Monthly Archives: March 2011

03.11.11
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Name Calling

It’s scary out there.  Watch out for free-floating name-calling and judgments about your ethnicity, how you live your life, your childhood, and, as always, what you wear.  No, this isn’t merely Oscar red carpet stuff.  This is Natalie Portman parading her very pregnant unwed motherly self on the Oscars and thus being a poor role model for young girls.  This is about drunken Dior uber (yes uber) designer John Galliano captured on video saying he admired Adolf Hitler at a Parisian bar while warning a presumed Jewish woman that only a few short years ago her “kind would have been gassed.” Or “Two and a Half Men” creator Chuck Lorre snidely being referred to as “Chaim Levine” by Charlie what’s his name.  Or Rep. Michelle Bachmann calling the Obama administration a “gangsta” government (okay, “gangster” but we know what was meant).  Or potential US presidential candidate Mike Huckabee announcing the president grew up in Kenya (uh, Hawaii), with his father (only met him once), wasn’t in the Boy Scouts or the Rotary Club like most of us in the US (they weren’t big in my hometown of the Bronx, NY either), and had misinformation about the Mau Mau Revolution that caused him to think…. Well, the important words in that sentence are OBAMA and MAU-MAU, get it???   Yes, that’s editorializing but I’m pretty sure I’m right.  And this is a blog.

For good measure let’s throw in MSNBC’s Snidely McSnide Chris Matthews asking Bachmann on election night if she’d been “hypnotized” when her answers seemed canned.  Or Kathy Griffin joking she wanted to “take down” Bristol Palin, only to then be called a “bully” by her Mama Grizzly mom Sarah.  Of course, Sarah was called a Bully and “Cruella” several months ago when she skinned a moose live on TLC by Aaron Sorkin on the Huffington Post, so maybe that’s a wash.

The point is —  never let it be said I’m not as fair and balanced as Fox News or any other cable station in America.

I haven’t even gotten to any of the Oscar dresses.  (And I won’t).  Or the fact that none of the out of shape and ill-wardrobed men on the red carpet ever ever seem to get criticized for what they wear unless they actually decide to put on a dress as Matt Stone and Trey Parker did at the Oscars one year.  What’s that about?

Has it ever been this bad?  Probably.  It can easily be argued there is more bile-like vitriol available because everything now can be You-Tubed, Facebooked, Twittered, digitally remastered and recorded into oblivion.   And every gas-baggy, fire-breathing, ready to cast the first stone hypocrite (yes, that’s all many of us) is ready to hurl the first insult.  Why anyone believes they can even have sex in private is beyond me.  And those who still think you can go on a website anonymously and get it – well – does anyone really think that still?  Or as Dr Drew Pinsky might say, “then you want to be caught?”  And as Dr. Phil might then answer, “And how’s that workin’ for ya?”

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!

You can’t even fix a $65 million musical like “Spiderman: Turn off the Dark” in private anymore without the whole world knowing it.  The new musical’s opening has now been postponed another four months to July, making this the longest recorded preview in the history of the world.  Even longer than the Watergate hearings but shorter than the time it took to make and release any one of the “Spiderman” films and much less expensive, so that’s something, I guess.

I grew up as a member of at least four religious, ethnic and social minorities by my count  (gay, Jewish, short, not much interested in sports) as well as at least two majorities (male and white).  Do the math and that still makes me more in the minority than most people.  But given that status, I can honestly say as a middle-aged person (well, yeah, because I plan to be on Willard Scott’s Smuckers jar one day!) that I don’t recall it being this relentless, this bad, this out-of-control in your face.  Oh sure, I heard the occasional sniggering about being “queer” as a teenager.  But that word is no longer considered a pejorative, since in our post racial, post-sexual age, minorities have adopted the language of the oppressor.  Meaning gay people today proudly proclaim to be “queer.”  Just as Black people are allowed to call each other the “n” word.  Which reminds me of that famous “Saturday Night Live” sketch where Chevy Chase and Richard Pryor freely threw various ethnic epithets at each other, only to meet at a very uncomfortable impasse when the White person (Chase) decided to fling back the “n” word at Pryor.   Watching it even now I get jittery, which is why I suppose Pryor really was one of our true comic geniuses because it’s also very uncomfortably funny.

Not to downplay the contributions of Chevy Chase, in case he’s reading, which I’m sure he’s not, because he’s busy working in the hit cringe comedy “Community” now, and still on NBC.

Call me lucky or sheltered, and maybe I was, but it wasn’t till I was in my twenties in Chicago that I ever heard my first honest-to-goodness blatant name-calling epitaph.  I’m sitting at a busy outside coffee shop on Michigan Ave when two Chicago businessmen, sitting as close to me right now as you are to your computer screen, casually converse about the days events.  I’m hearing snippets of their conversations until one clearly said, “Yeah, and then the guy tries to Jew me down.  You believe it.  He tries to Jew me down!!”

Rewind the tape, please.

…Oh, I heard it right?

Really?

I can remember plain as the cursor on your keyboard stopping, looking at them casually continuing their conversation and wondering, maybe I was wrong.  But I wasn’t.  Because I can still hear it.  Again.  And again.  Every time I think about that day.

With so many outlets to hear so many words these days, I can’t imagine how much hurtful, untrue or marginalized epithets people in their twenties are hearing.  Not to mention those 17, or 15, or 13, or 12 or under.  I’m a liberal  (oops, a fifth minority?).  And I’m not a parent.  But even people who are many, many, many decades away from having their face on a Smuckers jar like me, can wonder, has it really come to this?  Can we maybe dial it down a few notches, perhaps do just a tad better than we’ve been doing?

As one of my friends once joked to me, or perhaps I once joked to one of my friends,  “They can put a man on the moon but with 1539 channels, you’d think I could find something decent to watch on TV.”

Not decent like the council of morality, censorship, core value, American, apple pie decent.  Just a little less manipulative and a little bit more honest.   And maybe not so —- mean?

We can have one or two remarks in private because really, let’s not fool ourselves.  And comedians and artists should probably be exempt.  But as for the rest of us – think about it.   I haven’t mentioned Cong. Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting in Arizona or its many causes because maybe it’s connected (or isn’t) and maybe I don’t need to.  This is more about pollution.  Intellectual pollution.  And the warming is global and coming from all sides.

03.04.11
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The Sheen of Illusion

Hollywood was long ago nicknamed the dream factory but with an Oscar hangover that somehow allowed me to think that James Franco co-hosted part of the Academy Awards in Marilyn Monroe drag, I don’t entirely trust my perspective.  This same fever dream then starred Charlie Sheen, star of a show I never watch, “Two and A Half Men” appearing to me on every television channel I flipped my remote to, proclaiming he lived with two women he called “the goddesses,” was filled with “tiger blood,” and uttering such memorable quotes as, “I don’t sleep.  I wait.” My medications obviously need to be adjusted.    Or maybe it could be my writer subconscious begging me to be that much bolder in my work.  More likely, it’s both.

Some years ago a friend of mine commented on some such event like Suzanne Somers bringing her one woman show to Broadway (he now contends it was some other event but I prefer to think of it this way) that “it’s the end of civilization.”  I have been meaning to call him to ask what stage he now considers us to be in.  A culture drunk bender that will require a century of rehab?  Post Armageddon?  Perhaps it’s the finale chapter of “Newhart” where he wakes up next to the wife of his previous successful television series, Suzanne Pleshette, in the finale of his second successful television series, and when he tells her the details of his new sitcom life of the last five years, she looks at him and deadpans, “Go back to sleep.”

We might all need a long sleep.  But how long?  A century?  A decade?  Or two or three?  Maybe we’re sleeping already and we don’t know it.  Is that the real message of “Inception?”  Have I finally figured it out and can now once again be considered culturally literate?  Or is that my fantasy, too?

A certain amount of both illusion and truth is needed to succeed in the entertainment business, and I suspect in any creative enterprise.  But how much of each?  That’s the trick.  Keeping it in the proper balance.  For yourself.  Because everyone needs a different dosage to not only succeed but to survive in today’s world.

It should be noted I’m appropriating Edward Albee’s famous line from his masterwork “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”  Albee, by the way, didn’t win the Oscar for the movie version of Edward Albee’s “WAOVW” – that was  Ernest Lehman (“North by Northwest”), who admitted he tried to open up the story, only to go back to many of the lines and moments in the play.  But he still got the credit and Oscar for the words on the page, which yes, he did edit and reorder, but most of which were written by Albee.  Perhaps that’s the screenwriter’s job and he deserved it.  Or is it an illusion that he wrote the movie version.  I don’t know and it’s up to others less dreamy to decide.  (Note:  A friend just called to tell me Lehman didn’t win but was nominated, which is an honor in itself where you get a nice certificate and a free luncheon, something Albee still might have been rightfully entitled to.  Now picking up where we left off — )

What I do know is that when starting in any creative profession one must have a notion or vision or illusion of one’s success despite the odds.  Some call that goals.  Motivational guru Tony Robbins talks about finding a mentor and visualization and thirty years ago got a lot of attention for demonstrating this by walking across a bed of coals barefoot – willing himself not to feel the heat.

It’s a clever metaphor – not feeling the heat when you’re attempting to do something new and different.  Arianna Huffington was warned by most of her friends that she’d fail miserably when she started Huffington Post and now has become one of the most influential media moguls in the world.  Columbia put “E.T.” into turnaround in 1981, thinking who’d want to see some story about a little kid and an alien directed by the guy who’d just done the overblown box office disappointment, “1941?”  One of the producers of this year’s Oscar show came up with the excuse that “we had to try something – even if nothing worked, we can fix it.  But at least we did it.”  As disappointing as the Oscars might have been to many, he has a point.  Success has many parents but failure is an orphan (no, I didn’t make that up).  You need to dream and dream big (nor that either).  Be fearless.  Knowing success is not a straight line but a circuitous graph that is more nuanced and jagged than Bernie Madoff’s financial books and probably more treacherous to navigate than Charlie Sheen’s brain patterns.  (that’s mine, I think).

Some people say to be bold – Think Different.  At least that’s what those Apple ads told us – from Einstein to Bono – so it must be true.  But then once you do, everyone tells you your ideas suck and you’re crazy.  Until you prove them wrong.  Or implode.  Or explode.

One of the cool and troubling things about society is there is room for everyone or no one.  You have to self-monitor and yet not self censor.  One person’s truth is society’s illusion or vice-versa.   One of the things a writing mentor of mine, Oscar nominated screenwriter Anna Hamilton-Phelan (“Gorillas in the Mist”) said years ago stayed with me. She invited me into her writer’s group and at one point, reading a very personal, independent screenplay I was writing, she noted that one of the greatest things about not having had a movie made is that you don’t know how many things will have to change and what can go wrong.  You can write unencumbered because you don’t know enough yet to censor yourself.  In the last 25 years I’ve heard that sentiment shared by Callie Khouri, Shane Black and just about every screenwriter I’ve ever met.  What I think they’re saying is you need a certain amount of illusion to get by in a world crazy enough to have phones stand in for musical instruments…

…and politicians and governments ignoring the true will of its people (fill in your own links because I’m not getting political right now).  It’s up to us to dream and dream big.  If it works out and it gets the message across then you are a genius and as rich and famous as Madonna or (fill in political figure of your choice). Do it wrong and you’ve Charlie Sheened yourself across the airwaves.  None are particularly real but all are an attempt at something.  In today’s culture, it’s your choice to decide which illusion you want to present as your, or our, truth. If you’re creative and lucky enough, the former can just as easily become the latter.  Of course, that could just be my illusion and the way I survive.  Which is also totally fine.  Despite what anyone else thinks.  Because I believe it’s so.