colons in one sentence if one is inside a title. I look on gchat and consider whom I might IM with the question, but get ahold of myself. Focus. On the matter at hand. We have an article to get indignant about. We can only hope.
12:03 PM: The first paragraph leaps off the screen with a description of the wowee effects reporters were exposed to at the very special sneak peak: "a giant, burrowing robot with city-block-length metallic tentacles wrapping itself around the middle of a skyscraper and crushing it like a beer can.”
So all that sounds swell. Who can object to city block long tentacles? But the thing is, i mean, this is all CGI now. You can program a computer to do anything. It’s not like they built city block long tentacles. It’s basically a cartoon. Even if they make it look kinda real, how impressive an accomplishment is that? Is it harder to program a computer to make city block long tentacles than it is for the computer to make the grass look greener in a scene? I don’t know…But all of these, we’re reacting like we’re still seeing actually impressive effects and stunts instead of just…cartoons…
12: 05 PM: Ditto on this detail: "The bad ‘bots deal with puny humans easily enough: they’re armed with weapons that neatly reduce the city’s fleeing population to piles of smoking bones.“
Wow, they turn a whole city’s population into a ple of smoking bones. Just think of the imagination it required to come up with that? The person who leaned forward at the table at the story conference and said, wait a minute. People…shhh! Something is coming to me…What if instead of turning the population of the city into a heap of rubble…what if we turned them into….piles…of…bones…
A hush fell over the room. That’s brilliant, whispered a producer. Everyone made a note to themselves on their legal pads to remember where they were at this moment. All eyes turned to Bay, staring down at the table, nodding to himself. He reached for his Red Bull, ripped the top of the can open with his teeth, stuck a straw up his nose and inhaled the entire can. The room braced itself. That was the sign. Bay was going to say something brilliant.
"Not piles of bones,” he said. The room gasped. “Piles of SMOKING bones.”
The applause sign went on above his head. The room rose to its feet in ecstasy. Grandmothers broke down in tears. A sailor grabbed a nurse and kissed her. An executive reached for the red phone and called up to Louis B Mayer’s office. "Tear up the playbook! I repeat, the Playbook is to be destroyed. Michael Bay has reinvented film.“
12:09: I pour my coffee over my head and read on. I make it as far as the next sentence.
“This one is a more mature storyline. It’s definitely darker,” director Michael Bay says before previewing the footage Thursday. “When people see the movie, they feel it’s more emotional at the end. The stakes are higher because it takes place in an American city. You’re not as disconnected with Egypt and the pyramids, which are kind of otherworldly.”
I briefly toy with taking my own life. Oh that the Everlasting had not fix’d his cannon ‘gainst self-sacrifice. Darn it!
A more mature storyline. So that means this one is targeted for eight year olds (or for the eight year olds inside us all) instead of for seven year olds?
Definitely darker…Yeah, willing to crush skyscrapers and turn cities full of people into piles of smoking bones. That’s some dark edgy stuff, Michael Bay. Really gives you insight into the meaningless void of human existence. Did you collaborate with Hubert Selby Jr. on this?
Oh yes, and thank God its a place people can relate to seeing destroyed, not some otherworld place whose destruction is meaningless to us, like Egypt.
I mean, if audiences are really going to relate to this movie, would anything other than seeing Bel Air destroyed actually move them? If it’s about parts of the city they’ve never been to and where none of their friends live, I mean, who can relate to seeing that obliterated?
12:15 PM: The EW author writes, ”There’s no way to judgeTransformers 3 yet based only on these scenes.“
I respond, Oh really?
12:16 PM: More description, with commentary:
”Wounded V-22 Ospreys slamming into each other as soldiers skydive between the colliding tiltrotor planes, then swooping through the city’s canyons on wingsuits, like flying squirrels, dodging Decepticon fire …Like I said: Craaaazy.:
Skydivers bashing into falling planes, what will these crazy kids think up next?
12:18: They are playing Edie Brickell at this coffee shop again. Is the universe conspiring against me?
12:19 PM: Bay is still blaming the writer’s strike, and thus the writers, for the awfulness of Transformers 2: Bay also has something to prove after 2009′s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. “You’ve heard what I’ve said about [the second film] and whatnot,” Bay says. He called that movie’s villain, The Fallen, “kind of a bulls— character” and acknowledged he needed to shed the goofball humor and craft more coherent battles. “Yes, people may have been turned off by it,” he said. “We may have gone a little south in the direction, but we were under the gun with a terrible writers strike.” That led the production to commit to giant set pieces before they were fully thought out, since moving such a large crew around the world requires a lot of planning that can’t be easily or cheaply reversed.“
Yes, I’m sure if they could have done just another polish or two on that script Transformers 2 would’ve been Shakespeare. But what then explains the soulless nightmare of Transformers 1?
12: 23: Although admitting it was terrible.. ”But even in the midst of acknowledging mistakes, he still notes: “You don’t make that much money on a movie ($836 million worldwide), and it doesn’t become No. 1 at the American box office that year if people hated the movie.”
And after all, who can argue with that.
At ten bucks a head, approximately 83 million people saw Transformers 2. Some other things that 83 million people participated in: World War I, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, watching a balloon that didn’t have a boy in it fly across the southwest.
Hits every one of them! And who are you to argue Mr and Mrs Snooty Downtown Critic in your jodhpurs and your backpack?
12:30: There was one big pothole that audiences found in the film, the relationship being Shia LeBeouf and Victoria’s Secret Model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.
“In testing this movie, audiences are like, ‘I don’t believe it at first, their relationship,’” Bay acknowledges. “But then they say at the end of the movie, ‘I understand it.’ You buy it more.”
Why don’t audiences buy it at first? Bay hints that he got the same reaction regarding Megan Fox in the other movies, and jokes that it’s Shia’s fault. “I mean, come on. How’s Shia going to get two of these beautiful women?” he scoffs.
This is what audiences identified as the pothole of the Transformers films. Well, it’s a relief to see our education dollars are not going to waste. And thanks to the delicate human drama the film weaves, by the end of the film, they do believe a buff but wooden hero can get with a Victoria’s Secret model. After Michael Bay takes them on that romantic journey…
12: 42: Having made my way to the end of the piece. I am convinced. This movie is going to be awesome. Where can I buy tickets? And hats? Will EW provide more stunning looks behind the scenes so I don’t have to wait until July to see it all? I can only dream, and dream i shall now do as the rosy fingers of a coma summon me.
There are many reasons not to trust critics. I say this even though I am sporadically one of them. But on the other hand, here are there, there are some smart ones who now and then say something that makes you look at things a little more deeply.
In my day, I’ve met lots of them. Some are nice, some are pompous windbags. Some are brilliantly intimidatingly smart; others you wonder how they manage to even type their names.
But the one thing none of them is is funny. From high to low: from the lowliest commenter on the Amazon DVD pages to the hallowed pages of the New York Times, they are all a bunch of self-important pompous stuffed shirts (starting with me) whose clenched jaws would break if they ever tried to smile. If they tried to laugh, the released force would cause a concussive wave the size of 15 Hiroshimas. They are to a critic solemn, self-absorbed and pompous in person. On the page, they are even worse (except for Anthony Lane, who can write funny). Even even worse are the new wave, precious ones (who may or may not be chief critics of the NY Times for instance). These are the types who favor “humor” over “comedy” and find This American Life to be the most sidesplitting laff riot on the planet.
It’s not their faults. Being told your opinion matters will turn anyone into an a-hole. Getting paid to share your opinion could turn the meekest into Mussolini.
All this is inspired by reading the incoming pans of Your Highness, which the critics are destroying.“Great screen comedies that feature a severed Minotaur’s penis as a key prop are, sadly, few and far between,” writes The Hollywood Reporter. Caryn James writes: “There you have the simple-minded formula: plop the actors into Medieval times and costumes, and have them scatter contemporary language around, along with plenty of nudging sexual references.”
Well, minotaur’s penises and the above formula could be brilliant comedy on lots of days of the week.
I’m sure Your Highness actually is dreadful. It does look it and Natalie Portman is contractually barred from appearing in more than one decent movie a decade. But that said, when considering where to bank my entertainment dollars this weekend, taking the word of a critic on a comedy is like letting your lawyer repair the brakes on your car: He may get lucky and get it right, or you might wind up wrapped around a tree.
These days, when almost everything you see makes you feel like you fish tacos you had for lunch might just’ve been sitting for a few hours too long, what is just majorly annoying (the Kardashians, etc) and what is something we really should be concerned about (Octomom, etc). In general, I try to err on the side of the former and save my alarums for actual child torture.
seems to fall pretty nicely on the Causes for Concern side of the line:
Photographer Tyler Shields tells EW that the actress is in talks to star as the Valley of the Dollsactress in his upcoming film Eyes of a Dreamer, a film about murderer Charles Manson, who famously killed a pregnant Tate in August 1969. (Tate was married to filmmaker Roman Polanski at the time.) Though Lohan is not yet locked in for the role, Shields — a friend of Lohan’s who is set to play Manson in the film — says if “the timing is right, it will happen.”
“We’ve worked together many, many times,” Shields tells EW. “She asked me about [Eyes] … And I said, ‘Oh you should be Sharon Tate.’ And she was like, ‘That would be amazing.’”
“Shields says he intends to “go all the way” when it comes to showing the horrific Tate murders in the film. Lohan, he says, wouldn’t balk at acting in such scenes. After all, she’s already been the subject of some violent-minded photos taken by the director. (See here.) “I’m just going to be directing people to do the craziest s— they’ve ever done,” he says. “[But] I’m going to find a way to do it where it doesn’t turn people off, but it gives you the feeling of it. I want this to really hit people in a really specific place.””
Yeah, crazy s—. And nothing like hitting people in a really specific place for art’s sake…All the way, I guess would include Tate having her unborn child cut out of her stomach. Transgression rules, bro.
Last Friday, Nikki Finke, Hollywood’s leading internet terrorist, masquerading as a journalist, posted the following paragraph on her blog, which she later removed, but not before it was captured by David Poland:
FRIDAY PM: I am still on medical leave. And in pain. And understandably cranky. But I asked Universal to forward me early box office numbers today and those overpaid slackers are too self-absorbed to care about the one filmmaker, Illumination Entertainment’s Chris Meledandri, who is singlehandedly rescuing that bomb factory. If Universal doesn’t make a big deal about Hop overperforming today, why should I? (Note to Steve Burke: Fire the studio’s entire executive, marketing, and PR staff. They’re useless…)
The tales around Hollywood of this sort of behavior by the woman widely known as Crazy Nikki are legion. Threatening to get assistants and low to mid level functionaries fired and demanding their bosses execute them if they fail to bend to her will is her SOP. Sadly, she has mistaken this practice for journalism, an error that I can explain the foolery of upon request but is too self-evident to waste precious internet space on here.
It is also sad, but far too predictable, that those who noisily posture as defenders of truth and the little people against the big corporate baddies are too the first to step on any little person that gets in their way, as has been Nikki’s practice time and again. But again, a subject for another post.
For today, I just have a few quick questions for Hollywood that come to mind in light of the above.
The biggest thing I wonder about when I see that paragraph and reflect on all the stories of Nikki screaming to the bosses to fire whomever, is to these bosses who get these calls, can you tell me, were you born such sniveling cowards, or is that something you worked up to in your distinguished careers?
People work for you, they give you their time, they put their reputations in your hands, and some lunatic terrorist insults them and/or smears their names in public and you still deal with this person? Is standing up for the people who stand by you just too ridiculous to contemplate in this day and age?
And what do you think she’s going to do to you? Write a nasty post about you? For that, for fear of a nasty rant from Nikki Finke you are willing to shove your loyal workers heads right under the wheels of the biggest bus in Hollywood? Is it really worth never being able to look at yourself in the mirror just to avoid being the subject of a little Nikki rant. Believe me, half my colleagues in journalism have been the subject of them. I personally have been the subject of an offline Nikki terror campaign. I swear, it doesn’t hurt a bit. It’s kinda fun even.
I ask Hollywood whereever ye may dwell, next time you get one of these calls, how about trying out the old “We do not deal with people who talk to our people that way” or in the event of a public shaming like the above “If you ever want us to take your calls again, you will post a public apology to all the people whose reputations you besmirched.”
And finally, I ask Nikki’s employers at MMC, who bankroll this terror campaign, whose name and lawyers she constantly invokes in pursuit thereof, are you comfortable with these things being done in your name and on your dime? What exactly will it take to make you step in here.
Thank you for your attention Hollywood. You may direct answers here.