You might have been noticing in the Twitter updates, each week I've been setting for myself a big picture goal. So far, I've been getting a lot out of it. Last week's, "one step after the other" was a big success and thinking about these macro-sized things and making them into weekly mantra's can be helpful when you get stressed.
This week's mantra is born out of two things; the first, being the death of Tim Russert, who was one of my heroes. I talk about Russert's influence on me as a journalist over at Flaming Politics, but he's a hero to me because of the way he conducted his life. He was aggressive, tough and successful, but remained true to his roots, cared deeply about passing on his knowledge as much as he was excited about absorbing others and brought passion to all the arenas of his life. I believe, and try to live out, that success should never change who you are, because who you are is what makes you successful. Tim clearly embodied that axiom. Here's a guy who worked relentlessly, put his family first and still showed a generosity of spirit to everyone he met, no matter who they were or where they came from.
The second reason I'm keeping "Let There Be Love" in my head this week is that I'm making real headway on the screenplay and it's reminding me why I love writing stories: They surprise you. I keep referring to the movies as "Close Encounters", because I want to do a big, fantastical commercial film that's grounded in an everyday reality. But the surprise over the weekend is that I'm realizing that what I'm writing is an anti-apocalyptic movie. The usual summer blockbuster is about the world put in peril by a killer storm/alien/large rock of kryptonite and someone comes along and beats up someone else and somehow the world is saved. I think I'm writing a film that inverts that formula a bit. The end of the world always seems just around the corner, be it by the hand of war or science or religion and sometimes it does come, whether its in Darfur, on the beaches of Normandy or on the 82nd Floor of Tower One, but we keep living. In the face of apocalypse, humanity doesn't run screaming into the night; we endure. We don't have the luxury of Superman, so we survive through love.
Now, I just need to, you know- make it sell to the 14-28 year old males. Good thing I put in explosions and hot chicks.
"CARRIE: I knew he didn't want to find the skull with me. I pushed him and pushed him. I knew he'd already found the skull with two other women. I'm so stupid. And now I'm all alone in this waterfall in the sky inhabited by Aztecs." Excerpts from Sex and the City and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
"And remember the time Clint (Clint Ritchie) was knocked unconscious and time-traveled to the Wild West? Carlivati will riff on that plot, too. "Bo (Robert S. Woods) and Rex (John-Paul Lavoisier) are hit by lightning and wake up in 1968 — the same year OLTL hit the air," Carlivati says." My old bread-and-butter, One Life to Live is revisiting some of its most famous plots to celebrate the show's 40th anniversary.
I'm so copping out on new material here. I've been really busy the past few weeks-- shooting a couple of videos for BCBG, writing articles, doing some work on the comic book and finishing up a screenplay, so it's been a YouTube palooza here. Now I'm cheating another way-- by answering your emails via blog:
Greg writes: Just saw that you are a BSG fan. So glad to hear it! I have been coming to you site off and on for about 5 months now and have always found it to be a great place to get a fresh look on things or reaffirm what I was thinking already. Now to also see that you are a fan of the re-imaged Battlestar Galactica makes me just giddy. Have you watched it from the beginning or did you recently start watching it? I also have to agree with you on whining Lee Adama versus HOTT Sam Anders; in my mind there is no competition. Are you a fan of any other kind of sci-fi?
Hey Greg! I joined the BSG phenom about halfway through Season One, which meant a lot of catching up on the miniseries. Like most people, I thought a show about robots named "Battlestar Galactica" sounded stupid and like everyone, I was hooked after an hour. There are no BSG-haters, just people who haven't seen the show yet. That said, the final season is driving me nuts. They've taken serialization as far as you can go and I feel less like I'm watching a one-hour TV show and more a giant movie that's been cut into hour long segments. That said, I'm glad to see that Lee's found a way to make a career out of his whining. And Anders-- still waiting for the badass Cylon side to come out. Hopefully, the arrival of Leoben on Starbuck's cruise ship from hell will light a fire in him.
As far as other sci-fi goes, yeah- I'm a big sci-fi dork. The screenplay I'm working on now is definitely sci-fi, though more in the Twilight Zone vein than anything else. That's one of my favorites to be honest and I've always loved the combination of noir and sci-fi. Heinlen's Stranger in a Strange Land is an important book to me and for some reason I seem to have watched both of Majel Rodenberry's shows, Final Conflict: Earth, who'se plotline about the Latino-looking aliens inviting men and women to become half-breeds in their sex pods, felt like the futuristic equivelent of Imitation of Life and that other show with Hercules on it. When I had the flu recently, I sat down and started to watch Firefly, but I thought it was self-important crap and was relieved to find out Joss Whedon wouldn't be directing an episode of BSG this season after all.
I adore Christian Siriano. He's like the world's most overachieving, fabulous chinchilla. This week I found out he's dating my pal Brad, which makes me love him even more. He's also, by far, the most talented designer to ever appear on Project Runway. "Watch as the young fashion phenom flatirons his hair and speaks his own private language."
And just how fierce is Christian? Do a Google suggestion search for "Christian" and you get:
Christian Bale Christian Louboutin Christianity Christian Dior Christian Music Christian Siriano Cristiano Ronaldo Christian Audigier Christian Science Monitor
Don't Let Heidi Hold You in Suspense- Nick Verreos Has Season 4 Finale Goods
The ridiculously talented Nick Verreos has a gorgeous newish blog that's totally fierce. Sorry, just finished watching the final 'regular season' Project Runway episode and Christian's vocabulary is still stuck in my head. Don't you just love that kid? He's like a chirpy little chinchilla. I wouldn't be half-surprised if we see in the obligatory 'Tim Gunn rides in a Saturn Roadster to the Designer's Homes' segment of the finale that Christian's parents raised him as a cat, complete with a charmeuse-lined scratching post. C'mon, you totally see it.
Anyway, Uncle Nick has a new blog and he's just posted about the Project Runway Fashion Week show. If you want to be totally spoiled, check it out...yo.
What with the writer's strike looking like it's going to continue on for a long time, I realized this is it for new scripted television for a while. In a couple of weeks, the shows airing now will have run out of scripts and America will be forced to watch, well-- actually, there's the Sarah Conner Chronicles and Jericho and I've been meaning to catch up on DVD's I have never opened and of course all of reality TV and the truth is, who really watches network television anyway?
But, that's not my point! My point is, with these last waning days of TV-as-usual, I thought it'd be nice to take a moment to be thankful (how topical is this blog, right?) for our regularly scheduled programing. Let me count the ways:
The dykey shrink on Bionic Woman. While everyone else around her engages in funny, sexy, scary B-action movie dialogue, she skulks around her office looking bored and probably imagining she was someplace else--making her the show's most relatable character. You don't want to go bionic, you just want to go home and fall asleep watching Jane Fonda workout tapes. Hey Lady, you're still not interesting enough to bother learning your name, but I thought the C-plot where you decided to get a plant for your office was genius.
Journeyman's important work shedding light on time traveling addiction. See, there's this guy and he disappears on his family all the time. Sometimes he shows up with a gun and sometimes with money, and he's visiting his ex-girlfriend, which is weird since she's dead. But he tells his wife he's a time traveler and she starts enabling-- I mean, protecting him. Oh yeah, his brother drinks too much, his boss used to and he had a gambling addiction, which is actually a thinly veiled metaphor for being a time traveler. Whoa.
The fact that Hiro on Heroes is finally out of feudal Japan. Oh, here's a great idea- take your show's most popular character and cut him off from the rest of the show for the first half of the season by making him act out a milquetoast version of Tale of the Genjii. Seriously, And now, a haiku: Tim, What did you do?/Cherry blossoms? C'mon dude!/ Boring, lame, don't care, Ack!
Bringing Seussian narration back on Pushing Daises. First rule of screenwriting: Don't do narrator voice overs. Or as they say in Freshman Comp: Show, don't tell. But Pushing Daises is the show that says, "Who needs a rulebook when I've got cute on my side?" This show creeps me out like a teddy bear that just wants to hug and 'wuv' me all day long does. I hate it even more because when I tell people that I don't like it, they assume I'm some sort of monster incapable of getting 'a-dorable'. I get it. I'm just unimpressed.
That Brothers & Sisters is Chicken Soup for the Liberal Soul. It doesn't take a genius to see that the only difference between Touched by and Angel and Brothers & Sisters is the demographic they target. Both shows happily reaffirm the world view of their respective audiences, wrapping up the complexities of their lives in ways that make them seem more exciting then they really are. No Big Issue can't be debated, solved and hugged out by Sally Fields and her cast of Every Great TV Actor of the Last Ten Years.
And the one thing I will be thankful for when original programming goes off the air:
Family Guy finally going away. First off, I like you Family Guy. I think you've been damn funny. I also think a Star Wars tribute is lame. And it's not that I don't get the appeal of old guy child molester jokes-- I just don't think it's funny every single week. I've actually started thinking that since you've come back from the dead, you've been hell bent on seeing just how much your audience will stand, how far you can push the "envelope". But as I watched Peter Griffin appear as Mexican Mary Poppins, fall on Jane & Michael, killing them and then seeing Peter alternately slide the bloodied bodies under the bed and vomit-- for like, what was that, a minute? I realized I just don't care anymore.
P.S.- Still on hiatus, but figured I had to do something for Thanksgiving. Have a great one!
Still sick (less so, but my throat is scratchy enough to prevent podcasting and I seem to want to nap constantly), but I know how fickle my readers are, so here are some awesome things I've been doing in between my delirium tremens. Like the title says, these things will swallow up your day, not that you were doing all that much to begin with:
Jericho: the complete first season online. All the major networks have video on demand versions of their major shows. It's pretty frikkin' awesome. Brought back from the dead by a major fan drive, apoco-drama Jericho will air seven new episodes sometime soon (depending on the writer's strike), but you can catch-up on the first season online.
Truth be told, the show takes a long time to warm up and the producers seem to miss the fact that the reason we love Jack Bauer is because he's a bad ass, not a guy just looking to fit in at the bake sale, but once the town next door goes all Lebensraum on Jericho and we see that the army's wearing a new version of the stars and bars, the show goes nuts.
My proposal is for something I call Riverside Park-- using the footprint of San Francisco's Candlestick Park in the railroad area north of Cesar Chavez Boulevard. It's extremely close to Union Station, could be connected by a "game day shuttle" and once you moved the L.A. County jail out of the area, you could infill the project with mixed-use retail and hi-rise condos. It could then be the third anchor for downtown, continuing the sweep from L.A. Live through Grand Avenue, as well as a catalyst for L.A. River development. What's great, though is that this map gets you thinking about these things.
Also, while I despised the 30-second "lightning round" imposed on candidates at last nights Democratic Debate, the guy on fire (and by my estimation, the most straightforward and Presidential) was Joe Biden. Check it out:
I haven't said much about this new season of TV. That's because basically, it sucks. There's Samantha Who?, Gossip Girl and Journeyman, which after three hours and 40 minutes, wound up getting past the conceit of its premise to actually tell a story.
So I'm going to talk about a show you may have never heard of. It's called Ace of Cakes and airs late nights on the Food Network. The show is like The Office, only it's about Charm City Cakes, a Baltimore, MD based cake company owned by Duff Goldman, a goateed, baseball cap wearing dude who you wish was your boss. Each episode is pretty basic: they get cake orders, usually consisting of a mix of outrageous (an armadillo dressed as an EMT) and the classic (wedding cakes). Goldman's hired his friends to run the cake shop and the show is a mixture of cake-making and goofing off. You don't learn a thing about making cakes and while a lot of the staff is ornery, there's never a fight.
Instead the show is an intimate portrait of a local neighborhood. You meet the oddballs that inspired John Waters. You get a real sense that the folks who run Charm City Cakes were the weirdos in high school, but they stuck around because, hell, Baltimore is their home. They may have wanted to be "serious artists" at one point, but instead they make people in their community happy. It's sort of basic, but every time it airs, I'm hooked.
I'm doing the MySpace/ Fox Storyteller challenge and will be shooting a itty bitty pilot next weekend (weekend of Nov.3) . I'm looking for actors. If you know or are an actor feel free to get in touch. The roles I'm looking for are:
KATE (30s-40s): CEO of a major company, she's part Richard Branson, part Michelle Obama. She speaks her mind and has made her name by having bigger balls then the boys.
JENNY (late 20s): A grad student in the sciences who's also a head turner. Like most of the heroines I write about, she has a thing for singing karaoke. She's also recently divorced. Her work came first.
DONALD (late 20s): Fifteen jobs in six years, all on his parent's dime. A "pretty face" who nobody takes seriously, except for himself, that is.
MATT (late 20s): Serious, with a military background and a quiet belief in Jesus that sustains him through difficult times. His square demeanor hides the fact that he still struggles with his addiction issues.
JAVIER (50s): A money man with political connections who's motto is "Don't tell me what's possible, tell me what's probable".
DOUG (early 30s): An upbeat, eternal optimist as the result of spending too many years at grad school, though he's acutely aware that he has the social skills of a donkey with halitosis.
ERICA (early 30s): A P.R. genius who never says no.
Because if you've just seen Ellen break down about her puppy on air, you might be considering suicide. As a nation, we're grief stricken by Ellen's pain and shame shame upon animal rescue shelters for enforcing rules designed to prevent puppy trafficking! But we all have to soldier on. There are things still worth living for. For instance- here's something that should cheer both Ellen and America up a bit:
It wasn't until Andy Samberg came along that I realized that most of my life, I wasn't really getting comedy. Thanks to a generation of comics steeped in observational humor, like most of the public, I came to believe that something was funny because a comedian told us it was.
"Look at this- isn't it outrageously funny?", Dude With a Hatred for His Ex-Wife intones into his microphone, throwing some air quotes up in the air. Not that this can't be fun in a smart aleck way (see Conan, Dave), but it's not really funny. You laugh because you're in on the joke, not because you're happy.
The alternative is the gross-out, frat boy humor of say, Adam Sandler. What Samberg does it combines the two. He's a smart dude that makes you think a little, but he's not uppity about it-- he just wants to make you laugh.
So thank YHWH for Andy. He did it again this week with "Iran So Far Away" and R&B love song to Iran's prime minister, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It's not exactly Chaplin's The Great Dictator, but it's in the same territory. Check it out:
The soft touch is what makes it brilliant and potent. It's light-hearted irreverence is just the sort of thing Ahmadinjad brutally keeps his people from engaging in.
Samberg won an Emmy this month for "Dick in a Box", his duet with Justin Timberlake and of course, he's also the dude that gave America "Lazy Sunday", which looking back on it, basically introduced the hipster ethos to mainstream America. And then he also turned Natalie Portman into Easy-E by giving her a full out gangsta rap. Basically, the dude's been funnier in two years than Adam Sandler's managed to be during his entire career.
Kid Nation is Pretty Much the Most Awful Thing on Television, Ever
Someday, scholars will look back on the TV Guide listings of the early 21st Century and come across something like this:
"This week, the children compete for the right to have more than one outhouse and will be divided into a caste system of unequal labor and wages."
or
"The children are tricked into believing that if they don't kill a chicken, they'll die. Then they battle it out for a chance to have a water supply that won't freeze up on them at night."
And when the scholars of the future read this, I pray they judge us harshly. There was a lot of speculation thatKid Nation, CBS's experiment in child exploitation, wherein 40 kids live on their own with no parents, would devolve into a Lord of the Flies-like world, but after watching the first two episodes, I'm certain these kids are going to make it through. Not because of any innate decency in children (children can be monsters after all), but because in this case, they've got a common enemy to rally against: namely, the producers of this disgusting show.
You see it when the Green team, led by 12 year old Laurel, from Massachusetts, fails to finish their task in the alloted time. By coming in last place they are consigned to be "laborers", the lowest of Kid Nation's contrived social classes, meaning they will be forced to clean the outhouses and do menial work. Because they failed to complete the task, they also keep the rest of the kids from getting a supply of fresh drinking water from dozens of freeze-proof pumps that are scattered throughout town. The host, Jonathan Karsh, shows them the pump with dramatic fanfare before informing them they'll have to do with the one freeze prone pump they have now. And what do the kids do? They rally around the teary-eyed Green Team, hugging them and making jokes about how they don't need the pumps anyway. It's one thing to make kids compete for fabulous prizes (hell, I loved Double Dare), but only a sadist could enjoy watching kids compete for a reliable source of water.
Then there's 15 year old Greg, from Nevada, who is the show's oldest kid. He's made out to be the villain; a scheming sociopath who likes to kill animals. Only, in the background scenes, you see Greg time and again carrying some kid on his shoulders or giving them a hug and his expertise at skinning animals comes from working in a butcher shop. The producers want you to think this kid is only being nice because he wants a gold star-- which is awarded by the "town council" at the end of each episode and is worth $20k. Yeah, because if you're a kid who has to work in a butcher shop and is facing the direct prospect of having to pay for college or living on your own in 2-3 years, you're a monster for working hard and helping out a bunch of little kids to earn some money.
The people behind this show make Bill Murray in Scrooged, yelling at an assistant to staple antlers on mice to make them look like reindeer, seem like a saint. The only people worse than the producers are the 40 sets of parents who willingly sent their children off to a labor camp.
The only pleasurable moments in the show is when you see the kids developing their own games and strategies-- a couple of girls start a daycare for the kids stuffed animals and a few boys go hunting for jackrabbits in the precocious way kids actually play. These are the sort of things children should be doing, not competing for sanitation. Kid Nation isn't an experiment in how kids act, it's disgusting proof that grown-ups need to grow-up.
And no, I'm not watching any more of this show. Seeing kids cry isn't my idea of a good time.
Take the slim lines of The O.C. (it's produced by Josh Schwartz) add a handbag from Sex and the City (both are filmed on location in NYC) and toss in some girl-powered Less Than Zero pumps and you have Gossip Girl, who's source material (a series of kiddie books) would be easier to lampoon if it weren't for the fact that there's a show premiering this season based on a Geico commercial. The show premieres tonight on the CW and I've got peeps behind it, so watch. If nepotism isn't an incentive, if the show is successful, it'll give me an opportunity to tell you all about the time I tutored a diamond heiress' daughter in her Upper East Side townhouse.
Hurray for having something newsworthy to video blog about. My take on Kenneth in the 212's decision to post naked photos of Thomas Roberts. There was a rumor going around at the NLGJA Conference that he had these photos and was planning on releasing them. Why?
Not that anyone is surprised by Republican Fred Thompson's entry into the Presidential race today, but his decision to announce his candidacy on Leno is raising some eyebrows, especially since he skipped a Republican debate to do so--and aired an attack ad against the other candidates that aired before the debate. But that's not the only television related snafu facing the former Law & Order actor. While NBC made the decision Saturday to no longer air episodes of L&O in which Thompson appears, TNT plans to continue airing episodes, in spite of concerns that this could infringe on equal airtime rules for candidates.
If the world were a cooler place, this would lead to a ruling that every Presidential candidate get their own cable drama. Don't you think it would be great to see Kiera Sedgwick get Hillary Clinton as her new partner on The Closer? What hijinks will ensue after Mitt Romney moves next to Bill Paxton and his brood on Big Love? And for some reason, I kind of want to see Barrack Obama on The L Word.
How can we make this happen? What show should Kucinich be on?
"Uncle, do you really believe your apostasy has brought you closer to our Heavenly Father?" "Shut up."
Try out HBO's swanky quiz and tell me which polygamist stereotype you are in the comments. I'm (unsurprisingly) a Barb. The season finale of Big Love is on again tonight at 9pm.
Another busy day, another blog blow off by way of YouTube videos. Two great previews for Battlestar Galactica fans:
BSG producer David Eick comes to NBC this fall with Bionic Woman. I love that the man has made a niche for himself with thoughtfully realized remakes of 70s sci-fi shows.
And a sneak peek at the upcoming Battlestar Galactica movie, Razor, coming in October to Sci-Fi.
Thats the question I'm asking myself after this season of HBO's polygamist drama Big Love. It seems so easy. Get a few followers/wives/children and anoint yourself Daddy/Godhead and depending on your aesthetics and budget move into a suburban development/creepy compound/abandoned warehouse. Sure you have to wear tacky business attire, but no job is perfect, right?
For better (and for worse) the show has abandoned much of its "typical family x3" premise in favor of a Lynchian "dueling polygamist clans" plot line. Paterfamilias Rex, Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton) has spent the season pitting two Mormon Fundie groups against each other to his own advantage, while the ladies in his life move along cluelessly, assuming that Bill's lack of affection has more to do with them than the fact that he's off trying on a crusade to bring polygamy to the masses.
In one corner, he has his lovable child-bride taking father-in-law Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), who he sweet talked into thinking he's pals with. Roman, for all his flaws (like, you know, sleeping with 16 year olds) truly believes in the power of family. At the end of the day, Bill is still part of the Juniper Creek family and thus, part of Roman's flock. In fact, Roman seems to have begun to treat Bill as something of a successor to his empire, not knowing that Bill still sort of holds a grudge for well--everything Roman's ever done to him.
In the other corner you have Hollis Green and his band of cross-dressing, iron branding nutters with a penchant for sending gift baskets and ending phone calls by saying "Sincerely Yours, Hollis Green". I mean, how cute was that kid dressed in rags and a winter cap chasing the emaciated dog around the warehouse? Precious. Both want Weaver Gaming, which Bill wants for himself, so he's pitted the two against each other, which you know-- strikes me as a really dumb idea.
I have to give it to the Big Love writers. Last season, you really believed that Bill was trying to give his family a different life than the one he grew up with. You believed his whole "we're normal except for the Principle, which is God's will" schtick. This season, we've watched Bill sanctimoniously invoke his family's health, safety and well-being as reasons to glorify his own name. It's become stunningly clear that Bill doesn't give a rats ass about his family. He's never home, his business pursuits result in things like having the family boat torched by crazies and he seems more like the people he's trying to take down with each new episode.
At this point, Bill has ceased being a likable protagonist and I wonder where this is going. What will happen when Barb, Nikki and Margene find out the peril Bill has put the family in. They're so willfully ignorant, it probably won't hit home 'til it literally hits home, though even then, nobody seems to mention the fact their boat was singed to a crisp in the driveway. How long will these ladies stand by their man?
The ridiculously talented Nick Verreos has a gorgeous newish blog that's totally fierce. Sorry, just finished watching the final 'regular season' Project Runway episode and Christian's vocabulary is still stuck in my head. Don't you just love that kid? He's like a chirpy little chinchilla. I wouldn't be half-surprised if we see in the obligatory 'Tim Gunn rides in a Saturn Roadster to the Designer's Homes' segment of the finale that Christian's parents raised him as a cat, complete with a charmeuse-lined scratching post. C'mon, you totally see it.
What with the writer's strike looking like it's going to continue on for a long time, I realized this is it for new scripted television for a while. In a couple of weeks, the shows airing now will have run out of scripts and America will be forced to watch, well-- actually, there's the Sarah Conner Chronicles and Jericho and I've been meaning to catch up on DVD's I have never opened and of course all of reality TV and the truth is, who really watches network television anyway?
I haven't said much about this new season of TV. That's because basically, it sucks. There's Samantha Who?, Gossip Girl and Journeyman, which after three hours and 40 minutes, wound up getting past the conceit of its premise to actually tell a story.
Take the slim lines of The O.C. (it's produced by Josh Schwartz) add a handbag from Sex and the City (both are filmed on location in NYC) and toss in some girl-powered Less Than Zero pumps and you have Gossip Girl, who's source material (a series of kiddie books) would be easier to lampoon if it weren't for the fact that there's a show premiering this season based on a Geico commercial. The show premieres tonight on the CW and I've got peeps behind it, so watch. If nepotism isn't an incentive, if the show is successful, it'll give me an opportunity to tell you all about the time I tutored a diamond heiress' daughter in her Upper East Side townhouse.
Thats the question I'm asking myself after this season of HBO's polygamist drama Big Love. It seems so easy. Get a few followers/wives/children and anoint yourself Daddy/Godhead and depending on your aesthetics and budget move into a suburban development/creepy compound/abandoned warehouse. Sure you have to wear tacky business attire, but no job is perfect, right?
