Rushfield Babylon

In the 20 years since the LA Riots, I have exploited just about every experience I’ve ever had in my writing.  I wrote an entire chapter about the time in college when my friends and I argued for a night about whether we should go to Denny’s for dinner.  But somehow I’ve never written about my riot experiences anywhere at all.  But it’s been twenty years now, so it seems like a decent time, as everyone else is doing, to open up that closet finally.

I think on one level the riots were kinda too scary in a way that I still haven’t wrapped my head around.  I’ve lived close up to three disasters in my time - The LA Riots, the Northridge quake and 9/11 in Lower Manhattan.  Of the three, the Riots were definitely the scariest to me.  With the earthquake and 9/11, something horrible happened but in both cases in their way they were anomalous events that happened and then they were over and within days we were talking about the remarkable way everyone pulled together and showed that in these hard times, neighbors really do mean something etc. etc.    During the riots, people did not pull together, they pulled apart and one felt they were seeing how if you knock a couple pegs away, society could unravel and maybe never pull itself together again.  And that’s still kinda unnerving to remember.

When the riots began, I was just out of college and working as a volunteer coordinator for Bill Clinton’s quixotic bid for the Presidency, then getting slaughtered in the primaries by the formidable Tsongas and Jerry Brown machines.  The morning of the first day of the riots, a staffer in our office who worked for the city attorney’s office advised us at the morning meeting that the verdicts in the Rodney King trial were coming in that day and they were likely to be not guilty and they had been getting word that the gangs in South Central were getting ready to make some kind of big move if and when that happened.  Being 22 years old and pretty stupid, I thought little of this.

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Seeing a hard-boiled brutal Norwegian thriler at an early bird screening in a sold out house filled with Westside 90 year olds who think theyre watching a side-splitting screwball comedy

Appropriately for a site with a soul made of used tin foil, Deadline.com asks the question: “Is it Time to Let Movie-Goers Send Text During Films?”

They continue, reporting on a debate at the Cinecon gathering currently underway in Las Vegas:

Regal Entertainment CEO Amy Miles says that her chain currently discourages cell phone use “but if we had a movie that appealed to a younger demographic, we could test some of these concepts.” For example, she says that the chain talked about being more flexible about cell phone use at some screens that showed 21 Jump Street. “You’re trying to figure out if there’s something you can offer in the theater that I would not find appealing but my 18 year old son” might.  IMAX’s Greg Foster seemed to like the idea of relaxing the absolute ban on phone use in theaters. His 17 year old son “constantly has his phone with him,” he says. “We want them to pay $12 to $14 to come into an auditorium and watch a movie. But they’ve become accustomed to controlling their own existence.” Banning cell phone use may make them “feel a little handcuffed.” 

There is so much to hate here, it’s hard to know where to begin.

For starters, the feeling of these executives that it is unfair of them to impose any standards of behavior upon their visitors, like they’ll be uncool old people if they tell their teens you can’t text here, is truly horrific.  As though there’s nothing more important for a giant exhibition chain than being thought of as cool by teenagers.

But let’s just be absolutely clear on this question so there is no wiggle room: if you text during a movie when there is any other person in the theater, you are the scum of human existence.  You are the reason that in thirty years no one in this country will be able to spell their own names.  Your determination that there is nothing the arts could have to offer more important to whatever mindblowing thought you have to fire off that second means that you no longer recognize the existence of any plane higher than your own scrambled brainwaves, which is essentially what it is to be an animal, which is how you should be treated, preferably by ushers armed with cattle prods to herd you like the insentient bovine creature you are.  

If you are a young person (or worse still a not so young person) who just needs to be with your texts at every moment, there are lots of places you can go to text - in your classroom, while having intimate relations with someone very close to you, at your parents ’ dinner table, while whale riding, while standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon.  America recognizes that all these experiences are far less meaningful then whatever you have to say to your friends and thus has granted you liberty to text during them.  Just not in my movie theater.

Further, if you are texting during a film in a theater with other people either oblivious or unconcerned with how your little screen is flashing light at people distracting them from the experience on the big screen they have devoted their time and money to seeing, then you are at least an entry level sociopath and at the very least, society needs to keep a close eye on you because you certainly won’t be doing it any good and may well soon do it a lot harm.

If you are a theater chain who thinks that allowing this will let you provide a cool experience to young people that will win their devotion: good luck with that.  After you’ve chased away all the people who are there to watch movies and turned your cinemas into giant laser tagopolis’ I’m sure the kids will see the need to keep shelling out 20 bucks a pop instead of just standing out in the parking lot.

So here is the only sensible response to this ever growing threat at our theaters:
1. If you see someone text, don’t be such a coward.  Ask them to stop.  Your fellow patrons will love and admire you for it.
2. If they refuse to stop, ask the theater manager to remove them. (I know, you’ll feel like a snitch.  Get over it.  I’ve had a multitude of kids throw out of movies, and it’s the best feeling on Earth.)
3. If the theater manager refuses to take action, ask for your money back and write to the chain asking if this is their policy and informing them that you will never attend their cinemas again.

I know I’m getting all riled up by a little text but I can’t tell you how many times in the last couple years I’ve had films ruined by this.  The joy of the moviegoing experience is immersing yourself completely for two hours in an artistic creation and for that very very short time in our lives to be cut off from the constant demands of society, and that experience is very quickly disappearing. The savages have overrun the city walls. This is no longer a symbolic battle; it is our last stand.

TVGuide.com reports:

Smash has found itself a new lead.

Gossip Girl executive producer Josh Safran is finalizing a deal to replace outgoing bossTheresa Rebeck as showrunner in Season 2, sources have confirmed to TVGuide.com. Rebeck, who created the musical drama, announced last month she would step down at the end of the first season, but retain her executive producer credit. NBC renewed Smashfor a second season the same day.

It looks like NBC is carrying through with their previous threats to take away everything that is uniquely special and jaw droppingly bad in a way that only we Smash fans can appreciate and turn it into a generic catfight soap opera.  Less backstage madness, more Desperate Housewives.   Better crafted - less Debra Messing orphan mourning insanity - but just totally forgettable is what they would do with our Smash.  

It may be too late for our collective action to have any affect. So let us treasure these final days we have together, people of Smash, before it’s all taken away from us and we never have a show with a Bollywood scene again.

(in no order)

1. AA Gill is Away by AA Gill 
2. The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski
3. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
4. Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte
5. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
6. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
7. A Time of Gifts/Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor 
8. Eclipse by Alan Morehead
9. Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee
10. Italian Journey by Wolfgang von Goethe 

 

Don’t miss out on the new podcast!

First we chat with , relationship and sex advisor and author of a  on a single lady’s relationship with the cats in her life.

Then we convene our panel of entertainment intellectuals to discuss the latest in a high flying TV season, for good and ill.  TV Guide.com’s , Esquire columnist Stacey Grenrock Woods and entertainment genius Jim Gibson discuss Girls - the raves, the hypes, the backlash and the counterbacklash, Mad Men, Suburgatory, The New Girl, Community and everything the world’s abuzz about on the airwaves. 

Download it direct right here.

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Sometimes, a media thing is born that must be killed. But it can’t be killed because the media people like doing it and because it’s about a topic that gets a lot of hits. A perfect example of this phenomenon, which we like to call Media Thing That Can’t Be Killed, is Slate’s weekly roundtable discussion of the previous Sunday’s Mad Men episode. A few of us clever underemployed writer-types thought we’d give the genre a tweak. The results are below. 

Featuring a correspondence between conversationalists Stacey Grenrock Woods, Neal Pollack and Richard Rushfield in regard to last week’s episode of AMC’s hit show, The Mad Men.

My Bad Pennies:

Unlike Betty and Henry Francis, who spend the lion’s share of this week’s Mad Men episode offscreen in Buffalo—Buffalo, of all places!—I’m going to jump right into the fray: Is it possible that Matthew Weiner is setting us up for the revelation that Michael Ginsberg, he of the loud jackets and louder voice, is, in fact, Richard Speck, perpetrator of the Chicago nurse murders? Despite the fact that Don Draper’s dream murder scene seems to indicate that Don has the potential to be a serial killer, all the evidence is there this week to convict our favorite new copywriter. The murders appear front and center, on every newspaper cover, in every utterance by fat Grandma Pauline, and, most importantly, in Ginsberg’s weird Cinderella speech to the shoe executives. Michael Ginsberg is peering through every doorframe, lurking at every window.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I interpret Mike’s Cinderella monologue as something that could only be delivered by a deeply disturbed serial killer. Think about it: He lives alone with his father. He doesn’t “do anything” but work. And then, given two minutes of solo screen time, he chooses to talk about a helpless beauty walking the streets alone, nearly shoeless, stalked by a nameless “prince” who will not relent until she belongs to him. From there, it’s a short step to buying a train ticket to Chicago, brutally slaying eight nursing students in a dorm, and returning home in time for work on Monday.

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The Rushfield Babylon Podcast Trapped in Men’s Central Jail Episode

Is ready for your consideration.

An interview with Duncan Roy, discussing my story from this week’s LA Weekly

an independent film director whose life was plunged into a nightmare out of Kafka when a bureaucratic glitch led him to be imprisoned for three months in LA County’s Men central jail, with no explanation of why he was being held or to whom he could appeal.

On the streets again now, he shares his horrific tale. 

Download it direct right here.

Or available on iTunes here.

Or on Stitcher here.