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Sorry so short today... had to spend most of my time packing for our new digs down the street. And I'll be off next week. Look for HAL to return full throttle December 1.
HAL's not much for celebrity news (Winona Ryder stories just make me sad), but sometimes the crimes are so egregious that you have a sacred duty to bring them into the light:
Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simspon have named their son
Bronx Mowgli Wentz.
God knows the world does not need another Josh or Jason. However, the point of not choosing the obvious is to avoid the stupid, not to run headlong into its arms. [Gawker]
Venn diagrams rule! From "Venn That Tune: Bringing the Poetry of Maths to the Magic of Pop," by Andrew Viner:
" 'It's a car that you have to experience in almost telepathic terms,' said Roger Becker, head of vehicle engineering for Lotus, without a trace of irony," Dan Strumpf reports. I almost short-listed this item, but couldn't deprive anyone of the breathtaking hubris apparently on display at the LA Auto Show, along with Rolls-Royce Phantoms, Maseratis and the Lotus Evora which, in addition to its telepathic features, apparently "goes beyond the sense of touch." Hey, they're tasty, too!
"You're dealing with the ultra rich who, even if they take a hit, a car purchase for them is a very, very fractional piece of their net worth," says auto analyst Erich Merkle with consultancy Crowe Horwath. "Whether they're paying $50,000 for a car or $200,000 or $300,000 for a car, it really makes no difference in their net worth."
Sales at many cream-of-the-crop carmakers are bearing that out, and are either flat or down modestly. Some, like Rolls-Royce, have actually increased.
That said, Lamborghini sales are down 15 percent; Bentley, 30 percent. Maybe that will help bolster the case for the big three automakers in Washington next month. [AP]
The plummeting ad market has been good for at least one company: San Francisco-based production studio Science & Fiction has signed a deal with MSN as a "preferred production partner" in the creation of branded entertainment for MSN.com. The first project, "In The Motherhood," was designed for Suave and Sprint; now in its second online season, it's spawned a TV pilot with a full-season order from ABC. Another program, "Fearless," was created for Hummer 2. Writes Andrew Hampp:
"Michael Siegenthaler, director of MSN's Branded Entertainment and Experiences, said the key to getting branded video noticed on MSN is to present it seamlessly among editorial content on the MSN home page.... For us, it's really all about where the brands guide us. Everything we do starts with a briefing -- not tossing ideas over the wall as much as going in and taking everything you can do with a communications strategy. It's not just demographics but psychographics -- taking those in-house and really collaborating on ideas that are perfect for the brand and perfect for our audience."
Nothing funny to say here, other than I expect that the phrase "it's really all about where the brands guide us" will now haunt my dreams. Even so -- at this point, who's going to say no to any guidance if it allows you to avoid, you know, unemployment? [AdAge]
Comic strip "The Pitchers," by Joe Berger. Funny only if you like transcriptions. [Guardian]
Click for larger resolution
The mark of a classy company? When you click on a link to its website, you get a bogus come-on for spyware. That's the howdy you get at Moda Entertainment, "a full-service entertainment company" now being sued by Stephen Humprey Bogart (one and the same) for cheating "him of $340,000 (and) paying him for only 2 months for more than 3 years of work." Once you're on the site (not recommended; that spyware popup is persistent), it still takes some digging to figure out exactly what Moda does:
"It is because of MODA’s business model that the company today does not have any of the requirements, cost factors and overhead that accompany the traditional structure in the industry."
Wow; it's almost like they don't exist at all! As best as I can tell, Moda makes deals with the estates of deceased actors like Humphrey Bogart, Donna Reed and Judy Garland for licensing opportunities. I'd imagine there's some money in that; best of luck, Mr. Bogart, in extracting it. [CNS]
Talk about losing the plot. With "Heroes" in a creative and ratings tailspin, executive producer Tim Kring fired co-exec producers Jesse Alexander and Jeph Loeb earlier this month. Loeb/Alexander said they would still attend a Nov. 17 panel at the Creative Screenwriting Expo in Los Angeles as planned, but Kring would not. Then everyone reversed themselves and it was Kring repping "Heroes" solo. OK, fine. Confusing and kooky world out there.
But what's really baffling is what appears to be Kring's strategy to bring back the fans. Before he went into some heavy-duty griping about how hard it is to write for the same characters, here's what Kring had to say on the panel:
(The serialized show) is a very flawed way of telling stories on network television right now, because of the advent of the DVR and online streaming. The engine that drove [serialized TV] was you had to be in front of the TV [when it aired]. Now you can watch it when you want, where you want, how you want to watch it, and almost all of those ways are superior to watching it on air. So [watching it] on air is related to the saps and the dipshits who can't figure out how to watch it in a superior way." (emphasis mine)
Whee! So for your show to be a hit, you need more saps and dipshits? That should make everyone feel great. [IGN, via Defamer]
I am really, really glad that Elijah Wood starred in a billion-dollar trilogy because it provides me a convenient if threadbare excuse to post this music video in which he has a charming and utterly low-key presence. This is Greg Laswell's "How the Day Sounds" and while it's a very fine song, and the video was shot in the world's best soda shop (Galco's, in my neighborhood! We even shopped there the day they were shooting this!), it's also the best lo-fi music video since OK Go's treadmills. Kind of like emo treadmills. Anyway, hope you enjoy.
OK, John McCain, we get it: You'll never be president, but you are and always will be The Angriest Man In The World. In August, Jackson Browne sued McCain for using his song "Running On Empty" without permission. This week, Eriq Gardner reports, McCain responded with two 20-page motions: one's to dismiss the charge under "fair use," the second is to collect attorney fees and other costs under a statute that defines Browne's case as a SLAPP, or a "strategic lawsuit against public participation" -- in other words, it's the hippie who's the free-speech bad guy. Well played, McCain. [THR]
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They give us way more credit than we deserve. The video was made in conjunction with our Comedy Impact Report, published today.
Ben Silverman has joined the board of GE/NBC Uni's $250 million Peacock Equity Fund, which helps "identify media investment opportunities" between $3 million-$25 million. What might Peacock Equity enjoy? Well, its investments have included recommendations engine Loomia, educators' online resource Hotchalk, women's blogging network BlogHer and medical search engine Healthline; the fund also invested in and later sold ad platform Adify, which yielded a tenfold profit. True, it all lacks a certain showmanship, but that's sort of comforting in this day/age. Which begs the question: Then why Silverman?
Good morning. If you'd like a pleasant start to your day, or if your day has already gone horribly wrong, I recommend that you invest about three minutes watching videos at UK newspaper site The Sun. First up is a clip of Aardman Animations' "Creature Comforts" (different from the ones that won the Oscar, just as delightful), followed by "Pop Songs for the Deaf," which has nothing to do with Queens of the Stone Age and is... well, watch it. (Linking because the Sun won't let me embed and their presentation beats me extracting the videos from YouTube. Nice work, guys.) And again: Good morning. [The Sun]
So this is pretty great: The Cobrasnake, a party photographer known for being equal parts ingratiating/annoying/hipster, was allowed to shoot a series of interiors at Endeavor's offices. Not that much was revealed (assistants look exhausted, agents are exhaustively well dressed, lotsa shots of Tom Strickler), but the compositions and colors give a fair sense of Ari Emanuel's sanctum as a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. [The Selby, via Defamer]
Heads up, all you music supervisors who believe the highest expression of your art is a stint on "Grey's Anatomy" or on Wes Anderson's next movie. Ronald Bergan has a real challenge for you: "Leaving aside the many meretricious or fanciful biopics of composers or films about musicians, there have been few instances of celluloid characters actually listening to classical music."
He cites Manoel de Oliveira's "Belle Toujours" as containing 'one of the rare extended sequences of classical music in a film, to which the characters listen intently, without talking." Even Ingmar Bergman's work was unable to scale the heights; Bergan says the auteur presents the overture to "The Magic Flute" "as if it was a Coca-Cola commercial, cutting rapidly between faces in an audience of all ages and races." And too often classical music serves as a cue for bloodthirsty madness to follow, as in "A Clockwork Orange," "Elephant," "Funny Games" and "The Piano Teacher."
Intriguing stuff, but he loses points for this sentence: "Pier Pasolini has seldom been bettered for the use of non-diegetic classical music, but that's another blog." God, I hope so. [Guardian]
"A well-placed tipster" tells Owen Thomas that Google's kabillionaire CEO, Eric Schmidt, was pulled over last month in Los Angeles for talking on his cell phone while driving. And furthermore, Schmidt was talking to since-deposed Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang "to discuss how to get a proposed advertising deal past government regulators." That last bit sounds like it runs with the unicorns, but nonetheless: Don't say I didn't warn you. [Valleywag]
This falls under geeky but amusing: Remember Cinemanow? Probably not; it was created in 1999 by Trimark Entertainment, before they became part of Lions Gate (and later, Lionsgate) and back when Variety still used words like "'Netcasting." It's safe to say that the glory days then predicted by Trimark chairman Mark Amin never came to pass ("The potential of the Internet and broadband is now well established, and we feel our early start in this medium will contribute greatly to our future success." Ah, youth.) Anyway, Sonic Solutions, a company that makes digital media software, bought Cinemanow for terms that were "not disclosed." That's often slang for "not enough to be worth talking about," an impression borne out by a release that doesn't even mention the company was partially (dis)owned by Lionsgate.
The subtitle sounds like pure hyperbole -- "The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How it Changed America" -- but Ken Tucker makes a good case for it in his book "Scarface Nation," S. James Snyder reports. In 1983, Brian DePalma's film earned just $44 million and critical disdain. However, no less an authority than Snoop Dogg tells Tucker that "you can also use it the way businessmen use self-help books... 'Scarface' laid out everything a gangsta needed to know... but having a kind of morality." So why did Hollywood initially dismiss it? Writes Tucker,
"("Scarface" star) Steven Bauer repeated to me the famous anecdote about one major director's reaction: 'Marty Scorsese turned to me — he was sitting in front of me at the premiere — and he turned around and said, Steven, this is a magnificent film, but be prepared because Hollywood is going to hate this film, because it's about them.' [Producer Martin Bregman] concurred about the dim view his colleagues took of the film: 'Scorsese was right. Hollywood did hate it, hated it. We were looked at as though we were dragging filth into their living rooms.' "
Also: more than two million have downloaded "Say hello to my little friend!" as a ringtone. [Time]
Briefly there was RedLasso, a web video company that let you edit and embed a ton of TV clips almost in real time. It would have been the answer to everything if it weren't wildly illegal. Now there's 1Cast, funded by cell-phone pioneer Craig McCaw, which opened today in private beta. Dan Frommer describes it as:
"a growing, legal, video clip library from TV and news networks, such as CNBC, Reuters, the AP, AFP, etc. (The company says it's in the process of signing up pretty much everyone in the business.) Via 1Cast's browser, you can build embeddable video "casts" about a certain topic -- a person like Barack Obama, a company like Citigroup, etc. -- which gather more clips over time, and put them on your Web site."
Frommer has some criticisms, but as a former RedLasso fan I'm too excited to indulge. Besides, this is beta day one -- get an invite while you can. [SAI]
God bless Twitter, which currently remains immune to studio embargoes. Erik Davis collected the Twitter responses he's received so far on "Twilight," the film currently slated to tilt Earth off its axis when screenings begin midnight Thurday. "I won't say who these comments are coming from since some belong to other prominent film critics and movie bloggers," Davis writes, "but the majority of buzz seems pretty all over the board." And survey says?
"Not that it was great, but I actually enjoyed Twilight more than Quantum of Solace (bracing for impact...)"
"TWILIGHT: cheap looking and often hilarious. DARK SHADOWS at DEGRASSI JR HIGH. With half the budget."
"Wow. Twilight not bad. "
"Twilight, seen. It wasn't terrible... Wasn't great, either. I hate movies that are painfully mediocre. They are worse than bad movies."
" It's a sad, sad day when "Twilight" has better action than the latest James Bond movie."
"If you want to hang out with a lot of teenage girls and sexually frustrated middle-aged women, get yourself to a "Twilight" screening!"
Not that any of it matters. The men don't know, but the little girls understand. [Cinematical]
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Has real life made reality programming unpalatable? Scott Collins points out that an awful lot of nonscripted shows -- everything from "Deal or No Deal" to "Survivor" -- are struggling for, well, survival. Meanwhile, "Gossip Girl," "30 Rock" and "Ghost Whisperer" show improvement in the ratings. Writes Collins, "Many of the reality shows currently on network schedules are, not to put too fine a point on it, old. 'Survivor' is in its 17th cycle... 'Dancing' is winding down its 7th season, the time when most series begin to show signs of wear." And he points out that "the deep recession of the early 1980s may have created a fertile environment for the success of nighttime soaps about the treacheries of the rich and infamous, such as 'Dynasty' and 'Dallas'... As the Dow continues to spiral down and jobs dry up, viewers may have decided that their everyday lives already contain more reality than they can bear." [Show Tracker]
British film censors have invented a new warning: "disability themes." That's the phrase attached to "Special People," a British comedy directed by Justin Edgar that follows a neurotic filmmaker who teaches young wheelchair users about filmmaking. And, yes, most of the cast has disabilities. Says Ian Macrae, editor of magazine Disability Now, "It's the exact equivalent of putting a warning on a Spike Lee film saying, 'This film contains black people.' It's medieval thinking." Pic is handled in the UK by Guerilla Films. [Disaboom, via Fark]
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"Australia" is looking barren. As Claude Brodesser-Akner reports, Nielsen numbers on Baz Luhrmann's $130 million epic don't look good: "Overall, the film has a 5% unaided awareness, and only 60% of respondents said they were aware of the movie when its title was mentioned to them. Among those who were aware of the film, only 29% expressed definite interest, and only 6% said it would be their first choice at the box office." Numbers were even lower for men, and for women under 25.
Older women, who likely heard Oprah declare "I have not been this excited about a movie since I don't know when" on her show Nov. 10, are more generous; 40% of those aware of "Australia" showed "definite interest" in seeing it. Says a non-Fox marketing exec, "That's good, but older females are the hardest to get to go to the movies, especially when your partner takes one look at the movie and says, 'Not a fucking chance. Take a girlfriend.'... If you can't get young girls interested in this movie, I don't know how you come out of this. There's just too much [Academy Award] competition then." [AdAge]
Snoop is Martha's Best. Guest. Ever. Don't believe me? Three words: Cognac mashed potatoes.
The auto industry is begging like James Brown to please, please, PLEASE give them $25 billion for a bailout.
So far, Congress has been less than sympathetic; the public, it would seem, even more so. As Nicholas Carlson points out, YouTube viewers this video two stars out of five, with more than 181,000 views -- and the top referrer is a GM-owned site. [SAI]
Moriarity has a long interview with Spike Jonze about his long-delayed "Where the Wild Things Are" and this is what we learned: Jonze still wants the movie to be scary.
"And I think that’s what freaked the studio out about the movie too. It wasn’t a studio film for kids, or it wasn’t a traditional film about kids. We didn’t have like a Movie Kid in our movie, or a Movie Performance in a Movie Kid world. We had a real kid and a real world, and I think that’s sort of where our problem was. In the end they realized the movie is what it is, and there’s no real way to... it’s sort of like they were expecting a boy and I gave birth to a girl. So they just needed their time to sort that out and figure out how they were going to learn to love their new daughter. And that was hard, but you know, in the end I got to make my movie. And with the version you saw, I was trying to get the money to do the pick-ups I wanted to do, and it just took a lot longer to finish it."
It also sounds like his aborted development of "Harold and the Purple Crayon" in 1996 turned out to be a necessary evil.
When it finally got the plug pulled on it I found myself oddly relieved… depressed too, and sad, but there was a part of me that was relieved. And I realized later that I was relieved because it had gotten away from what I wanted to do. I think I’m much more aware of that now. It’s commercials too. Ad agencies are always the same way. They always just want to pick it away from what your initial idea was, and that one just luckily didn’t happen, I think. I mean, it’s a bummer it didn’t happen, but I’m also glad it didn’t happen in a compromised way, because it just moves away from what you want by like a millimeter a day, and then you look up a year later, and it’s miles away from what you wanted.
Here's hoping that the delay means that "Where the Wild Things Are" didn't follow suit. [AICN]
So how did Summit Entertainment get its paws on the upcoming behemoth that is "Twilight"? Patrick Goldstein lays it out for you, but for those with latent ADD: Paramount Pictures screwed up. So did 20th Century Fox (via Fox Atomic). Then it came to Erik Feig at Summit, which had recently morphed from a sales-financing company to a full-on wannabe mini-major with the adddition of former Paramount exec Rob Friedman as partner to Summit founder Patrick Wachsberger. Cut to this Friday, when the film will be on 5,500 screens and could sell out most of them. Also of note: Goldstein sources say Paramount's Brad Weston didn't think supernatural movies were commercial, since "Cursed" flopped when he was at Dimension Films; and Goldstein describes Friedman as "the Hollywood equivalent of T. Boone Pickens, the oil tycoon suddenly turned alternative energy booster," a concept more frightening than marauding bands of undead teenagers. [LAT]
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London's Groucho Club sounds like the Factory, Little Nell's and the Copacabana rolled into one. And yet the UK film business largely sucks; meanwhile, Hollywood rolls merrily along while making do with, what, Villa? If it's a cosmic joke, the punchline is "Soho Society," a new book written by Bernie Katz (that's him, as painted by Triana de Lamo Terry). Imagine Amy Sacco dishing for 140 pages during the heyday of Bungalow 8 and you get the idea. Although that's hard to imagine, since the chapters have names like "Seduction Of The Straight Man," "Interview With A Rent Boy" and "No 1 Door Whore."
Variety editor Steven Gaydos, who spent five years in London, brought the book to my attention, writing: "It's all the more impressive an accomplishment as Katz is no literary poseur but rather a self-described low-life, as evidenced by his intro to the book in which he recounts the fateful day in his youth when his father's "life ended somewhat abruptly with a bullet in his head... never one to miss an opportunity, I sashayed over to his wardrobe and navigated my way across the sea of footwear to his black Pierre Cardin alligator-skin shoes, which I'd secretly always had my eye on." Yeesh. Gaydos adds: "The health freaks here can't condone the kind of alcohol consumption that goes on there." I'll bet. And: "I miss it more than words can say." Yeah, I can see that, too.
The book's illustrated with original artworks by Damien Hirst, Peter Blake, Tracey Emin, John Maybury and Sam Taylor-Wood, all of which will be on exhibit November 26-December 2 at London's Lazarides Gallery, with an auction hosted by Stephen Fry to follow.
All of which sounds fabulous and only serves to remind me that none of this info does me any damn good. Anyway, if you're similarly masochistic, here's the book.
The first reviews of "Australia" are in! Survey says? Well, depends who you ask!
Claire Sutherland, at Australia's Murdoch-owned Herald Sun, can't get enough of the outback:
"It's a movie with a message, but Luhrmann provides the audience with no shortage of thrills, from a cliff hanger cattle stampede to the bombing of Darwin. Kidman and Jackman are perfect together, Jackman's broad speaking drover a perfect foil to Kidman's snooty English rose.... A love letter to the Australian landscape and our history, 'Australia' has international blockbuster written all over it."
She also calls the film "a compelling and moving tale which traverses war, race relations, class and the Stolen Generation.... (with) some of the most beautiful photography ever seen in an Australian film, from the Bungle Bungles in the Kimberley to the Northern Territory in the midst of the wet season."
And then there's Jim Schembri at Australia's Canberra Times, which is owned by Fairfax Media:
"In what has to be the most hyped and self-consciously local film since 1984's 'The Man From Snowy River,' the anxiously anticipated 'Australia' is not a bad film. But it's far from a great one, and certainly not one destined to be a classic."
And that's the opening paragraph; another 450 words' worth of damning with faint praise follows, acknowledging that the film may be popular, "possibly wildly so," especially as a chick flick. But Schembri also calls it an "overlong melodramatic saga" that is "never boring, but, boy, is it overlong. At a mammoth 165 minutes it feels too much like a work in progress." And: "There are only so many wide shots of the Aussie outback that the human mind can stand."
Ouch. [Herald Sun, Canberra Times]
Although YouTube viewership dwarfs that of Hulu (83 million unique viewers vs. 6 million), digital media research group Screen Digest says Hulu's ad revenues are growing more quickly and may draw level with YouTube's in 2009. Writes Tim Bradshaw and Matthew Garrahan, "The feat suggests traditional media companies can make money online without having to cede control to Google, as the music industry did to Apple, whose iTunes music store dominates the digital music market." Says Screen Digest analyst Arash Amel, “YouTube is in a very tough place right now. Most of that user-generated content [on YouTube] is worthless or illegal. The next 18 months will determine whether or not it was just an expensive mistake for Google.” Echoes Tracey Scheppach, video innovations director at media agency Starcom, “YouTube hasn’t done a great job justifying why advertisers should migrate online.” And even Matthew Liu, a YouTube advertising product manager, admits as much: “We’re in the early stages, I wouldn’t say we’re where we want to be.” [FT]
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This is how bad it's gotten: the Sundance Film Festival, an event that (fairly or not) has become synonymous with sponsorship, is looking to the state of Utah for financial aid because corporate purses are drawn tight. According to NPR, "Organizers recently met with state officials and said the film festival is good for the state's economy. An official with the Governor's Office of Economic Development responded that everyone is having a tough time right now." And the timing for this potential handout is, shall we say, awful. There's already talk of a Sundance boycott in the face of the passage of Prop. 8, the logic being that Mormon hotbed Utah is a "hate state." Among the strong arguments against such a protest is that Park City, while in Utah, is not of Utah. If the festival were to receive state funding, would that logic still hold?
Two former journalists believe PayPal donations will bring them the $3 million they need to complete "Not Evil Just Wrong," a documentary that takes on "global warming alarmists." The film's website (which, as of Monday morning, says it's received $1.6 million) describes it as "the most controversial documentary of the year" and "This is the film Al Gore and Hollywood don't want you to see." Not that there's a film yet to see, Harry McGee reports; the Irish Film Board called the unfinished doc "repetitive and creatively thin." Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer's first documentary, "Mine Your Own Business," was largely funded by a "mining company that wanted to develop an open pit gold mine in an impoverished village in Romania" and "contended that the actions of environmentalists were destroying communities and lives in developing countries." McAleer says the mining money did not compromise the film. "They saw what I had written [about the village] in the Financial Times and saw that I was representing it in a fair way. Also they had a good story to tell. They were the only people who could save this village from being destroyed by environmentalists." [Irish Times]
Good morning. If you missed last night's Barack Obama interview on "60 Minutes," here it is:
The video is brought to us by Pfizer/Viagra, which also sponsors my much-adored repeats of "Mad Men." When did Viagra become the go-to sponsor for video on demand?
Today was the last TRL. Not that I ever watched, thank God. I'm too old and being home to watch it would have basically meant being unemployed. Anyway, here's MTV's 60-second obituary. It's worth putting up with the 30-seconds' worth of snowboard-videogame commercial that precedes it.
Hollywood, you've been very naughty. It seems most Americans believe religious values are under attack by "people who run the television networks and major movie studios," according to a survey from the Anti-Defamation League.
"These findings point to the challenges that we face in dealing with issues of religion in society," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. "Disturbingly, 43% of Americans believe there is an organized campaign by Hollywood and the national media to weaken the influence of religious values in this country."
While Foxman makes Hollywood and the media sound like Miss Elmira Gulch, what's disturbing to me is that we try to run organized campaigns all the time and they usually center on making pots of money. Lately, we haven't been doing so well with that one. And even if we ran campaigns with Obamaesque effiency, I don't think there would be any interest in weakening religious values since there's pretty much no money in that at all.
For someone like me who doesn't actually like going to movies that often, this is really quite handy. [Cinematical]
First off: Can you believe what former TYCO CEO Dennis Kozlowski looks like? He's straight from Central Casting as a fatcat-turned-jailbird. Secondly: As Silicon Alley Insider's Caroline Wexler points out, "Why the jailers would agree to let him appear (on Fox Business) is beyond us."
However, he may (may - not putting money on that, no pun intended) have a point when he says his actions don't really register when you look at Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and AIG: "Tyco is still a viable company, still alive and kicking. Bear Sterns is under, Lehman Brothers is under. Merrill Lynch had to be acquired. There are all kinds of banks going under right now."
Still, it's hard to feel too badly when he says stuff like this: "I sit here and I read about a $150 billion bailout of AIG, I compare it to a $6,000 shower curtain. It's hard to reconcile the two."
True. That's because NO ONE IS SUGGESTING THEY'RE THE SAME THING. It's not like his gold-laced shower curtain wasn't obnoxious, but it didn't even came close to being the extent of his sins against Tyco Intl.; he was convicted of misappropriating more than $400 million in corporate funds. Granted, an AIG bailout could support 37 Kozlowskis in the lifestyle to which they were accustomed, but let's face it: That's still pretty gross. [Fox Business]
This was a good week for the culture jammers. First the Yes Men distributed 1.2 million copies of a fake New York Times announcing the end of the Iraqi war; then, indie filmmakers Dan Mirvish and Eitan Gorlin wrote a new play for the How To Get Ahead in Hollywood handbook: Create a political pundit, make him famous and then confess that he doesn’t exist.
The NYT broke the “Martin Eisendstadt” story Thursday, explaining that the would-be John McCain pundit who publishes a blog, operates a Washington, DC consultancy and is the subject of multiple YouTube videos as well as the apparent subject of a BBC documentary, is actually the creation of filmmakers Mirvish (co-founder, Slamdance Film Festival) and Gorlin, whose “The Holy Land” won the Slamdance grand jury prize in 2002.
Eisenstadt was initially created for a sitcom Mirvish and Gorlin are pitching, “The Pundit.” With Gorlin portraying the character in popular YouTube videos, the myth remained relatively intact throughout the election cycle; sources ranging from CNN to the Huffington Post took his existence on faith.
Mirvish and Eitan also manipulated the spin cycle to spread rumors that Paris Hilton was feuding with McCain, that Sarah Palin received a $900 spray-on tan and that Joe the Plumber had a tryst with SNL's Kristen Wiig.
However, Mirvish and Gorlin decided to reveal themselves the week after the election, when reports surfaced that an anonymous McCain source said Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent.
“Someone said it, but it wasn’t us,” Mirvish says. “So we took credit for it.”
Mirvish posted the claim Tuesday on Eisenstadt’s blog and then spent a few hours at the American Film Market. By the time he got home, MSNBC’s David Shuster was reporting the Eisenstadt-Africa connection as a breaking news story.
Eisenstadt’s political career may be over, but Mirvish and Gorlin’s has just begun. They already have received an offer from the publishers of Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” book. And, says Mirvish, “We still think he's a brand. We're doing meetings next week. Eisenstadt still has to carry on.”
Mirvish is nothing else if not persistent. He made his first film, "Omaha," in 1995; when Sundance rejected the comedy for its lineup, Mirvish responded by launching Slamdance. When he wrote and directed the “real-estate musical” "Open House" in 2004, he raised a ruckus when the Academy refused to activate its live-musical category that year.
I spoke with Mirvish as he was preparing and shuttling his three kids to school on Thursday morning. His wife, a doctor, had worked the night shift.
Did your agent know you were doing this? Or anyone else in the industry?
It's very generous for you to presume I have an agent. I've had a few over the years; I don't have one right now. There's a number of people in the TV world who knew about us and our shenanigans -- production companies, networks. JJ Abrams' company Bad Robot, Paramount TV, CBS, Comedy Central, Sony TV, Ashton Kutcher's company...
So basically, it was a massive left-wing conspiracy?
Continue reading "Behind the Sarah Palin hoax: Interview with Dan Mirvish " »
Dan Mirvish is nothing else if not persistent. He made his first film, "Omaha," in 1995; when the Sundance Film Festival rejected the comedy for its lineup, Mirvish responded by taking the film to Park City, Utah to launch Slamdance. More recently, when he wrote and directed "Open House" in 2004, a "real-estate musical," he raised a ruckus with the Academy when it refused to activate its live-musical category that year.
And so it would follow that he'd be involved with the Great Sarah Palin Caper otherwise known as Martin Eisenstadt, the conservative talking head who claimed Palin didn't know Africa was a continent but, in reality, doesn't exist. (Eisenstadt, that is. Not Palin. Or Africa.) The New York Times wrote about the hoax in today's paper with the cooperation of Mirvish and his partner in crime, Eitan Gorlin. And all hell has been breaking loose for Mirvish ever since, mostly because his doctor wife worked the night shift and left Mirvish in charge of getting their three kids to school. Nonetheless, he picked up the phone in between zipper and shoelace crises to discuss his adventure.
Did your agent know you were doing this? Or anyone else in the industry?
It's very generous for you to presume I have an agent. I've had a few over the years; I don't have one right now. There's a number of people in the TV world who knew about us and our shenanigans -- production companies, networks. JJ Abrams' company Bad Robot, Paramount TV, CBS, Comedy Central, Sony TV, Ashton Kutcher's company...
So basically, it was a massive left-wing conspiracy?
(Laughs) Right. Not that any of them were involved at all, because they weren't. (At this point, chaos takes over as his daughter Becca starts to scream.) Zip it up, no, OK, take it off. Who left me in charge? You know what, Dana, let's continue this a little bit later.
[More coming.]
You know how John McCain aide Martin Eisenstadt claimed that Sarah Palin didn't know Africa was continent? Maybe Palin didn't know (I'll bet she does now!), but that McCain leak never happened because Martin Eisenstadt doesn't exist. He's actually Eitan Gorlin who, with Dan Mirvish, crafted an elaborate hoax designed to lampoon the gluttonous 24-hour news cycle. That, and help the filmmakers pitch a TV show. (Frankly, if it weren't for the fact that I've known Dan since he co-founded Slamdance in 1995, I'd still doubt the veracity; "Eitan Gorlin" looks like a family name that comes from a long line of anagrammers.) Richard Perez-Pena has the story, "A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence;" I'll have an interview with Mirvish later today. [NYT]
But what the hell. Click through for larger resolution. [Screen Junkies]
Looks good, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it's a well-designed and utterly phony spoof, one that was handed out in New York this morning at subway stations around the city. Writes Sewell Chan:
The paper is dated July 4, 2009, and imagines a liberal utopia of national health care, a rebuilt economy, progressive taxation, a national oil fund to study climate change, and other goals of progressive politics.
The hoax was accompanied by a Web site that mimics the look of The Times’s real Web site. A page of the spoof site contained links to dozens of progressive organizations, which were also listed in the print edition.
(A headline in the fake business section declares: “Public Relations Industry Forecasts a Series of Massive Layoffs.” Uh, sure.)
Later on Wednesday morning, the Yes Men issued a statement claiming credit for the prank. The statement said, in part:
In an elaborate operation six months in the planning, 1.2 million papers were printed at six different presses and driven to prearranged pickup locations, where thousands of volunteers stood ready to pass them out on the street.
The Yes Men were also the subject of a 2003 documentary directed by Chris Smith, Sarah Price and Dan Ollman. [NYT]
HAL is staying away from the Oscar handicapping game and its half-breed cousin, handicapping the Oscar handicapping game. However, Gawker's Alex Carnevale raises an excellent point: Why is the once-nascent category of animated filmmaking still limited to just three nomination slots?
The list of films that could be nominated for the Academy's seven-year-old Best Animated Feature Oscar was released, and everything else in the category will be overshadowed by the one lock for a nod, Wall-E. The rest will campaign for just 2 other slots. With more animated films produced outside of the Disney system, small triumphs like the Israeli animated documentary Waltz with Bashir may find themselves on the outside looking in when nominations are announced next year. With only a tiny run in American theaters to put itself into consideration, why is the Academy continue to insists on cramming the field into this tiny category?
There's 14 films in the full submissions list. Six are major-studio CGI ("Bolt," "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who!," "Kung Fu Panda," "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa," "Wall-E," "The Tale of Despereaux"), four are major-studio-CGI wannabes ("Delgo," "Igor," "Dragon Hunters," "Fly Me to the Moon" -- what, no "Space Chimps"?) two are Japanese anime ("The Sky Crawlers," "Sword of the Stranger") and two are tough to classify: the stop-motion "$9.99" and the animated documentary "Waltz with Bashir."
I don't think anyone's feeling bad for the wannabes (except maybe Harvey Weinstein), but with the continued growth in the number of animated movies each year, the indies are in a position to get screwed. Not that indies aren't used to it, but animation is an art form in which they have a consistent and legitimate opportunity to kick ass and with only three slots, the odds are just too great that they won't even get the chance to square off.
It's not like we need yet another Oscar category (please, we're begging you), especially one like "Eccentric Animated Films That Almost No One Saw But Deserve An Audience More Than Anything Else." But Carnevale's point is a good one: At seven years old, the animated-film category is old enough to cross the street by itself. Maybe it's time to let it stretch its legs into five nominations, like the big kids?
All that debate about changing the ending of "Australia" probably isn't the worst thing that could happen to Baz Luhrmann. I'd say that honor belongs to the fact that he was in New York on Tuesday, flying back to Sydney with one day to finish the $130 million movie that has its world premiere Nov. 18. "I'm going back to the mixing desk to finish it in 24 hours," the director told Michelle Nichols as he left for the airport. "It's right on the edge, we're right up against it. I literally have to on Friday night push that button. This is really dangerous, I hope there's no problem with the plane going back." As for the ending, he said he wrote six versions and shot three. Hugh Jackman doesn't die in the one he's using, but Luhrmann scoffed at the idea that 20th Century Fox forced the choice on him. "You really think that on my films people tell me what to do? I don't think so," he said. "On my films I decide." [Reuters]
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