The Legion of Decency

Lazy Sunday # 92: Working Class Heroes

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:47:00 +0000

This Sunday, I’m being lazier than usual. Part of that’s procrastination. This is the day I clean out the garage so there’s somewhere to park the car come winter.

Where does all this crap come from?

Where the hell is it supposed to go?

So, in lingering over a second cup of coffee, I listened to CBC Sunday Edition instead and heard a reprise of one of their old shows. (Guess somebody’s being lazy over there too). But their repeated program had a special meaning for me, because of the reaction I’ve gotten to the post below this one.

Yesterday, I wrote about an idea I had to shake up the Canadian TV business, maybe revitalize it and perhaps in the process help save the jobs of a lot of other Canadians who work as far from creative pursuits as it’s probably possible to get.

A lot of people thought I was being funny or just shit disturbing. But I wasn’t. I was deadly serious.

And in wondering why I’d gotten that reaction, I realized that a lot of people in Canadian show business don’t think such things are possible. Whether through personal experience of a cratering industry or by buying into the lies of the networks or the welfare state mentality of our Arts bureaucracies, they’ve come to believe that they really don’t have much power or influence or the ability to change anything.

But we can.

If you search through this site (I’d find all the links for you but, like I said, I’m being lazy today) you’ll find stories about me as an actor who’d barely started his career and had no noteworthy credits helping to break the stranglehold American Equity had on Canadian actors, literally preventing us from “telling our own stories”. You’ll find others about the founding of the Writers Guild of Canada, which now fights hard for Canadian writers but was little more than a dream 30 years ago.

Those weren’t sudden aberrations in the lives of the people involved. They were part of a continuum that has bound the needs of creative and working people for about as long as anybody can remember.

There was a time when playwrights like Clifford Odets filled Broadway theatres with plays that demanded his audiences consider the lives of the blue collar workers whose rights they mostly ignored. Woody Guthrie did the same in music and John Steinbeck added those working voices to some of the greatest books in American literature.

Later, that torch was picked up by screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo, Rod Serling and Paddy Chayevsky.

Change can happen and people who do what we do can be a great part of it.

But somewhere along the way, we were co-opted into thinking we weren’t working people anymore. We were elevated to an “Artist” class, a somehow “better” caste where we could sip at the free bar in a roped off tent and rub shoulders with people, who in another time would have been courtiers to Louis XVI and now have titles denoting the ruling families of various Arts Councils, innumerable Arts Funds and Telefilm.

Those people want us apart from our true audience and stabled to serve the needs of political agendists and social engineers, not entertaining working families and making their days a little easier to bear by way of a hot serving of popular entertainment.

The Sunday Edition show this morning was about a one-of-a-kind concert that took place in 1952 in Blaine, Washington at the Peace Arch Border Crossing, familiar to anybody in the lower mainland of British Columbia. American singer, Paul Robeson, a well known activist and outspoken Black performer had run afoul of one “Red-scare” group or another.

But because they couldn’t actually prove he was a Communist or a threat to the nation, his country had opted to silence him. And while domestic Media conglomerates were as compliant then as they are now, Robeson’s detractors also had to make sure he didn’t find a platform somewhere outside their borders.

And so, Robeson had been forced to surrender his passport and was not allowed to travel outside the country.

But on a sunny May afternoon, Canadian locals of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers union arranged for Robeson to sing off the back of a pick-up truck parked under the Peace Arch, accompanied only by a piano.

And 40,000 people turned up to listen – as well as remind their governments that Art has meaning to all people, not just those with smooth hands and a little more money than others.

Our audience, the people who really need us, doesn’t live in windowless rooms in Ottawa or linger near the shrimp tray. They work for a living. And in helping them, we help ourselves.

Enjoy your Sunday. I’ll be in the garage.

How To Make Friends and Influence People

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:47:00 +0000

So, it’s Saturday and I’m reading the morning paper – happy to be at the end of a week where it became clearer that not much is going to happen in the Canadian television business until this whole “carriage fees” issue gets settled and the Canadian Media Fund issues its new guidelines for funding programming here.

So – like April.

We’re basically in tread water mode until April.

Oh, there’ll still be some stuff getting made. And we’ve now got no excuse for not working on that script we’ve been meaning to write if we had time. But until everybody in broadcasting knows:

A) how much of somebody else’s money they have to spend

and

B) how many Americans they can have showrunning or writing or starring in or directing their “Canadian” shows

…nobody is committing to anything major.

For the next 6 months, the only people getting a regular pay check in the Canadian TV business will be the bureaucrats who oversee our operations. Why the government has to keep paying them when there is little or nothing to oversee is an argument for another day.

However, getting back to that morning paper. I found a story that not only offered a solution to our problems but might also help out tens of thousands of our fellow Canadians facing imminent unemployment.

The illustration above, comes from a story in the National Post, available free here and for $2 on your newsstand – most of which either goes to bankruptcy lawyers or Goldman-Sachs. So, if you could help them out by buying the hard copy, that might save a couple of jobs too.

The gist of this story is that the $787 Billion American stimulus bill signed into law by President Obama this summer is literally killing a lot of Canadian companies.

Across the USA, products marked “Made in Canada” are banned from import and use in projects using that stimulus money. Even if they’re the only version of the product available and especially if they’ve already been part of the work already done. To qualify for the cash to finish these projects, some cities and states are cancelling orders and even being forced to rip out the Canadian goods they’ve already installed.

The “Buy American” rule in the Stimulus package was a well meaning but not well considered one. Yes, it guaranteed that US Tax dollars were spent creating American jobs – except where companies like Goldman-Sachs, who got us into this mess, used it to pay off people in their foreign subsidiaries – but it also transferred the suffering both offshore and to American companies that had previously been managing to somehow keep the lights on.

One Canadian company, for example, is laying off workers because it can no longer sell into the US. But the American companies that once supplied it with raw materials are also laying off workers because the Canadian company is no longer buying.

Now, Canada could retaliate with its own “Buy Canadian” policy, but that would likely just make things worse.

Unless…

Unless we could find a way of hurting the Americans just enough to make them rethink their policies, while not hurting ourselves that much in return.

Now what industry that we both share could do that?

Show Business.

Right now, Canadian TV networks spend $700 million purchasing American programming. Virtually all of that programming is already available to us from the American networks delivered by Canadian cable and satellite. What if Canadian networks were told they couldn’t spend that money anymore?

That’s $700 Million pulled out of the US economy in the click of a remote button.

Would the American Industry retaliate – maybe.

But total sales of Canadian programming to US networks is a fraction of our spend. And a lot of it goes to US nets who are selling little into this country in the first place and really need the low priced programming we supply.

We might not get hurt at all.

And how badly would we feel any damage if even a small percentage of that $700 million was invested in new Canadian programming to fill up the now gaping holes in the Canadian networks Prime Time schedules?

The domestic production industry likely wouldn’t suffer. It might actually see a job creating boom in new production.

Would advertisers pull their sponsorship from Canadian networks?

Not likely. There are already rules prohibiting them from buying ads on cross border stations and they still need to get the message out about the goods and services their clients offer.

Would Canadian networks suffer?

Absolutely not.

Haven’t they been telling us for weeks how important local TV is to them and how it must be saved?

Here’s their chance to finally save Local as well as compete head to head with American networks instead of just rebroadcasting the same old shows. Here’s their golden opportunity to build future revenue streams through a library of original programming they’ll be able to sell on DVD and iTunes and market to countries with less stringent trade rules than the US.

And if Canadians have so warmly embraced “Flashpoint”, “Battle of the Blades”, “Corner Gas”, “Trailer Park Boys”, and countless clones of American reality shows – why wouldn’t they just as warmly embrace more of the same?

Meanwhile, let’s add a surcharge on American films coming into the country or even on movie tickets if the film is American. Practically every other country in the world has done that without worrying about choppers of Marines massing on their borders. We almost did it a couple of times.

Will it reduce the number of people going to see American movies in Canadian theatres? Of course not.

Will it cause studios to pull their films from distribution here?

Are you nuts? Have you seen how much money they make in non-domestic markets that already ding them on every imported film or for a few cents on every ticket dollar – or both?

And in the world of theatre and concerts – are the promoters not going to be willing to pay a little more to get those money machines over the border? Are the people regularly paying $100 or more to see “Jersey Boys” and “U2” going to flinch at another buck or two that’s then rerouted to support Canadian theatres and bands?

Nope.

Suddenly, by limiting our “trade war” to just one small industry, we’ve potentially created a job boom here.

And how does that help the Canadians who now make sewer pipes and industrial pumps who are losing theirs?

Well, a little bit might get spent on some infrastructure projects here. But more importantly, you don’t take almost a Billion dollars out of Hollywood without somebody picking up the phone to call the guy whose campaign they helped to finance.

And then the guy who needs to get re-elected puts down his basketball and calls his Canadian counterpart and says, “What’re you doing to me?”

And then the Canadian guy makes sure his hair’s in place and answers, “What’re you doing to me?”

And then they figure something out.

And then Canadian companies start selling their pipe and pumps to California and California companies get to bid on projects here.

And maybe that means that us guys in Canadian Show Business who won this little skirmish don’t get to keep all we’ve gained and Global gets “House” back and CTV has some cop show with initials for a title every other night.

But us show biz types would still be far better off than we are now.

And some of those people whose jobs we helped save might have realized we’re their neighbors and work for a living just like them and they might decide to sample what we have to offer instead of the same old stuff.

Couldn’t that work?

Lazy Sunday # 91: Trying To Keep Up

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 13:53:00 +0000

I’m sure the television business isn’t all that different from any other line of endeavor these days. Everybody’s just scrambling to keep up.

This week the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation revamped its news services in an attempt to reach a wider audience, a younger audience, Hell, any audience.

Our leading private network continued a process of trying to make itself the lead story and center of attention by embedding on camera personalities in the Olympic torch run.

And the once hard-charging Canwest broadcast system, reduced to creditor protection status, was in court scrambling around the remaining pieces of its empire in an effort to hang on to what little hope of recovery it has left.

Meanwhile, independent producers and industry creatives are in a constant state of flux, working countless permutations and combinations that might get a show on anything from conventional television to an iPhone app (and maybe somehow on something in between).

Our world feels like it’s speeding up, pushing us to run faster, work longer, embrace technologies we don’t even know how to operate, let alone understand and try to still pay at least lip service to every email, text, instant message and tweet that comes flying at us.

I have Facebook friends I would never want to have a cup of coffee with and follow folks on Twitter that I not only don’t know, but don’t even know who they are --- for the simple reason that I need to understand a little of what they understand, because their insights into what’s going on might (even slightly) inform my own.

Yesterday, I asked an overwhelmed guy in a tire store for a particular brand of snow tire. He’d never heard of it. I pointed out the sale ad in his company flyer. He showed it to his partner, who wondered when the heck those had come in. Only the kid in the back who changes the tires knew where they were piled.

A couple of months back, I decided my father didn’t need to deal with the creaking desk size PC that allows him time to have a nap between when he turns it on and when it’s finally ready to work. I took him to a computer store to look at laptops priced at a fraction of what his old unit had set him back. As the salesman rattled off all the things one of these babies could do that he and his old machine had never dreamt of, I watched him physically tune out.

“Are you all right?”, I asked.

“This is all science fiction,” he answered, “and I’m not Buck Rogers.”

Well, none of us are Buck Rogers. But we can’t stop the world and get off either.

We are living in exponential times.

I don’t have any solutions to our dilemmas, but I think getting a handle on how fast it’s all moving can at least make us realize we’re not alone, not somehow incapable of understanding and, perhaps most of all, less afraid of change.

Maybe what follows will help.

Maybe not.

But take it on board and then try to enjoy your Sunday.

Bread and Circuses

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 16:09:00 +0000

On the previous two occasions Canada has hosted the Olympics, I was thrilled by the prospect of the Games and filled with a mix of national pride and that “family of man” camaraderie the Olympic movement is supposed to symbolize. This time not so much.

The official commencement of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games celebration was marked yesterday by the arrival of the Olympic torch in Victoria.

Over the next 45 days the flame will be carried from one end of the country to the other (and presumably back) by 12,000 proud Canadians we’re told are honored to have been chosen to represent their nation and all that the Olympic spirit represents.

Like sponsorship money.

Earlier in the week, CTV, supposedly cash strapped but somehow still able to shell out $90 million for the right to become the official host broadcaster for the Games, (more than double what CBC paid for the far more lucrative, longer and more sports filled 2008 Summer Games) brought us live coverage of the Olympic flame being lit in Panathenian stadium in downtown Athens.

During this, the commentator referred to “the sacred flame” being prepared for its journey here from its home “in Ancient Greece”. How the Olympic movement became a recognized religion or the method by which such holy fire would travel through time from Ancient Greece to our modern era remained unexplained in the welter of hyperbole already being rolled out by whoever is writing this crap for CTV.

The rest of the network’s crack team of Olympic embedded journalists immediately swung into action from morning show through hard newscasts to gossip mongering magazine hosts to let me know every detail of the flame’s flight and the exciting journey it would take into the hearts of Canadians once it got here.

Here we see the flame enjoying an in-flight meal of Oxygen. I believe the sacred flame has the aisle seat while its backups cope with a lack of leg room. In contrast to recommended Canadian flight safety standards, however, none of the flames appear to be wearing seat belts.

What CTV’s meat puppets glossed over in their excitement was that 2500 of our 12,000 torch bearers would be employees of CTV, the Globe and Mail and other corporate entities who have ponied up the cash to pay for the torch run.

In other words, what has been presented to us for months as a generous corporate contribution to national pride is really little more than a tax-deductable marketing expense.

More than 100,000 Canadians applied for the honor of carrying the torch, agreeing in the process to pay their own expenses to get to whichever 300 metre strip of pavement had been designated as their portion of the route.

But 2500 of them, including eager school children, former Olympic athletes and anybody who worked for a rival media outlet were turned away, so the likes of “e-Talk” hosts Ben Mulroney and Tanya Kim could take their gossip show on the road.

Above, the cast of CTV’s new series “Splash Park Boys” carries the torch.

Speaking on Canada’s foremost sports program, Bob McCown’s “Prime Time Sports”, Globe columnist and torch runner Stephen Brunt defended his journalistic integrity by saying, “This is all part of the machinery of the Olympic Games and the money machine that is the Olympic Games”.

In other words, don’t expect to see Mr. Brunt wade in on the recent revelations by China’s Sports Minister that he got IOC President Jacques Rogge elected on the condition that he land China the 2008 Summer Games or that the IOC head has since been quite vocal in his support of the Chinese crackdown in Tibet.

Or maybe, just don’t expect his column to be featured all that prominently if he does.

Didn’t Mr. Brunt lose as many tax dollars on the failed Toronto 2008 bid to this corruption as the rest of us?

Or is that all just part of the “money machine” that is the Olympics too and forgivable now that some Canadian company (like his own) is finally making a buck off it?

The full text of the discussion can be found here in Prime Time’s Monday podcast. McCown’s website also hosts a column by William Huston stating that Globe editors were so concerned about the negative backlash of all this that they pulled a torch relay section that was supposed to run in today’s paper.

I’ve always been a fan of Mr. Brunt’s writing, particularly his superb books, so it’ll be interesting to see if he skews far from what was offered in today’s G&M by their first torch bearer, Gary Mason. After describing a relay organizer who gets teary eyed just talking about the torch, Mr. Mason offers the following…

“Our group represented a true cross-section of Canadians. There were former Olympians, such as skier Allison Forsyth. There were moms running for daughters who had died. An aboriginal teacher and a diabetes researcher. There was Morgan Tierney, a former UBC goaltender, who spent four years on her hockey team and didn't play a regular season game, though she got into the team's last playoff game of her final season.

Lloyd Robertson, the CTV anchor, also ran with us.”

Gee, let’s not miss a chance to slip in that corporate reminder, huh, Gary? One big happy family doing all we can to tug the national heartstrings for ratings.

Mr. Mason also mentions the many who cheered him along the route, while failing to remind his readers that one of them could have had his place in the spotlight --- if only they’d had his company’s money and connections. His full column is here.

Elsewhere in the paper of record, reporters describe upset children who didn’t get to see the flame pass by because…

“About 400 anti-Olympic demonstrators wound through the downtown core. The zombie-themed march zig-zagged unpredictably through the streets, keeping police on the move to keep rush-hour traffic at bay.”

Interesting journalistic slant isn’t it? Globe and Mail sponsored torch runners “a true cross-section of Canadians”. Anybody opposed --- Zombies.

It’s sad that the values of the Olympic Games have apparently fallen so out of favor that their worth can only be realized through the furthering of somebody else’s corporate agenda. Although this isn’t the first time that’s happened.

The original torch relay was conceived by Adolf Hitler as a way of promoting the dominant Aryan race propaganda of the 1936 Berlin Games and carried through the capital cities of European countries he would subjugate not long after, symbolically reminding the world that all roads would soon lead to the home of the true master race.

You don’t hear CTV mentioning that they’re following in Hitler’s footsteps in their import dripping coverage of the torch relay. But by having their staff doing the running their message is much the same. Some of us are more important than the rest of you. Some of us are better than you. Some of us have a rightful place in the spotlight you paid for --- just like we have a right to more of your money through carriage fees to bring you even more of our endless, self-referential, self-aggrandizing drivel.

And those rights don’t just include basking in the warmth of a sacred flame and a snazzy tracksuit and toque.

Although the province of British Columbia has a shortage of H1N1 vaccine, it was revealed that the Torch relay team (including a phalanx of “Zombie-fighting” cops who surround the runners every step of the way) was at the front of the needle line, vaccinated prior to far more at risk groups like pre-school children, pregnant women and those with underlying health conditions that would have made them expendable to the inventor of the original torch relay --- and apparently just as easily shunted aside by those in charge of the current one.

“Bread and Circuses” were a mainstay of the Roman Empire as it crumbled, with one Emperor after another keeping a restless populace placated by free loaves of bread and free admission to their Gladiatorial spectacles. The process continues today --- except for the “free” part. Now we all pay the freight ($6 Billion and rising for Vancouver 2010) so the Emperors can be entertained.

And that process apparently includes co-opting respected journalists, making sure your network stars trot through tiny towns towing a “Support Local TV” banner and otherwise pretending this is all just the way the world works nowadays so you might as well just enjoy it.

Well, you know what I’m going to enjoy most? I’m going to revel in all those scrubbed “wouldn’t say poo if they stepped in it” CTV celebs and jock-sniffers showing off a torch that was clearly designed to represent the host Province’s major export in the form of a giant stylized aluminum BC Bud Marijuana joint.

I can’t wait for Ross Rebagliati to take a final toke off it before handing it to Senator Nancy Greene to light the official Olympic flame in 45 days.

Can a solution to the Nation’s deficit be far behind?

I’m also going to take comfort in the knowledge that people now know that each CTV Celebrity and Globe and Mail columnist running the torch represents one kid in a wheelchair, one Canadian whose father died of Cancer or one past or future Olympic athlete who was denied a chance to express their personal love of their country in the name of Corporate greed.

Way to thank the people who buy your product, guys!

And then I’m going to root for a Men’s Hockey Final between Russia and Sweden.

Not just because it looks like both those two countries will have a better team in Vancouver than we will. Not just because all that foreign content will more accurately reflect normal prime time programming on CTV. But because it might make the network finally realize that you can’t buy blockbuster ratings, no matter how much you stack the deck in your favor.

CBC Stops Covering The News

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:48:00 +0000

Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper caused a frisson of outrage among the country’s chattering classes by stating that he didn’t watch Canadian television news. Many of these were the same people who had cheered vociferously when American President Barrack Obama declared that he didn’t watch the most popular newscast in his own country.

Interesting comparison that, how one head of state is placing himself out of touch by not getting his news from the same sources as the majority of his constituents while the other is not --- for doing the same thing.

But Mr. Harper’s problem might soon start afflicting more and more of us since, as of last night, CBC Television made it clear that it wasn’t covering the news anymore either.

After months of tinkering and weeks of excited promotional announcements, CBC debuted its revamped and modernized “CBC News Network” on Monday, climaxing in the debut of the new nightly news hour “The National”, hosted by Peter Mansbridge.

The old nightly news hour was also called “The National” and was also hosted by Peter Mansbridge, so it would seem they didn’t revamp and modernize everything.

But it was clear from the opening seconds that they’d gotten rid of the lengthy intros and the big honking news desk. In the hour that followed, it also became clear that they’d also gotten rid of anything that could be construed as news.

Now, I’m all for change. And I totally get that everything needs a fresh coat of paint or a new approach from time to time. But what appeared on Canadian TV screens last night was little more than a white flag, a surrender of anything that could be labelled journalism in favor of offering style over substance.

The opening story, the one old Pete needed to make sure we got before anybody even had a chance to reach for the remote, was the arrival of Swine Flu vaccinations. After a summer of flogging the Federal government for dragging its feet on getting the population immunized, for supplying aboriginal outposts with body bags instead of hand sanitizer and not properly promoting the coming danger, the CBC suddenly didn’t seem to know what spin to put on the story.

We were shown endless lines waiting for hours to be immunized in Calgary. Didn’t these people know that kids and pregnant women were supposed to go first? Then to a Vancouver clinic where there were no lines because they only got 80 doses for their population of hugely at-risk aboriginal women and addicts with HIV. Okay, it turns out they could get a shot if they just walked a couple of blocks to a Public clinic or waited until next week when another shipment arrived, but according to the reporter aboriginal women and folks with HIV won’t do that.

Okay, so I’m getting confused. Is the problem too much demand and not enough shots or…

Never mind.

We move fast on the New National so it’s on to Toronto, where, despite a poll that says half of us don’t think we need a shot, everybody was being urged to line up as soon as possible by the local director of public health, who, although not being a kid or a woman who appeared pregnant or even aboriginal was interviewed while getting a shot that I had just been led to believe could have been better used on some junkie with AIDS in Vancouver.

I think…

Isn’t the News supposed to make you less confused about what’s going on?

Was the CBC’s take that the drug distribution system was messed up? Were a panicked population not co-operating out of fear of the impending pandemic? Was it that the elites were elbowing aboriginal women out of line to make sure they were safe? Do we really need to get a shot or don’t we?

Couldn’t tell you. Because under the new “Let’s get on with it” format we were already moving on to story number two.

No context. Little content. Why? I guess it interrupts throwing all these important stories at you as fast as possible.

All the news that can possibly fit or something like that.

Okay, so…

Story #2 was a poll showing that 80% of Canadians had no interest in next week’s visit of the Prince of Wales.

Really?

That’s important News?

And if 80% of us already don’t give a fuck why is it the CBC’s second lead?

No idea.

But we still got 2 or 3 minutes of some British newspaper editor opining that it was “the worst possible news” for the Royal family.

Seriously?

Do you think it’ll stop them acting like pompous assholes?

Nobody asked.

Toward the end of those three minutes, however, the CBC reporter glossed over one astonishing tidbit, that Canadians pay more per capita to support these inbred aristocrats than the British.

What!?!

But did anybody at the CBC add any more information on that? Nope. Instead, Mansbridge lowered his tone to one of hushed concern and asked “Does the Palace know?”

Does the Palace know?!!!

Dude! your reporter already said 80% of your audience doesn’t fucking care!!! Why would we give a flying fadoo what the Queen thinks?

Could you ask about the money?

No.

Moving on.

Story #3: Frank Stronach wants a weaker dollar.

Why?

Could it be because it might cost him less to borrow money from American Investment Banks to buy Opal from Germany?

Again, and despite having the new host of the flagship business show on the revamped network present in person, Pete didn’t ask. And she didn’t act like she’d have known anyway. Instead they both gushed at how cool it was to stand around doing the news instead of doing it sitting down and moved on.

Oh, and a note here to CBC Production --- if you’re going to shoot Peter Mansbridge standing up instead of sitting behind a desk, could somebody either tailor his cuffs or get him to hitch up his pants during the commercial breaks? I mean, if all’s you got’s style, get it right. Just sayin’.

Story #4: was protestors in Ottawa disrupting the House of Commons. No footage of the incident because the cameras in the House didn’t catch it. No details on the Bill they were yelling about either. Apparently six of them were fined 60 bucks.

Six people fined sixty bucks and it’s story #4.

Other news out of Ottawa yesterday was of a Conservative Senator under investigation for fixing government contracts. Elsewhere in the country, the Mob apparently has a stranglehold on Montreal City Hall and the Quebec construction industry. In world news, massive car bomb attacks killed 155 people and injured more than 500 in Iraq and Fidel Castro’s sister admitted she was a CIA mole.

None of that made the CBC National news on Monday night, let alone was deemed more newsworthy than 6 idiots in Ottawa being fined 60 bucks.

Story #5: Jerry Moyes agrees to sell the Phoenix Coyotes to the NHL. Mansbridge comments that this likely means the team will not end up in the hands of Canadian Hockey wannabe Jim Balsillie.

Duh.

I guess Pete’s been so busy learning how to stand around with one hand in his pocket that neither he nor any of the show’s many producers was aware that an Arizona court had ruled Balsillie was ineligible to get the team and Jim himself had announced he was giving up more than two weeks ago.

But tonight that’s suddenly “new” News.

Mansbridge then got into what appears to be a new rapid fire format that repeated a couple of times, allotting about 10 seconds each to three or four stories in a row, offering absolutely nothing beyond a couple of brief sentences of copy.

Again, no context. No detail. No insight. All those things CBC News with its several hundred million dollar a year budget is supposed to offer that other competitors and the Internet cannot.

We then moved on to a series of what I think are supposed to be feature reports even though they’re really short. In these segments, female correspondents turn up like wet-behind-the-ears cub reporters called into Editor Pete’s office to talk about their awesome day of newsgathering.

First up was “What’s in our drinking water?” Turns out it’s a antibiotic resistant bacteria. Now that’s news!

Except it’s not.

Seems it might be a problem in 20 years, if the scientists we were shown working on a solution don’t find one.

So….this might be news in 20 years.

Not now.

And after Peter goes all Fox News on how “brutal” the bacteria looks in the slide show we got, the reporter buttons her own apparently now complete non-story with --- and I quote --- “Just drinking the water won’t make you sick. But Superbugs, IF they do develop, they CAN BE serious --- especially to the SICK.”

Before the next feature with Wendy Mesley, which has been hyped three or four times now, because she’s like a CBC Star, we get another quick hit story.

Ontario has imposed a cell phone law prohibiting all but hands free systems while driving. I live in Ontario so I’ve already been bombarded with this for weeks. And I doubt many people in the rest of the country care.

But CBC augments this snippet by letting me know the province has also revamped the Amber Alert laws so cops can issue one if they simply “believe” a child has been abducted. And they also don’t have to have a description of the abductor or the kidnap vehicle anymore…

Um, excuse me, Peter, but could somebody let me know how that works? I got Bluetooth, so if I’m driving and see an Amber Alert, I can call. But if I don’t have a description of the Perp or know what kind of car he’s driving, do I just dial 911 if I see any kid in a car?

But Mansbridge has no time for such nonsense. He’s already got a reporter in Winnipeg going “in-depth” on all the stupid things people do in their cars.

Said reporter starts out sitting in a cruiser with a 20 year Winnipeg cop who’s “seen it all” to watch for people doing stupid stuff. And the cop promises that we won’t have to wait long.

But apparently we do, because what follows is a montage of people doing stupid stuff, most of it from Youtube clips that went viral two or three years ago.

This is the new CBC News Network!?! Youtube clips and a reporter describing what he once saw this one time – at band camp…

Anyway, the cop buttons that piece, warning people not to do anything stupid – which apparently they already weren’t because he and the reporter didn’t actually shoot any original footage.

Okay, Peter announces we’re getting to Wendy Mesley’s feature soon – right after a gadget CBC has been “scrutinizing” that doesn’t cure cancer. Only it turns out that this story will be appearing --- uh --- later in the week…

Then ten seconds on the Karadich genocide trial, another ten on people in Pakistan starving, five for the new elections in Afghanistan and about the same for 14 American soldiers and DEA agents killed there.

Um – isn’t all of this more newsworthy than people driving while having sex and drinking water that isn’t really dangerous?

Isn’t this still the respected world news service that all our tax dollars have supposedly paid for?

Apparently not.

Instead, Peter does a stand-up interview with former Canadian General Rick Hillier who’s got a new book out, about things that went on in Afghanistan five years ago and then buttons the interview by letting us know that Gen. Hillier will be interviewed for a much longer time and in far greater depth on “The Hour” which is coming up in, uh, less than fifteen minutes…

So --- why did The National bother? Slow news day? The guy was already in the building, so what the hell?

Geez, aren’t ratings for “The Hour” low enough without cutting them off at the knees like this?

Never mind.

Moving on.

To the weather.

Okay, I’m Canadian. I love weather. What’s coming tomorrow?

Don’t know.

The entire weather report is about a tropical storm bearing down on the Philippines.

I kid you not.

And our trusty meteorologist then throws things back to Mansbridge with “That’s your forecast. Back to you, Peter.”

Lady, it’s not my forecast! I don’t live in Manila. And neither does anybody else who’s watching!

By now, I just want to see this Wendy Mesley story they keep hyping and try to find an actual newscast.

But first, Mansbridge has to pepper me with another flurry of ten second stories. The internet will soon allow non-Latin domain names. Great. Including me, how many people watching this show don’t write in Hindi? NASA animation shows astronauts arriving on the moon in 2015. Good. Still lots of time to plan the party. And somebody pretended a meteor landed in Latvia. Wow, bizarre Baltic hoaxes are now important news stories at the CBC.

But finally, it’s time for Wendy Mesley. And her big feature is about people who are profiting from the Swine flu. Okay. Goddamn opportunist sonsabitches! Let’s have at ‘em!

But it turns out the profiteers are Glaxo, who made the vaccine that was so damn important in the lead story. And Purell, who’ve sold $22 Million in hand sanitizer since the CBC started hyping the importance of hand washing last Spring.

Guys, this isn’t news. And they aren’t profiteers. Where are the scam artists and the cheerleaders of doom?

They don’t name any. Instead, Wendy puts on a Hazmat suit she bought online (probably with your tax dollars) and goes to a bookstore to buy a book on keeping your kids from getting sick.

The National even adds a bouncy whistling theme to all this so you know it’s supposed to be really funny even if it’s not.

Done with her little bookstore prank, Wendy then goes online to show you all the other silly stuff you can buy to keep the flu at bay.

Not only was Wendy’s exposé complete bullshit, I’m sure it cheered up the family of a 13 year old Boy in a Toronto suburb who died of Swine Flu earlier in the day.

I’m certain it must have also offered some insight to the kids on his hockey team and school he went to who are now under quarantine.

Perhaps it will lighten the load of the relatives of a ten year old girl from London, Ontario, also a Swine Flu victim, who will be buried tomorrow.

But then, those kids died far from the centre of CBC news coverage in downtown Toronto, so nobody at The National probably even noticed.

Mansbridge’s response to this utterly insensitive tastelessness --- and I quote --- “Good story. We can expect more of these?”

Wendy: “You bet” chirped out with the glee of somebody who’s just realized that trivializing the news is way more fun than actually reporting it.

Jesus Fucking Christ, Wendy! You’re better than this!

You already divorced this Mansbridge ass clown once! What’re you doing co-signing his bullshit?

You used to be one of the CBC’s best reporters. Why are you suddenly trying to become the next Samantha Bee?

I reached for the remote. But there was only one more story to go, so why not see if the new format could somehow redeem itself.

And this is where we went from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Mansbridge introduced the tale of a Venezuelan Symphony conductor who has apparently set the music world on fire. And he’s about to be interviewed by Jian Gomeshi of CBC radio’s “Q”.

Wait, isn’t that the same radio station that stopped playing Classical music because they said nobody listened to it anymore? And isn’t the CBC the same company that fired all of its classical orchestras for the same reason?

Is somebody having a change of heart? Is Classical music making some kind of profound return to popularity?

Don’t know.

Y’see, first Pete and Jian talk about how astonishing this guy is and Gomeshi goes on at length about what an amazing interview he just did. Then we get the interview.

Or rather, one sentence of the interview.

One single sentence.

Then it’s back to Gomeshi and the news that you can hear the whole thing on CBC radio on “Q” and it’ll be repeated on the National “later in the week”.

WTF?

Guys this is not news. It’s self-promotion and the kind of news omission and trivialization even Fox News doesn’t stoop to presenting.

This is abject, ”We don’t have a fucking clue about what’s important anymore!” and “We also have no idea what we’re doing!”

I finally turn the shit off, having officially watched my last CBC TV newscast.

What’s the point? I can learn more in five minutes surfing the Internet. And it won’t cost me and the rest of the country hundreds of millions in taxes that might be better used --- I don’t know --- maybe getting Swine Flu vaccine distributed in a more timely and organized fashion so 10 and 13 year old kids don’t have to die.

It’s clear that CBC News has completely lost its way. No wonder the journalistic rank and file have already publicly rebelled.

And no wonder the Prime Minister doesn’t bother watching.

Maybe he’s not as out of touch as some at the CBC would have you believe.

Lazy Sunday # 90: Book Porn

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:05:00 +0000

When a screenwriter finishes a script, he doesn’t have to go to a lot of trouble making it presentable. # 5 Brads. 20 lb. Hammermill paper. Maybe a cardstock cover (I recommend “Proscript” – they come pre-punched).

Some screenwriters, at the end of a series or later in their careers when they want to remind themselves that they actually had a career, will bind their produced scripts in leather with a gold imprint approximating the final product’s title font.

The unproduced scripts stay in a drawer awaiting the inevitable “Have you got something with a woman in jeopardy that can be shot in Bulgaria?” call from your agent.

But there are people who take the printed page further, pulling you up with inspired awe.

Such is what follows.

For those who love books, who cherish a rainy afternoon exploring musty shelves of long forgotten masterpieces, this is “Book Porn”.

And I have a feeling even those who have traded paper for a Kindle, audiobooks or MP3 downloads may feel a twinge of loss or even a whispered “Really? Daddy wants…”

Only $4600 a copy.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Pictorial Webster's: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

The Balloon Boys

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:28:00 +0000

If I could interrupt for a moment…

And now back to “E-Talk Daily”…

Not Evil Just Wrong –- Okay, Maybe A Little Evil

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:54:00 +0000

There was a little publicized but potentially game-changing event on the Internet last night.

“Big Hollywood”, a site you can link to from my list on the far right – and to some also far right in their own show business outlook, held what they billed as the largest movie premiere in history, streaming Irish documentarians Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney’s “Not Evil Just Wrong”.

McAleer and McElhinney’s film is a response to Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 Oscar winner, “An Inconvenient Truth” and was made after the filmmakers challenged that film’s “facts” in a British court, eventually receiving a High Court ruling that 9 key points in the Gore film were patently false.

“Not Evil Just Wrong” details those falsehoods as it explores what McAleer calls “The true cost of Global Warming hysteria”. And despite what you may think, it is a long way from the work of somebody in the habit of wearing a tinfoil hat.

The film features respected activists such as Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, now fighting against what he sees as the growing immorality of the environmental movement as well as a long list of legitimate scientists, including the two Canadians who discovered that Gore’s now famous “Hockey Stick” graph of spiking world temperatures was the result of a mathematical error and not actual Global warming.

However you feel about the Climate Change debate, “Not Evil Just Wrong” offers arguments worthy of being discussed. But despite months of trying, its producers had been unable to find an American distributor willing to buck the prevailing Green mood in Hollywood and bring it to your local Cineplex.

Therefore, Big Hollywood decided to cut through the Big Media blockade and make it available free online. The stream I was watching hit well over 9500 by the film’s end and the overall response for all streams offered was just North of 46,000 good enough for Big Hollywood founder Andrew Breitbart to announce the debut of a sister site “Big Environment” at the Q&A that followed the screening.

And that’s one of the reasons I think this was a game-changing event.

In his book, “Here Comes Everybody”, Internet Guru Clay Shirky predicted that we were at the end of the era where content could be controlled by the gatekeepers of the media, and that day has clearly arrived.

From the struggles of politicians with news outlets they don’t like to broadcasters angling to save their skins by suddenly pretending to care about local television we’ve entered a world where nobody can control who hears what anymore.

Perhaps Al Gore really is a selfless crusader desperately trying to make sure there is a planet for his children and grandchildren to enjoy. But perhaps he’s also somebody making sure his privileged position in the world isn’t undermined by having too many others seeking to enjoy the same lifestyle.

Last night, what was screened for anyone who cared to watch, was a fairly persuasive argument that many in the Green movement either don’t know what they are talking about or are trying to soft sell the enormous world wide problems their agenda may create.

Who knows, next week, somebody might start telling people the truth about the Canadian “Save Local TV” debate that has both broadcasters and Cable companies pitching half-truths and outright lies to what was once, but is no longer, a captive audience with no other alternatives for learning the real facts.

And just maybe that might lead to more people than just the Bloc Quebecois asking where all those Millions Canadians invested in Cinar actually went and why nobody in Ottawa wants to open that scary can of worms.

And perhaps the week after that, some Canadian movie the taxpayer funded and no distributor will spend money to promote will be made available to its investors, who may enjoy it and start asking for the real reasons nobody wanted them to see it.

No financial return in that last prediction? Well, we’ll see. Because last night’s stream of “Not Evil Just Wrong” also marked the launch of a DVD marketing campaign hoping to benefit from word of mouth arising from last night’s presentation.

Y’see, we’ve reached a point where its harder to shut people up, harder to withhold the fruits of their labors or to scare them into doing what you want with predictions of flooded planets, drowning polar bears and swarms of killer bees.

Remember the Killer Bees? Are they still coming? Shouldn’t they have been here by now?

Where all this moves from a free speech and access to information issue to one with a darker shade and larger implications is the major point made in “Not Evil Just Wrong”, a point that makes you realize the title is an outright lie and the filmmakers know it.

It’s a point brought home in a moment featuring environmental spokesman Ed Begley, who chokes up on learning of someone else’s innovative Green project and later in an interview assures the filmmakers that he was truly moved by his colleague’s initiative. After the camera is turned off and the filmmakers have walked away, Begley’s still live microphone picks him up chortling about being an actor and thus able to realistically fake an emotion.

The film then details past environmental initiatives and how their well-meaning intentions resulted in millions of third world deaths and doomed countless others to lives of hopelessness and poverty.

In the process, it becomes patently obvious that many in the Green movement are well aware of what has been done in the name of or resulted from their work and that for a few of them Cap and Trade, emission controls and promoting organic solutions are just one more way they’ll get rich while others suffer.

The Climate Change debate is not over. But control of the media most certainly is. And the parallels between one attempt to dupe the public and others being perpetrated by those who own and control Big Media are impossible to miss.

Like many in the Green movement, there are those in Canadian television who are also well aware of what has been done in the name of or resulted from their work.

And despite the fact that the Canadian Media Fund and others in our government may not have realized that online initiatives and Internet content are no longer merely “experimental” in nature, it’s clear to many of us that they are rapidly becoming the only option for Canadian creatives who seem to have no place in a system run primarily for the enrichment of people who don’t care about much beyond their own wealth and well-being.

The day when we can be easily played on any subject may soon be over.

Lazy Sunday # 89: The Sunday Funnies

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:34:00 +0000

When I was a kid, Sunday mornings before you had to get ready for church were filled with the Funny Pages.

The Regina Leader-Post, my newspaper of record at the time, actually didn’t publish a Sunday paper. But the Saturday edition came with a thick insert of full color cartoons that my brother and I stashed unread until the next morning.

We’d get up and turn on the radio, where a couple of the local DJ’s would giggle and snicker and read the comics to you. They had theme songs for each section and described every panel in exquisite detail, in case you didn’t have the comic section or you might have missed the hidden visual joke in the bottom right hand corner.

The show filled up an entire hour with nothing but two guys cackling over the adventures of “Pogo”, “Blondie”, “Superman” and whoever else graced the hand drawn pages of newspapers back then. It was an hour that allowed harried parents to sleep in while inventing what may have been the first multi-media entertainment format.

And I just realized that in describing this I’ve handed CanWest or some other low-rent Canadian broadcaster another hour of inexpensive programming they won’t have to pay writers to create…

…although they’ll probably need to find a way to own, synergize and vertically integrate all the cartoons first…

…and not just in their executive offices…Ba-Dump-Bump!

Anyway.

What was great about the combination of that radio show and those funny pages was the way they attracted you to characters and stories you might otherwise have never allowed yourself (or been allowed) to be exposed to and also helped you to appreciate them.

Walt Kelly’s “Pogo”, for example, was not a comic strip for kids. But it lead off the Leader Post comic pages (and therefore the show) and it was obvious by how much fun they had with the stories that the DJ’s liked it a lot. This was political and social satire of the first order and far above my head. But the sense you got was that this was something other people really enjoyed and maybe you should bookmark it for future reference.

Later in life, when I was able to decipher who the Pogo characters really were and what their “swamp talk” meant, I understood why J. Edgar Hoover had gone so far as to have FBI cryptographers search for “hidden messages” in the content.

But additionally crammed into those brightly colored pages were more story variety and differing styles of humor than can be found in any night of prime time television programming.

There was the whimsy of the Disney strips and the Wisdom of “Peanuts”. There was the classy family fun of “Hi and Lois” and slapstick of “Dennis the Menace”. And there were also serial adventures set in the worlds of fantasy and pulp like “Superman” and “Red Ryder”.

There were also a couple of strips the guys on the radio skipped, such as Milt Caniff’s “Terry and the Pirates” probably because it would have taken an entire hour just to get through the dark plots, complex visuals and lengthy dialogue.

As a trivia note, at the time I was exposed to them, many of those strips were inked by Sonny Grosso, a budding New York cartoonist who became the French Connection Cop, then technical advisor on “The Godfather” and later producer of several TV series.

An avid consumer of these strips also couldn’t help noticing over time that the same joke you laughed at one week in “Beetle Bailey” might pop up again later in “Mutt ‘n Jeff”. But each had a completely different approach to the material, a point of view skewed by its inner reality and an alterantive visual style in which to sell the punch line.

In a way, those competing strips were a triumph of style over content, less concerned with what they were saying than how they said it and always aware that they had to engage and excite you in the process.

The color comic sections have either disappeared from today’s newspapers or remain only as a shadow of their former selves. Maybe they’re not cost effective anymore. Maybe the level of creative talent they require has moved to greener pastures.

But what we’ve lost is not just the fleeting enjoyment they offered, but the easy exposure to a story or visual style one audience or another hasn’t previously embraced.

That social aspect of Cartooning is among the many elements of the craft explored in detail by Robert Mankoff, cartoonist, cartoon editor of the New Yorker and creator of The Cartoon Bank in a documentary available online at Big Think and excerpted below.

It’s a wonderful exploration of what’s funny and why and almost as much fun as reading (or listening to) the funny pages themselves.

Enjoy your Sunday.

The Hole In Daddy’s Arm

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 06:32:00 +0000

“There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes,
Jesus Christ died for nothin' I suppose.
Little pitchers have big ears,
Don't stop to count the years,
Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios…”

-- John Prine (“The Ballad of Sam Stone”)

On Wednesday, I was invited to attend a conference ostensibly billed as my opportunity to learn about and comment upon the newly established and still working out the wrinkles Canada Media Fund, the Federal Government’s new program to assist in the finance of television programming and projects designed to take advantage of the burgeoning “New Media” frontiers.

There were about 300 of us. Independent Producers. Documentary Filmmakers. Creative Guilds. Broadcasters. And pioneers in the realms of interactive entertainment, game design, online content and other enterprises trying to bring Canadian innovation and creation to the Internet.

It was a very genteel affair. There were curried soups, Italian sandwiches, tofu nibblies for the Vegetarians in the crowd and fancy pastries. There were screens for Powerpoint presentations, whiteboards for scrawling and a mass of microphones to make sure every question and comment was recorded.

At the centre of the room was a circular table with microphones where volunteers from each of the gathered groups could be specifically questioned on various topics by the facilitators and representatives of the new Canadian Media Fund.

These were mostly the same people who have administered the Canadian Television Fund for many years and are now charged with preparing the industry for the new rules and regulations that will govern what drama, comedy, documentaries and children’s programming gets made in this country.

The whole thing was a well orchestrated bureaucrat’s fantasy. And in true “The Bureaucrats are running things” fashion, the first thing that those of us already tech savvy learned was – the room had no internet access.

No tweeting colleagues across the room. No googling additional information on anything discussed. No fact checking. No showing somebody your Youtube video. No comparing what you were being told today with emails on your home computer from yesterday when the nice lady at the CMF had assured you they were really “on your side”.

Speaking one on one, they’re always “on your side”, aren’t they? That’s how bureaucracy works. You think you’re being taken into confidence, when you are simply being taken.

Somewhere around the 7th Century BC, Sun Tsu, author of “The Art of War” the most important book ever written about dealing with crisis and conflict and those who would govern others warned, “When bureaucrats prosper, the people are harmed”.

And for the next few hours we were duly harmed. Disabused of any notion that this new fund will actually finance any innovative activity in new media. Made to realize that there will be less money in this diluted pot of public money for actual production of television. Instructed to give up any hope for a turn around in the industry.

Oh, they were gentle with us, repeating the mantra that nobody was going to get everything they wanted, slathering us with lubricants so it wouldn’t hurt as much when the penny finally dropped and what was being “recommended”, “seriously considered” or “mandated by the Heritage Department” was finally revealed and we all knew that the creative community and Canadian taxpayer were once again going to be royally boned in order to feed the insatiable hunger for free money of our nation’s broadcasters.

“But the morphine eased the pain,
And the grass grew round his brain,
And gave him all the confidence he lacked,
With a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back…”

While the chipper CMF people kept insisting that no final decisions have been made, a simple read of the detailed handouts made it clear that creating and supporting even more revenue streams the the broadcast networks was a fait accompli.

Not only do our broadcasters already get a major portion of their program financing from the Canadian Taxpayer, not to mention such handsome regulatory gifts as simultaneous transmission, increasing commercial minutes, genre protected specialty channels, Local programming funds to pay for the one hour of news they do each day and the incessant consideration of “carriage fees” --- under the new CMF they’re going to get even more.

Broadcasters will now be able to access public money to produce their own “in house” programming. They’ll receive funds to set up and operate the online streaming of the programs they produce. And unless I’m completely misinterpreting the lines we were carefully coached to read between, the shows they produce with taxpayer money won’t even have to have many Canadians in them.

The fund created by Parliament to “tell Canadian stories” will instead finance stories written by writers who aren’t Canadian and star actors who live in Hollywood. The next time a picture like the one below appears in the newspapers, it’s quite likely the only actual Canadian content will be the Heritage Minister.

Keeping Canadian television series that are funded with public money 100% Canadian was the first item on a top ten wish list I was given by the Writers Guild of Canada. Number two on that list was a request that CMF regulations be relaxed so Canadian writers can write science fiction stories that “take place in a generic or fantasy setting that is not identifiably foreign”.

That should give you some idea of how much control bureaucrats in Ottawa now have over what gets written in this country.

Please, sir – permission to write my own ideas? I mean, it may not take place in Toronto, but it’s a really good story…

Nope. Not if you want Public money.

However, if your program schedule is wall-to-wall with American Science Fiction, American cops, American soldiers fighting in Iraq, American reality Shows and American celebrity gossip, you can have almost as much Canadian tax money as you want. With these new “in-house” regulations, CTV, CBC and CanWest are well on their way to getting tax credits for just telling you what the weather is.

And when they stream that weathercast online, you’ll pay for it some more.

And when they send it to your iPhone, you’ll pay twice. Once for the stream and once for the air time you used. And likely both to the same conglomerate that owns the TV channel and your cell phone company and still seems to need government welfare.

And while the Canadian public is constantly told by this Federal government and our business leaders that we need innovation and imagination to get our country to the forefront of the high tech future, the insatiable need of our broadcasters to have control of the vast majority of the new media funds makes that an impossibility.

Like a junkie who needs ever larger doses of Heroin to get high and lets his kids starve to get his fix, our broadcasters have successfully lobbied the Heritage Department and the Canadian Media Fund to make sure almost none of these public funds go to anyone actually trying to innovate any form of new media.

Our broadcasters’ addiction and the apparent willingness of our Government to feed it is literally destroying any chance that we’ll ever be a player in any high tech future.

This country already lags much of the world in almost every aspect of new media production and delivery. More money is made by 16 year old kids designing iPhone Apps in other parts of the world in one day than is earned by our new media creators in an entire year.

Without an intervention, where somebody in government has the courage to finally tell our broadcasters to start putting their enormous profits back into their own research and development and their own business instead of spending it to buy more companies they can unsuccessfully synergize and vertically integrate with, Canada will soon be so far behind the rest of the world in this department that we’ll never catch up.

It was patently obvious to everybody in that room that our media fund bureaucrats had been doing what the broadcasters have demanded for so long that they were completely incapable of conceiving how money from the fund could be used for projects that don’t need a broadcaster in the first place.

Mobile Apps, Gaming, Interactive Content, IPTV all had no handholds in the new regulations their developers could even grab onto. And why should that be surprising! The people who run the CMF still don’t get why “The Trailer Park Boys”was a success, insisted they didn’t want to “de-stabilize” an Independent Production community that went flying off the rails years ago and didn’t laugh out loud when somebody making documentaries insisted their work shouldn’t be judged by audience ratings but by how much they had healed the world.

“And the gold rolled through his veins
Like a thousand railroad trains,
And eased his mind in the hours that he chose,
While the kids ran around wearin' other peoples' clothes...”

Over coffee later, I met people from the new media tribe who could have been my kids or my grand kids, as boggled as the clutch of screenwriters my age were as to why a fund established to foster creativity had so little actual room for it (or them) and yet had all the money in the world to pour into broadcaster coffers.

Maybe it’s too soon to say what I’m about to say. Maybe I’m tired and I’ve just had too many years of taking the rap for bad Canadian shows when I know most of the good ones never even got the chance to be on the air.

But I know that while I was in that meeting, other meetings were being held across town as CanWest assured its staff that they haven’t really gone bankrupt and they’ll all be back bringing more American entertainment into Canadian homes real soon.

So maybe I gotta say it…

If you’re under 30 and want a career in television or new media. Leave now.

I don’t know where you should go. I don’t know if your best destination is LA or Australia or London or Hong Kong. But leave now. And once you get where you think you can make a go of it, write James Munro, our Heritage Minister, and let him know that his country will have to do without your innovation and your imagination. Tell him you wanted to stay, but these junkies were stealing all your stuff and even taking the food off your shelf in the fridge, although they had more than enough of their own.

Tell him you’ll come back if he can get the broadcasters off the public teat, get them to clean up their act and contribute to society and the business the way the rest of us do, instead of being the self-centred pigs that they are, squeezing producer budgets so some shows aren’t even paying people minimum wage or they’re working for credits.

If you’re over 30…

Maybe the best thing is to go to your nearest Tim Horton’s and see if you can get on the night shift. There might be a chance you can get some writing in around 4:00 a.m. when the rubbies are all snoozing and the bagels the Bureaucrats will be buying to go with their morning coffee are still in the oven.

I know it’ll take you longer writing that script if you’re working at Tim’s. But at least you’ll have one ready once the Bureaucrats realize that if the broadcasters are getting all the money then nobody probably needs them to do any fund managing anymore.

The creatives in this country and the taxpayers are the ones suffering now. But you people from the CMF who spent the day annoying, patronizing and marginalizing us will be next. Because when Daddy needs to fill that hole in his arm, everybody and everything else will sooner or later disappear.

The Casting Couch Diaries

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 04:50:00 +0000

Last week, it was David Letterman admitting to multiple “affairs” with members of his staff, including some of his female writers.

This week, Jimmy Kimmel revealed he was sleeping with one of his writers.

Simultaneously, the gossip pages were speculating that “Mad Men” creator Matt Weiner had decided to stop sleeping with one of his writers and she had subsequently left the show.

Now, if one wanted to take this series of events less seriously, you could wonder:

a) Wow, TV writers must really be hot stuff, huh?

b) Have none of these guys heard that old Hollywood Joke -- “Didja hear about the Polish Actress? She slept with the writer!”

c) Is this “people who work together sometimes sleep together” somehow news to anybody?

Look, I’m not condoning the practice of the rich and powerful having sex with people who work for them. And certainly not if they abuse their positions of privilege to seduce people who feel pressured to satisfy their boss’s desires.

But the way the mainstream media has jumped all over this issue and begun rooting out new versions of the story makes me think that before we’re through they’ll be outraged upon learning that Lucy was sleeping with Desi…

John Doyle of the Globe and Mail was among many who used the Letterman story to write an impassioned piece defending the honor of the ladies of our industry. You can find it here. And I gotta say that I don’t disagree with many of the sentiments Mr. Doyle shares in his column.

And as much as Mr. Doyle and I have disagreed on other issues in the past, the one thing I sense is that he is a Gentleman of the old school and chivalrous to a fault. However, when he and others depict my show business workplace as one where the powerful endlessly feed on “the needy and vulnerable”, I feel an obligation to point out that’s there are such things in the world as Free Will and personal morality.

We all draw our own lines in the sand.

There are some things each of us won’t do under any circumstances. What I’m okay with and what you find acceptable may be completely different. There’s no harm done to either of us unless one coerces the other into moving or crossing their line.

My lines are fairly clear. I don’t sleep with anybody I’m working with. Never have. Fairly certain I never will. Down the road a little later, sure. When we’re punching the same time clock – not gonna happen.

In my view it just complicates things for everybody involved, making all of us tiptoe around things that may need to be dealt with head on, both those in the relationship and everybody else we’re working alongside.

In my 35 plus years in show business, I’ve been hit on by male and female producers, casting directors, agents, directors, lead actors and actresses and various members of the crew. The first time I was officially saddled with an Executive Producer credit, I attended a casting session with an elderly director where not one but two of the beautiful ladies auditioning included the scene Sharon Stone is most famous for as part of their presentation.

After the second actress left the room, the director smiled and said, “It’s nice to feel wanted, isn’t it?”. My wife made a far more pragmatic observation, “You poor thing! From now on you’ll never know if they really like you or they just want a job!”

And for most of us, that’s the reality of contemporary show business. The opportunities are there. Some people take advantage. Some use sex to climb the ladder of success. Sometimes some of us are left to wonder, “Did I just get fucked or did I just get fucked?”

Maybe I’m only speaking from my own experience, but most of the women I know in this business have their heads screwed on pretty straight. There aren’t a lot of Damsels in Distress. And if somebody is making them feel “icky”, both the law and the majority of people in their workplace are willing to take their side.

On two occasions, I’ve fired men who worked for me after they refused to discontinue their unwanted advances on women who worked for the company. And sadly, on a couple of others, I’ve lost valued members of my crew because they chose to work for somebody who was less of a heel.

Free will and personal morality.

Yes, I’ve taken angry phone calls from my own bosses when I wouldn’t give them the phone number of an actress who was working for us at 2:00 a.m. or give them her hotel room number so he could “send flowers”.

And I’ve also heard that catch in the voice of an actress when I’ve called late at night because my assistant has gone home and there’s just nobody else around to let her know her call time has changed.

We all know some men in the business try to take advantage. But it goes the other way too.

One of the worst tongue lashings I ever got was from a female Producer after letting her know her personal “masseuse” was not going on the payroll. Another tried to get me fired upon hearing that the stunningly handsome young man she’d met at the gym was not going to be one of our stunt men.

This depiction of film sets as places where slimy producers give shrinking violets no choice but to surrender their innocence wrongly discredits us all. Somehow the media just don’t want to accept that we’re actual adults and capable of making the tough decisions adults sometimes have to make.

It also doesn’t take into account the nature of most production environments. People work a 12 – 18 hour day with regularity. Sometimes that goes on for months. The people you work with become the only people you see, the only people you interact with and the only ones with whom you share your feelings. That and the pressure of the machine pushes people closer. Sometimes it leads to happy marriages. Sometimes it leads to relationships that never would’ve (or should have) happened under any other circumstances.

There used to be this old Hollywood joke…

Q: Have you ever cheated on your wife?

A: Does Location count?

For me that perfectly captures the reality of production. There’s no other outlet. There’s no escape. Shit happens.

And precious little of it is without full consent from all the parties involved.

I remember a very respectable actress collapsing on the couch in my office after a particularly stressful week had led to one hell of a Friday night party I had missed. “How was the party?” I asked. “Somebody should’ve bought more condoms.” was her tired reply.

The other thing I want to say about all this is that I’m fairly certain that what was going on on “Late Night” and those other shows was fairly well known to most of the people involved and that the vast majority of the men and women working on those shows were not unlike me and had lines in the sand about not sleeping with those they worked for or with.

If Mr. Letterman’s activities or those of Mr. Kimmel or Mr. Weiner had been adversely affecting the show, the interactions of the rest of the staff or were creating a “Toxic” workplace, somebody would have brought it to their attention.

And that wouldn’t have taken extraordinary courage or selflessness. It’s simply the mark of professional.

People who are good at what they do and also have a certain pride of career or character know they’ll get another job. They also know that life’s too short for more than the normal load of bullshit. And they know that they either have to change the corporate culture or leave before any of the stain gets on them.

David Letterman wouldn’t hear any of that from his boss Leslie Moonves, who had a very open affair with one of his employees before leaving his wife for her, and he wouldn’t hear it from Sumner Redstone, who runs the whole damn conglomerate, for identical reasons. But he would have heard it from any number of people he depended on or was closer to than the women who shared his bed.

That would suggest to me that nobody was really being hurt – unless they’d allowed themselves to move their own lines in the sand.

What is news to me, however, is that this apparently doesn’t go on in newspaper offices, around morning talk shows, inside car dealerships, at real estate offices, or banks or hospitals.

Because, take it from me – it is. And as long as the people involved are okay with it, I’m sure the rest of us can get on with our lives.

Lazy Sunday # 88: The Animal Sanctuary

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:46:00 +0000

My apologies for the lack of posting this week, but it’s been kind of busy up here, just North of Hollywood North. First of all, my dog’s in-laws dropped over for the week.

That’s my friend, Dusty, on the Left, her Mom on the right and Grandma sandwiched in the middle.

Anybody who owns a dog knows they don’t really require that much work. Maybe less than an hour a day to do the actual feeding, watering and maintenance part. Walk and play time additional and often non-negotiable, of course.

Add two more dogs and the time consumption increases exponentially, especially the navigating of three extremely happy to be outside animals on three leashes.

Our lives were complicated on day one of the visit when they suddenly stopped galloping around the wilderness that backs onto our home, freezing stock still and then converging on a grove of trees. I thought they’d sensed the arrival of some local wildlife, maybe a deer or racoon, hopefully not a skunk or the pack of coyotes that had already been howling at that night’s full moon.

It turned out they’d found a couple of kittens shivering in the bushes. They were about a week old, according to the emergency clinic vet, and not likely to pull through without a lot of care. I bought a can of Kitty formula, willing to give it a shot. He told me that I also had to make them urinate and defecate, something the mother cat accomplishes by licking their butts. I said I wasn’t quite that committed to saving them. He told me a damp cloth would work as well.

Turns out I didn’t need a damp cloth. I also didn’t need to keep watch to make sure they were comfortable or warm enough. The makeshift kitty box in the kitchen was immediately surrounded by three large female sheepdogs, all making sure these tiny members of a completely different species got the care and attention they needed.

Butts were licked. Sleeping forms gently nuzzled. Bodies groomed and guarded. Sometimes they took turns. Sometimes all three silently hovered in case they were needed. Even though I did the feeding, I did it with an attentive audience that wasn’t above nuzzling my arm into a better position or nosing away the bottle so nobody was overfed.

By the time the in-laws went home, the new arrivals had clearly weathered the worst of their storm and the neighborhood kids had delivered the addresses of good homes nearby willing to take in a new addition to the family.

It’s funny how this all works. Dogs normally loving to chase cats and neighbors who suggest a pet’s too much trouble suddenly showing a side of themselves you never expected.

But then, we all tend to do what’s unexpected sometimes and it often leads to further unexpected results. You go somewhere you would never be caught dead and discover how much fun it is. You taste something you’ve always turned up your nose at and realize what you’ve been missing. You talk to somebody you really have no interest in, soon you’re friends and sometimes you’re more than that.

I think in the end, we’re all lost kittens or those who know it’s not really going to kill us to help. And we all take away more from the experience than we had or were before.

Everybody needs a good friend --- or another one.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Lazy Sunday # 87: Kick Out The Ladder

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:23:00 +0000

“Now if you run into a tough situation, it’s very tempting to say, ‘Well let’s just not do this or let’s take the easy path’. But when all you have is the hard path, you just keep going.”

Looking around at the current state of the world, the economy, the future, it’s fairly clear that there are some hard paths ahead. Indeed, taking one hard path or another may be all that we have to choose between.

Certainly, that’s the case for those of us working in film and television. Distribution models are collapsing, pools of development money are shrinking, license fees from broadcasters cover what was once the budget line item for feeding the crew.

The money we used to depend on hasn’t disappeared. Instead, it’s primarily being used to finance the debt most main stream media conglomerates took on to buy up their competition. One rogue moment in the economy and suddenly they’re strapped.

And then they get further strapped by having to hire people who don’t know their business but get paid a whole lot of money to manage debt.

Think of it as getting a job, using your new found salary to lease a car and then getting fired. Life isn’t over and you’ve got some savings. But you’ve also got these car payments. Instead of employees living two pay checks away from being on the street, the companies they work for are now in the same situation.

In days like these, a lot of well-meaning politicians and self-help gurus come along with platitudes like, “When you’re in a hole – stop digging” and “tighten your belts" until we can get “shovels in the ground” --- which sounds a lot like continuing to dig a deeper hole.

Maybe we need to put our shovels down and start looking around for a different tool.

If there are going to be fewer outlets for our work, even fewer places to pitch our ideas and nothing to live on while creating and crafting what will finally get you out of this mess, then some new approach has to be found.

But how do you find it?

At Honda, one of the few car makers not asking for a government hand-out or facing imminent failure because of current realities, and always one of the most innovative at making cars better, the engineers have a philosophy called “kicking out the ladder”.

What that means is --- you climb a ladder to the second floor. Somebody takes away the ladder that provided your support and a way of escape. Now what do you do? The idea is that giving you no options creates new thinking and new solutions.

“Kicking out the ladder” is one of a series Honda has placed on a new video site, http://dreams.honda.com designed to teach you new ways of problem solving so you can realize your own dreams.

And these are far from boring corporate videos.

Watching a Honda executive with a decided Bushido streak describe what “Kick out the ladder” really means is the kind of delicious moment that makes you want to learn everything these guys have to offer about thinking outside the box.

So, kick out the ladder.

Find a new path to realizing your dreams.

And enjoy your Sunday.

Remember This For Later

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:04:00 +0000

Sometime tonight, CKX-TV in Brandon, Manitoba will stop transmitting.

The sale of the local CTV affiliate to Bluepoint Investments fell through yesterday. The new buyer, who was acquiring the operation lock, stock and barrel for $1.00, couldn’t reach an agreement with Canadian Satellite providers to carry its signal.

In a communication, CTV President Ivan Fecan said, "Brandon, like many of our smaller stations, is not carried by satellite companies, who say they don't have room for all of Canada's local TV stations, while finding plenty of room for foreign channels."

More on the delicious irony of that in a moment.

For now, the sad reality is that a station that has served its 124,000, mostly rural, customers for 54 years and employs 39 people will be no more.

A brand new $150 million fund to support local programming won’t help.

A sudden doubling and tripling of ratings for the new CTV season won’t help.

A CRTC ruling allowing CTV to fit even more commercials into those awesomely successful new shows won’t help.

Even Jim Shaw, a man with far deeper pockets than Bluepoint, couldn’t help --- and he was the first to back out of a similar dollar sale last June.

Despite his massive cable empire, Jim knew the economic reality of Brandon and all our other struggling local markets. Most of the customers are rural. And the only way to get a package of TV channels to them is via satellite.

Soooooo….

What satellite company serves Brandon?

Expressvu.

Who owns Expressvu?

Why its the same company, CTV-Bell-GlobeMedia-Teachers-Pension-Plan-Whatever-Else, that owns CTV.

What?

Wait a minute!?!

Am I telling you that while CTV is leading the Canadian broadcaster charge for more Public funding and carriage fees from each and every television watching household to “Save Local Television”, one of its own stations is going under because another division of the self same company doesn’t care if it goes broke, and the guys who run the whole operation don’t care either because they’re still making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit?

Apparently.

But wait. There’s more. There’ll be blood shooting out of your eyes before I’m done here!

God, I feel so Glenn Beck right now!

Last month, Expressvu began charging its customers another $1.50 a month to cover its contribution to that aforementioned fund to save local television. Even though they don’t carry most of the stations that are in trouble, and their non-carriage is one of the major reasons why those stations are struggling.

Ergo, their customers are paying for services they don’t get and couldn’t if they wanted to!

And the ones who live in Brandon are being charged for services that aren’t even there!

Since I used to subscribe to Expressvu, I happen to know that they have room for several VOD Porn channels. And apparently those are of more value than the 10 or 20 that would keep hundreds of local Canadian TV employees working and hundreds of thousands of Canadians informed with regard to what is going on in their small cities and towns.

I guess it’s better that Canadian Tax dollars and subscriber fees be paid to purchase Quaaludes and Champagne in Woodland Hills, California than to inform a Manitoba farmer that they’ll be frost on Saturday night so you better get the crops in.

But Expressvu makes way too much money selling Porn to bother with the needs of Brandon or any other Canadian city. And since Ivan Fecan shares in some of that money, he’d obviously rather the folks in Brandon were jerking off instead of knowing what went on in City Council.

And seriously, if you were running the company and wanted to depict yourself as the saviour of Canadian TV, wouldn’t you argue for the replacement of one Anal Intruders channel to make room for your own affiliate before blaming phantom outside agitators?

But Mr. Fecan didn’t. That’s why he said, “Foreign channels” and not “Masturbation movies”.

And what he meant was “American channels” not Al-Jazeera, Telemundo or the BBC.

Mr. Fecan has a way with words, or at least fuzzing any mention that his channels carry the exact same stuff as those bad-for-Canada “foreign channels”.

By happenstance, I made a gas and burger stop in Brandon on the day Blueprint bought CKX. It was headline news in the local paper, with quotes from the mayor, local business people and the new owners about how great this was for the city. Not only had jobs and local pride been rescued, but Blueprint was promising it would follow the “Go Local” mantra that has been the philosophy of successful small TV stations around the world.

They were promising many hours of local news, locally produced programming to serve the agricultural base of nearby communities and maybe even broadcast home games of the city’s beloved hockey team, the Brandon Wheat Kings.

These were all things CTV had the money to do, but had decided to squeeze in some more “CSI” clones from one of those foreign devils channels instead. Clones which CTV could then second and third window throughout their conglomerate owned specialty channels to maximize profits and reduce the need to produce any local content --- funny how the black line items in that CTV conglomerate’s budget get shared around the company while the red line ones don’t.

But then, they’ve got you paying for those, don’t they?

As usual, the jobs lost in Brandon, and Red Deer earlier this summer, plus the personal indebtedness of everybody who kicked in to save their jobs at the local Global affiliate in Victoria, can be laid directly at the feet of the CRTC.

The Federal Government’s very own Heritage Committee, after hearing from the very same group of Usual Suspects who had pleaded the very same “Save Local TV” case before the CRTC many times, specifically asked the CRTC to take the profits and losses of the ENTIRE holdings of the broadcasters into account when devising a solution.

Later, the Heritage Minister himself publicly reminded them that their job was to look after the needs of the Canadian Public – which would include the 124,000 people about to be without a local TV station in Brandon.

But the CRTC ignored all that and did what they always do. Only this time, they just didn’t bend over for the Broadcasters, they showed them where to put the umbrella.

So tons more money was earmarked to be taken from satellite companies and cablecos with no guarantees from broadcasters that they’d keep local stations open in return or create one more minute of local programming or news.

And the broadcasters took that money without mentioning that the real problem wasn’t that people weren’t watching or were watching something else, it was that they couldn’t see local programming even if they wanted to.

Would it be too hard to tell Expressvu that if they want a semi-monopoly on Satellite TV in this country, they have to serve the whole country?

We do that with Air Canada, requiring them to provide feeder service from smaller spots on the map for the protective perks they’re given. We require people to pay for Public schools even if they don’t have kids, and to support health care even if they never get sick.

For all the breaks we give broadcasters and those operating our Broadcast Delivery systems, is it to much to expect access to local television in return?

And maybe some honesty from everybody instead of all the corporate games.

One last thought for Ivan Fecan.

Replace some of that speech of yours a little and you’d get…

"This Canadian TV show, like many of our series, is not carried by CTV, who say they don't have room for all of Canada's local production, while finding plenty of room for foreign product."

Now you know how the creatives in this country feel.

Not nice when the shoe’s on the other foot, is it?

You think you, us and the BDU guys might all be further ahead if we worked on that?

Rammstein’s Pussy

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:08:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago, I had the misfortune of being invited to a screening of Lars Von Trier’s “Antichrist”, the film that “scandalized” Cannes, opened the “serious film” section of the Toronto International Film Festival and is now the hot topic of debate at the far more intellectual New York Film Festival.

"Grotesque masterpiece” or "offensively misogynistic" --- which ad blurb will sell more tickets? Would including rusty scissors with the Deluxe DVD pack be too much?

After mulling over my own reaction to the film, which was far from positive, I think I’m just happy that Von Trier is finally getting professional help for the severe depression that apparently plagued him to a debilitating level through production.

This is an enormously talented artist capable of powerful and challenging work. It would be rewarding to see him able to do that without being distracted by the demons he’s been fighting.

That said, I wondered if much of the most controversial content in “Antichrist” was an artist coping with those demons, doing what he felt was necessary to engage his audience or breaking through the cultural noise to get his work noticed in the first place. I’m speaking, of course, of the lead actors’ genitals.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with sex scenes on film even the ones where things get explicit. I did a ton of them as an actor myself. Most of those sequences were designed to titillate or explore sexual issues, and the making of them had little to do with actual sex.

Part of that is because sex on film is mostly about getting sprayed with glycerine so you look sweaty, ice cubes between takes to keep nipples erect and contorting bodies into positions even the Kama Sutra never imagined to accommodate the camera.

Therefore, I don’t know if that’s really Willem Dafoe’s dick or Charlotte Gainsbourg’s kitty doing the heavy lifting in “Antichrist”, or if Von Trier used stand-ins, stunt players or prosthetics. What mostly concerned me was how needlessly tacked on the explicit shots all seemed.

It must have felt that way to Von Trier as well because he delivered what he termed “Catholic” and “Protestant” versions of his final cut. The latter being the more explicit --- and, of course, the only version purchased for film festivals and distribution.

But hey, we all know what really sells, don’t we?

There used to be very clear lines demarcating what was mainstream, soft core and hard core and artists made their own decisions about which of those fields they wanted to work. Sometimes their decision came with condemnation or negated the possibility of moving from one realm to another. Porn stars didn’t do guest spots on TV shows and if an “A” list actor strayed too far into other territory he wasn’t “A” or even “B” list anymore.

In fact, it was often possible to track a performer’s decline as they moved from high budget films to lower levels to soft core. Nobody seemed to go the other way without plastic surgery and a change of identity.

Nowadays, Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson appear pretty much anywhere either plying or implying their original porn skills. Television’s top rated comedy “Two and a Half Men” does entire episodes revolving around the hiring of hookers and porn film imagery permeates just about every successful series and film.

Porn culture has very clearly established a significant foothold in our industry. The general reaction to “Antichrist” makes me think we haven’t reached the point where explicit sex is expected by a mainstream audience. But it’s certainly far from being outright rejected.

And that makes me wonder where we’re going to have to go next.

Where producers used to negotiate for nudity or the parameters of using a body double, will we soon need to be defining which sex acts our actors will participate in and with whom they will or won’t do them?

Will young actors be told that in order to work at their craft they better get used to screwing whoever plays opposite?

And will we all have to go down the same path the Porn industry has been forced to take since it more or less gained respectability 30 years ago by depicting sex in a more and more graphic and degrading way?

I believe I got some insight into the answers to those questions a few day’s ago, when an advertising and promotions website sent me a music video entitled “Pussy” by one of Germany’s most successful Rock bands --- Rammstein.

Rammstein has garnered immense international success with such hits as “Du Hast” and “Engel”. They’ve been nominated for Grammy Awards and are known for a stage show and pyrotechnical display that rivals everybody from “Kiss” to “AC/DC” and has been witnessed by millions of fans. They’re as big as you can get in their homeland and well up there everywhere else.

And now they’re doing Porn.

Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me. I’ve always thought Rammstein’s music was kinda Heavy Metal as performed by The Tubes. And surfing through television channels in Europe will inevitably bring you into contact with German made pornography, which can best be described as --- in a word --- blunt. In most of their explicit sex, he’s a storm trooper and she’s Poland.

But while Rock ‘n Roll has always been about sex, from Howling Wolf promising “Smokestack Lightning” to Chrisie Hynde splayed across the hood of a Chevy to most of what debuted this morning at the iTunes store, the majority of it has been “suggested”, left to your imagination or presented in a manner where how much you 'get it' defines how cool you really are.

Not anymore.

And you know that the bar has either been raised or lowered, depending on your perspective.

In order to compete, does Gene Simmons have to start doing a little more with that tongue?

Does Angus Young finally lose the shorts --- literally?

Because no matter what they and others have achieved or created and might come up with in the future, somebody else is going to be getting all the attention by following Rammstein’s example.

I’m afraid we can’t dismiss all this as just a blip in the zeitgeist. Youtube may be able to keep taking the Rammstein video down as fast as it’s posted. But other competitive sites don’t seem to have a problem accepting the traffic --- and neither do their advertisers.

I think this is a game changer. Anytime a mainstream artist, be it Willem Dafoe or Rammstein, decides a certain approach will find them an audience, that decision resonates through the rest of the culture.

Maybe I’m wrong. But I’d appreciate knowing where my logic has gone askew.

Therefore, here’s Rammstein’s “Pussy”. Definitely NSFW and probably out of place in a lot of other environments too. You can find it here if Blogger asks me to maintain a certain decorum or my own sense of what should be on this site gets the better of me.

But somehow I don’t think I’ll be getting too much direct feedback from readers asking me to remove it.

Because this is where we are. And this may be what many of us have to become to survive.

Stop Making Sense

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:19:00 +0000

From their first moments of preparation for the profession, screenwriters are ingrained with the imperative that they need to be smarter than anybody else on the project. Not more intelligent, or more knowledgeable with respect to all of the talents that must be gathered and exercised to execute their vision. But smarter in the context of knowing every beat of their screenplay backwards.

A good screenwriter makes certain that all the loose plot threads are neatly tied before the final frame. He or she knows what motivates each and every one of the characters, their back story and why they behave the way they do. No matter what twists and turns take place during the story, they all must have a basis in the internal logic of the piece.

When a script works, it purrs like a finely tuned Jaguar, effortlessly taking the reader (and eventually the viewer) on a smooth and exhilarating ride, where they never feel a single pebble on the road and are barely aware of the G-forces while gliding through the turns or accelerating along the final straight.

To this end, the writer is often assisted by others connected to the project, the development execs, a caring producer and energetic director, a cast anxious to breath life into the personalities that will enact the story, a conscientious crew ensuring that nothing intrudes on the manufactured reality.

The point of this entire, often lengthy and expensive process is to both ensure that the set never stalls or the audience never disrupts their suspension of disbelief to utter, “Hey, wait a minute, how does he know that, why is she acting so strange or that doesn’t work”.

As veteran screenwriter Frank Pierson observed in a famous lecture on adaptation, “Novelists can lie. Screenwriters have no such luxury.”

Yes, we writers are the guardians of “the word”. No film could be a success without our dedication to our craft…

And…

…what a load of shit!

You want to make a film a success? Blow something up and make it seem important.

This weekend, I went to a warehouse sale where the DVDs were 6 for $10. It wasn’t some pirate outfit. It was a guy who buys up the shelves of mom and pop video stores that have gone broke, manufacturers overstock and the like. Sorting through massive piles of films I’ve never even heard of was a humbling experience.

There’s so much out there that people sweated over, agonized to realize and struggled to make logical and understandable and --- perfect. And amid such an abundance of unfathomable effort were also titles that had made a boat load of money. Among these were two that eventually comprised the program of my semi-regular Sunday night double feature -- “Miami Vice – The Unrated Director’s Edition” and “Transformers”.

“Transformers” first.

Sometimes, I don’t get the point of something --- ukulele music, #followfriday, the Snuggie…

And. I. Just. Will. Never. Get. Michael. Bay. Hollywood’s Summer Blockbuster security blanket.

Michael Bay movies are mostly incoherent. They’re sprawling and stupid and don’t follow even their own fractured internal logic. There’s no character development. No story. Nothing to care about. Nothing to attach to --- because it’s all just eventually going to blow up. Loudly.

Need a character to do something completely out of character, the characters in Michael Bay films just do whatever comes into his head. Plot getting too convoluted to understand, ignore it and move on. Special effect not working, just interrupt it with a close-up of a simpering star (male or female) and keep going. Flow and transition don’t matter, just keeping throwing shit at the screen until you can’t make head or tail of anything because so much has already been irrationally stuck onto so much else.

Bay’s are movies that communicate one message – stop caring. Give yourself over to the kind of rush you can have without also expecting to feel something.

But no matter the utter pointlessness, “Transformers” earned just under $1 Billion at the box office, as did “Transformers 2” which will surpass the original’s take when it’s released on DVD shortly. That’s five times what each of the movies cost to make, meaning a third, fourth and fifth instalment are a foregone conclusion.

In other words, films that break all the rules of the filmmakers art will earn many times more than most of the most successful movies in history. And an easy Billion apiece more than all the films produced in Canada this year will show as profit.

Hell, Bay’s studio will make more money from posters featuring Megan Fox’s ass than the total that Telefilm will realize for investing in Canadian movies.

What does this tell us?

Well, it pretty much proves that this whole “develop to perfection” process we’ve evolved is one grand waste of time as far as a significant portion of the ticket buying audience is concerned.

They simply don’t care that a large number of people, who work for studios, production companies, agencies and the like, are charged with the responsibility of finding good and/or marketable material that will be what the audience wants to see in six months, nine months, one year or even two years time.

These execs flood out of Yale and Harvard and the film departments of USC and UCLA with degrees in literature and commerce and course credits for semiotics and Late 20th Century Romanian film. These are really, really intelligent people, the kind of people who can hear ten words of your pitch and know it’s a rework of a never published Danish folk-tale or a subject tackled better in a masterpiece by some obscure Russian Auteur.

If they like your idea, they know how to perfectly pitch it up the ladder to the next level of executives and the level above that and the one even further above that. And once an idea is sold, they may or may not be among the vast cc: list that will then append notes, rethink plot points, spit-ball casting and do all of the other things that comprise the ascending levels of Development Hell.

Draped in the finery sold by Fred Segal and Barney’s, they book tables for breakfast, lunch and dinner in every trendy cafe from Santa Monica to Burbank, massively fuelling the local economy.

And Michael Bay renders all that they do pointless.

He knows that the secret is to stop making sense, to set aside the intellectual games and just blast whatever is in front of the camera to smithereens.

In “Adventures in the Screen Trade”, writer William Goldman suspects that no studio executive ever goes home and says “Guess what, Honey, we decided to make ‘Mega Force’!”. Yet somewhere in LA, there always seems to be a guy ecstatically screaming “We hired Michael Bay!” through his Bluetooth.

And if you don’t think the studios haven’t finally realized the secret to his Midas touch, take a gander at what’s on the production slates for next summer and beyond. Back in July, Universal won a FOUR STUDIO BIDDING WAR for the rights to the Atari video game “Asteroids”. You remember Asteroids, the only thing that happened during the entire game was --- shit blew up.

Also looking for writers who couldn’t give a crap about character, plot or nuance are: “Mechwarrior”, “Shadow of the Colossus”, “World of Warcraft”, “Infamous” and “Diablo” --- games that are repetitive and predictable and don’t do much but make stuff explode.

Seeking an antidote to the nihilistic future predicted for my profession by “Transformers”, I plugged the “Miami Vice” disk in the player. I’d seen the movie in a theatre and had liked it, adored the score and had been enthralled by Michael Mann’s always muscular imagery.

Michael Mann has produced and/or directed and/or written some of the finest films I’ve had the pleasure to experience, from “Thief” to “Manhunter” to “Last of the Mohicans” to “The Insider” to “Collateral” to his masterpiece “Heat”. They just don’t come any better and brighter than Michael Mann.

So I figured, “Hey, you’ve already seen the movie, switch on the director’s commentary and get some insight into the kind of genius that might save us from an endless parade of Michael Bays”. So I switched on the commentary. And I listened. And I was amazed --- in a kind of “You must be fucking kidding me” way.

For as the movie rolled, Michael Mann talks not about filmmaking, but about hardware. He goes on and on about the engineering genius of those who build “Go-fast” boats or one of a kind airplanes, while practically disassembling and putting back together every piece of weaponry that appears on camera.

He prattles on about how this actor is a genius and that one’s brilliant, in the process suggesting that, for the most part, fairly stock performances have a special quality because the actress is really British but you can’t tell or only speaks Mandarin so she had to learn her role phonetically or absolutely floored him with their performance in some arcane Bolivian art film.

He details the back stories he constructed for many of the characters, how their parents were Cuban doctors who fought in Angola for example, when that information has nothing to do with any scene in the film and is never reflected in anything the actor is doing either. Instead of revealing character through what they say, do or by what others say or do about them, Mann just spins off on fantasies that suggest he has a whole house full of imaginary friends.

Mann describes having his actors spend weeks with undercover drug squads, even participating in drug deals and drug busts to learn what it’s really like to be undercover, how they spent endless hours in SWAT training so they hold their guns perfectly and are aware of what the rest of the actors playing cops would be doing in the tactical situation being portrayed.

You almost wanted to scream at the screen, “They’re doing the same thing you can see any actor do who’s watched an episode of the original “Miami Vice” TV show!” while also wondering if having the actors follow Drug Bust Scenario # 23 saved him the trouble of actually having to block the scene.

Things began spiralling out of control as I realized Mann was not going to explain why the first two set pieces of the film, the opening boat race and following nightclub scene had virtually nothing to do with what followed beyond revealing that Crockett and Tubbs like women and driving fast.

He ignores major inconsistencies like how does Colin Farrell suddenly have a grenade after three guys just frisked him by concentrating instead on how the set was painted. And, perhaps worst of all, despite his apparent desire for absolute verisimilitude, he ignores the central story of Crockett breaking the cardinal rule of undercover and sleeping with the enemy. In fact, in the scene where that occurs, he launches into a lengthy history of Cuban Salsa.

By the time Mann went into detail about the dangers and difficulties of shooting location footage in Paraguay, which, beyond a stock shot of the Iguazu Falls, could have been a backlot in Culver City, I was wondering if his primary talent was the spewing the kind of bullshit he’d obviously used to convince some dumb studio exec to pay for such a ridiculous additional expense.

And when he began painstakingly detailing the SWAT tactic strategy of the final gun battle with actors following a classic “L” shape attack plan, and all he’d learned from the neurosurgeons who’d been technical advisors on a brain surgery scene, I finally lost it.

Somehow a shipyard shootout as old as an episode of “Naked City” was being prettied up as something of major cinematic significance while also regurgitating medical mumbo-jumbo that had nothing to do with the 30 second hospital scene he’d actually shot.

The producer part of me considered how much it must have cost to insure Colin Farrell so he could go along on a drug bust and how much had been frankly wasted trucking a crew to Paraguay and the Dominican Republic and elsewhere for footage he once create for the original TV series without leaving Dade County.

Meanwhile, my writer incarnation was growing more confused by the mounds of research Mann had obviously acquired and then clearly not bothered to use in any way that might benefit his audience.

I’m sure the man is wonderful company over dinner and fills his production with fun toys and field trips. But none of that was making the movie richer for anybody watching it.

And I started to wonder if all of those honorable traits we screenwriters hold dear and the level of craft we sacrifice our personal lives and sanity to maintain really matter.

Maybe we need to just blow stuff up and bullshit about the rest of it. God knows it seems to be what really makes a movie successful.

Lazy Sunday # 86: Nick Vujicic

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:25:00 +0000

Wow! 86 of these Sunday things. I wonder if it’s time for a new act?

Rather than wasting all that time and energy trying to find something that isn’t already viral on the Internet, maybe it’s time to move on.

Y’see in American slang “86” means to get rid of something.

The term apparently comes from the New York State Liquor Code, Article 86 of which describes the circumstances whereby a patron can be refused service and/or “removed from the premises”.

And you can’t spend a day on any film set without hearing somebody say something like “86 the apple boxes” or “86 the talent”, meaning “Get ‘em out of here”.

There are some who believe “86” garnered its association with moving something along because it describes the dimensions of a traditionally dug grave, eight feet long and six feet deep.

Whatever the derivation, the intent is the same. 86 symbolizes that something needs to be gone.

Sometimes that’s the annoying drunk at the end of the bar or the leading lady when insert shots are taking up the rest of the day. Sometimes its your dreams and your desire to keep pursuing them. 86 some of those big plans you had and life does get a whole lot easier to live.

And a whole lot less interesting.

One night in a club, I heard a punk band introduce a song called “Life’s tough. It’s tougher if you’re stupid”. And that’s, of course, true. Life’s also tough if you have dreams nobody else believes in.

Or were born like Nick Vujicic.

But Nick’s a guy who never quits. Somebody who never stops believing anything is possible. He has one mantra we should all live by…

Never give up!

And enjoy your Sunday.

Relentless

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:08:00 +0000

I did a couple of things that were out of character for me this summer. One was conscious, the other --- not so much.

The conscious decision was taking a University course on Hannibal. Ever since I was a kid and saw the absolutely terrible movie version of Hannibal’s war with Rome, starring Victor Mature, I’ve had a fascination with the subject.

A couple of times I’ve tried to envision it as a script but couldn’t figure out how to make it matter for a modern audience. Now, I know how to do that – and I’ve got a course credit from a prestigious American University to boot.

A couple hundred more of those and we’ll be checking off that salutation box marked “Doctor”!

I’m saving most of what I learned about Hannibal for some upcoming posts on the CRTC, my own personal version of the corrupt Roman Empire. If you see a herd of elephants crossing the Laurentians this Fall and converging on Gatineau --- that’ll be me.

The not as conscious element of my summer was that I started watching Fox News.

The first couple of weeks of that were kinda out of my hands. I was just somewhere where it was the TV news people put on in the evening. But soon I became fascinated by what I saw unfolding in front of me and kept watching.

And in an odd way, Hannibal and Fox News have quite a few things in common.

Now let me start by saying, I don’t think Fox News is any more “fair and balanced” (their motto) than any other news outlet. And I don’t put much more credence to their coverage of “The News” than I do anybody else’s reportage.

An objective who, what, where, when and why may not be impossible to find in contemporary journalism, but we certainly don’t live in a world where many of the major news services aren’t regularly caught with their biases showing.

And is any of that really bias, or is it just a natural reflection of the ideologies of those in charge of the final message? Nobody is objective. Nobody is without an agenda. And most of us are mostly full of shit when we claim that we have neither.

Now, before this summer, Fox News was just some guy yelling in the background as far as I was concerned. The few times I sampled their wares, it felt like the parent network’s original ratings staple “When Animals Attack” given a shave and a thousand dollar suit. The talking heads all seemed to be channelling rabid evangelical preachers while simultaneously unable to keep their cameras off as much cleavage as possible.

It was all just so shrill and tacky.

And that was when the Republican Party they so clearly supported was completely in charge. Any half sane person had to assume this was the lunatic fringe and worry about what would happen if these people were ever taken seriously.

Following the election of Barack Obama and a general House and Senate cleaning in Washington, most political pundits were not only predicting the disappearance of the Republican Party but a dramatic shift away from the Neo-Con agenda and outfits such as Fox News.

Like Hannibal, left sitting on a North African beach with his defeated father after Rome had tossed Carthage out of Sicily, it looked like the game was over.

But then something happened.

Much as I cheered President Obama’s election and the promise it held, I got a couple of twinges early on when I heard respected journalists talk about getting an exciting tingle up their leg when they thought about the new President or that they now felt it was their job to help him succeed.

Really? Is that the media’s job? What about those old tenets of the Fourth Estate, that the primary job of the Press was to keep those in power honest?

Hannibal, like all good Generals, instinctively knew that politicians can never be fully trusted. No matter how much you may admire them or their policies. Maybe he’d read Sun Tsu’s “The Art of War”, written 300 years before his own time, which contains the warning “When bureaucrats prosper, the people are harmed.”

I have a feeling a wily old newshound (or maybe just crafty corporate General) like Rupert Murdoch also noticed that other journalists were leaving the field and suddenly saw an advantage. One that has been employed with stunning success.

I first came to Fox News this summer as the US embarked on its great Health Care debate. Having lived under the Canadian system, I know there’s really nothing to fear about Socialized medicine – beyond having to acquire a bit of a tax fetish to pay for it.

But like many, I was surprised by the force of the Fox News attack on the policy, figuring it probably threatened the glut of pharmaceutical commercials that seem to fuel the newscasts over there.

But then, I became equally stunned by something else. When Congressmen and Senators were questioned about the bill, most admitted that they hadn’t read it.

And not long after, when their own constituents asked the same questions, they still hadn’t read it.

And even after those Town Hall meetings had degenerated into each side calling the other “Nazis” and it was becoming clear the original bill was in jeopardy, politician after politician made it clear they still didn’t know what was in the bill.

Now, Americans shouldn’t think this is unusual behavior. Members of all four Canadian parties passed a tax bill last spring (C-10) which mapped out censorship of the Arts – and it turned out that none of them had read that part before voting in favor.

Our tax dollars at work – and a valuable insight into those politicians Hannibal knew better than to trust.

Like most Canadian artists in the C-10 debacle, many Americans began asking what else their politicians (from both sides of the floor) weren’t paying attention to. But most of the main stream media didn’t seem interested in investigating that story either.

Much like Hannibal noticing that Rome never thought any Army might try crossing the Alps, Fox News realized it had the story to itself. And maybe it had stumbled on something more.

Fox News’ flagship show is “The O’Reilly Factor”, and it’s always been a ratings winner. Part of the reason for that is the gruff charm of host Bill O’Reilly, who constantly refers to his viewers as “The folks”. Whether his act is sincere or contrived doesn’t matter. Because in television terms, “It works.”.

Surrounded by a rep company of correspondents and commentators ranging from a body language expert who goes over video to determine if the subject is hiding something to comedian Dennis Miller, O’Reilly engages his audience in a nightly discussion of the news of the day that simply isn’t available anywhere else.

And most of the time, that interplay belies all of those myths that the audience for Fox News is Redneck, Racist, Ill-informed and – well – not as smart as the people who get their news from other sources. Most often, the discussion makes its ideological points subtly in the midst of a conversation that wouldn’t seem out of place anywhere.

But in relentlessly questioning “What’s really in the Health Care Bill?”, O’Reilly began drawing a massive audience, tripling and quadrupling those who were getting their information from CNN or MSNBC.

Imperceptibly at first, then more openly, he also began lumping Republican and Democratic politicians together. It was clear his audience didn’t trust either side that much. They’d voted out the former and now were having second thoughts about the latter.

One night, in mapping the audience response to one of his monologues, a red line marking Republican approval and a green one the democrats, O’Reilly had realized that “the folks” didn’t want partisan babbling. They just wanted the straight answers nobody else was even trying to give them.

Via O’Reilly, the Fox News question soon expanded from Health Care to “What’s up with the bailout, cap and trade, cash-for-clunkers, Acorn and all these Czars?” Basically instilling in its audience the feeling that maybe this new President and his closest allies didn’t really know what they were doing or couldn’t be trusted. After all, after an ever-lengthening summer away from the office, they still hadn’t read that damn Health Care bill.

The electorate were fed up with the politics of politics.

It was the same way Hannibal built his army, by convincing a thousand disparate tribes that Rome couldn’t be trusted and didn’t have their best interests at heart.

Now, the Administration and the rest of the media could’ve probably nipped all of this in the bud by openly responding to the concerns the Public expressed or the many ways Fox News stretched the facts to connect their dots. But they didn’t.

Why not? Was it hubris? A belief that Summer was a slow news period and it would all eventually go away? A dismissal of Fox News and their viewers as members of that lunatic fringe?

I don’t know. But I do know that Fox didn’t wait to open a second front.

Late afternoon host, Glenn Beck, a former stand-up comic, Rock DJ and CNN correspondent who describes himself as “A Rodeo Clown”, latched onto the zeitgeist of discontent and distrust and dug in his spurs. Over three months, his own ratings tripled and he turned into a national phenomenon, watched by more people than every other competing news service combined.

What Beck does brilliantly is play the role of a guy out of his depth and struggling to understand. He evokes sympathy by appearing just as confused by what’s happening to his country as many of those who watch him. Again, whether that’s cynical or dishonest doesn’t matter. “It works.”

Beck decided to go after the people Obama embraced as his inner circle, echoing the mantra most of us heard from our moms, “If you want to know what somebody is like, look at their friends.”

So he attacked those closest to the President, in the same way that Hannibal made a point of personally dispatching the generals sent against him.

After one battle, he sent 200 hundred blood-stained gold rings back to the Roman Senate. They had been taken from the dead hands of the cream of Roman Knighthood. A message that he would decimate the ruling class rather than ever come to terms with them.

A typical Beck program often includes a segment with Beck at a blackboard trying to figure out something like this…

A guy missing his tinfoil hat? Somebody looking for fire where there isn’t even smoke? Wouldn’t it be helpful if a real journalist delved into all this?

But all summer long, none did, insisting on taking pot shots at the messenger instead.

Meanwhile, Fox News found endless new ways of hammering the Administration. Was MSNBC silent because CEO Jeffrey Imelt needed the Cap and Trade bill to pass for the sake of GE’s bottom line? Could there be any other logical explanation for Obama dolls being sold in the NBC store?

During the Cash for Clunkers program, Fox found mechanics going broke because people were trading in their old cars instead of fixing them and a dour lady from a Kidney charity that was struggling because the government was paying for junkers people would otherwise have donated to her group.

Blow after blow sent the message that the Administration agenda was hurting the little guy and looking after somebody else.

During each program, Beck pleads for people to help him save the country, to send him intel, to be whistleblowers. Maybe it’s just the modern TV version of offering Captain Midnight’s Secret Decoder Ring.

But --- “It Works”.

If only 1% of Beck’s audience is doing what he asks, that amounts to about 10,000 true believers on the lookout in every single state in the Union.

It took him weeks of going after Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones, to end that man’s political career; a campaign completely ignored in the main stream press.

The New York Times, in its first report of the scandal, on the day Jones resigned, attributed his fall to an old video where he referred to Republicans as “Assholes”. The truth is, it was a long list of videos repeatedly shown on Beck’s program, including one where Jones, speaking to an inner city audience, affirms that White environmentalists are specifically choosing to dump dangerous materials in Black neighborhoods.

Minutes after claiming Jones’ scalp, Beck was twittering his followers with a list of who he wanted information on next. In an era where every newspaper editor knows the term “citizen journalist” Beck was actually making use of them.

Within days, he had forced the reassignment of the head of the National Endowment of the Arts over a demand that Artists who wanted grants sign on to the President’s agenda first.

And then he scored a major coup, presenting incredible hidden camera video shot inside Acorn, filmed by a pair of neophytes, that caused the Census Department to bar the community organizer from leading the next Census and the Senate to cease funding the group.

Since many on the Right had worried Acorn might skew the Census to change the boundaries of Congressional Districts to favor the Left, this could translate to a stunning reversal of electoral fortunes.

And it was a bloodless coup accomplished by complete amateurs and so revealing of the silence of the main stream media that it had “Daily Show” host John Stewart staring blankly into camera and asking American journalists, “I’m a fake journalist and I’m embarrassed. Where the fuck were the rest of you guys?”

And that’s what this is all really about.

At a time when TV news is struggling to survive, where things are so screwed up that Katie Couric earns more money for reading the news than NPR has to fund all of its news programming, Fox News saw a vacuum, moved in and filled it.

And still --- nobody else seems to have the stomach to take them on. Like the Romans, they seem content to hunker within their city walls while Hannibal pillages the countryside.

After decades of plundering Rome, Hannibal was finally defeated by Scipio Africanus, a Roman General who simply copied his tactics and used them against him.

And that is the only strategy that might also save the other news channels and network news departments who are watching their ratings plummet while Fox News increases its numbers by thousands of new viewers every night.

This is a revolution in television news that has gone virtually unchallenged by the the media establishment.

If Fox News really is being disingenuous about the American President’s agenda and the complicity of the Press, then other journalists need to get to work and get to the truth.

Otherwise, these guys are going to dictate the public mood and control the political agenda for a very long time.

Again, I want to be clear, that this isn’t really about politics, your own perspectives or what you think the right direction for society might be. It’s an example of how somebody determined to succeed can quickly gain the upper hand and change the game.

It’s an illustration of the way power and influence works and how to make your agenda the one which gets adopted.

You need to be relentless. You need to find the weakness in every single decision your opponent makes and refuse to accept anything less than what you want.

After 10 years of watching Canadian television decline, while we have tugged our forelocks and spoken politely with the CRTC, it’s clear that conciliation and polite debate do not work. It’s time for us to start going after those who refuse to hear our voices, to force them on pain of their own survival to finally act in our interests.

What Hannibal knew instinctively, Machiavelli, voiced very succinctly, “Don’t stand around too long with the knife in your hands.”

You find the opening and you strike.

Now excuse me while I go find some elephants.

We Don’t Do Period

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:20:00 +0000

It seems we’ll be back into the never ending Canadian TV Regulation Wars in the coming weeks, with the CRTC now announcing two (“Count ‘em, two!”) sets of Fall hearings on the state of the industry. How often do these guys need to make the same decision, anyway? Is it a Best of Five series? Seven?

However, I have to say the field has become more interesting with the arrival of a new player, the Harper Government, who seems to be giving the Commission’s leash a yank in an attempt to get them to remember they’re supposed to be a consumer watchdog rather than broadcaster lap hound. Details from Grant Robertson, the busiest journalist in Canadian Show business – or maybe just the only guy at the Globe & Mail who couldn’t score any TIFF passes.

As always, the just concluded Toronto International Film Festival was less about movies than the parties. That forces even guys like me to hang up the “quiet loner” mantle and slip into something elegant. Or as elegant as necessary to hang with barely working Canadian writers, actors and filmmakers.

I usually explain my non-attendance at industry events with the “Because they don’t let me bring a shotgun!” excuse. But lately, I’m thinking the real danger of packing heat would be wrestling it from the grip of so many in a mood to cram the barrel in their own mouths.

For what seems to be happening in our country is that we’re building a creative community with nowhere to create.

It’s all well and good that several levels of government used TIFF to announce $7 Million in new funding for the Canadian Film Centre and $10 Million more to complete a permanent Festival complex. But you gotta wonder if there will be any production for those CFC kids to work on once they graduate and if the grand Festival theatres will have Canadian films in a sufficient number to raise their own screen content above the 2% level our cinematic output accounts for in the rest of the country.

Shouldn’t we have our own industry before we spend so much public money on training and exhibition? Especially when those trained and the places where our films are exhibited will both have to depend heavily on the kindness of foreigners to survive.

But then, that’s always been one of the places where our National Psyche misfires. We crave acceptance at all cost, wanting to be internationally regarded as the wonderfully extra-special people we all know we are. And somehow artists approved by association with the Ivy League cache of their Alma Mater or inviting people to watch movies in a jewel box setting is supposed to accomplish that.

The fact that others not burdened by such a lack of self-esteem pay more attention to the content on screen isn’t a concept those so blinkered will ever be able to get their heads around.

But let’s get back to those struggling to make an industry here.

Somebody twittered the warning “It’s become ‘Lord of the Flies’ in here.” from one party I attended, perfectly capturing (as talented writers are wont to do) the rudderless chaos of so much creative energy unable to find normal release and degenerating into something else.

You hear many excuses for the reduced markets for Canadian work. The need of some local buyers to have guaranteed financing or foreign sales before they’ll commit to development, for example, or the desire for the concept to copy a current American model or success.

One of our nets won’t consider any drama submissions that aren’t budgeted in the $2 Mil/episode range, which must mark the first time any network anywhere hasn’t been all over a producer to “make it cheaper”.

It’s also a business model that flies in the face of every recent Canadian TV success from “Corner Gas” to “Trailer Park Boys” to “Being Erica” while making the break even point for investors almost impossible to reach in the current economy. And given our private networks public pleas of poverty it makes even less sense.

However, one of the most prescient clues to what the real problem is came from a writer friend who’s trying to sell a Period piece.

Canadian nets are notoriously loathe to shoot anything where the actors can’t be dressed off the rack. Shortly after “Mad Men” debuted, a local development exec let me know they were in the market for a period drama. I offered a couple of ideas, to which she responded, “We weren’t thinking of going back that far.”

In other words, they really wanted something from the 60’s, like “Mad Men”. If you signed with a US network first. And had foreign sales.

One of these network geniuses had listened to my friend’s pitch and worried aloud about becoming known for doing Period.

Shouldn’t the concern have been, “How can this idea make us money? How can the stories we do here resonate with a modern audience? How can this series make us the place where viewers know they can find something different?”

But network executives apparently don’t think that way. Canadian ones in particular seem to eschew the opportunity to break new ground in favor of re-tooling or simply replicating what can be found pretty much anywhere else.

Perhaps that’s a safe choice when it comes to personal job-security. But when iTunes is your company’s only option at securing future profits, you’d think you wouldn’t want a little more than your version of “So You Think You Can Dance” competing with somebody else’s copy.

When you’re stuck in a falling box, your only salvation is beginning to think outside it.

But, in the same way they don’t embrace the story potential, visual freedom and imagination sparking ability of Science Fiction, Canadian TV Execs are loathe to program much that’s set in the past, preferring to till a narrow segment of human history (the Present) as it is seen through the eyes of endless incarnations of cops, doctors, lawyers and young singles.

I started wondering why they’re so afraid of a tapestry of human experience so diverse you could program a different era and/or culture (as well as all it had/has to offer) in every available prime time slot for decades without repeating yourself. And unfortunately, I think I found the answer.

Teachers.

I’ve written about how stupid our audience is being made before, much of that process the result of an education system too lazy or too disinterested in our kids to even teach them how to read.

And while the Nation’s movers and shakers were craning their necks to see if Megan Fox was as hot in person as she was in “Transformers 2”, the Canadian Council on Learning published a study showing that 48% of Canadian adults operate at a literacy level below the minimum required to cope in a knowledge based economy.

To make it simple – half of us can’t comprehend a newspaper anymore, let alone begin to deal with a novel.

The CCL included a map with their study showing the national scope of the problem. Green and Yellow sections denote a lower proportion of adult illiterates, orange and red indicate illiteracy at levels up to 69%.

As a Western Canadian with an admitted Conservative bias, I hope some of you notice the corollary between literacy and the Nation’s voting patterns.

Just Sayin’…

Anyway – we already can’t read. And now it appears not learning History is next.

The UK has a whole lot of History, so much that PBS wouldn’t have much programming without it and CBC wouldn’t have as many shows they can pretend are actually Canadian.

But there’s a movement afoot over there to stop teaching History because they now have so many kids in school who were born elsewhere that some in Education are asserting that those children feel left out, don’t relate to what’s being taught and therefore fail.

The fact that there are still a lot of indigenous kids who might like to know where they come from and that it might not harm the imports to get up to date on how their new home got this way seems to escape Educational Bureaucrats.

It makes you wonder how many culture clashes could be avoided if teachers were working at making everybody a little clearer on how the people they don’t fully understand came to be the way they are.

In my part of the World, where one School Board has already banned “To Kill A Mockingbird” in a misguided attempt to reduce racial sensitivities; it’s come to light that School Boards are encouraging teachers to augment their classes with a field trip to the nearest “Medieval Times” outlet for “A History Lesson Your Child Will Never Forget! @ $40 bucks a head.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Medieval Times performance. It’s an extension on the Dinner Theatre concept which grew out of the “watching something while you eat” TV Dinner Concept. In this case, it’s basically “Chuck E. Cheese” with horses.

The audience is herded into an arena and treated to mock jousting while wearing paper crowns and eating with their hands, constantly being assured what they’re experiencing is an accurate portrayal of life in a Medieval Castle.

It’s not.

It’s a Vegas style concept so dependent on school shows for its corporate survival that they’ve developed a whole “educational” package to encourage school attendance. This includes a handout on dramatic acting educating the kids on arcane theatrical terms like ACTRA and AFTRA as well as such definition gems as “Background Performer: …Extra” and “Extra: …Background Performer”.

The Medieval Menu for school matinees features:

Garlic Bread

Oven-Roasted Chicken Quarter

Sweet Corn Cobette

Herb-Roasted Potato

Freshly-Baked Chocolate Chip Cookie

Bottled Spring Water

(Gluten and Dairy free options available)

Those of you with a literacy level high enough to get you this far down the page should also be able to discern how many of those products were actually available during the Middle Ages.

Passing this off as History is right up there with what passes for History on Canada’s History Channel. You might as well show “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” in class (somehow I’m sure The History Channel already has) or simply take the kids to Vegas where they can climb the Eiffel Tower, take a Gondola through Venice and meet direct descendants of Al Capone in one very “educational” afternoon.

And while they’re there, maybe somebody can teach them how to play Poker, because it might be their only shot at earning a living after graduation.

What this laziness and lack of imagination in the education community breeds is -- well, the very same thing -- in everybody they were supposed to teach. And it’s clearly starting to affect what gets offered as television fare.

When kids can’t read and therefore have fewer options, they’ll start to see the degradation of “Bromance” or “Rock of Love” as their only chance to be somebody. They’ll believe the abusive atmosphere of “Hell’s Kitchen” is what they have to put up with in the workplace or that there’s a Millionaire “Bachelor” who’ll marry you after one night in a hot tub.

And the ratings hungry people who run television will be more than happy to oblige.

Making room for fewer dramas -- and even fewer Period pieces that might coax them to stretch their understanding of the world.

To put it simply -- Nobody is taught enough History anymore to be able to follow a Period piece without being in a constant state of confusion.

“Why doesn’t he use his cell phone? Whaddya mean they didn’t have ‘em back then?”

“Why is she taking a train if she’s in a hurry? That’ll take forever!”

“No clues! Are they nuts? Where’s the CSI guys?”

“Did that Atticus guy use the ‘N’ word? I thought we were supposed to like him!”

Having lived through the 1960’s, I’m frankly stunned by the vast number of mass media journalists who filed miles of copy prior to this season’s launch wondering at the differences between the sexes displayed in “Mad Men”. Even if these people are waaaaay younger than me, didn’t they have parents? Didn’t anybody ever tell them that things have changed a little in the last few decades? Don’t they know that iPods aren’t magic, they evolved from what preceded them?

Apparently not.

And they’re the ones who know how to read!

I’m sure there’s an argument to be made that television is a struggling medium right now and we’ll get back to more diverse programming once the “New Media” business models are perfected. But I look at how many of last night’s Emmy Awards were carted away by “Mad Men”, “Grey Gardens”, “Little Dorrit” and “House of Saddam” and I realize that producing in the Period genre might be one of those models.

Maybe the problem is bigger than teachers.

Maybe the Canadian TV mantra isn’t “We don’t do Period.” It’s --- We don’t do. Period.

Lazy Sunday # 85: Capturing Television

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 12:52:00 +0000

The Emmy Awards will be handed out this evening, celebrating the best the last American TV season had to offer. Some of your favorite shows will be honored. Some of them will be robbed. And twenty years from now, the ones that mattered to you will still hold a special place in your heart.

What we watch and why we watch it is always ethereal, always changing. But what remains constant is the drive to communicate, to engage and to bring something special to the screen that abides in those who make television.

Finding a new idea or a fresh take on the oldest one there is and then feeding the voracious machine that churns out the shows millions want to make a part of their lives is a daunting task. And despite what “TMZ” and “Access Hollywood” might lead you to believe, that task is accomplished by intelligent, thoughtful and courageous men and women, who find a vision, follow it and make it real for the rest of us.

Many of these people have been gathered together by those who hand out the Emmys, The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, at a very special site still in Beta called the “Archive of American Television” at www.emmytvlegends.org.

Stamped with the mandate of “Capturing Television, One Voice at a Time”, the Archive offers hundreds of in-depth video interviews with the legends and pioneers of television – formatted for easy searches by person, show, topic or profession.

Some of these interviews are hours in length, as several generations of the industry explore television from its first days to its current transitions to other media platforms. From writers, actors and directors on the creative side, through the crews and technicians who contributed to and executed the vision to the network presidents and programmers who built and sustained the delivery system for all that creativity, the business of making television has never been so thoroughly examined.

Here you’ll be able to see Elma Farnsworth, widow of Philo Farnsworth, television’s inventor, describe the night her husband showed her the first images ever seen on a cathode ray tube and then sent a telegram to the backers reading: “Well, the damn thing works.”

You’ll listen to James Arness detail the rehearsal process of “Gunsmoke” as the production worked to transform the TV Western from a diversion for kids into an adult drama that would be a ratings leader for 20 years, the longest primetime run in US history.

There’s Walter Cronkite talking about the one and only commercial he did for Winston cigarettes.

Jay Sandrich recalling the 119 episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” that he directed.

Larry Gelbart repeats his favorite line from “M*A*S*H”, The one where Father Mulcahy describes doctors warming their hands over open wounds.

And all of this is mixed with clips and historical footage and anecdotes to die for. It’s the kind of emersion into what it really takes to make great television that no University or Film School can ever hope to provide. All for free and totalling more hours than you’ve probably already spent in front of a television set.

Before you enjoy the glamor and glitter of the Emmys, learn what it really took to get there.

And Enjoy your Sunday.

TIFF Protest Update

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:26:00 +0000

Since all the working journalists in this city seem to be up to their eyes at the Toronto International Film Festival covering where George Clooney was partying, who that woman with Colin Farrell was and if you could really see Jennifer Connolly’s nipples, the actual research into slightly more important show biz news has fallen to some of us “untrustworthy” scribes on the internet.

Last week, Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, writer Naomi Klein, director Ken Loach and stars like Jane Fonda and Danny Glover (among others) combined their industry profiles to condemn the celebration of films profiling Tel Aviv in this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

All the details you could want are located a short distance down this page.

Since that protest launched, most of the press coverage has been about who’s on which side. Kind of a Map of the Stars’ Social Issues and grasp of International Affairs, offering, at the same time, one more opportunity to announce who might be spotted shopping Bloor Street’s so-called “Mink Mile”.

“Ohmigawd, Megan Fox is wearing a Roots jacket! Does that mean she’s not “dumb as a rock” or does it prove it?”

As a result, what hasn’t been dug into is whether this is really a bunch of well-intentioned celebrities expressing their collective social conscience or an orchestrated campaign run by somebody with a different agenda.

Turns out, it’s the latter…

Late last week, the organizers of the protest issued a press release celebrating some of the new names that had been added to their list of supporters. It provided a phone number for journalists to contact for further information. It was the same press contact phone number that had been appended to John Greyson’s original “open letter” to the Festival withdrawing his film “Covered”.

If you call that number, you get a very friendly lady eager to answer all your questions except where her office is located. But if you Google the number, you discover it belongs to Palestine House, an education and community service organization for Palestinians partially funded by the Canadian government.

In the past year, the organization’s same contact phone number has appeared on press releases supporting Apartheid Week at the University of Toronto, organizing anti-Israel demonstrations in Ottawa and protesting the Royal Ontario Museum’s exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ancient Hebrew texts apparently “looted” from the Palestinian people).

So we’ve got a few interesting questions local journalists could be asking, like…

Why is the government funding an organization to attack arts events the government is also funding?

Is this protest against “the Israeli propaganda” machine really just an arm of the propaganda machine of The Palestinian Authority?

Are the artists involved aware of that connection or simply “useful idiots” in this whole affair?

Is anybody willing to get their head out of the bean dip and cleavage to practice any real journalism?

Or --- is the free bar and access past the velvet rope all that really matters this week….

Lazy Sunday # 84: Birds on the Wires

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:33:00 +0000

Where does inspiration come from?

Everywhere.

Enjoy your Sunday.

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

SWAGmania at TV, Eh? – Eh?

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 21:42:00 +0000

Despite the fact that she has already single-handedly established her blog as the Go-To site for information on Canadian Television, TV, Eh? creator/manager Diane Kristine Wild keeps coming up with new ways of encouraging, coercing and practically bribing people to watch Canadian shows.

And not just watch – now she’s looking for reviews, opinions and feedback. Y’know, that stuff us guys in the business need to hear so we can make what we make even better.

So, here’s your chance to tell the world what you think of a current Canadian show.

And there’s real live television SWAG awaiting those who want to kick in either:

140 characters on Twitter

1 Blog Post

or…

A donation to “The Actors Fund of Canada” – a charity that doesn’t just look after actors, but assists people from all parts of Canadian Show Business.

The details of Diane’s contest and the long lists of prizes are below. But I want to kick in a little to this endeavor of hers myself.

If you want to write a review and need more than Twitter allows but don’t have a blog, feel free to send it here in comment form and I’ll publish it for you. (Please be aware that some editing may occur if it looks like your opinions might get both of us sued).

AND

If you end up winning, I’ll match the donation Diane is making to the Actor’s Fund in your name and send you a hat or T-shirt from one of the Canadian series I’ve worked on.

So get involved and write something or donate something. The most important feedback we get doesn’t come from professional critics or others in the industry. It comes from our audience. You’re why we’re here. And we need to know what you think.

Here are the details from TV, Eh?:

To celebrate the new fall season, TV, eh? has 5 prize packages to give away to 5 Canadian television fans. Winners will be chosen from a random draw of all eligible entries in each of 3 categories. Tweet, blog, or donate to the Actors’ Fund of Canada to win:

1) Twitter Contest

Are you on Twitter? Tweet your 140 character review of a current Canadian show or tell us why you’re looking forward to an upcoming Canadian show. Important: use the hashtag #tveh

Twitter grand prize package includes:

Durham County Season 1 DVD set
Rick Mercer Report: The Book
CBC Vancouver News bag
The Movie Network t-shirt “I like to watch”
HBO Canada baseball cap
The Movie Network magnet frame
The Movie Network pen
$10 donation in your name to the Actors’ Fund of Canada, courtesy TV, eh?

Twitter 2nd prize package includes:

The Movie Network stainless steel water bottle “Always Riveting”
CBC Radio Orchestra pen
The Movie Network baseball cap
The Movie Network magnet frame

2) Blog Contest

Write a review of a current Canadian show or tell us why you’re looking forward to an upcoming Canadian show and:

a) post to your blog, then send the link to TV, eh?

or:

b) send the text of the review to TV, eh? (entries will be posted to this website)

Blog grand prize package includes:

Durham County Season 1 DVD set
CBC baseball cap
The Movie Network t-shirt
The Tudors book: “It’s Good To Be King”
HBO Canada CD/DVD holder
The Movie Network magnet frame
The Movie Network pen
$10 donation in your name to the Actors’ Fund of Canada, courtesy TV, eh?

Blog 2nd prize package includes:

The Movie Network stainless steel water bottle “Always Riveting”
CBC Radio Orchestra pen
The Movie Network baseball cap
The Movie Network magnet frame

3) Bonus Prize: Donate to the Actors’ Fund of Canada

Just make a donation to the Actors’ Fund of Canada and email TV, eh? with your name to be entered into the draw. Prize consists of:

TV, eh? baseball cap
Intelligence poster autographed by star Ian Tracey
CBC pin
The Movie Network frame magnet
The Movie Network pen

The fine print – for all categories:

One entry per person per day
Deadline: September 14, 2009
In doubt if a show is Canadian? Search this site for the title.
Privacy: TV, eh? will not share or use your email address for anything other than contacting you for your mailing address if you are a winner.

Not Among The Brightest Stars

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:54:00 +0000

“So where’s the Cannes Film Festival being held this year?”

---- Christina Aguilera

Movie people have a long history of championing social causes. Some have been less than laudable.

In one of the first successful feature films ever made, D.W. Griffith framed the Ku Klux Klan as the heroes. Leni Riefenstahl used her cinematic talents to burnish and sell the National Socialist agenda of Adolph Hitler. And now Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, writer/filmmaker Naomi Klein, British director Ken Loach and Hollywood stars Jane Fonda and Danny Glover (along with about 50 other artists) have combined their industry profiles to condemn the inclusion of Israeli films in the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival.

The basic tenet of their argument is that by celebrating films set or centred on the city of Tel Aviv, the Toronto Festival is “complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine”, supports an “apartheid regime” and thus becomes an unthinking foot soldier in the oppression of the Palestinian people.

Many might paint the artists taking this position as anti-Semites, self-loathing Jews or artists in favor of censorship, and those monikers may well apply to some who signed their names to a manifesto entitled “No Celebration of Occupation“ which can be found in its entirety here. But I think the truth is that wherever their motivation lies, most of them simply haven’t paused to consider what succeeding in their campaign really means.

Now, I’m about the last guy who’s ever going to untangle the problems of the Middle East. I’m not a Jew. I’m not Muslim. And to be honest, I figure boiling the Israeli-Palestinian issue down to a difference between religions is where any solution starts to get confused in the first place. As the Mayor of Dublin said during “The Troubles” in Belfast, “Ireland’s problem is there are a lot of Catholics and a lot of Protestants and not many people who understand what it means to be a real Christian”.

Arguing who was living where first or longest or why you shouldn’t have to negotiate with somebody who lobs missiles at your kids or blows up buses or ambulances or pizza parlors ends up being just about as pointless. And whichever side you choose to support, there’s a lot of what’s gone on that you might be able to justify or logically explain but you sure can’t be proud of owning.

“I find it a bid sad that there is no photo of me at the museum at Checkpoint Charlie."

--- David Hasselhoff

That said, by picking this particular target, these protesting artists have pretty much made it clear that they think it’s okay if the nations that side with them in their opposition to Israel deny other artists the same rights and privileges they expect for themselves.

John Greyson is a well-respected Canadian filmmaker, who sometimes makes movies exploring Gay themes. And while he could show those films in Israel, maybe even during the “Pride Week” that’s celebrated annually in Tel Aviv, he’d be taking his life in his hands doing the same thing in the Gaza Strip and virtually every other Middle Eastern country. In some of those places, even waving his rainbow flag could see him put in prison, raped and/or beaten to death.

You wonder if Mr. Greyson truly believes what he puts in his films or if it just gets him into a less populous funding stream or ensures his presence at every film festival afraid it may appear politically incorrect were it to exclude him. It would seem that enjoying his lifestyle and the freedom to espouse its values isn’t something he’d like to see available to Gay filmmakers in the countries who most enthusiastically support his anti-Isreal stance.

Jane Fonda’s movies and exercise tapes don’t get shown in Sudan, one of the countries which espouses the destruction of Israel. Forget tights and leg warmers, this week a female journalist there was sentenced to 40 lashes with a leather whip for wearing pants in public. An international outcry eventually had that sentence reduced to a fine. But several women who turned up to show their support for her were beaten by police for their trouble.

Jane didn’t say much about that. Nor have I heard her protest the fact that in many Arab countries men and women are not even allowed to be in theatres at the same time. Even if they’re married.

But that’s not really a surprise. For while she spoke out passionately against the Viet Nam war, Jane refused, despite several well-published opportunities to use her notoriety and perceived influence with the victorious South East Asian leaders, to say one word about the genocide that followed in Cambodia.

“Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that but not with all those flies and death and stuff.”
--- Mariah Carey

A similar kind of hypocrisy or moral relativism seems to reside in Naomi Klein, author of “The Shock Doctrine”.

A friend, who recently returned from working in Saudi Arabia, described he and his fellow office workers being herded into the street one day by a number of police carrying the canes they used to regularly dispense justice to those who contravene various local laws. A bound man was brought into the street and my friend thought he was about to witness another beating. But instead, the man was beheaded.

And while Ms. Klein decries that sort of thing when it’s done by Chilean dictators, George Bush or the fuckwads who work for Blackwater. Her voice seems to go silent when the same kind of “shock treatments” go on in the countries she is helping to demonize Israel. Maybe that has something to do with ensuring that her husband, Avi Lewis, stays employed at Al Jazeera, an Arabic news organization that has often shown beheadings --- including those of terrorist hostages --- to inform and educate their audience.

I don’t know how Danny Glover squares his participation in this protest. I heard one wag suggest he might’ve spent one too many “Lethal Weapon” sequels in the company of Mel Gibson.

But I wonder if Mr. Glover is aware that the “apartheid state” he opposes allows Arabs to vote or that there are elected Arab members in the Knesset, Arab judges in the Supreme Court and Arab professors in its universities. In fact, one of Tel Aviv’s most famous orchestras is almost equally comprised of Israelis and Palestinians. Does that sound like Apartheid to you?

Maybe he’s also unaware that American Congressman John Conyers, who founded the Congressional Black Caucus is on the Congressional record stating that applying the word apartheid to Israel belittles real racism and apartheid.

Maybe he doesn’t know that the slave trade still thrives in many Arab countries. And while some of the victims are those who share Mr. Glover’s race and ancestry, most are now impoverished women and children. In 2004, the head of Interpol’s Iran Bureau published a report claiming that the sex-slave trade there was one of the country’s most lucrative industries.

“I've never really wanted to go to Japan. Simply because I don’t like eating fish. And I know that's very popular out there in Africa.”
— Britney Spears

Perhaps the member of this group who most disappoints me is Ken Loach. Loach is quite simply a master filmmaker. A couple of his early works, “Poor Cow” and “Up the Junction” had a major influence on my work and my understanding of the power of cinema. More recent pieces like “Fatherland”, “Carla’s Song” “Raining Stones” and “The Wind That Shakes The Barley” have universally been recognized as monumental pieces of cinema.

He’s always been a filmmaker who wore his social conscience on his sleeve. But lately, it feels as if he’s lost the plot when it comes to determining where real injustice is most at home.

While (to the best of my knowledge) he never demanded that American films made during the Bush or Reagan eras not share the bill with his own at other film festivals, he’s begun to do just that with works from Israel. Last month, he pulled his most recent film, “Looking for Eric” from the Melbourne Film Festival over the same issue he’s espousing in Toronto.

Not as politically correct as Canadian Festival executives, the Australians were more than happy to tell Mr. Loach he was quite welcome to tuck his little movie up his air-tight Limey Starfish and stay home. As Melbourne Festival director Richard Moore correctly observed, “"to allow the personal politics of one film-maker to proscribe a festival… goes against the grain of what festivals stand for", adding that "Loach's demands were beyond the pale".

"Is this chicken what I have, or is this fish? I know it’s tuna but it says Chicken, by the Sea.”

-- Jessica Simpson

By their very nature, film festivals program works that are controversial and ground-breaking. They are a forum where filmmakers censored, marginalized or misunderstood in their own countries can find an audience. They are places where ideas are exchanged, debated and shared. They are not places where the film lovers who choose what is to be screened should be pilloried by artists with their own ideological axe to grind.

Within the next few days, the Toronto Film Festival will screen Lars von Trier’s “Antichrist”, a film which will send Rosedale matrons screaming from the theatre and make grown men retch in the aisles, every single one of them scarred for life. There will probably be one or two other films that will offend somebody’s sensibilities, shatter their illusions or insult their core beliefs. Sometimes good films do that. Sometimes films we don’t like do it too.

But nobody (least of all artists who enjoy such freedom) has the right to say who can make those movies or who should see them. But that’s what happens in Iran and Saudi Arabia and Syria and other countries who have also called Israel an Apartheid or Racist state.

Like the man says, “You can’t fix, stupid!” And it’s almost as tough to combat what’s fashionable or universally agreed as a priority within an ideology. But that doesn’t make it right or acceptable or anything else but beneath contempt.

If only some of those clear-eyed and committed Canadian filmmakers behind this protest were half as concerned with not screening films that were boring…

“If, from the many truths, you pick one and follow it blindly, It will become a falsehood, and you – a fanatic.”

Lazy Sunday # 83: Teddy Bear

noreply@blogger.com (jimhenshaw) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 14:05:00 +0000

One of the Country DJ’s I listen to recently had a contest to find the song “Guaranteed” to being a tear to your eye. Like everybody who listens to Country music, he’d heard his share of Hurtin’ songs. The genre is simply chock full of lost loves, lost dreams and lost dogs.

Every Cowboy roadhouse has a string of selections on the jukebox you hesitate to play because it might strike the wrong chord in the quiet loner sitting on the stool at the far end of the bar. Many a Wurlitzer has been trucked to the dump riddled with bullet holes to be buried not far from the fool who plugged in its last quarter and pushed B-29.

But this guy wanted to know which song consistently pushed your own buttons. The one that never made you holler “Oh, get over it!” or “Move on”. The song where you knew what was coming and you still kept listening and took it, aware you were gonna need a hanky before it was done.

The song that won had everything to do with broken hearts and broken dreams. But mostly it was about truckers.

I’m not sure when truckers first became an accepted touchstone of all that is America. But for me, that seed was sown when I first saw the movie version of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”. Early on, in the famous “Diner” scene, the kindness of a couple of truckers melts the heart of a waitress who’s seen too much, reminding us that even the darkness of the Great Depression can’t snuff out basic human decency.

Hollywood, which always knows an emotional winner when it sees one, picked up that theme and ran with it. From “They Drive By Night” through “The Wages of Fear” to “Convoy”, “White Line Fever” and even “Smokey and the Bandit”, there’s always a trucker who instinctively knows what’s right, what’s true and what’s bullshit.

In my own experience, I’ve had two nights in truck stops where a lounge full of drivers told me what shows were going to work and which would fail.

The first occurred on a snowy night in Colorado when Fox debuted hockey. Some of the guys I convinced to watch that game knew a little about hockey. None were fans. But the sight of Fox’s animated blue streak to help viewers follow the puck elicited a simple “The fuck was that?” followed by laughter, followed by my realization hockey might wait a while longer before it caught the attention of Americans.

A couple of summers ago, I traded a six pack for an hour of TV time in Wawa, Ontario to watch the debut of “Flashpoint”. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of the show, a few minutes in, a couple of the guys commented on the impressive array of weaponry and the cast’s obvious skill in handling them. That attention to detail always let’s you know an audience is also picking up the rest of what’s going on. And I have the feeling if the series’ handlers had given themselves over to a little more “gun porn”, CBS wouldn’t be debating its renewal.

Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear” debuted in 1976 at the height of the CB radio craze, one of those apparently recurring moments when trucker culture seems to fill a void within our own. It topped the charts within a month of its release, crossed over to the pop charts and stuck around forever.

And that’s odd, because “Teddy Bear” isn’t really a song. It’s just talking with an instrumental backing. The theme is hackneyed and somewhat trite. And once you’ve heard it once – well, you know the story.

In fact, in the first 90 seconds, the piece clearly telegraphs every single button it’s going to push. Like a bad script with a story editor’s red penciled “On the Nose. On the Nose. On the Nose” scrawled all over it, you know exactly what’s coming.

But that doesn’t matter.

Because then “Teddy Bear” twists. And then it twists again. And no matter how often you’ve heard it and maybe because you’re listening for when those emotional turns actually occur, all of a sudden the road ahead is getting a little harder to see and you’re reaching for the Kleenex box on the dash.

Yep. That country DJ was right. Despite all that’s hokey and stupid about it. “Teddy Bear” delivers and in the process makes you wonder if all those people who vet stories for art and relevance and importance have even the first clue about the reactions of the people that work is supposed to reach.

So, grab a tissue, shed a tear and then…

Enjoy your Sunday.