Dream Log: Beautiful, Unsuccessful Hollywood Actress

I dreamed I was an actor in Hollywood. I was the same age and appearance as in real life, and just as poor, and I was writing this blog same as in real life, but I was living in Hollywood and auditioning. I knew many actors and actresses who were much more successful than I. 

 

It was afternoon, and Ryan Gosling and I and several other actors were hanging out at some tables on a sidewalk. Ryan was wearing a tuxedo. I was wearing a cheap suit. It was uncomfortable and I was self-conscious, worried that others could see how cheap it was. 

George Clooney showed up, also wearing a tuxedo. He asked me what I had been doing lately. I started to talk about the blog, and the conversation died. It didn't seem to me that George was being rude. Rather, it was extremely difficult for him to sustain an interest in something which, from his point of view, had so little to do with movies.

It became evening, and we went inside the theatre outside of which the tables had been the entire time. I felt miserable, and was at the free bar, searching for something with alcohol in it among the soft drinks and snacks, when a very beautiful actress approached me, wearing a man's-style white shirt, black skirt and black stockings. We had known each other for a long time, but had lost touch.

I don't know whether she was someone who exists in real life. She was a little under medium height, had green eyes and straight chestnut-brown down to her shoulders, was a little over 40 years old and looked essentially the same as she had when she was under 20. I was confused about why she wanted to talk to me. After a little while she said she had to go, but that she wanted to hang out with me some more, and, the way she touched my arm and looked into my eyes when she said it, it seemed like she meant it. 

Eventually I gave up my search for booze, concluding that this must be a health-conscious event. Many actors and actresses are extremely meticulous in choosing healthy refreshments. The incidence of veganism is very high in Hollywood. This is one of the reasons why some actors and actresses look very much the same over age 40 as they did under age 20.

Across the room I saw the beautiful actress talking with a man wearing a tuxedo. From their body language, he looked to me like a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend. 

I had conversations with several people similar to the one I'd had with George Clooney: they asked what I'd been up to, I answered honestly, describing the blog, they found it impossible to feign interest. 

Then I heard the voice of the seeming boyfriend over the PA. Somehow, although I hadn't heard his voice before, I knew it was the same guy. And now it was clear that he was her boss, because he was telling her to put on an apron and bus the area. And apparently the reason I hadn't heard anything about her recently, was that her acting career had not been going especially well. Earlier, she had easily supported herself by acting.

She went behind a curtain to the service area to get an apron. I took off my suit jacket and followed. Even though I really hate food service work, I was going to put on an apron and tell her I wanted to help her bus the area. But before I got there I woke up.

Dream Log: Hollywood Freeze-Out Over Papyri Scandal

In real life, there is a major scandal in the world of papyrology: Dirk Obbink,

formerly the head of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project, which is far and away the world's largest collection of ancient papyri, is accused of having stolen some of the Project's papyri and having sold them to the Green Collection, a Christian non-profit organization which runs a museum dedicated to the Bible.

This is really horrible. I hope Obbink proves to be innocent. Stealing and selling ancient artifacts in his care is just about the worst thing a papyrologist can be imagined to have done. Criminal charges have not yet been brought against Obbink, but -- well, it looks really bad. The only possibilities I can imagine are either that Obbink is guilty, or that he has been very skillfully framed. His claim is that he's being framed. We'll see.

I dreamed last night that there was a suspected link between Hollywood and the Obbink scandal. In real life, I am aware of no such suspicion. In my dream, I was selected to serve as a liason between papyrologists and Hollywood during this difficult time, presumably because I know a few words of Latin and have acted in some plays at the community-theatre level and lower.

I dreamed that I was at a Hollywood fundraiser, in order to reach out and establish trust with some Hollywood big-shots, and that my mission wasn't going well. People in Hollywood were very nervous about the scandal, nobody knew me, and nobody trusted me. Antonio Banderas was staying right at my elbow. Apparently he had been given the assignment of keeping an eye on me. His hair was shoulder-length, he was wearing a tuxedo with a white jacket, and he was not overflowing with affection toward me: not smiling, not talking more than he had to, just staying close, as if he were guarding me in a basketball game.

Then all of a sudden he noticed a counter where they were giving out... well, it seemed to be some sort of confection which doesn't exist in real life, as far as I know. It was halfway between a cinnamon roll and a cookie. Ooh, Antonio wanted one of those. One or maybe even two. I darted over to the counter, came back with two lusciously-glazed cookies and gave one to Antonio. He finished it quickly, and I gave him the other one. This definitely cheered him up, but did not make him friendlier.

Then I noticed that the back of his white jacket had been drawn on with a felt-tipped pen or magic marker. Some sort of goofy parody of tailor's markings, with great big dotted lines. I couldn't imagine that Antonio would be happy about this. I could easily imagine that he would blame it on me.

If this weren't enough, Antonio informed me that Salma Hayek was about to arrive, and that she had some sort of official message for me. This made me more nervous than the magic marker on Antonio's otherwise-immaculate white jacket. I was afraid that Salma would find me unattractive. Especially when I was standing so close to Antonio. I wished that I had some time, a few months, to work out really hard and diet very strenuously, before meeting Ms Hayek for the very first time.

But Salma never showed, and after a while Antonio went away.

The benefit was being held in a brand-new multiplex cinema which was interchangeably ugly with every other brand new ugly multiplex cinema anywhere in the world. The entire dream was inside the multiplex, and there was no way to tell whether we were in LA, New York, Duluth, London, maybe Dubai, or somewhere else. I'd heard jet-setters complain about how every new airport in the world looked like every other new airport. It occurred to me that not only did all new multiplex cinemas look the same -- they all kind of looked like airports.

Movies were showing on all the screens throughout the event, with the lights on in the screening rooms, and with no walls between the screens. You could see several screens at once. I assumed they were going to put the walls in before the thing officially opened, but I didn't know. On one of the screens was one of the big-budget animated movies, of which there have been so many in the past couple of decades that for me they have all became a blur. I thought I heard George Clooney's voice coming from that screen, playing a squirrel or a rabbit or something. I happened to turn around at that moment and see George Clooney himself striding down an aisle, all grey: grey hair, grey tux, grey shoes and socks, looking like a gosh-darn movie star. "Hey George, you in this one?" I shouted, waving my head at the screen behind me. George smiled tensely, recognizing me, said, "I think so," and kept moving.

I sat down and tried for a couple of minutes to involve myself in the animated movie, until I noticed a couple of guys sitting behind me who looked like goons. They weren't wearing tuxes, they weren't even wearing suits. One of them had biceps as big as footballs coming out of the sleeves of his black T-shirt. And they sounded like goons, too. Given the general air of hostility toward me at the place, instead of waiting to see whether these particular goons were going to come after me, I went for a walk, looking behind me all the time.

Back out in the lobby, a short guy in an orange suit had three guys spread-eagled against a wall and was frisking them. I asked him to show me his ID. He didn't look like a cop to me. Maybe that's just because I'm old, and there used to be more requirements for cops to be tall. But the guy didn't show me any ID. And I was frustrated, what with huge movie stars icing me, and goons and whatnot. So I wrestled the guy to the ground and searched him, found no badge, no gun, no cuffs, no law-enforcement ID of any kind, nothing. I told the three guys spreadeagled on the wall that I was pretty sure they were free to go.

The short guy in the orange suit kept laughing at me the whole time, a creepy heh-heh, heh-heh laugh.

I was going to leave the building and go for a walk, but I woke up instead.

Great Struggle Underway in Hollywood

Right now, as we speak, a titanic struggle is underway in La-La-Land:

It's Marvel Comics superheroes against... blue thingies (I've never seen Avatar) in a fight for something which actually means very little! (More on that below.)

Right now -- on the 14th of July, at 11:12AM Eastern Standard Time in the US -- Box Office Mojo shows that Avengers: Endgame is $13.4 million behind Avatar in all-time world-wide box-office. The studio that does the Avengers movies has announced that the home video versions of Avengers: Endgame will be released on July 31. Avengers: Endgame has 17 days left to do what long seemed to be impossible for any movie to do: topple Avatar from the #1 spot on the all-time world-wide box-office list.

Worldwide box office is what they call box office from all over the world. You might think they mean the same thing when they say international box office, but they don't: international box office is worldwide box office minus domestic box office, which is the US & Canada. And as I mentioned above, it means very little.

Not in terms of billions of dollars: billions of dollars mean a lot, of course. But in terms of which movie is the most successful of all time, it means very little. It's ridiculous. And yet it makes my heart race because, don't you see, it's all I have!

Avengers: Endgame may be ending its theatrical run on July 31 -- or then again: maybe it's ending its run in the domestic market only, in the US and Canada, and continuing to show in cinemas in many other parts of the world. I just don't know! -- but it's only beginning to make money. For in addition to box office revenues, there are the monies from home video: DVD, Blu-Ray, digital, streaming and who knows what all else, I'm old and I still haven't figured out Blu-Ray. Can you play DVD's and Blu-Ray's on the same equipment? I have a deep fear that you cannot, but I just don't know! I'm so old that I'm very proud of myself for having been able to take that screenshot of the Box Office Mojo page and leave a copy of it in this post! Can you imagine being that old and out of touch?!

But, old as I am, I still know this: after home video comes pay-per-view, and then premium cable, and then basic cable, and then -- is there still broadcast TV? Anyway: and there's also merchandising.

And it seems reasonable to me to assume that Scarlett Johansson has at least a 2% cut in all of that. And that the worldwide box office will be less than half of the money which Avengers: Endgame eventually will make in the next 3 or 4 years. Which would make Ms Johansson's cut over $110 million!

But dontcha see, I'm just guessing about all of this, except for the box office figures! Why do they make the box office figures public, when every other single piece of financial information is sort of confidential? ("Sort of" because now and then some of the other information will leak or even be released on purpose, but don't hold yr breath about it happening in any given case!)

So, as I was saying: Avengers: Endgame has 17 days to get $13.4 more in world wide box office, to topple Avatar from the #1 spot. The meaningless, but still very, very exciting #1 spot! Unless it has more than 17 days because it's still running in cinemas in other countries.

Will 17 days be enough? I just don't know! It will be close! Follow the link above, the chart is updated several times a week! The suspense is killing me! This is ridiculous! It might just be because I'm autistic and numbers can affect me in irrational ways! Maybe Stan Lee is looking down from Heaven and smiling! (Why wouldn't he smile, Heck, he probably could've BOUGHT Heaven!)

PS, 23 July 2019: The epic struggle is over, Endgame passed Avatar a couple of days ago:

Dream Log: Hollywood Party

I dreamed I was at a party in the house of a Hollywood executive. Most of the party guests were also executives at movie studios. It was dark inside the house. The exterior walls of the house were glass, and almost all of the light we had came from the bright security lights on the lawn, and from the security lights of the neighbors. To one side of the house, several lawns away, surf broke on a beach and reflected the bright white lights.

I was lying down on a sofa and trying to sleep, but the commotion of the party made this impossible.

The lady of the house grabbed me by the arm, pulled me to my feet and proceeded to give me an uninteresting tour of the house. Several times during the tour she asked me if I was homeless. Each time, I told her I wasn't, but she seemed either not to be listening, or not to believe me.

After dragging me around one lap of the house, the hostess let me go in the room where we had started, and I sat down on one of the several sofas in the room.

Across the room from me was a very pleasant-looking woman. She had shoulder-length hair which hung down straight except for one thin braid. We looked at each other for a very long time. In waking life, I very rarely maintain eye contact, because I'm autistic. In the dream, the eye contact also felt very intense. Gradually, the woman began to smile. She walked across the room to me, said she was going to the kitchen, and asked if she could bring me something. I told her I'd like a glass of water. She asked if that was really all I wanted from the kitchen. I assured her that it was.

When she returned, I said that I assumed she was an actress, because she was very attractive. "Thank you, she said, "but actually, I'm a paleographer. I specialize in the Carolingian minuscule. That's --"

"Oh, I know what the Carolingian minuscule is," I replied. "I'm very interested in the transmission of the Latin Classics."

"So you're a Classicist?" she asked.

"No. Well, maybe just barely one. An amateur Classicist, at any rate. So, how did a paleographer end up at a party full of movie-industry muckety-mucks?"

"I'm working on a project at the Getty," she said. (The Getty is a huge museum located in two places in Los Angeles, which contains paintings, sculpture and many other things, including a significant collection of manuscripts.) "The project is being financed by one of the guests here tonight. And you? How did you end up at this party? Are you a movie executive, to finance your love of the Classics?"

"No, I'm afraid I'm only an essayist. And I don't remember how I got to this party," I said.

We agreed to leave the movie executives behind and walk down to the beach. Dawn was beginning to break. The horizon over the ocean began to turn pink. Every minute or so, someone ran past just where the sand began to get wet, in running clothes, except barefoot. They ran very, very fast. I told the lovely paleographer that I had the impression that movie stars tended to exercise harder than professional athletes. She said it seemed that way to her as well. Then I woke up.

Thought-Experiment About Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine And Hollywood

If Einstein, Planck, Bohr and other prominent physicists had make a concerted effort, around, say, 1920, to warn against the dangers of using radioactive materials in research, and had succeeded in keeping such research very small-scale and protective measures at a very high level, would they have succeeded in effectively banning nuclear power and weapons 20 years before they were developed, simply because things like radium and uranium and plutonium were consistently treated like exactly what they are: extremely dangerous things which should be kept as far from people as possible? At the very least, they might've lengthened Marie Curie's life a little bit, and who knows to how many beneficial scientific breakthroughs that alone might have led? And she's only the most famous of many physicists who killed themselves with radioactivity.

And if this had happened, would there have been fewer of those dopey movies made whose message, in a nutshell, is: Oh noes! Cutting-edge science and technology is leading directly to an apocalypse which will eradicate all of mankind, helphelphelp they're gonna kill us all?

You say you hadn't noticed such anti-STEM fearmongering in Hollywood? Well, sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Take a stroll with me through time: remember 1995? People were starting to get excited about the Internet. Remember the 1995 movie The Net, with Sandra Bullock and Dennis Miller? Sweet Sandra's life is threatened by one swarm of evil people after another -- all because she works on the (duh-duh-DUHHHHH!) Internet. Remember 2001's Swordfish, with convicted hacker Hugh Jackman forced by extremely-dangerous John Travolta and completely-topless Halle Berry, tempted by evil, evil cutting-edge equipment to participate in extreme violence via the (duh-duh-DUHHHHH!) Internet? Like many other movies, Swordfish is notable for unintentionally-hilarious depictions of how non-experts imagine that cutting-edge technology works. Movies about computers tend to age very badly.

Remember what genetic modification led to in The Fly and the Jurassic Park movies? Not to mention almost every single Frankenstein movie? Young Frankenstein ends pretty nicely. It's the only exception which occurs to me at the moment. Can you name one other Hollywood movie in which genetic engineering leads to anything other than pure horror? ("How could you have been so blind as not to see that playing God would end up killing us all?! Oh, damn you, damn you, you fool!")

Or artificial intelligence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator movies, the Matrix movies, or, to take a more recent example which may or may not prove to be as memorable, Transcendence, released in 2014, starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman, which has both the hilariously non-realistic computer stuff and the horrifying apocalypse as the inevitable result of AI? ("Oh, how could you have been so blind?! How could you not have seen that the attempt to make a computer brain could only lead to huge massacres?!" That's not a direct quote from the script of Transcendence but it's pretty damn close.) You beginning to see the trend I'm talking about?

You beginning to understand how vaccination could be so unpopular in Hollywood because so many people there don't understand STEM (that's Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) [PS, 1 July 2017: Actually, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Whoops!] and have an uninformed fear and loathing of it?

I agree, unreservedly, that nuclear energy and nuclear bombs are very, very bad things, and that it's only natural that they would lead to an association of STEM and disaster in many minds. But things could have been very different. Scientists themselves could have prevented that nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs ever came to be, and if they had acted early enough, that prevention could have been relatively easy. There's nothing intrinsic about physics which had to lead straight to nukes.

And the fact that those bombs and plants did come to be has had a tremendous effect on the way that people in STEM research work. But that's one of the things you don't know if you don't know very much about STEM besides what you see in movies.

Dream Log: Real And Unreal Cities

Like many other people who have spent most of their adult lives in big cities, I grew up in rural areas, dreaming --literally and figuratively -- about big cities. Since I had spent very little time in big cities, my childhood dreams about them were, of course, quite unrealistic. For some reason, many of my dreams about big cities still have that same unrealistic quality, featuring a lot of really gorgeous-looking extremely-big buildings which have never existed.

Shortly before I went to bed last night I saw the latest episode of "Homeland." The episode was set mostly in Berlin, as is most of the current season of the show, and partly in Amsterdam. The establishing shots of Amsterdam, the wide-angled shots of downtown areas, clearly were really shot in Amsterdam. While watching the show I wondered how many of the scenes set in Amsterdam with Claire Danes and other major cast members were actually shot in Amsterdam, and how many back in Berlin. I was thinking, if that's fake Amsterdam shot in Berlin, it's pretty good fake Amsterdam.

Then this morning it occurred to me to wonder how many of the scenes set in Berlin might actually have been shot on a Hollywood sound stage, or in Canada, or Pittsburgh, or wherever. Part of the reason that more big-budget movies and TV are shot in southern California than anywhere else is because the area offers locations which can look like anywhere on Earth: the polar regions, the tropics, the Sahara, mountains, prairies, ancient Egypt, the moon -- you name it. And for over 100 years Hollywood has just kept on getting better at looking like anywhere. It used to disappoint me after I learned that so many movie and TV locations were faked. Now I just see it as one more aspect of film-making which can be done well or poorly, and I appreciate it when it's done well. Many movies set in NYC and shot in LA look much more like NYC than many shot in NYC. That's a fact. If any director has made a really good and convincing movie set in LA, with lots of exteriors, which was shot entirely in NYC, that director is an awesome genius. It's a lot more difficult than the other way around.

So anyway, I went to sleep thinking: Real Amsterdam? Fake Amsterdam? And maybe subconsciously I was already thinking: Real Berlin? Fake Berlin? (Clearly, a lot of it is real Berlin, including a fair amount with main cast members. I'm just wondering whether the Berlin in the show is 100% Berlin.) And I dreamed about a very unrealistic-looking Cologne, Germany. Way too many skyscrapers, and most of the other buildings were also unrealistically tall. Germany doesn't do skyscrapers the way the US does. 14 of the 15 tallest buildings in Germany are in Frankfurt, which gives it a skyline rivaling that of Cleveland, and not rivaling Chicago or NYC, or even LA.

So yeah, this dream-Cologne had an entirely unrealistic emphasis upon the vertical. Even in the dream I thought, Hey, is this Berlin or something? But the city in the dream was much more rife with skyscrapers than the real Berlin or even the real Frankfurt. It was more like the real Hong Kong, skyscraper-wise, than anything in Europe. (East Asia is doing skyscrapers even more than the US, these days.)

And the dream was mostly about a friend and me walking up and down and around on open-air staircases on apartment buildings way, way up in the air, among glassed-in skyscrapers, in nice short-sleeves weather with gentle breezes, visiting people who had big luxurious apartments with spectacular views of many skyscrapers all jammed together in an entirely unrealistic downtown Cologne. It felt a lot like we were flying.

Old Smelly Geezers Hooking Up With Sweet Young Things In Hollywood Movies

I'm hardly the first to complain that Hollywood has depicted a lot of nauseating relationships between old men and young women. Perhaps the most notorious such depiction involves Gary Cooper (b 1901) and Audrey Hepburn (b 1929) in Love in the Afternoon, released in 1957. I'm surprised that Cooper was only 28 years older than Hepburn. In the movie, he doesn't merely look old enough to be her father, he looks old enough to be her grandfather. Cooper was in his mid-50's when Love in the Afternoon was shot, but he could easily pass for a man in his 60's, and while Hepburn was in her mid-20's, her character in the film doesn't really look, or behave, as if she is full-grown.

A more recent example is Draft Day (2014), with Kevin Costner and Jennifer Garner. With a Costner looking old and a Garner looking young. I channel-surfed by this one a few times, and gathered during my brief stops that Costner was an NFL team owner whom everybody thinks is going to get completely creamed and outplayed in the upcoming draft by the mean old other NFL team owners. Frank Langella, for example, doesn't actually have fangs in this movie, but brimstone does seem to be smoking whenever he makes his ominous appearances onscreen, grinning sadistically at the thought of how he and the owner team owners are going to rip decent old-fashioned American Kevin Costner (think 1950's James Stewart) to shreds in the draft. Maybe it's not actually brimstone smoke, but things like steam from the vents on NYC streets, and ominous lighting and so forth. And I haven't watched this entire movie, and the parts I did watch I didn't watch carefully. So maybe Langella's character actually does have fangs, and a long red tail and cloven hooves.

Anyway -- as I channel-surfed, I could stand up to about 30 seconds at a time of this Ivan Reitman masterpiece, and I gathered that Garner plays a young woman who works in decent, all-American Costner's office, and who seems to have a personal relationship with Costner apart from work. I thought, maybe she's his daughter, working at Dad's place. But no -- ewwww, ewwww, she's the female romantic lead!

I haven't been able to stand a second of it since I figured out that much.

I was surprised to find out that Gary Cooper was only 28 years older than Audrey Hepburn, and I was very surprised to learn that Costner is only 17 years older than Garner (born in 1955 and 1972, respectively). In Draft Day, Costner, lean and worn, more than a bit thin-limbed and stooped and leathery, looks much more than 17 years older than Garner. His character looks old enough to be her character's father if he wasn't particularly young to have had a kid at that time.

I'm really surprised that Jennifer Garner is 43 years old. I was thinking 34 or 35, I was thinking that she had been 20 or 21 when "Alias" started airing. I was also under the impression that she had done every single one of her stunts herself, at least until she got pregnant in the final season, but apparently I was misinformed about that as well. This is truly crushing for me. I thought every second of all of that ass-kicking sexiness in "Alias" was Jennifer. Sweet, sweet 20-to-25-year-old Jennifer.

*sigh*

And this brings us to The Intern, a film starring Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro which was released yesterday, which I haven't seen, a summary of whose plot I have yet to find. All I've seen are some trailers. And sometimes it's a mistake to judge what a film is about by the trailers. Sometimes the trailers are extremely misleading. But the trailers for The Intern give the strong impression that the character played by Hathaway (born in 1982 and could pass for younger) is almost uncontrollably horny for the character played by De Niro (born in 1943 and looks it). It's no stretch at all to say that De Niro's character looks like Hathaway's character's grandfather.

But I haven't seen the movie. Is this one going to go into the Ewwww! Hall of Fame alongside Love in the Afternoon and Draft Day (and let's not forget the notorious Entrapment, starring that adorable couple Sean Connery and Catharine Zeta-Jones, 39 years apart in age, where Zeta-jones' behavior onscreen and off made her name into a punchline)?

I've heard Hollywood women, actresses and writers and directors and producers, complain about the typical movie romantic pairs of men with much younger women much more often than Hollywood men. The Intern was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, the producers were Meyers and Suzanne Farwell. Is this going to be one of the rare Hollywood movies that mocks such couples? I haven't seen any of Meyer's movies, I think she may already have gotten started mocking older men with young women in Something's Gotta Give. Maybe in The Intern De Niro's character is as good a guy as Hathaway is constantly saying in the trailers, and he tells Hathaway's character that her crush on him is kinda messed up, and that she ought to snap out of it because so-und-so, some younger character in the film, played by, oh who knows, Orlando Bloom or Chris Pratt or some other actor who is actually less than 40 years old, is obviously a great guy who loves her and, like her, still has all of his teeth.

But that's pure speculation on my part. If Something's Gotta Give and/or some other films of Meyers' actually have subverted Hollywood's sweet-young-things-love-smelly-arthritic-old-geezers paradigm (let's not forget De Niro and Carla Gugino in Righteous Kill from 2008. Or De Niro and Amy Brenneman in Heat in 1995 -- eh, maybe that one wasn't so much of a stretch. And in Righteous Kill some of the onscreen characters did say that De Niro's relationship with Gugino was odd because of their ages, instead of acting as if it was all perfectly normal and waiting for the director to yell "Cut!" before they could rush away, looking for a quiet place to vomit), maybe Hollywood only allowed her to make that/those movie/s if she vowed to really go all the way in supporting the stereotype in a future production, so that in The Intern, Hathaway and De Niro are gonna....

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!

Often, Bill Maher Sounds Almost As Intelligent As Ben Affleck

And then there are times like last night's "Real Time," marred by Bill's ant-vax screeds. To be sure, Bill insisted that he's not anti-vax, but just a "vaccine skeptic." Well, those are the same thing. Just as criticizing people's religious beliefs is the same thing as criticizing the people who hold the beliefs..

A moron like Jenny McCarthy or Sam Harris is one thing. But Bill sounds perfectly intelligent most of the time, offering cogent and precise evaluations of morons who deny climate change and vote Republican and think that the Affordable Care Act is a tragedy. But when the topic is Islam or vaccinations, it's as if someone changed the channel to Fox News.



Bill points out that the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that climate change is happening, is caused by human activity and is big, big trouble for life on Earth, and that there is a clear fix: green energy, wind, solar, plug-in electric cars and so forth. The thing is, the very same scientists also overwhelmingly agree that vaccines have nothing whatsoever to do with autism, or kidney disease, or any of the other things the anti-vaz nuts link it to, and that not vaccinating children risks re-creating the very same plagues which vaccines eradicated a century ago. So it's quite surreal to hear Maher spouting unscientific bullshit to support his "vaccine skepticism," and concluding, "[...]and it's not like global warming, cause that's real!" and chillingly, last night Bill's audience cheered him for that, instead of booing him as any well-informed crowd would have been expected to do.

It's not just backwoods rednecks who have an anti-vax problem in the US: prosperous, liberal Hollywood has that problem too. Does Hollywood's anti-vax bullshit have something to do with Scientology, and with charlatans preying on movie stars and peddling holistic treatments and magic crystals and pyramids and other such garbage? How could it not have everything to do with those things?



(Some of you may be old enough to remember when Ben Affleck and Matt Damon suddenly became huge stars on the strength of Good Will Hunting, which they wrote and in which they starred, Damon playing a genius and Affleck a sympathetic but not particularly intelligent schlub. Maybe you remember the rumours following Damon and Affleck's spectacular Oscar win for the screenplay, rumours to the effect that Affleck, like his character in the movie, was not particularly bright, and that he owed his Oscar mainly to his good friend Damon's generosity in sharing the writing credit with him. In light of the screenplays Affleck has written since then, and the movies he's directed, those rumours now seem kind of dumb. Not that I see any reason to suspect that the rumours got it exactly backward and that Damon is dumb.)



I really hate to say it, but I see no reason to suspect that Maher is going to brighten up any time soon, either about vaccines or about Islam. I can only plead with his fans -- I'm a fan too -- to think for themselves when listening to Maher, and realize that sometimes he knows what he's talking about, and sometimes he doesn't have a clue, and that when he sounds like he's on Fox News, it doesn't mean that Fox News is sometimes right about something.

HOLLYWOOD!!!

"Whaddya got?"

"A mob comedy with somebody like DeNiro in the lead."

"Like Analyze This! ?"

"Definitely in that ball park."

"Lovin it."

"DeNiro's definitely a crook, he's connected, but he's not violent like most of his gumbas. He's a con artist."

"Lovin it more."

"Long cons, elaborate schemes, very theatrical. The Sting, Spanish Prisoner, think those kinds of jobs. But he cons the wrong guy. He didn't know it, but the last guy he ripped off is the son of a very high-up boss. It doesn't matter that he gave all the money back and apologized, the insult is still too grave -- all his friends are trying to kill him now. So he uses his skills as a long-con guy, and invents an identity he can use to hide. He figures, where is a place, a milieu, seldom frequented by wise guys? The fashion and beauty industry. He creates an identity like Dr Whatsisname, the guy with the miracle youth cream, who has the infomercials with Cindy Crawford and the melons."

"Yeah. I know the guy you mean. I can't think of his name either but I know who you mean."

"Yeah, so he's pretending to be someone with a European accent and a miracle anti-aging treatment, except he's not nearly as smooth as Dr Magic Melons. Much more like Jacques Clouseau, except louder and angrier. And he actually does get women to look a lot better, but it's not because of the 'special extract' he's claiming he made in his lab, which is actually Lubriderm put into vials he gets from a place that stocks chemistry labs. The Lubriderm does no harm to the ladies' skin, but he makes himself look like an age-defying genius with 2 things: 1, the placebo effect, pure and simple. He tells the women he's got a miracle cure, and they believe it's miraculous because they want it to be. 2 is where the loud angry yelling comes in. He waves his arms and yells at his 'patients' that in order to 'activate' the full effect of the 'extract,' they have to drink a lot of water and eat a lot of vegetables and exercise and stay out of the sun and so forth -- whatever they should've been doing to keep their skin looking nice but they weren't. So of course they look much better. And DeNiro takes credit for it. And DeNiro says that he uses the 'extract' himself, and people look at him a little funny, cause, ya know, it's DeNiro. He's not exactly peaches and cream. But then he adds that he's 105 years old and he didn't start using the 'extract' until he was in his 80's, and everybody's, 'Wow, he looks so good for a 105-year-old man.' And he gets a job as a columnist for a health & beauty mag. This is the gumba-free zone he's blending into for camouflage. I see somebody like Katherine Heigl as a scrappy, good-hearted co-worker, and Cate Blanchett as the over-the-top tyrannical publisher."

"Yes! I see it! Yes! Which one is the love interest, Heigl or Blanchett?"

"Hell, he's a con man -- why not both? Heigl because she's less than half DeNiro's age and this is a Hollywood movie, so it's practically a law that she has to fall for him hard, and with Blanchett, I see the two of them haggling over his contract. It has a clause where Blanchett's rag gets a percentage of any writing he does for anybody else. What percentage? He says, 'How about 10 percent.' She says, 'I was thinking more like 15.' He gives her a killer fake-French smile and says, 'Well zen -- how about 20?' And Blanchett has a little shudder like she's just had an orgasm sitting there."

"Oh, baby! Sold! Sold! Erica! Get in here! Call Bob DeNiro, Katie Heigl, Cate Blanchett and Bobby Zemeckis. Tell em to call me, I got a comedy for them with a script like they never dreamed about. Listen! Very important: tell each one of them that the other three are already committed, you got that? Okay, get outta here, go do your magic with the phones, Sugarpants. So, Mr Genius Writer, my new best friend, you got a title already for this blockbuster?"

"Of course: Moisturize This!"

"YES! This masterpiece is gonna go from pitch to production faster than any movie since Roger Corman stopped doing crank!"

Poets, Artists, Hollywood, Money

For a long time I thought that I was very good at remembering passages from books and dialogue from movies and TV word-for-word. In the past few years I have come to grips with the fact that I am not especially good at it. What seems to me like a vivid and exact memory to me is, over and over, in fact quite different from the original text. For example, for a long time I was quite certain that I remembered a character in a movie -- I couldn't recall what character in which movie -- saying, "When poets dream they dream of money." I'm now fairly sure that that was a mis-remembering of a line spoken by Ricky Jay's character in David Mamet's movie The Spanish Prisoner --a terrific movie, by the way, and very much about money among other things. The thing is, I'm not sure whether we're meant to understand that Jay's character is saying (approximately if not word-for-word), "As the poet said, 'Let us dream,' and when we dream, we dream of money," or, "As the poet said, 'Let us dream, and when we dream, we dream of money.'"

I had assumed it was the latter, and thought that it might make sense because poets -- poets in the USA, at least -- tend to make very little money from poetry, so that they would dream of money as naturally as hungry people dream of food.

If it's the former then it sounds much more like the attempt of a man whose business is money to lend an artistic air to his profession.

In the past couple of days I saw another character in another movie, an actress, I've already forgotten which actress and which movie, say something like, "Don't they say that artists dream of money?" The actual line may be quite different, the only thing I'm reasonably sure of is that the movie didn't seem particularly interesting to me and I didn't watch the whole thing.

Movies are probably the art form which makes the most money. Movies or pop music. Gene Siskel said, in a good PBS series about Hollywood from the early 90's, said it with notable conviction and no ifs ands or buts, that Hollywood movies were the biggest big-time in showbiz, implying that if TV people doubted this they were deluded. Remember, my mortal enemy is Cliche Man, and cliches are cliches, not necessarily, as the cliche says, because they are true, but because they sound good. But Siskel may have gotten this one right.

Guy Ritchie's movie RocknRolla --another terrific movie, by the way, and also very much with money as one of its themes --seems to suggest that rock n roll is the biggest big-time in show biz. Perhaps that's true when you compare British rock n roll to British movies, and and false when you compare the most big-time pop music to Hollywood movies.

Without a doubt, the biggest big-time Hollywood movies involve a lot of money. Folks is gettin' paid. (The producers and studios heads are gettin' paid much more than the stars.) And so perhaps this business about artists (or poets) dreaming of money, if it does not merely sound good but is also true, is more true about Hollywood movie folks than about artists in general. It may be relevant, not because it applies to impoverished artists, but, quite on the contrary, because it applies to the very wealthiest people who could conceivably be called artistic or poetic, and it may be that these rick folks are rich because they're always dreaming of money, and the poor poets and artists, generally speaking, may not miss the money as much as I would think. Perhaps, among the group of children with anything like an interest in writing, the ones more preoccupied with money tend to give up poetry before they're full-grown, in favor of writing screenplays full-time, or the better-looking ones among the potential screenwriters may have tended to have gotten their teeth whitened and noses fixed in order to go after the bigger movie-star money, if they haven't given that up to become movie execs, if they haven't given up Hollywood altogether for Wall Street, to work with people like Ricky Jay's character in The Spanish Prisoner and tell each other in their spare time that they're artistic.

As with so many posts on this blog, I have no answers here, but mainly just a few questions, which I hope some reader or another may have found to be interesting food for thought.

Hollyvood Crepp?

In The Bourne Supremacy,(the movie), (2004), the killers, Bourne and the others, in Europe and India, carry around huge piles of dollars. Not Euros. In Russia, the Russian cab driver at the airport asks Bourne, in Russian, "Dollars or rubles?" Bourne sez dollars and off they go. It's not clear whether the cabbie would bother to move for rubles.

Nobody mentions Euros. Is this strictly realistic? In Russia in 2004? Even in 2013, after 4 years of Obama restoring the dollar and several years of the Euro going ka-plooey, and even though I live in the middle of the US, if someone asked me if I wanted Euros or dollars, I'm not sure I wouldn't say Euros.

(Some Russian cabbies may have turned down rubles in the early 1990's, but in 2004? Really?)

In The Bourne Identitya freshly-amnesiac Bourne opens a safe-deposit box, and for the length of a tantalizing brief shot we see, under the pistol and among all the fake passports, piles of dollars and of other currency. I had assumed Euros were in there, but The Bourne Identity was released in the summer of 2002, when Euros had only been in circulation since January, and this scene was in winter, and who knows how long Jason had been out of touch with reality while the contents of that box waited there, so hmm. It was a Swiss bank, maybe we were meant to think Swiss francs. Bourne offers Franke Potente dollars to help him evade apparently every police force on Earth, plus rogue mutant assassins like himself, on his way from Switzerland to France. No mention of francs, Swiss or French, or Deutschmarks, although she's German.

Really?

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe dollars still go perfectly well with big stacks of fake passports of many countries. Or maybe right at this moment a German, a French person and an Italian are watching The Bourne Supremacy together, and the German just can't take it anymore and is beginning to yell at the TV screen: "Vat ze fuck?! Dollars, dollars, dollars -- you're in fuckink Europe! Not even gonna mention Euros? Zis iss supposed to be some great realistic Euro-thriller?! Hollyvood shit in Europe iss vat it iss! Franke, how could you go along viss ziss?! Mebbe she didn't go along viss it, end zett's vy she's not in ze sird vun. Hollyvood crepp!"