Quote of the day: Crapola chronicle

Official Historian of the Great Deeds of White People Tom Hanks apparently has signed aboard the film adaptation of Bill O'Reilly's crapola chronicle of Abe's murder, a farrago of bullshit so extraordinary that the historians at Ford's Theater refused to sell it. Nice work, Tom. Tell us about astronauts again.

That's Charlie Pierce on . . . well, you can see what he's obviously on about.

Tom Hanks has, for many years, suffered from Oliver Stone Syndrome, a condition in which, if the sufferer makes a blockbuster movie about a historical person or era, they gradually come to believe they own it.

At a time when the remaining World War II vets were dying at the rate of about 1 a day, the “Saving Private Ryan”-besotted Hanks thought what America really needed was another memorial competing for space and status on the National Mall, and not -- you know -- actually looking after the health and well-being of those still-surviving vets. Or defending policies that recognized their sacrifice like the GI Bill.

Fifty years later: The thirty seconds he sold for $200

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make successful in entertainment.

--Steven Spielberg

A few months ago, I was musing about the sort of bill that can one day come due when, let's say, you're Bernie Taupin and you've just spent less than an hour on the phone with Elton John creating "Rocket Man," which will then go on to sell a gazillion records.

Here's another sobering example:


First, the outcome:

Now the back story:

In the late 1950s the CBS television network offered $200 to any composer who could write a catchy, creepy signature theme for its new sci-fi show, “The Twilight Zone.” The winner was Marius Constant, a French modernist composer of Romanian descent. Sadly, no other work by Constant, who died at 79 in 2004, will ever attain the pop-culture status of the “Twilight Zone” theme, 30 seconds of music that he tossed off in a single afternoon for kicks.

Hollywood update

The WGA strike ended on Wednesday, and it's been interesting to watch the industry putting the pieces back together. I find it a little odd that it was apparently the impending Oscars that may have pushed AMPTP to sit down seriously at the table. If ever there was an event that cried out more for "less talk!", I'm at a loss to name it. But let it pass.

On television, the strike-imposed blackout had the side effect of clearing out the undergrowth so that oddities like Reaper could bloom, while it wiped out a lot of struggling shows, and left some, like Pushing Dasies and Bionic Woman, in limbo. In one of the more unexpected results, it may have found a broadcast audience for the ultra-darkly fascinating Dexter, whose first-season episodes from Showtime are now running on CBS.

And I can watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report again--I wasn't that interested in all-interview shows, particularly when interviewees were crossing picket lines to be there.

Of course, the strike also added to the already-burgeoning ranks of no-union-writer shows (aka "reality" shows--as if dreck like Moment of Truth anything to do with reality). Forty years ago, many Americans were mortified to think that the image that other countries had of us was through international syndication of The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres. Now--in addition to the overseas adventures of George W. Bush--our neighbors around the world can use American Gladiator and Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? to form their opinions of us. We get Jane Austen from them; they get Jeff Foxworthy from us. Couldn't be prouder.

Still, the WGA members did hang in there, and good for them. Nice to see the media corporations dragged kicking and screaming into the late 20th Century. Hats off to all the other unions that honored the strike, too. The successful outcome of this strike, plus the SEIU successfully organizing the historically un-organizable janitors in several large cities around the country in the last couple of years, mark two all-too-rare large-scale victories for labor.

I haven't seen anyone connecting the theme to this famous image (although I certainly don't fault the WGA for it), but the WGA produced a series of great viral videos to promote their cause, collectively titled "Speechless."

The gist isn't complicated: Without writers, actors can't talk. Some of the videos were pretty straight-forward: (Here and here.) Some were clever mash-ups on the theme, like this and this.

But my all-time favorite is the one by indie queen Illeana Douglas (recently seen on cable in a Law & Order: SVU episode as a defense attorney who has to wear the ugliest shoes she can find so that her client, who is--among other things--a shoe fetishist, will pay attention when she talks to him). Douglas's video is funny as hell--it's her very own "Springsteen Unplugged" moment:

Clearly, there's silence, and then again there's, you know, silence.

Douglas, by the way, is in The Year of Getting to Know Us, featured at the Sundance Film Festival last month. And--if I may bask in someone's reflected glory for a moment--a friend of mine, whose brother was a producer, attended Sundance. At my request--hint? wheedling?--she brought me back a menu from the catered dinner thrown by the producers, with a beautiful lipstick kiss print and an inscription from la Illeana herself. Woof.

But don't take my word for it (by all means, click to enlarge):

I hereby officially declare Illeana Douglas the p3 "It" Girl.

We always do it nice and rough

The main reason anyone remembered Ike Turner today is Tina.

"The stuff that dreams are made of"

"The Maltese Falcon" premiered 66 years ago today. It's as good today as it was then. (We're talking about the Huston/Bogart/Astor/Greenstreet/Lorre version, not the two earlier versions.)

It's a tough call, picking classic moments--the movie is full of them, one after the other. This one's a gem, though (some of you will notice that Peter Lorre's wonderful rant later became a signature line for "Ren and Stimpy"):

(I suppose technically that deserved a spoiler alert. Ah well.)

And you can't really appreciate the aura of cold-blooded calculation that radiates from every single character in the film without this:

Dashiell Hammett famously wrote of private eyes like his creation Sam Spade:

He wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander or client.

Am I the only one tired of the "Hillary/1984" hype?

Okay, for anyone who's missed it, here's the clip that's had its viral 15 minutes of fame, and then some.

There are those out there--including people whose opinion on many topics I respect--who think this is the future of political communication.

I'm not one of them.

I have no beef with the technical expertise it demonstrates but, substantively, I think the Hillary/Big Brother metaphor is silly and doesn't connect. So--Hillary is Big Brother? Or is it that Obama is the Mac? (Probably not the latter--market share's too small.) Does anyone but the most ferociously partisan Obama supporter think that Hillary's "conversation" theme puts her in the same league with an icon of global totalitarianism (or with IBM/Windows, whichever is worse)?

Really?

If we're going to praise that digital non sequitur, why don't we go ga-ga over these yet-to-be-digitized pop-culture references, while we're at it?

Obama digitized as Rick Blaine, Clinton digitized as Ilsa Lund:

Obama: But I've got a job to do, too. I'm going to be President. In the White House. Where I'm going, you can't follow.

Obama digitized as Rhett Butler, Clinton digitized as Scarlett O'Hara:

Clinton: Barak, Barack . . . Barack, if you go to the White House, where shall I go? What shall I do?
Obama: Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Obama digitized as Ross Geller, Clinton digitized as Rachael Green:

Obama: We were on a break!

Obama digitized as a young girl, sitting in a meadow pulling petals off a daisy; Clinton digitized as a mushroom cloud rising from a nuclear explosion:

Obama: Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

[nuclear detonation, mushroom cloud rises, Clinton's face appears out of the center]

Clinton: These are the stakes--you must vote for me, or you must die.

In each case, if you're an Obama fan, the point is obvious and in your guy's favor (and, one imagines, you'll forgive and forget how little sense it makes). If you're not, its meaning is totally obscure--but, in this conversation, who cares what you think?

It's really not much more than an old Diet Coke commercial amped up to the next level--the latest gee-whiz technology linking pop-culturally cool images with a product to which they otherwise have no obvious connection, simply because the technology lets you do it. If it's that technologically sophisticated, so the thinking goes, it must mean something, right?

Let's move on, shall we?

Quick everyone: Update your resumes!

Time Magazine has named you Person of the Year!

Did you think 2006 wasn't shaping up to be your best year? Funding disappeared on your break-through stem-cell therapy for diabetes? Watched your job get outsourced to Bangalore? Worried that you're one hospital stay away from signing your life over to your credit card company? Didn't get to the gym as often as you resolved to last January?

Well to that, Time says, pish posh! You rule!

You are, to put the matter as bluntly as possible, one of the select few "who shape our collective destiny as a species." Come on, I bet even your mom never believed in you that much.

Think what a real asset this is going to be the next time you're up for promotion. Dude, you totally aced out even Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for this award! And he's got a nuclear weapons program! When your boss puts your records side-by-side, just imagine how you're completely going to kick the ass of that guy who was "March 2006 Employee of the Month" at the Omaha office. (March 2006 Employee of the Month in Omaha! As if. You shaped our collective destiny as a species.)

Now it's true, the odds are only 26 out of 6 billion that you were also named one of the "People Who Mattered." Time gave that distinction to "the usuals"--you know, the Pope, the President, the Vice President, Rumsfeld, Kim Jong-il, that crowd. But so what? "Person of the Year" is so much cooler-sounding, and besides, would you really want to be included in that collection of geopolitical whackjobs?

Break out the Red Bull and vodka! Crank up the Talking Heads! Release the doves and the balloons! Dig out your address book and call up every girl/boyfriend who never "got" you and rub their noses in it!

Say it with me: "I am the Time Magazine Person of the Year."

And they can never take that away from you, baby!

(Note: The "PotY" distinction does not apply to the Time staffers who came up with this lame dodge. Not since the Iraq Study Group Report has a outcome been so ballyhooed before its release, only to land with such a moist thud upon arrival and so quickly become destined for irrelevance when it becomes clear that the committee so thoroughly shirked its responsibility.)