The death of Elizabeth Taylor this week marks the passing of an era in the world for many reasons.  One of the many for me is that my mother looked like her.  Not exactly.   But enough that I can recall every few months of my childhood, and then periodically over the years, being somewhere with my mother to hear those words:  “Anyone ever tell you you look a lot like…” “You know, you’re a dead ringer for…”  My mother used to smile demurely at such adulation, and then, as time went on, was simply amused by it, only wishing she’d had some of Elizabeth’s money, a few pieces of her jewelry, and probably just one or two of her lovers, if I might be so bold.  But such is life that my Mom didn’t live like a movie star queen, just simply thought of herself as one.   A classy pedigree can do that to a person.  But that’s off topic and you don’t need a glimpse into my therapy.

Ms. Taylor represented the best of an era – obscene looks, talent, money, passionate love affairs, marriages, children, public scandals and bouts with death, only to rise out of it like a phoenix and go through the drill of each all over again.  It’s the stuff of great drama – the kind that are seldom made anymore on film, television or the stage.  And in addition to her life, Elizabeth Taylor lived and played in all three venues.

For those under 30, think Angelina Jolie and multiply it seven fold for each of her husbands or eight fold for each of her marriages (she married Richard Burton twice).  Like Ms. Taylor, at the age of 36, Ms. Jolie has to her credit lots of kids, money, lovers, movies, and a sole best supporting actress Oscar and is about to remake “Cleopatra.”  By that time in her life, Ms. Taylor had all of the above plus she had already completed “Cleopatra” got paid the most money of any actress in the history of the business for it and helped sink Twentieth-Century Fox AND earned TWO best actress Oscars.    (Is this comparison a faulty one? Probably not).

Ms. Taylor and Ms. Jolie would probably rightly tell us that the Oscars are clearly the least important achievement on the list, though if the economy keeps tanking they might be worth much more than their present value in gold.   And a case could be argued that it would be the best thing in the business right now if one of the remaining studio conglomerates does sink for overspending on a big, bloated overproduced movie – no kibosh on the new “Cleopatra” intended for producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, because I might want to get one more big original screenplay of my own produced one day and certainly don’t want to burn any bridges the way things are.  But if one examines the two Oscars won by Ms. Taylor for best actress and the sole statuette won for Ms. Jolie for best supporting actress, and the films each have made to date as among the biggest dramatic movie actress in the business, it gives a little peak into what’s going in movies today and a look at why Elizabeth Taylor’s death is totally and truly, once and for all, really clearly the passing of an era.  Especially in the entertainment business.

Taylor won her second best actress Oscar for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” made at age 35 and was roundly criticized as too young for it. (An enduring, culturally iconic film, it won a lot of Oscars and is the first film by now legendary film director Mike Nichols). Jolie, 35 this year until June, made/released  “Salt” and Johnny Depp’s  “The Tourist.”  Jolie is the most bankable (female) star and thus gets offered EVERY VIABLE PROJECT IN THE WORLD. Trust me, even probably before Meryl Streep if she’s age appropriate.  (Or even if she’s not.  Could she have played Julia Child?  Well, the studio might have liked it).  So did Ms. Taylor.  That’s how she got to do “Virginia Wolff” when most people thought she was hopelessly too young and miscast in her thirties and a “movie star”.  So it’s not a question of turning down.  As someone wisely once told me when I didn’t like the seemingly bad choices a star actress was making, “what are the films being made that you think she should be doing that are being made.”  Years later questioning my career, he once again told me – “what are the open assignments you really want to be doing from what’s out there???”

Here’s a list of some of Ms. Taylor’s great films from ages 18-35 – “A Place In the Sun,” “Giant,” “Raintree Country,” “Cat on A Hot Tin Roof,” “Suddenly Last Summer,” “The Sand Piper” and “Taming of the Shrew.”  For blockbusters, let’s add  “Cleopatra” and for star vehicles she elevated let’s include “Butterfield 8,” which did win her the first Oscar.  (Though so did her near death experience that year and an emergency tracheotomy). During that time she also managed to have five marriages, several children and almost die, while losing a husband, stealing the husband of her friend, bankrupting a studio and becoming Hollywood’s highest paid actress.  Aside from her Oscar winning supporting role in “Girl Interrupted,” Ms. Jolie also did most of the above, though with less marriages and not being a friend of her present “husband”’s former wife.  Yet Ms. Jolie’s films include:  “The Bone Collector, “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” Beyond Borders” “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” “Original Sin,” “”Salt, “Wanted” and “The Tourist.”  For blockbusters, throw in, well, “Alexander?” For star power elevation of material throw in  “”The Changeling” and  “A Mighty Heart.”

What are the studio films being made today where Ms. Jolie acts in that would raise her film oeuvre to the level of Ms Taylor’s?  Any in development?  How about what’s being made out of books or Broadway plays?

I’m waiting.

Still waiting.

Silence.

Okay, think some more.  Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller??

Okay, then let’s watch a scene from “Virginia Woolf?”

Which brings me to Sony’s new blockbuster,  “Escape from L.A.” “Battle: L.A.” Do we have to?  Oh yeah.

For $100 million and who knows how many tens of millions of advertising, it’s not that the film reaches the depths of badness of, let’s say, “Battlefield Earth.”  It’s not that entertaining.  It’s just dreadfully mediocre and well below average.  Boring bus and truck John Wayne/Green Beret stuff by way of nauseating hand held camera, generic alien villains, earnest subplot characters whose arcs are thoroughly confusing, and spoon fed information from talking heads on TV screens that violate every rule of screenwriting by mostly telling us verbally what’s going on rather than by allowing plot to unfold amid the action.  But it’s escapist, you’re making too much of it, you say?  Perhaps.

Do you want me to start comparing its star Aaron Eckhart, who tries valiantly to survive and sometimes manages to elevate the material – with the movie star he looks most like – Robert Redford (check it out, they have the SAME thick blonde HAIR I can only dream of possessing and cleft in the chin, sculptured face).  I won’t go through their films but go to IMDB and check their ages and the comparable credits thus far.  Poor Mr. Eckhart doesn’t have much of a shot at Redford stardom.  Not because he’s not a movie star and not because he’s not good enough.  But because they are simply not making them like they used to anymore on the silver screen.  Plain and simple.

What’s going on now is the classic “B” movie – the programmer of years gone by – the low budget war movie with the hackneyed plot – or the cheesy science fiction tale with the “B” stars – has become the “A” movie price wise and attention wise for all the major movie studios.  And the “A” movies, which you’d include most of the Oscar winners, are now the “B” films – lower budget, acquired by other companies, featuring big stars and memorable (sometimes) plots, adapted from classy material.

Is it topsy turvy?  Or is this simply the end of Planet of the Apes (spoiler alert), where Charlton Heston realizes that the planet he has crashed landed on where apes can talk is not some bizarre far off doppelganger for Earth but actually Earth itself, transformed by decades of time and lack of attention to its species.  That could be a melodramatic description but so was Planet of the Apes, written by the great master storyteller Rod Serling, who luckily didn’t live to see the remake of his tale being turned into yet another pulp studio blockbuster some four decades later.

At a director friend’s birthday/dinner party this weekend, I was chatting with two screenwriters more well-known and more produced than I – talking about the change in eras and sensibilities in the industry.  It was agreed one becomes irrelevant if one complains too much about the way things are because, well, they are what they are.  And that this generation deserves to have their kind of music and movies, just like we did.  Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, wonderful so they are, felt like a million years ago to us, when our parents talked about and played them.  That must be how the movies of the 60s and 70s seem, and rightly, to young people and the industry today.  But will Angelina Jolie movies or Elizabeth Taylor’s movies stand the test of time?  They both share a lot of qualities, top of the list being their stunning beauty and abilities as an actress.  But Ms. Jolie has been born into a different dimension of space and time.  Where you need aliens, guns, 3-D or an end of the world problem to get anyone’s (studio’s?) attention.  So she does the best she can.

We, meaning anyone in the industry, especially those of whom are young and thus have a longer shelf life than the rest of us at this moment in time, might want to help her.  At the age of 60, Elizabeth Taylor was able to use her stardom to help turn the tide on a worldwide pandemic. She showed us that anything was possible and reinvented herself as a great humanitarian.  For those who love movies and make them, her passing might be the time to take note of what’s out there and, like she advised, try to do just a little bit better. even though the deck seems stacked against us.  It’s not as important as fighting AIDS or world hunger (Ms. Jolie’s charity), but aren’t the movies at least worth trying to save?

In closing, two Elizabeth Taylor quotes come to mind.

“So much to do, so little done, such things to be.”  And, finally –- my fave — “Big girls need big diamonds.”

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.