Oh crap, another blog.

“Welcome to my blog.” I must have written at least half a dozen versions of this post before, but here we go again.

I built my first website in 1995. It was my “official” website (to distinguish from all the other Japhy Grant’s) and to put things in context, it was listed in the top 100 websites on the Internet by Mozilla (go ask your I.T. guy). Of course, there were probably only 102 websites on the Internet at that point.

Since then, I have blogged and created content for the web with varying frequency. After 9/11, I spent hours in the campus library sharing my reactions, thoughts and news about the new world we lived in through a blog I called “The Modern Romantic.” After moving to Hollywood to pursue a career in filmmaking and TV writing, I got caught up in writing for local gay magazines like IN Los Angeles and Frontiers. In time, I became Frontiers‘ Arts & Entertainment Editor and found myself writing for The Advocate, Out, Salon, True/ Slant and the New York Observer. My internet habit had become a career.

Two days after the 2008 election, I took over as editor of Queerty, then the web’s largest LGBT website. With Obama taking over the White House and Prop 8 passing in California, there was plenty to write about and I was waking up at 5 a.m. every day to pump out 4 major articles as well as 20-30 short blogs on any bit of news that I thought would interest Queerty’s readership. It was A LOT of fun. My mandate was to bring some level of original journalism to the “link to articles” world of blogging and along the way, I managed to tick off everyone in the gay community in one way or another. My new gig also started just as the economy was collapsing and it wasn’t a huge shock to find out that Queerty’s mother company was collateral damage. Six months after starting, I was out at Queerty and left with a choice: Do I stay in journalism or focus on what I came out to L.A. to do: Create entertainment?

I figured if I was going to choose between two dying industries, I might as well choose the one I loved, so I hung up my journalist hat and started taking jobs (any job) in Hollywood’s nascent web series industry. Internships became full-time positions and with an insider’s view of how the whole “Internet entertainment” game was shaping up, I produced my own web series and won a cool competition by Intel to “create the next big idea in digital entertainment.”

I now get to take many of these ideas and bring them to life through Fishbowl Worldwide Media. In January, we launched Petsami, a digital entertainment network for pet lovers and we have a few secret projects up our sleeves as well.

The thing is, while there are approximately 24 billion blogs on “social media strategy” on the Internet, there’s very few dedicated to using social and digital tools to tell stories. So, I says to myself, “Self, why not start a blog…again?”

Which brings us full circle. I am aiming for a post a week to begin with and will build up as needed. I’ve also gone ahead and taken as many of my previous blogs and integrated them into the new site. This is, after all, the “official” Japhy Grant site and while I mentally made a distinct break between my time as a journalist and my curent career as a digital entertainment producer, the truth is that both roles have informed and strengthened the other.

I love telling stories, be they true or made-up, digital or old-school and I like sharing my ideas and process with anyone who’s interested. That’s the idea behind The Format. I’ll give some professional insights on what makes a great web series, talk about how the medium of the web changes the kinds of stories that are told on it and also ask questions and give tips that you may or may not agree with. Other than this post, I don’t expect it to get terribly personal and while I may write about politics again someday, it won’t be here.

Hopefully, this will be a fun ongoing adventure into the future of digital entertainment and social storytelling that you and I can take together.

Got a question? Ask in the comments.

That, three films in, nobody seems to have figured out the basic concept behind the Transformers franchise must really piss Michael Bay off — and it shows in every frame of the latest installment Transformers: Dark of the Moon. This isn’t a film you watch; it’s an experience that happens to you, like being in a car wreck, only instead of deploying airbags, these cars talk and are from outer space. It is an all-out assault on Mid-Western America in both literal (Chicago gets creamed) and figurative terms, but it’s also a relentless assault on the audience.

Watching Transformers: Dark of the Moon will activate your latent Cro-Magnon lizard brain and liquefy it into motor oil. It’s the kind of the thing they force detainees at Guantanamo to watch as part of their interrogation techniques. Like Moloch slouching towards Bethlehem, it’s a movie that presages the end of days, if not for human kind, then at the very least for cinema. And yes, it’s a fucking masterpiece.

What critics and audiences keep missing is that Michael Bay is making a movie that is a Transformer. It’s the perfect artistic response to the imperative to direct a movie about robots from outer space that turn into cars. One minute you are watching a secret history political thriller, the next a teen romance. One minute you’re watching a pro-America war film with slow-mo flags waving in every shot, the next a Dr. Strangelove-esque farce starring Frances McDormand and John Turturro (who, like Strangelove, rides around in a wheelchair shouting at everyone about imminent catastrophe).

In Dark of the Moon there are explosions, John Malkovich, cars, robots that are cars, gay ex-Nazi’s, explosions, fat Americans, Chernobyl, explosions, racism, robo-racism, explosions, a Leonard Nimoy-bot that quotes Spock, Barack Obama, Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, the real Buzz Aldrin, perfect buttocks and more explosions. It is every kind of film you have ever seen and it is all those films all at once.

It’s a little bit like those “Will it Blend?” videos for the Blend-Tec blender, with Bay tossing the detritus of late stage capitalism into a giant mechanized cyclone, pulverizing our collective subconscious and splattering it on the screen in glorious (and impressively executed) 3-D for all of us to see. It is a Rorschach Test of our culture, which is why critics universally hate it. If it were playing on the walls of the Gagosian, it would be a sensation. That it plays on the multiplexes and that it takes for its subject matter hot babes, fast cars and explosions means that it will not and can not be loved the cultural elites.

Don’t listen to them, however. Dark of the Moon is art and often brilliant art. It is pop art, but more Lichtenstein than Warhol. There’s a moment where hot babe Rosie Huntington-Whitely stares out at the audience like a Playboy model in the midst of a decimated Chicago street while behind her robots tackle each other, jet fighters attack alien ships and explosions ricochet around her in slow motion that outdoes anything David LaChapelle has ever attempted. The robots are mechanized Pollack animations devouring up reality. If you stripped out all the special effects and performed Dark of the Moon on Broadway on a bare stage, you’d compare it to the absurdist plays of Ionesco and Brecht.

It is also something rare in Hollywood blockbusters — it’s a singular vision. Michael Bay has created the apotheosis of summer movies and while other films will be made from here on out that use CGI, explosions and vacuous speeches about good vs. evil, they’ll be pale copies of this, Bay’s very own Last Supper. It is simultaneously the Platonic ideal of what Hollywood thinks drives audiences to theaters as well a critique of the absurdity of these films, with their empty moral platitudes, jingoistic nonsense (there’s a great film school thesis paper on whether this film is pro-American or anti-American waiting to be written) and reliance on spectacle over storytelling.

It’s also a lot of fun, assuming you’re in on the joke. Transformers: Dark of the Moon is a film everyone should go see, though once you see it, you will never want to watch it again.

4 months without a post.  As you may know, I’ve been working on a web series called FOODIES. Check it out.

Still no excuse to leave the blog languishing.  Expect a whole new start at the beginning of May. Honestly, I’ve been thinking about how to best use this site, while still pursuing all the other writing related junk I do on a daily basis and I think I’ve come up with a plan that doesn’t require outsourcing my brain to a foreign country and/or set up a blogging sweatshop (*cough* Denton *cough*).

Until then, because why the hell not, I decided to do a tumblr. It’s called WeSayYouIs.  Check it out.

This is the time of the year when fake journalists, busy with a hectic schedule of office parties and finding excuses to drink all the free booze publicists send them, phone in their copy even more than usual.

And if there’s one way to fill up a page without trying, it’s the Top 10 list.

Anytime you tell the reader what’s cool & what’s not, you’re in the win zone, but the Top 10 List is in a class of its own. Look at any Top 10 list, movies, music, books, whatever– and you’ll see the exact same formula:

• 33% generally accepted critical successes
• 33% iconoclastic ‘outside the box’ choices designed to make you comment or respond.
• 33% things the fake journalist genuinely liked and/or has a good relationship with that person’s publicist.

This year, my first as a recovering fake journalist, I got to thinking about Top 10′s and how meaningless they are as forms of criticism (right up there with assigning letter grades to movies) and realized that the only Top 10 list I’d be interested in reading, would be a personal one.

That is, what’s YOUR Top 10 for 2010? What are the 10 things you’re going to put in your personal highlight reel for the year?

Mine are below. If you get a minute, I’d love to hear yours.

My Personal Top 10 of 2010:

1. All the amazingly hard-working and talented people who have come into my life via FOODIES and he knowledge that “This is the team.”
2. After a few years of being a hermit, going out, meeting new people and then hurling dodgeballs at their face.
3. Kanye West, who always seems to know what to say and when to say it.
4. Big Bear with Jeff, Craig, Dan and Brian.
5. Learning a new meaning of gratitude through my friends who have helped me so much this year. I wouldn’t be on my fet without them.
6. My parents finally visiting me in L.A. and having In n’ Out & Pinot Noir for dinner on my couch watching Obama crack jokes at the press dinner.
7. Death Valley in a Mustang convertible.
8. Deciding to go after what I want and not what I think the rest of the world thinks I should want.
9. Not putting up with anyone’s shit, especially my own.
10. Los Angeles, which asks nothing of you other than to stop sinking into the ocean (not gonna happen!) on film.

And because old habits die hard, here’s my favorite albums of the year, in no particular order:

My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy – Kanye West
The ArchAndroid – Janelle Monae
Friday Night Lights – J.Cole
High Violet – The National
Tron : Original Motion Picture Soundtrack – Daft Punk
The Lady Killer – Cee-Lo Green
So Runs the World Away – Josh Ritter
The Age of Adz – Sufjan Stevens
Lose Your Sleep – Natalie Merchant

So, what’s your Top 10 of 2010?

UPDATED: Do you know a gay or lesbian person? Then this post is for you. And considering that 1 in 10 people are gay, that means this post is for everybody.

You might have noticed that your gay friends have been a little depressed of late. Or maybe they’re outraged. Or, if they’re one of the many people out there questioning their sexuality or afraid to disclose it, they might just be plain terrified. Maybe you know why, but if you don’t, let me explain — and tell you what you can do.

The last few weeks have been pretty horrible for LGBT Americans. You may have heard that the Senate refused to even bring up a debate on getting rid of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the decades old policy that has discharged more than 13,000 soldiers from the service because they’re gay. But that’s the least of it.

In the last three weeks, four five young students have killed themselves because they were bullied for being gay. Two of the kids, Seth Walsh and Asher Brown, were 13. Billy Lucas, who hung himself, was 15. Freshman Rutgers student Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge after two fellow students secretly took video of him kissing another guy and posted it online.

UPDATE: A few hours after this story was posted came news of a 5th suicide; 19-year old openly gay Johnson & Wales student Raymond Chase, who reportedly hung himself in his dorm.

Add to that the story of Michigan’s Assistant Attorney General Andrew Shirvell, who started a blog attacking the University of Michigan’s openly gay Student President for being gay and who posted photos of the student with nazi swastikas on his face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwObjKZg9Jw

Add to that a twitter from raptard 50-Cent saying that anyone who “don’t eat pu**y” should “just kill your self damn it. The world will be a better place. Lol.”

It’s a lot to hate to handle all at once. Stranger columnist Dan Savage has started a grassroots program called “It Gets Better“, encouraging adults to post videos telling at risk gay teens that no matter how awful things might seem in high school, there’s a light at the end. Ellen has gone on TV bringing awareness to these deaths.

Let me take a minute to explain why this is so upsetting to so many of us, because I think if you’re not gay or lesbian, you might not get it. It’s not because you’re a bad person or ignorant, but there are some things you can only learn by living and being a gay teen is one of them.

For the vast majority of the LGBT community, growing up gay is a scary thing. As you start to discover your sexuality, you quickly discover that your feelings are different than everyone else’s. Remember how bewildering and confusing puberty was for you? Well, multiply that times a million for gay teens.

Toss in the the fear (real or not) that your family and friends will hate you if they discover who you “really are” and a society which comfortably tosses around phrases like “Don’t be a fag” or “That’s so gay” and even the most self-confident kid is going to wind up feeling lost at times.

Which explains why LGBT teens are 2 to 3 times more likely to kill themselves each year than their straight peers. In raw numbers, that means 150,000 gay teens will try to kill themselves this year and 1,500 will succeed. That’s about four kids a day. Suicide is a rising epidemic among teens regardless of sexuality, but for LGBT teens it’s a crisis.

And chances are most of you are horrified by these statistics. Most people aren’t bigots and don’t want to see teenagers, regardless of their sexuality, killing themselves. But what can you do?

It’s pretty simple actually: You have to speak up. If you’re upset over the four gay teens who have committed suicide in the last three weeks, speak up! Your silence is killing us.

The truth is there are and always will be more straight people than gay people. If straight people don’t speak up and defend gay and lesbian Americans, things will never get better, no matter how hard the LGBT community tries. We’re doing as much as we can to provide resources to at-risk LGBT teenagers, but until it becomes socially unacceptable to hate on gays and lesbians in this country, it’s an uphill battle. That is to say, we can’t do it without your help.

We need you to speak up when someone calls someone else a ‘Fag’ or calls something uncool ‘Gay’. You need to speak up even when there are no gay people around. In fact, especially when there are no gay people around. And if you’re still saying those kind of things, stop it. It’s not funny.

Post stories about gay rights and gay teens to Facebook. Be public in your support for equality. It’s a little thing, but there’s a chance you will reach someone’s mind and heart. If it’s no longer acceptable to hate on gays and lesbians, they’ll be a lot less gay teens hurting themselves. You could start by sharing this story with your friends, for instance.

If you work with or are around teenagers, don’t turn a blind eye when you see bullying. Too often bullying is dismissed as ‘kids just being kids’, but one of the values we need to instill in teens (and ourselves for that matter) is kindness.

If you’re friends with gay and lesbian people, try not to treat us like stereotypes. Ladies, not all gay men live to go shopping with you. Guys, most lesbians have no desire to make out in front of you. That’s why they’re lesbians. And please don’t ask which one of us is the boy and which is the girl. The more you treat us like actual people and not fabulous bedazzled pets, the happier we’ll all be.

If you’re liberal-minded or believe in personal freedom and are looking for a cause to get behind, you can’t do much better than pitching in for LGBT equality. Our not-so-secret agenda is to make America a safe place for gay people to live their lives openly, with the same opportunities and freedoms you enjoy.

Seriously, our radical dream is that we’ll be able to get legally married, have kids and have the chance to die for our country. The people fighting this are creepy old white men, douchebag hip-hop stars and Catholic priests. What more do you need?

We’re the good guys and we want you to join our team. All you have to do is speak up. We can’t do it alone.

*Awesome comics from Slap Upside the Head.

1. San Francisco-based studio Soviet Montage has cracked HDR for video. What’s HDR? High Dynamic Range images are created by taking two (or more) shots at different exposures and combing them together, creating truer to life images in the process. It’s all the rage among photographers (there’s even a feature on the new iPhone), but using a beam splitter and two Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR’s, Soviet Montage was able to bring the effect to life. Why do you care? Because the results look like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlcLW2nrHaM

2. Billed as “the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture”, The National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. is set to open Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture Oct. 29. Featuring works by Andy Warhol, Robert Maplethorpe and Thomas Eakins, it’s a rare example of a major museum show focused on gay identity and artists and a first for a national museum. Expect it to be horribly transformed into a conservative talking point in 3… 2…

3. Proof that web video isn’t all yuk-yuk comedy skits? Try Spike Jonze’s short film, I’m Here. Presented by Absolut Vodka, the short film is a love story between two robots. One of the neatest touches: When you arrive at the site, you’re presented with a video stream of a cinema marquee that changes depending what time you visit. The movie is pretty clever as well.

4. Tired of rampant Islamophobia? With an ABC News poll showing that 49% of Americans hold unfavorable views of Muslims, despite Islam being a religion practiced peacefully by more than a billion people, the best antidote to rampant ignorance is knowledge. National Geographic’s documentary, Inside Mecca is a fascinating look at the Hajj, the required pilgrimage to the holy city of Mohammed (and for my money, one of the most beautiful and moving expressions of faith found in any religion). The documentary follows an American woman who converted to Islam as she goes travels along with her fellow pilgrims from all corners and stations of the planet. Watch it here:

5. It’s official: Downtown Los Angeles, with hotspots like Church & State and Rivera is now A Place to Eat, according to the New York Times. Of course, the paper throws in Wolfgang Puck’s WP24, continuing the long-running assumption that there’s a Puck restaurant on every corner in L.A. Left out: Chaya, Drago Centro and the anchor od downtown haute dining, Water Grill. Still, plenty of pretty food porn photos to stare at.

One of the things that has interested me since the early days after 9/11 is how the event would effect our national psyche; not in the obvious heightened security, fear of terror, flag-waving and nowadays, threatened Koran-burning. These are all obvious and conscious reactions. What interests me is the way the attacks have altered the national subconscious. In short, I’ve been looking for the 9/11 Godzilla.

Now, we all know Godzilla, the beloved 90 foot tall radioactive lizard of enjoyably bad Japanese B-films and less enjoyable (but still bad) Matthew Broderick movies. And while J.J. Abrams tried to bring the giant killing monster-genre to New York City in Cloverfield, the American fascination with giant radioactive monsters is there mostly because it’s goofy and another example of the alterna-West that is Japanese culture.

For the Japanese however, Godzilla, Mothra and their ilk resonant on a deeper level. Giant radioactive monsters who level cities flat are unsubtle psychic demons conjured by the U.S. nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I wouldn’t argue that contemporary Japanese culture is purely a response to the bomb, but like the cargo cults of tropical islands who come to worship washed up cans of soda or downed planes as gods, the bomb, in all its terrifying devastation has become fetishized and ritualized in Japanese culture.

The obsession with emulating Western styles, the apocalyptic religiosity of Akira, even the a-bomb like explosions of Pikachu are all atomic residue of the devastating nuclear attacks that ended World War II.

Which brings us to America and the identity-shaking power of 9/11. As the event recedes into the distance, how have we begun to mythologize and fetishize the horrors of that terrible day? No nation on Earth is as reliant on its own national mythology to unify its citizens, which may explain why we’re the global home of the storytelling industry. So, what’s our 9/11 myth? Not the story of the day, but rather, like Godzilla, the mythologized subconscious version of it.

I recently reread Tom Junod’s brilliantly written Esquire feature, “The Falling Man” about the search for the identity of the man captured in Richard Drew’s iconic photograph of one of the “jumpers” who threw themselves out of the towers. Junod points out how quickly the U.S. media collectively decided to self-censor the images of people jumping from the towers and how quickly the people of the U.S. decided to wash the image from its collective memory. Junond writes,

“More and more, the jumpers — and their images — were relegated to the Internet underbelly, where they became the provenance of the shock sites that also traffic in the autopsy photos of Nicole Brown Simpson and the videotape of Daniel Pearl’s execution, and where it is impossible to look at them without attendant feelings of shame and guilt.

In a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers’ experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten.”

But like any trauma repressed, the disturbing image of those people so desperate for air or escape from the hell they found themselves in that they dove into oblivion has found its way to the surface. Nearly ten years after 9/11, we’re awash in the one image of 9/11 we tried so hard to repress.

The opening credit sequence of Mad Men may be the most obvious (though least commented upon) example. In it, a black silhouette of an office worker tumbles out of a skyscraper amid scraps of iconic ads representing American consumerism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcRr-Fb5xQo

Rewatching the credits with 9/11 in mind can be a profoundly disturbing experience, but it also clues us into the wider themes of the show: The downfall of the American man. Details may have anointed Jon Hamm “the last American alpha-male” this month, but if Mad Men is meant to reflect today and not simply be a time-period capsule for mid-century modernist design connoisseurs, then it’s telling us that the American alpha male is already dead — he leaped from the towers nine years ago.

It’s this specific image, the idea that the mortgage brokers and financial whiz’s of Cantor Fitzgerald and Goldman Sachs, the very types of people with mythologize as the pinnacle of success in capitalist America, took their lives by leaping from the towers that has sunk into our consciousness.

The alpha-male is our Godzilla, a doomed monster, terrible and pitiable at once. He shows up in Big Love, another show that’s credit sequence features bodies falling through space and this summer’s Inception, which spends the last third of the movie focused on a sequence of a group of corporate mind-raiders falling from a bridge in slow-motion.

The Falling Man is our new national Everyman. His fall is literal and metaphoric. His failures as human being extend beyond the professional to the personal and he’s not offered catharsis. Don Draper, Dom Cobb, Bill Hendrickson and their ilk aren’t offered redemption; just a long slow-motion free fall towards oblivion. And unlike the 60s, where a counterculture developed that rejected the old order in favor of a new, utopian ideal, the 21st century Falling Man is someone who we can’t seem to shake.

Perhaps what’s most interesting is that in fiction, The Falling Man is universally a white profesional, while the real victims of 9/11 were a diverse array of ethnicities and beliefs. The man featured in Richard Drew’s photograph is Latino and as the New York Times recently pointed out that the World Trade Center itself had a Muslim prayer room — and nobody said two words about it after the ’93 bombing. There’s something ugly about the whitewashing of reality in the creation of this new myth — whether it appears in Matt Weiner’s show or in the paranoid rantings of Glenn Beck. While the fall of affluent straight white male dominance in our culture might be a tragedy for, well, affluent straight white men, for the rest of us (and increasingly, ‘the rest of us’ is most of us), it seems more like a coming down to Earth.

The lesson for the myth makers here is to be skeptical and pragmatic; pulling on the threads of the nation’s psyche can have the effect of unravelling the tapestry.

The very image we rejected in the early days after 9/11 has us now transfixed. He’s come to represent our fears that old institutions no longer hold, that the success he embodied is not just fleeting, but illusory. His suspension in mid-air, plummeting towards an unknown destiny is the unspoken foundation of every political debate in this country. His power is so strong that we can only address him at right angles, metaphorically on premium cable. He’s our unspoken national secret we can’t shake, because we know that even now, nine years later, he is more than ever, our new reality.

One is about oversexed vampires, the other — oversexed mid-century office workers. Both are up for the Outstanding Drama Series Emmy this weekend. While on the surface the Southern Gothic goofiness of True Blood seems to have nothing in common with the Dostoevskian coolness of Mad Men, look under the hood and they’re the exact same show. Here’s how:

Both are “sequels” to seminal cable TV dramas.

Part of the fun of Mad Men and True Blood is seeing how they differ from the series that their creators worked on last. For Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner, that means his stint as a writer on The Sopranos. For Alan Ball, it’s Six Feet Under. Ironically, Weiner and Ball have switched places a bit. Where Six Feet Under was a leisurely and understated (drug-induced dream sequences excepted) developing essay on American life, True Blood is well, as bloody as The Sopranos, if not more so.

They’re both shows ‘about America.’

A lot of people I know who were fans of Six Feet Under hate True Blood. Their argument usually boils down to a feeling that Alan Ball is slumming it in the bayou, what with the profusion of vamps, werewolves, zombies, shifters and fairies. Yet, I think Ball is being totally authentic. Six Feet Under was ultimately a show about Los Angeles: What it means to live in a sort of post-post-modern vaguely apocalyptic world of cobbled together extended families.

True Blood is ultimately about the South and the supernatural elements are crucial to the storytelling. Whether it’s B’rer Rabbit or Tennessee Williams, the exaggerated and the supernatural are at the heart of all good Southern tales. It lets you get away with things you would never be able to otherwise.

How else could Ball get away with a scene from this season where Tara, the perpetually fucked-over black bartender, found herself running furiously away from a plantation manner in a 19th-century dressing gown pursued by wolves? In any other show, the overt slave imagery would boil over. Too familiar, too cliche, too tatseless, but somehow, because the owners of the home are gay vampire lovers and the wolves pursuing Tara are werewolves, the scene seems fresh. Over the top, but fresh.

Mad Men, of course, proves the old adage that all histories reveal more about the era they’re written in than the era they’re written about. In its retelling of the 60s, Mad Men eschews hippies and hope for the quiet disappointments of fractured identity and family. Oh sure, the furniture is meticulously researched, but you know, it’s about us, right now.

They’re both soap operas.

That’s the dirty secret about Mad Men and True Blood– they’re our generation’s Dynasty. Yeah, it’s a golden age for television, but despite the high-art pretensions of Mad Men and True Blood (okay, maybe just Mad Men), both shows turn on melodrama.

In fact, it’s amazing more people haven’t noted the similarity between Mad Men and the weepy 50s women’s melodramas that clearly inspired it. The only real difference is that the heroine of Mad Men is Don Draper. Like Mildred Pierce, he came from nothing, compromised himself to make a name for himself and is rewarded for his sacrifices with nothing but scorn and animosity from those he loves. Why do you think everyone in the show is always commenting on Don’s virility? It’s to mask the fact that he’s more Joan Crawford than Carry Grant– and it’s what keeps the show so entertaining.

Though until it starts throwing in some naked vampire threeways, both shows will have to share space in my heart as my favorite show.

TIME Announces New Version Of Magazine Aimed At Adults

Exactly. (From The Onion)

So, if you haven’t seen this John August approved short video, called “The Pitch”, check it out– it’s hilarious. It’s also wrong-headed. Here’s why I’d jump at the chance to write ‘Slinky: The Movie”. (Hint: It’s not just the money.)

First off, this stuff really does happen. I have a screenwriter/director friend. Very indie and auteur oriented tell me about how he was offered to write a live action version of Clifford the Big Red Dog and he told me the story with the same disdain and exasperation you see in “The Pitch.”

Now, maybe it’s because I’ve only ever optioned one pilot in my life and would like a career, but I’d jump at a chance to write Clifford, or for that matter, Slinky. As the nice development executive pointed out, Pixar made a bundle (as well as their reputation) off of a Toy Story. They also managed to make an incredibly poignant tale on the values we place on ourselves and our things in a consumerist society.

I don’t get this preciousness over not aligning your work with large, lovable consumer properties. Are you telling me that screenwriters, that is people who make the choice to work in a medium that is not only hugely expensive, but also requires an audience to be successful, are worried about being branded as “sell out’s”?

If you make a movie that’s hugely successful, drives people to go see it again and again and buy toys and Happy Meals based on your movie, you are not a sell out. You’re successful. The whole point of film and TV is that it’s mass media– it’s whole goal is to reach as broad an audience as possible.

So, what is selling out? My feeling is that it’s when you’re no longer writing or creating work which engages you. Selling out is working for a paycheck, not for the passion. Now, this might be the way I’m wired, but to me, writing a film about a Slinky sounds like a fun challenge, as challenging as writing about 16th century Parisian politics or dramatizing the scientific challenges of bringing a crippled spacecraft back to Earth.

If you don’t like Slinky’s, fine. But realize the issue is your snobbery, not an affront to your goddam artistic credibility. I was once asked to write a treatment for a film about Teddy Bears. The brief was, “The Teddy Bear needs to have five outfits that we can sell.”

Yes, this is the sort of cynical B.S. that Hollywood runs on, but I put together a story of the ‘original’ Teddy Bear. Inspired by Theodore Roosevelt, this turn of the century bear goes from a posh pampered life to the edge of the frontier, meets kokepelli in Arizona, escapes an industrial mill, etc… It wasn’t genius (and the treatment went nowhere), but it was a fun and rousing challenge.

Isn’t that the whole challenge of filmmaking– to create something that is both popular and good? I mean, think of what Todd Solondz could do with that Slinky.