Rushfield Babylon

Stanley Kubrick negotiates crew tea break schedule on Full Metal Jacket.

If you grew you during the period when Kubrick was unseen, uninterviewed and unphotographed and everyone just assumed he was Jack Torrance - an insane anti-social mad genius raging in some attic, all these glimpses remain astonishing.

HAS THE SUN SET ON THE CINEMA? Shocking field study results

Some interesting and disturbing results from my journalistic investigations.  In my work at Yahoo Entertainment, we have for a couple months  been hitting actors with e about their pop cultural backgrounds. 

One of the questions is: What is the first movie you ever saw?

For people of my generation (X), that’s not a question that you even have to think about. It’s like asking people what date their birthday is on. Growing up watching the same episodes of “Family Affair” over and over on fuzzy rabbit ears reception, suddenly being taken into a dark palace where a huge image soaring above plays out an epic story with production pieces beyond your wildest fantasies was one of the formative experiences of our lives.  Mine was Willie Wonka, and you can only imagine after 4 years of F Troop what that was suddenly like. To say my life was changed in a day would not be understating.  And so it was for most people I know.

So what has shocked me while conducting this survey, is that when I’ve talked to actors  - and mind you, these are people who make their careers on the screen - in their 20’s or below and ask them this question, nearly to a person they can’t remember.  Or they don’t understand the question and they think I’m asking: what was the first movie you watched on TV.  Their answers in this questionnaire, nearly always end up being that: the first film they remember watching on repeat on DVD. But almost none of them had a clear memory of going to the movie theater for the first time.  And this includes from very intelligent, incredibly creative young people I’ve spoken to.

This is of course disturbing for a thousand reasons. But most of all, I remember my time working at a newspaper way back in the mid 00’s when circulation was just taking the first stomach churning lurches as the jets began to fall from the sky. I remember how everyone had their thoughts about how the paper  - and all papers - were messing up, and everyone had their answers for how to lure people back. But at the bottom of it, every consideration came back to the fact that at that point two or three generations had come of age without adopting the newspaper habit as part of their daily lives, and having matured without it, it was going to be impossible to convince them it was necessary.

Whether these generations losing the newspaper habit was the fault of the newspapers themselves, just a reflection of the changing ways people consumed information or the growing post-literacy of our times is an interesting topic for debate (I vote for a combination of all three), but the fact remained that once that ship had sailed, newspapers doom was pre-ordained.

So: I put it to you America. Do are dozen or so actors I’ve talked to indicative of a larger trend?  And if moviegoing has lost its special place in the imagination, can it survive?  Or is that specialness something that people are able to come by later?  I have no opinion on “box office slump” reporting, other than generally to support my friend David Poland’s assertions that the articles on this are wildly simplistic and over-hyping a trend.  But stil!  I worry! 

No one wore any of these at the Grammys tonight.  Pathetic fashion fail.

I have been to the Workaholics.  For a Yahoo Office Drop By!  

BOOK REPORT: THE WARDEN by Anthony Trollope

It’s been at least five years since I last read a Trollope and I enjoy them always, but can’t remember a single thing about any of them - other than the odd supporting character here or there. Unlike Dickens where everything is so broad it all is grafted onto your consciousness, Trollope is about situations that are so slippery and conflicted, that just like life, once it passes, you can’t remember what all the fuss is about.

Given that, what I think all of Trollope is basically about, what The Warden is about anyway, is how life would be a lot better if people would just try to make the best out of what they are handed and be good to people around them then to get a lot of ideas in their heads. In Trollope, when someone gets an idea in their head - and they usually do for the most noble reasons - it means everyone around them is soon going to suffer and no one is going to come out for the better.

Which is more or less how I see life, so Trollope and I stand together.  As I get older, I see most of the problems in the world are caused by people getting ideas in their heads: She wants a big wedding; he’s got this vision there should only be one person at their wedding. Neither can let go of the idea in their head, so they don’t have a wedding at all and break up and their children are never born on down into infinity. At work, someone has a notion things have to be this way, despite the fact that that way is clearly not working and the way they are doing it is making life miserable for everyone around them and their boss has told them they need to change it. But they get themselves fired because they just can’t let go of this is the way it has to be.

On a societal scale, of course, the last hundred years has seen people with utopian schemes (of both the left and right varieties) cause more death and misery than all the previous conquests and religious crusades in history combined.

The plot of The Warden is too complicated to rehash - although the book is short - but basically an old reverend is living comfortable as the custodian of a charitable trust set up hundreds of years before.  It wasn’t originally intended that the custodian should live quite so well, but intentions are hard to get at over hundreds of years, and that’s how its evolved, he is doing good work for it, everyone is fairly happy, until this young reformer comes to town and even though he’s in love with the warden’s daughter, he some how gets it in his craw that its his duty to stick his nose in and make this right; but right, as Trollope best of all sees, is rarely an all or nothing, clean sweep proposition, but a 55/45 thing, requiring lots of compromises and humility.

Anyway, not the splashiest Trollope I’ve read. (Folks wanted to dive in would do well to being with Phineas Finn), but a good romp through moral ambiguity.  

@gary_Burghoff tweeting memories of Battle of the Network Stars is, by a zillion miles, the best thing that has ever happened in the history of media. I can’t even imagine what would come in second to this.

In 1979’ish I went to a filming of it at Pepperdine and came away with Richard Hatch’s autograph.  Maybe the best day of my youth.

And for those of you Gen Yay’ers who still haven’t gotten around to studying their history, to help you remember what a great land this once was.

I am dead. Why go on?  Media, we’re done here. Let’s all go home.

Office prayer corner

IMPORTANT LITERARY ANNOUNCEMENT: DISKO by Andrew Miksys

I am interrupting this Tumblr to notify all of the publication of an incredible new book of photographs.

My college classmate Andrew Miksys has spent a few years on an insane mission - he travelled across Lithuania photographing these small town former official buildings and Soviet clubhouses now turned into “Diskos”; the only social outlet for young people in these towns which adopt many of the trappings of American nightclubs of yore.  Andrew funded this project and the publication of the collection via a Kickstarter, which has produced a beautifully bound book of the images.

The yearning and desperation in these pictures is extraordinary to see and old friendship aside, it is one of the most unforgettable collections of photographs I’ve encountered in a very long time. Andrew was kind enough to let me share the 7 images above here as a little sampler of the delights within, but there are many many more and I promise you’ll pick up the book again and again to go over this series.  And it will look great on your coffee table besides that!

But don’t take my word for it.  Here’s a quote by Andrei Codrescu about the book:The discos of Lithuania were once Soviet offices, detention centers, weapons storage, rare Lithuanian mushroom-packing plants… who knows? One can dream of their former incarnations and feel that, no matter how grim, they are being violently shoved into history by the hungry young bodies Andrew photographs. These fashionably thin embodiments are literally the heirs of hunger. Poured into Western jeans and poses, they look like bewildered time-travelers who emerged in these shifting prisons to liberate them for dance. Andrew’s photographs capture a generation born to bewilderment: the disko kids still carry the past in their eyes and hard-to-maintain indifference, but they are the creatures of a very brief moment in time, one that will never ever exist again except in these pictures. Miksys has caught a fleeting world that emanates death and hope in the pulses of ephemeral disco lights.

Find out much more about Andrew here.

And click here to order your copy today. The best money you ever spent.

BEAUTIFUL STREAMERS: 6 GREAT FILMS ABOUT HUMAN/NON-HUMAN LOVE

This week, Spike Jonze’s film “Her” goes into wide release, exploring the complexities of a lonely man’s passionate relationship with his computer operating system. Although this may be the first time the possibilities of a man/OS relationship have been explored in the cinema, it’s not the first time a human being has played opposite a non-human in a romantic saga. Here are five other movies that have explored the possibilities beyond the confines of our species.

A living comedic legend shares his memories of “Roseanne,” “Sabrina,” and “Arrested Development.”

Thrill of a lifetime taking a tour down memory lane with Barth Gimble himself..