Zeroing in on your Target Market

I was watching the Olympics this weekend with my wife on our Moxi DVR skipping through one commercial after another, when my wife asked that I back up so she could watch a Target ad. She wasn't really interested in buying anything at Target, she just wanted to watch the commercial since our son started working at Target a month ago. My wife started raving about how clever the Target marketing was, the great use of the logo, etc. Me, I'm just pointing to the TV and grinning.

"Listen to the music," I say.

"What about it," she replies.

"Don't you recognize it?" I ask. "It's The Shape of Things to Come!"

She stares at me blankly. "Wild in the Streets!" I exclaim. She still doesn't get it. "The song, It's Max Frost and the Troopers from Wild in the Streets. We saw it just last month?" In her eyes I see the slightest flicker of recognition; sometimes with my wife, that's the best I can hope for.

For the past few months I have been TiVoing 1960's biker movies. Most, but not all, are the work of the great Roger Corman. Wild in the Streets is an exception to that rule, being directed by Barry Shear, a little-known, mostly TV, director who died in 1979.

I started off with The Wild Angels from 1966, a Corman flick starring Peter Fonda, Nancy Sinatra, Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd. It was during the filming of The Wild Angels that Laura Dern was conceived. The Wild Angels is not a great movie, but it is fun to watch and the theme song by Davie Allen and the Arrows is just amazing!

The next film I watched was not really a biker film, but it fits the mold. It was another Roger Corman movie, The Trip, written by Jack Nicholson and staring Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern and Dennis Hopper. The movie revolves around the first LSD trip taken by Peter Fonda's character and his friend, played by Bruce Dern, who tries to guide him through it.

This brings me to the last film I saw from this genre, Wild in the Streets, which features the great song The Shape of Things to Come by Max Frost and the Troopers which is used in the current Target ad on TV. The first thing you need to know is that Max Frost is the main character in Wild in the Streets; he's a rock star who becomes President of the United States at 24.

So, there is no band called Max Frost and the Troopers; they are, in reality, Davie Allen and the Arrows. Yep, the same Davie Allen who did the theme to The Wild Angels. You can see the Target ad and listen to the song by going here and selecting the Shape of Things to Come ad.

Wild in the Streets is a fairly interesting film. It foresees the Kent State Massacre years before it happens, though the aftermath in the film is quite different from the effect of the real tragedy. With all the talk lately about the aging of the baby boomers and how this will affect society, Wild in the Streets dealt with the ramifications of the boomers when they were young, when 52% of the American population was under the age of 25 and what might have happened given the overly opportunistic nature of politicians.

Christopher Jones plays Max Frost a young pop star who uses his connections with a young Senator, played by Hal Holbrook, to lower the voting age to 15 and eventually the age requirements for those running for congress and the President. Frost then gets himself elected to President and begins his "final solution" to the problem of aging: anyone over the age of 35 is placed into concentrations camps and given LSD, so that they can spend the rest of their life happy and free.

It's not a really serious film, more of a dark satire, and Jones chews the scenery more than once during the proceedings, but it is an interesting piece of 1960's nostalgia. Besides Jone and Holbrook we get some great performances by the late Shelley Winters as Max's mother and the late Richard Pryor as part of Max's posse. The final scenes in the movie are classic; it's a lot of fun.

More fun than watching a Target commercial, though they both have great music!

My Favorite Cherry!

I remember it like it was yesterday, the day the October 1974 issue of The National Lampoon hit the newsstands. I was already a big fan of the magazine (which most people only remember as having something to do with Chevy Chase movies) by this time and bought every issue no matter what the topic. But I took one look at their Pubescence issue and grabbed it off the newsstand before anyone else could. Oh, was I in love with this camel-toed cutie showing us her cherry and begging for someone to take it.

I remember years later reading that this was the best-selling issue of the magazine ever. I don't doubt it. I have no idea who the model was or who the photographer was, but they captured a pose that many have lusted over ever since.

As I Said!

I am nothing if not consistant!

Some Things Just Won't Be Denied

The cute guy to my right is our dog, Bowie. My wife picked him up at the pound a few years ago and brought him home unannounced. Today is our son's 19th birthday and the thought of birthdays got my wife to pondering Bowie's.

In the case of Bowie's birthday, he was a stray when first brought to the pound, so there is no record of his actual birth date. That means we get to choose one for him. Ah, the responsibilies of pet ownership!

When my wife began cruising the pounds looking for a new dog, she was not overly impressed by a dog the pound people had named Elvis. He was sort of funny looking and very noisy; Elvis sang. He would howl when he was happy or when he wanted attention and it was this habit of howling that earned him the Elvis moniker. They named him after Elvis Presley, the king of rock and roll.

Eventually though, my wife was won over by the sweetness of Elvis and brought him into our family. At first I was the only one not sure about the dog, but everyone agreed that we did not like the name Elvis.

There was no denying that this dog was a singer though and my first suggestion was to name him Torme, since he seemed like a crooner to me. My wife nixed that idea along with Sinatra; she couldn't see herself calling out, "Here Sinatra! Here boy!"

Which is how we ended up with Bowie. Our dog is named after David Bowie, which brings us back to the question of birthdays. We could have given him Elvis's birthday, since that was the name we first knew him as, but my wife was against that. You see, she and Elvis share the same birthday, January 8th.

"No," she said. "Let's give him David Bowie's birthday. He is named after David Bowie so he should share a birthday with him." Fine with me. I looked up David Bowie's birthday; it's January 8th.

Some things just can't be denied.

The Vilest of Republicans

This vile bitch to my left is right-wing uber-cunt Anne Coulter. In my opinion she is the true face of the Republican Party. She is evil, loathsome and disgusting and wants to kill anyone who disagrees with her far-right whacked opinions. Her latest foray into the sickening world of far right-wingdom is when she joked about killing a sitting Supreme Court justice.

Want to guess how many right-wing media hacks, who complained vehemently about Hillary Clinton's "plantation" remark, will do the same about this? I'll bet you can count them on no fingers.

Watch as Fox News shows you how fair and balanced they really are; this is a story they will ignore or blame on liberals if it gets any coverage at all. What a joke this country has become.

There is Only One Answer

I think that about says it all!

Poon Tang Chain Gang

I was given a task a few years ago by some teammates of mine to create a banner for the Poon Tang Chain Gang. I'm really not at liberty to describe what the Poon Tang Chain Gang was, though the name is pretty self-explanatory as to what it represented. Suffice to say that we all know what poon tang is and we all are familiar with a chain gang. You should be able to figure most of it out from that.

I dove into my task with gusto and in a short while came up with a basic concept for the banner. It would be three men in chain gang clothing being pulled along by a beautiful woman. The men would be chained together and the woman would have a hold of their chain. The three men would be representative of the three sides of a well-rounded man and would take the form of Clint Eastwood, Ghandi and Curly from the Three Stooges.

I made a few more detailed concept pieces of the woman before letting the men see the idea.

Without going into too much detail here, the men hated the idea. They felt it was too negative... though they did like the faces I was working on for the three men.

To address the complaint that the piece was too negative I suggested that instead of being dragged by the woman, the three men could be escaping from the woman whose home would be represented by a large vagina.

In a bolt of brilliance one of the men suggested that instead of three men we should consider one three-headed man. I really liked the idea and went back to work, generating two new concept pieces, which you can see to my left.

I presented the two new pieces to the men and they picked what they liked from each one. Now we seemed to be getting somewhere! I then took their suggestions and consolidated them into a new piece, a hybrid of the previous two.

I did this one on art board and spent considerably more time on it than the previous concepts, I made it a lot larger and more detailed than the two previous pieces, but I still worked the details up in pencil. I didn't want to do anything more permanent until I got the final "buy off" on the piece from the men. They would be making the final decision, not me.

To get a digital version of the artwork I scanned the pencils in two passes and pasted them back together in Corel Painter. Using the Corel Painter trace feature I inked the design in using my Wacom tablet. I then used Painter's natural media watercolors to finish the piece. The final touch was provided by two very nice fonts I found on the Internet.

From start to finish it took me about a month to complete this piece. We had the final product printed out on canvas as a three by four foot banner. A one and a half inch wooden pole used for staking trees was nailed to the white area on the top and bottom of the illustration. Upholstery tacks were used as studs to decorate the top and bottom and to keep the weight off the nails attaching the poles. It was topped off with a nice thick chain at the top to hang it from. The result was really stunning and looked much nicer than I imagined it would. Unfortunately the resulting piece was destroyed by fire less than 24 hours after being completed. The artwork obviously still exists, but it is no longer a banner and no longer represents any team or organization.

Down in the Boondocks

One of the best new shows on TV this year is on the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, their late-night programming block of cartoons aimed squarely at adults. As the picture to my left indicates, it's their version of Aaron McGruder's award-winning comic-strip, Boondocks. I've been enjoying this show for a month or so now, but made me want to talk about it today was this week's episode, "The Return of the King."

The "King" of the title is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the episode, Dr. King did not die when shot in 1968, he slipped into a coma. He awakens in 2000 just in time to be denied the right to vote during the Bush presidential fraud. But that is only the beginning, the first three minutes of the show to be exact.

This is a powerful show and like most episodes speaks of Aaron's immense disappointment in his people and what has become of them since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Eventually it all get to be too much, even for Dr. King., who at one point looks at a room full of hip-hop niggas and laments, "Is this it? Is this what I took all those beatings for?" Powerful, funny as hell and touching. McGruder's show is pure genius.

Miss it at your own peril.

Bringing in a Ringer

Last month the poster to my left was used to preview and premiere a new comedy, which debuted to mixed review and pretty poor box office. This Johnny Knoxville comedy was about two guys who decide to rig the Special Olympics to pay off a debt by having one of them, Steve (Knoxville), pose as a contestant in the games, hoping to dethrone reigning champion, Jimmy. Mentally-challenged high jinks and hilarity surely follow. The poster seems to explain the premise pretty well without giving too much away.

Sounds like a pretty funny episode of South Park from a few years ago. I'm not quite sure how well it works with flesh and blood actors instead of animated felt cut-outs, but I do have a friend who saw it and didn't think it was totally without merit.

This week I noticed that the advertisement in my paper (a little rag called the Los Angeles Times) had changed. I asked my friend at work if there were any scenes in The Ringer where they wore cowboy hats. He said, "No."

"Odd ad," I thought. Not because I didn't get the joke of the new ad. I just think it's a surprising choice.

If you are going to parody another film that is out on the market in your advertising, wouldn't you pick one that was doing better business? Do they really think that associating themselves with Brokeback Mountain is bringing to The Ringer the ringer it needs? I just don't see it.

Worse, what if you don't get the joke and go see The Ringer and really like it? I think you are going to be disappointed if you follow it up with a viewing of Brokeback hoping for the same "type" of movie experience.

Maybe they don't really care; any attention the film gets is probably going to help it's bottom line and apparently it needs a lot of help.

Titanium

It must have been the summer of 1971 or 72. I was 15 or 16 and in love. It was the 4th of July and I went out with a church group to watch the fireworks at the local fairgrounds. One of the reasons I was so interested in the church group was Lynn; she was cute as a button and, at that time, the girl of my dreams. I would have gone almost anywhere and done almost anything to be with her, which is a great indication of how little power I had in the relationship. Anyway, I remember that the group parked in a mall parking lot near the fairgrounds to watch the excitement in the sky. To get a better vantage point from which to watch the fireworks we climbed on top of the van we had come in. As we did so the roof buckled a bit, making a krumpling noise. I thought, "Gee, how come in all those Marvel comics the heroes jump all over the cars and the roof never gets a dent?"

Ah, the tough questions of youth! Anyway, I went home sexually frustrated (the story of my many relationships with Lynn) and over the next few days drew three pages of a comic book featuring a character I was calling Titanium. It was my first superhero; a Six Million Dollar Man rip-off. Race car driver Dan Peterson, heir to the Petré Cosmetic fortune is critically injured in a accident during a race at Ontario Speedway. Not really an accident, his pit crew boss was skimming money off the top, out after Dan's girl, yada, yada, yada! Good help is so damn hard to find!

I finished the pencils for all three pages but only the first page was inked to completion (and some of the lettering has not survived over the years). My major influences at the time were Berni Wrightson, Rich Buckler, Al Williamson, Jim Steranko, and Neal Adams.


I was trying very much to give the strip a Southern California feel, since most comic books were published out of New York and either took place there or in pseudo-New York cities like Gotham or Metropolis. I was planning on going back later and putting palm trees on almost every page. Enough of this east coast monopoly on superheroes. The missing dialog in panels 7-8 read something like "Hey ya weirdo! Look watcha did to my cab!" "Sheesh! Don't tell me LA is stuck with one of those costumed freaks too!" Why was I putting a New York cab driver in LA? I haven't a clue.


As you can see, I was trying all kinds of techniques on these pages. Lots of zip-a-tone mixed in with my own pen scratching work. I think this influence was coming from Al Williamson and his great newspaper work on Secret Agent Corrigan. The guy could make black and white seem like all you needed.


My third and final page is almost all pencil. I know it's hard to read, but the art (such that it is) is still there. We start off with the cop from page 2 in awe of the speed of Titanium. He then wonders aloud who Titanium is. The balloon is used as a separator between the cop in 1976 and Ontario Speedway in 1974. An interviewer is asking Dan Peterson what he hopes to achieve in life. Dan says something like longevity, prosperity and to end his racing jinx with today's race. You then see the reporter on a TV screen, introducing Dan Peterson as the heir to the Petré Cosmetics fortune and back to Ray in the pits. The bottom half of the page is Dan getting ready to start the race. It introduces his pit boss and you learn from his thoughts that he has done something bad to the car. Dan gets in the car and the race begins.

What you see here is that I had real problems with layout, particularly on the bottom of the page. I start on the left with two panels that must be read together (and I use the continued balloon to span them) but I also need you to skip the big panel and move over to the small panel on the right. So I drop in this hokey arrow which seems to be telling you to skip the second panel on the left since it is pointing you from the first panel on the left to the panel on the right. What a mess! Oh well, I was a big racing fan at the time and wanted to draw the cars and stuff.

This is as far as it ever got. There never were any further adventures of Titanium, or even any more pages to this one. Hey, I was only 15 or 16. My attention had a tendency to wander at that time. Lynn had this cute, very tight butt and these perky little breasts that fit so nicely in my hands and her scent... oh God she smelled like a dream...

Lost Films: Miracle Mile

Miracle Mile is not new or even new to video. It was released in theaters in 1988, but you most likely did not see it at a theater nor have you rented it. You should. This is a great little sleeper of a movie, a small $3 million gem that was lost in the shuffle when it was released and has never really been found.

My wife and I saw it at the theater when it opened in 1988, and what we saw we found very disturbing, which might also account for its lack of box office. I think this was the most shocked audience I have ever seen. When the film ended they sat in silence through the credits and then, also in silence, they quietly walked out of the theater; literally stunned by what they had seen.

Miracle Mile stars Anthony Edwards (before ER and after Revenge of the Nerds) as Harry, a young man who meets and falls in love with Julie, Mare Winningham, at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles (this area of LA is known as the Miracle Mile). They make a date to meet later that night at a coffee shop, but Harry oversleeps. He rushes to the coffee shop anyway, but Julie is long gone. While waiting around outside the coffee shop the pay phone rings and Harry answers it. The frantic party of the other end, who thinks he is talking to his father but has dialed the wrong number, tells Harry that the US has just launched its nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union and that the Soviet nukes are already inbound. He has an hour to get out of LA. Harry then hears a gun shot on the other end of the phone and a different voice comes on and tells him to ignore the call. But can he? Is Harry the victim of a brutal practical joke, or does he really know the world is about to end?

Harry doesn't know what the truth is and neither does the audience, but as he tells those around him what may be happening, all hell slowly starts to break loose in the early morning hours along the Miracle Mile. If it is true, Harry knows he can not leave LA without Julie. He has an hour to find the woman he loves, and get out of Los Angeles, or does he?

Miracle Mile leaves you guessing to the end. This film is full of startling images of a world quickly going stark raving mad, and I give full credit to director Steve De Jarnatt. But in Hollywood, if the movies you make don't make money you don't get to make movies. Miracle Mile was a box office bomb, taking in a little over 1/3 of the piddling $3 million it cost, and except for some work on a few TV series, we have not seen much from Steve since. That is a down-right shame, but don't let that deter you from seeing this wonderfully quirky little film. You may not come away liking Miracle Mile, but like all good films, you won't be able to stop thinking about it or the images it presented.

With the end of the Soviet Union the fear is not quite as present as in 1988, but the film is gripping in its depiction of how diverse people handle what they think is the end of the world. This film is really worth the effort to seek out and view. A lot of the reviews on IMDb use the word "haunting" when describing Miracle Mile and I couldn't agree more; when was the last time a film got under your skin so much that it affected your daily life? Miracle Mile is one of those lost films that needs to be found again.

Stating the Obvious

Sometimes pro football teams spend millions of dollars and all of their options drafting a player that for one reason or another just doesn't work out. Sometimes the player is unprepared for how fast everyone in the NFL moves, sometimes they are unable to adapt to how large the defensive or offensive line are in the pros. The worst kind of "mistake draft" is a player that is just plain trouble.

A lot of the time it is hard to determine just who will or will not be a "trouble" player. The asshole to my left, former Virginia Tech quarterback Marcus Vick has saved everyone the trouble of finding out the "hard way" that he is one of those "trouble" players.

Let's see, so far in the past week or so, Marcus has 1) stomped on the left calf of Louisville All-American Elvis Dumervil on camera during the Gator Bowl, 2) attempted to soften the blow by claiming that he apologized to Dumervil when he had not, 3) gotten kicked off the Virginia Tech team for his outlandish behavior, 4) been arrested for allegedly pulling a gun on three teenagers during an altercation in a McDonald's parking lot (he faces up to three years in jail), 5) exhibited the poor taste to actually eat at McDonald's, and 6) announced that he is going pro!

Yep, this "fine piece of work," this "team meltdown waiting to happen," this "waste of money and draft choices" is ready for his closeup Mr. DeMille. I can think of a lot of NFL teams that need help at the quarterback position; I can't think of one that can prosper by drafting this asshole.

A Question of How You Live

The past few days I've been thinking of death. We've had Lou Rawls, Barry Cowsill, a dozen miners... and I'm not normally a morbid person, but death just seems to be hanging around lately. On Christmas morning my parents lost a close friend suddenly, someone I have known for 40 or more years. It dampened everyone's spirits for the rest of the day; I could see it eating at my father. What good are gifts when you've lost your best friend?

It has all got me thinking again about the wonderful Six Feet Under, the story of the Fisher and Sons Mortuary that fascinated and captivated me for five glorious seasons on HBO, till its demise a few months ago. Maybe Six Feet Under is on my mind because I saw Rumor Has It... and as I previously related, three actors from Six Feet Under appear in that film.

Maybe, but I think not. I think it's death, just kinda floating around, through the air, making his presence known.

If you watched Six Feet Under then you know that each episode of the show began with a death and if you saw the final episode, "Everyone's Waiting," you know that it ended with a fifteen-minute look forward in which we saw the deaths of all the major characters on the show. I may as well admit it right now, I'm a crier and this show had my wife and I going pretty good.

It was meant to be sad, right? It showed how they all died, that's a sad thing, particularly if you've invested yourself in the characters over the years. How can it not be? It's death and it came for them just as it's coming for each of us and none of us like to think about that.

I watched that ending four or five times (this is what TiVo was created for folks) and about the third time it hit me that this was not a sad ending.

What was sad was the sheer hell the characters had been going though for the five seasons we watched them. Some of the most horrific stuff I have ever seen on television was presented on Six Feet Under. Every member of the Fisher family struggled with their demons during the show's run; each of them suffered greatly.

For five seasons we watched them endure the worst things in life; five seasons bookended with the deaths of Nate Fisher, father and son. And then in fifteen glorious minutes we watched them pull through it and live. And die. Sure, we knew that was coming; we all know it is coming. But in those last fifteen minutes we watched the characters put all of the shit they had gone through behind them; we got to see them living. And most of them lived very long lives full of joy and satisfaction.

Those final fifteen minutes made it clear that Six Feet Under was not a show about death, but a show about life. It's not about how you die, it's a question of how you live.

His Art Seems Film-iliar!

Drew Struzan is not exactly a household name, now is it? I would guess that very few people reading this have any idea who Drew Struzan is, but I’m also confident that every one of you is a Drew Struzan fan. Eh, where does my cocky confidence come from? How can I be so sure? It’s easy: I have never met anyone who didn’t have a great appreciation of and a great love for the work of Drew Struzan. Drew is in fact just flat out the best at what he does; he redefined our notion of what his area of expertise can be. He has been practicing his art, honing his skills, for 30 years and in that time has become the grand master of his special domain of art.

Drew paints posters for motion pictures. Long before you‘ve seen a single frame of celluloid projected on a screen, before the trailers have made their way to the front of your current movie experience, Drew whets your appetite for a concept or a hero. They leap out at you from the one-sheets, the posters that line the walls of your neighborhood theater. They call to you, entice you. They make your heart beat faster and send your blood surging though your veins. Drew is the master of painting heroes.
Drew’s painting introduced us to Marty McFly and John Rambo, to Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker, to Peter Pan and Harry Potter.

I saw Drew a few years ago at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena where he was signing and discussing of his new book, The Movie Posters of Drew Struzan, a 120-page compilation of some of Drew’s most famous work. After a short foreword by George Lucas and a biography of Drew by Jessie and Amy Horsting, we get to the real meat and potatoes of the book: Drew’s glorious posters, almost 100 of them. If you’re a fan of movies, of pop culture or of art, this book has something to delight you. Each page is a stunning piece of American pop, pictures you know and love.

There were only 35 or so people at the event, prompting Drew to note, "Looking at the turnout, maybe art is dead in America." He noted that he had spent a lot of time recently in Japan and that in that country "people are raised with an appreciation for art that is just missing in America."
Drew Struzan is quiet and soft-spoken. "I'm an artist, not a writer or a speaker, so I really don't know what I'm doing here. I don't have anything to say, but if you have any questions I'd be happy to answer them." And so he did, for the next 45 minutes.

Drew was asked what he is currently working on and responded, “That’s kind of a problem; I can’t tell you. The people I work for create marketing plans and when they want you to know what I’m working on, they will let you know. Until then, it’s a secret.” Drew did say that he had recently received a call from John Wayne’s son who was so pleased by the work Drew had done on the recent John Wayne postage stamp and that they “may work on something together in the future.”
When asked if he sees a movie before doing the poster, Drew responded, “Sometimes, but most times, no. I may see photos or a trailer. I usually get the script to read and I may see an incomplete film.” A follow-up question was did he ever see a finished film and want to re-paint the poster. Drew said “yes,” and someone yelled out ”The Name of the Rose.” Drew laughed, “That one is not my fault.”

“The producers had this really dark movie about monks and murder and were terrified of it. They had no idea how to market this film, so they told me to paint the poster as if it were a comedy. It wasn’t a comedy, but I gave them what they wanted, a totally inappropriate poster.”

Drew was asked if he ever looked at a film and turned down the job. He responded, “No, I have to eat. I have turned down work when I was too busy, but only then. When I was younger, and not so smart, I would work on two or three projects at a time; but not any more. I like to sleep and spend time with my family.”
Drew said it takes him two days to complete a painting, “though I will tell them it will take two weeks. And, sometimes it does, but most of the time I really only spend a couple of days on it.”

Drew’s finished paintings are done the size of a one-sheet poster, approximately 27x40 inches, because “this is the size most people will see.”

I asked Drew about his unique technique, mentioning that for years I thought his work was done in pastels because of its gritty properties, and had only recently read that he works in acrylics and colored pencils. “Yes, I work in acrylics and colored pencils; next question.” I asked how he came up with his technique and he explained that the nature of the business dictates the technique.
“I learned very early on in this field that the people who make films work very long and hard on them. Sometimes they may have worked twenty years to get their film made; they have a very high-level of investment in it. But they don’t have any idea how to make a hit film or how to market one, if they did, all films would be hits. So these people are searching for the correct formula, but are unsure. They change their minds, a lot. If I worked in pastel or watercolor, both of which I am quite capable of doing, I could never change a painting without you knowing I changed it. I can erase colored pencil right off the canvas. I can even erase the dots of the airbrush and you won’t know I did it. If I rub hard enough I can take the acrylic paint right off, reapply the gesso and paint in a new figure and you will never know I did it.”

Drew went on to describe how the producers of Back to the Future III wanted Michael J. Fox’s outfit changed on the poster and how Drew was able to completely erase the Fox figure and paint in a new one and you can’t tell he ever touched it.
When asked if it bothered him when his artwork was not used on the foreign release of a film, Drew said, "No, not really. The nature of the business is that they can use any artwork they like and usually do." Drew went on to mention an exception to this rule that he is quite proud of. "With the Phantom Menace, George Lucas had all the foreign distributors sign an agreement that my poster was the only art they could use and that, other than the text, it could not be modified in any way." Given that the film was released in nearly every country on the planet, it is believed that Drew's poster is the single most viewed piece of art in history.

I asked Drew about his work before he got into the film business, doing record album covers. I had only recently become aware that he did albums. I asked how many he had done and he said it was a lot. I asked if it was enough for a book and he replied, "Oh, yeah, I did hundreds of them. It's all I did for five years."

Drew did two of my favorite covers, both for Alice Cooper. The first was the cover to Welcome to my Nightmare, voted one of the top 100 Album Covers of all time by Rolling Stone Magazine. The second is the cover to Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits, which features the band as 30s-style gangland thugs.
You can see more of Drew's wonderful work and read more about him in a number of places on the web. The sites below are just the tip of the iceberg:
Drew’s own website
The Drew Collector’s Page
Echo Station: Interview with Drew Struzan

Out-Foxed by Sirius!

This year the only gift I really wanted for Christmas was a Sirius satellite radio. I have enjoyed listening to Howard Stern for years and thanks to Sirius I can continue listening to him without George Bush and his cretinous stormtroopers at the FCC getting in the way. God I long for the return of the land of the free; maybe this year's elections will give us the chance for a good ol' American impeachment! We can all hope.

In the months leading up to Christmas and my anticipated Sirius gift, I would, from time to time, check out the list of programs available on Sirius, besides Howard Stern. I was very pleased to see that they had two different progressive talk channels: Sirius Left and Air America. Since I listen to Air America most days, I felt pretty good about all this. However a few months ago Air America made an exclusive deal with Sirius-competitor XM and dropped Sirius as an outlet. Personally, I think this was a mistake on Air America's part but, not running the company, what I think doesn't mean much at Air America.

The dropping of Air America left Sirius with only one progressive talk channel but two conservative channels. On top of that they also carried the White House propaganda outlet known as Fox News. I began to think that maybe this satellite radio wasn't such a good idea after all. Then I got my first New years' gift.

Sirius dropped Fox News! I couldn't have asked for a better gift. Fox is a disingenuous enterprise at best and an un-American fraud at worst. First, it is not a news channel. They don't do news. They parrot White House talking points. They spread propaganda. That is not the same as reporting news.

The "personalities" (and boy do I use that term loosely) on Fox are not reporters. Reporters search for and report the truth. Fox people have no use for the truth. I could give you dozens of examples, but I'll just go with one. The ever repulsive Bill O’Reilly has repeatedly railed against the efforts of liberals to remove Christ from Christmas, and to protect his God Bill is not above bearing false witness (lying) to get his point across. Bill recently complained (and repeated the complaint on the David Letterman Show) that:

In Dodgeville, Wisconsin, the Ridgewood Elementary School has changed the song Silent Night to Cold in the Night and forced the kids to sing the lyrics, “Cold in the night, No one in sight, Winter winds whirl and bite,” to the tune of the original Silent Night.

O’Reilly seems completely unconcerned that the story is a total fabrication, so much so that he repeats it whenever he can. He wishes only to stir up his supporters, even if he has to make up the charges (sounds a lot like the squatter in the White House). So I say, good riddance to pathetic right-wing propaganda and long live the real American free press.

And thanks Sirius for the great New Years' gift!

I Give this Bookstore Two Thumbs Up!

A few days after the Oscars were given out last year I spent an evening after work at my favorite bookstore in Pasadena, Vroman's. It's just two blocks from work and in the past I have seen Howard Stern, T. Jefferson Parker, Walter Mosely and Drew Struzan there, all for book signings. This evening I was there for another book signing. The author was in town for the Oscars and spent a few days doing TV and radio interviews and this one book signing. The author was Roger Ebert and he was there to talk about his new book, The Great Movies II. Even though I have not read The Great Movies I, I knew I couldn't pass up an opportunity to meet the guy who has entertained me on TV for thirty years, the only man to win a Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Yeah, Roger did spend a little bit of time talking about his book, which is a collection of 100 essays he has written for the Chicago Sun Times over the past few years. Each essay covers a different film, each is around five pages long, and each is about a film that Ebert loves. Some are well-known and familiar to us all: Alien, Goodfellas, The Right Stuff, The Raiders of the Lost Ark, West Side Story. Others are films I have never heard of: Children of Paradise, Grave of the Fireflies, House of Games. What they all have in common is that Roger loves them all, and through these essays he shares that love with us.

I got to Vroman's early, about an hour and a half early. Even then, after purchasing a copy of the new book, I was about the 20th person to take a seat; a nice, close third-row seat. A man from Azusa (A to Z in the USA!) named Ivan sat next to me. Ivan said he hadn't been to a movie in over five years, that he didn't enjoy most films lately, but that he had watched Siskel and Ebert and then Ebert and Roeper every week and wouldn't think of missing a chance to meet Roger in person, though he was not going to buy a book.

With an hour to go the 100 or so seats were all filled, but people kept coming. They sat on the floor and lined the aisles. Through it all the large stack of books written by Roger, which dominated the front of the room, kept dwindling. With 10 minutes to go they announced that the 12 or so remaining books at the front of the room were the only unpurchased books written by Roger Ebert left in the store. They were immediately absorbed by the large crowd, now numbering, I would guess, around 300. Roger arrived shortly after 7:00 to a standing-room-only crowd of fans and a standing ovation.

Ebert spent a few minutes talking about his book and then started talking about the Oscars and his experience of the Oscars. He and his wife flew into town a few days before the award show and were out every night at this awards show or that pre-Oscar party. Roger noted that at every event he went to he ran into Wolfgang Puck. "Apparently, Puck caters every event in Hollywood." Puck always wore his kitchen "whites" and he never saw him when he didn't have a stain running down the left side of his chest. Roger speculated that he puts the stain on to prove that he actually has something to do with the cooking process. Finally it's the night of the Awards and Roger is working the red carpet in front of the Kodak Theater, interviewing celebrities for a cable channel when down the carpet walks Wolfgang with a tray of food, showing all the specialties he had created for the after-awards party. He had the same stain on his left breast.

He said that people always ask him how he liked the Oscar show and he never quite knows how to answer that other than, "I really didn't see it." Roger explained that although he goes to the Academy Awards every year, he has never been inside of the auditorium. As a writer, he is in a room off behind the stage area with all the other writers. They sit at tables with their laptops while the broadcast is displayed on a TV forty or so feet away and they listen to it though headphones. One side of the room is devoted to the "back stage media area," the place you always see on TV where the winners are being interviewed. "You have to flip up one side of the headphone so you can listen to the broadcast and the backstage interviews at the same time," Roger explained.

"People asked me, 'What did you think of them bringing all the nominees up on stage?' and I said, 'They brought all of the nominees up on stage?'" Roger said it's hard to write a column, watch a TV show and listen to interviews simultaneously without missing something. "While we sit there writing, there are two dozen chairs set up in front of the interview area where sit these people, who have absolutely no credentials but somehow managed to get these passes, which allow them to interview stars. These are not very bright people." Roger recounted two examples from this year:

One interviewer asked Cate Blanchett if she thought winning the Oscar for best supporting actress would help her career. She looked the fellow right in the eyes and said, "Yes, yes it will...asshole." Another interviewer asked Morgan Freeman what he thought it meant that a black man had won the award for best supporting actor. Freeman replied, "It means that more people voted for me than voted for the other guys."

Roger spent time talking about the future of Hollywood, from both the technical and the creative side. He said it's not quite there yet, he can still see a difference, but that it is getting harder and harder to tell digital movies from movies shot on film. "Sooner or later, film will disappear and all movies will be digital."

Creatively he said the lesson of this year's Oscars is that the studios did not want to make a single one of the top nominated films. He recalled how Universal turned down Million Dollar Baby which was budgeted at $25 million. "Eastwood has stayed with Universal ever since Dirty Harry and has made the studio a couple of billion dollars over the years, but they wouldn't give him $25 million for something he believed in because their research said nobody likes 'boxing' pictures."

"Clint had to find a private investor to put up half the money and then basically shame Universal into putting up the other $12.5 million. The investor got all foreign rights to the film, meaning Universal made a very, very costly mistake." Speaking more on Eastwood, Roger commented that, "Had Clint Eastwood not had this huge career as an actor, he would be known as one of the greatest directors of all time. Just look at the last two years. Of the eight Oscars given for acting, Clint Eastwood directed four of the performances. No one has ever done that before."

All too soon it was a hour later and the Vroman's people were giving Roger the "hairy eyeball." "This is a retail establishment," said Roger taking note of the looks being directed his way, "so I guess we ought to get to signing some books." Which he did. I was the fifth person in line and wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Another Question of Talent

You may be thinking, "What the hell is that?" Or perhaps, you are "in the know," one of the more discerning people traveling the World Wide Web. You were not born yesterday. You can't be fooled and you will accept no substitutes. In short, you recognize great egg carton Christmas decorations when you see them.

I mean, I think the quality of the item to my left just goes without saying. It shows what a six-year old can do with an egg carton, cotton, glue and his mother's bottle of red fingernail polish.

The child who made this was obviously brilliant. You may be wondering, what happened to such raw talent, what other great pieces of art has this masterful craftsman created, and more importantly, where can I buy them for my own private collection?

Like, "What is the meaning of life?" some questions were never meant to be answered. This is not one of those types of questions. I, your humble blogger, am the sole creator of this magnificent specimen of egg carton crafts.

OK, enough fun and games. The Christmas tree comes down tonight and this little guy goes back into one of the big plastic containers and goes back up into the garage rafters tonight. I just thought I'd share him before he went away for another eleven and a half months.

A Holiday Question

Is "Merry Kiss-My-Ass" an acceptable substitute when addressing right-wing windbags?

Yes In Deed!

No unpunished deed goes good.

Or something like that.

Is this a Wedding or a Wake?

Saw Rob Reiner's Rumor Has It... this week and really enjoyed the film. Jennifer Aniston plays a woman returning to her family home in Pasadena for the wedding of her sister. During the proceedings she discovers that her family was the basis for the book and the film The Graduate. Her long dead mother was Elaine Robinson, her grandmother (played wonderfully by Shirley MacLaine) was Mrs. Robinson and scoundrel Beau Burroughs (played by Kevin Costner) was Dustin Hoffman's Benjamin Braddock. I laughed and had a great time and what else is a comedy supposed to do? You should see it.

But, thats not what I'm here to talk about. What I wanted to talk about is Six Feet Under, the recently departed HBO show that held me spellbound for five wonderful seasons and how Rumor Has It... was a little bit of SFU heaven as three actors from Six Feet Under have parts in Rumor Has It...

The terrific Richard Jenkins has the largest and meatiest part in Rumor Has It...playing Earl Huttinger, the father of Aniston's Sarah Huttinger. In Six Feet Under the death of Jenkins' Nathaniel Fisher, family patriarch, is the catalyst that brings the Fisher family back together and begins their five year ordeal.

Sarah's bridal sister Annie is played by the beautiful Mena Suvari who spent the fifth season of Six Feet Under attempting to seduce Fisher daughter Claire into a lesbian relationship as the free spirited Edie.

The always wonderful Kathy Bates has an uncredited part in Rumor Has It... playing Sarah's trippy aunt who lets the cat out of the bag regarding the Sarah's mother and Beau. Bates played Ruth Fisher's friend Bettina for the last three or four seasons of Six Feet Under.

All in all, it felt like a Six Feet Under reunion and there is nothing wrong with that!

A Question of Talent or Taste?

So I'm looking at the NY Times Best Seller List this week and once again I am astounded by what book is on top. It's Mary, Mary by James Patterson and that just floors me.

I've only read one James Patterson book, Honeymoon which suckered me in with its designation as the 2005 International Thriller of the Year, whatever that means. I found it to be one of the worst written books I have ever read. A vapid, empty book, full of unbelievable characters spouting some of the tritest dialog I have read in years. I would read some of it out loud to my wife and we would both burst out laughing. From inept plotting to dull, lifeless characters to incredibly heat-less sex scenes this book had it all. It is a shamefully bad book.

So my question is, was Honeymoon an aberration, or is this guy a really poor excuse for a writer, and, if it is the later, why does anyone buy his books?

The Weird Trend Continues!

So tonight my wife wanted to see a Christmas movie. Well, we've seen most of them already. After 100 viewings of the outrageous National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation or a dozen viewings of the very good Elf, or five or six viewings of A Christmas Story, you're ready for something new. So I checked Video On Demand and there was Bad Santa, a film we had never seen (We were out of the country on a two and a half week cruise to Hawaii in 2003 when Bad Santa was in the theaters).

So Bad Santa it is. About halfway through the film Bernie Mac visits a prison in search of the owner of the car that bad Santa Billy Bob Thornton is driving (If you haven't seen the film, it's a long story). In the prison he meets the Father of "the Kid" at whose house Billy Bob is staying. It takes me a few seconds, but this guy I recognize. Not so much by how he looks as by how he sounds.

And it's another Star Trek connection. In this case the ever forgettable Star Trek Voyager. I couldn't remember his name, but I hadn't forgotten his character: Neelix. A quick look on IMDb refreshed my memory and brought me to his name: Ethan Phillips. He looked a little different back in his Voyager days.

It's been a while since I saw an episode of Voyager, but I recall liking the Neelix character at first and then getting real, real tired of him. But by that time I was tired of the whole crew. The show never rang true for me.

So it seems like I see a Star Trek cast member in just about everything I watch these days. Strange trend.

Him I Know!

My wife and I saw the exceptional Syriana last night, George Clooney, Matt Damon, Jeffrey Wright, Chris Cooper, et al were wonderful. The film is a tough look at the middle east and America's intrusion there. It's a film about oil, big oil and Islam and the meddling in the affairs of others by the United States. It's a powerful film, hard to look at sometimes but beautifully filmed. You should see it.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to talk about Alexander Siddig. That's him to the left with Matt Damon. Alexander plays Prince Nasir Al-Subaai, the son of the Emir of an unnamed middle eastern country. He has hopes and dreams for his country, of building a better place for his people, a place that will be able to survive the furture when the oil is gone and the wealth no long flows from the ground into the contries coffers. I found him striking and despite how far down the list of credits his name appears, I found him to be the heart of the film. He was wonderful... and familiar.

I racked my brain, but could not think of where I had seen him before. Well, once again, twice in a week it was Star Trek. In this case it was Star Trek Deep Space 9 as Alexander Siddig is also known as Siddig El Fadil who was known for seven years as Lt. Julian Bashir, M.D. Another great mystery solved.

Yeah, I knew him!

Season's Greetings and Happy Holidays!

This is the first year of my long life that I am refusing to say Merry Christmas. These right-wing Republican nimrods can shove "Merry Christmas" right up their tight behinds.

Had they not made a bogus issue out of it I would never of had a problem. But they have and now I do. Once the holidays are over and this distraction will no longer work, you can be sure that they will go back to talking about missing white girls in Aruba, anything other than how crappy the country is going under Bush.

Hey, I Didn't Know Her!

At least once or twice a year one of the cable stations runs a whole weekend of James Bond films. I enjoy watching Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan do their best to give life to Ian Fleming's master spy. I never really liked Roger Moore as Bond, he played every film with the same flippant note; it was all a big joke and he knew it and the way he acted he made sure you knew it. I don't know if this was Moore's decision to play the part this way or not, but it ruined those pictures for me. It wasn't James Bond, it was the Saint.

The first Bond film I saw at the theater, and I was pretty young at the time, was the second film, From Russia, With Love. I remember three things vividly about my first James Bond experience: 1) The opening sequence where Bond is stalked and killed (only we find out that it was not Bond but a training mission for some Russian spies). 2) Robert Shaw's tougher than nails bad guy, Grant, and 3) the evil Rosa Klebb with the poison-tipped knife in the toe of her shoe.

But that's not what I'm here to talk to you about (well, OK, partly that's what I'm here to talk to you about, but not soley). I'm here to talk about how From Russia With Love connects to the Burt Reynolds/Kris Khristofferson film Semi-Tough and how both of them connect to the Bobby Darin hit song, Mac the Knife.

You can learn a lot about the song, Mac the Knife if you search the Internet. For example...

"The lyrics are Marc Blitzstein's. They are a translation of the original lyrics by the great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and are from Brecht and Kurt Weill's socially-significant theatre piece, "Die Dreigroschenoper," or "The Threepenny Opera," as we know it. The play, which was basically a German adaptation of John Gay's "The Begger's Opera," was one of the factors that got the two collaborators run out of Berlin on the proverbial rail. Hitler was not pleased--so Brecht and Weill both fled the country and ended up in America, Weill in New York and Brecht in California (where he wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays.) Weill stayed in the U.S. and had a number of Broadway hits, most notably "Knickerbocker Holiday" (which includes the beautiful "September Song"). He died in NY sometime during the '60s, I think. In 1951, Brecht, who was a Communist of sorts, ran afoul of the infamous House Un-American activities Committee. After a rather rough and rude questioning, he saw the handwriting on the wall and moved back to Germany, settling in East Berlin, where the great master of "epic theatre" died in 1956."

Interesting but I know what you're thinking, "What has that got to do with From Russia With Love or Semi-Tough?" Good question and I'm getting to it, I swear!

A few months ago I Tivoed Semi-Tough, a film which I had not seen in years but which I remembered did a hilarious skewering of Werner Erhard's est Training. Anyway, I'm watching Semi-Tough and at one point Burt Reynolds' character goes to get "Pelfed," the latest new age trend. Getting "Pelfed" consisted of being sadisticly beaten by masseuse Clara Pelf, a scrawny little old lady. It was a funny scene, but what really caught my attention was the old woman playing Pelf; it was Rosa Klebb from From Russia With Love (see, the first connection!).

I recognized the face, but didn't know the name. When the film ended I carefully scanned the credits and there it was: Clare Pelf -- Lotte Lenya. Huh? I couldn't have read that right! Back up the TiVo and it still says: Clare Pelf -- Lotte Lenya. But isn't that the name of a character from the song Mac the Knife?

Doesn't it go somethng like...

There's a tugboat, down by the river dontcha know
Where a cement bag's just a'drooppin' on down
Oh, that cement is just, it's there for the weight, dear
Five'll get ya ten old Macky's back in town
Now d'ja hear 'bout Louie Miller? He disappeared, babe
After drawin' out all his hard-earned cash
And now MacHeath spends just like a sailor
Could it be our boy's done somethin' rash?

Now Jenny Diver, ho, ho, yeah, Sukey Tawdry
Ooh, Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown
Oh, the line forms on the right, babe
Now that Macky's back in town

I said Jenny Diver, whoa, Sukey Tawdry
Look out to Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown
Yes, that line forms on the right, babe
Now that Macky's back in town.....

Look out, old Macky's back!!

Well, I had to look this one up and, yep, it's her. The "Lotte Lenya" whose name appears late in the song is, in fact, the actress who appeared in From Russia With Love and Semi-Tough -- she was an Austrian-born singer and actress with a lucrative career in the years between the world wars, and on Broadway following WW II. She was also Mrs. Kurt Weill. For the opening of The Threepenny Opera, Weill wrote The Ballad of Mack the Knife as a part for Lenya the night before the premeire. The Bobby Darin version of the song changed the name of one of the characters from Polly Peachum to Lotte Lenya as a tribute to her career.

And that is how I get from Semi-Tough to From Russia With Love to Mac the Knife.

Hey, I Know Her!

A week or so ago AMC was having its "King for a Day" festival: All Elvis All Day. I TiVoed a couple of films: Girls! Girls! Girls! and Blue Hawaii. Ends up these films have a lot in common. They are produced by the same guy (Hal B. Wallis), directed by the same guy (Norman Taurog), written by the same guy (Allen Weiss), and both take place in Hawaii. Neither are great films, though Elvis does "get down" during some of the songs in Blue Hawaii and is pretty impressive to watch. But that's not what I'm here to talk to you about. No, I want to talk about the leading actress in Girls! Girls! Girls!, one Laurel Goodwin.

In Girls! Girls! Girls! she's billed as "Introducing Laurel Goodwin" and IMDb verifies that GGG was indeed her first film, of which she only made six. As I watched I was struck by her sweet perkiness and, I have to admit, her wonderful rear. Every time she turned her back to the camera I stood up and took notice (OK, maybe I didn't really stand up and take notice, but I did hit the "slo mo" button on my TiVo). She was the highlight of the film for me, which is saying a lot about a film that also stars Stella Stevens.

Yep, Laurel Goodwin: cute, perky, nice ass and something else... there was something else... she seemed vaguely familiar. The more I watched the more familiar she became. I knew I had seen her somewhere before... but where? Maybe, I thought, it was a western. After all, she had that sweet "rancher's daughter" face and a figure that would have looked great all trussed up in those constricting dresses the women inevitably wore in most westerns. That seemed about right... but it was wrong. I didn't remember Laurel Goodwin from a western, well, unless you remember that Star Trek was pitched to Paramount as Wagon Train in space.

Laurel Goodwin played Yeoman J.M. Colt in Star Trek:The Cage the original pilot to the Star Trek series. The Cage footage was later used in the Star Trek two-parter, The Menagerie, where footage from the Cage was presented as alien recordings of a previous voyage of the USS Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike.

When I saw the entry in Laurel's IMDb listing I remembered her like I saw the episode yesterday, not 20 or so years ago. As a kid I thought she was just cute as a button and wished she had been one of the cast members to make it to the series, but such was not to be. Laurel only made one other film after the Star Trek pilot. Seems a shame to me.

A little more snooping on the web located this biography of Laurel at a Star Trek site.

Like I said, "Hey, I know her!"

Getting It Right

After totally screwing it up last year, Time Magazine got it right this year.

Time Persons of the Year

Christmas Question

Christmas Question

If I spend more money shipping the gift than I spent on the gift, did I spend too little on the gift, or did I ship it too late?

Another Question

Is there anyone left who doesn't know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that George W. Bush is the most inept person to ever darken the White House towels?

A Question of Age

The older I get the longer it takes me to recover from a night of little sleep. Problems kept me up most of Sunday night and even after sleeping normally since then I'm still dragging my ass around.

A Question of Numbers

Q: How many Bush Administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None. There is nothing wrong with the light bulb; its conditions are improving every day. Any reports of its lack of incandescence are delusional spin from the liberal media. That light bulb has served honorably, and anything you say undermines the lighting effect. Why do you hate illumination?

I Cried In Public

I cried in public recently. It was somewhat embarrassing, but I didn't care. My wife noticed, but said nothing. It was one of those good cries, not loud and blubbery, just soft and satisfying. It was a cry of joy, of my heart exploding, full of pure pleasure; something welling up inside me that could not be contained by the physical. It snuck up on me as I gazed at a painting, a Monet. I was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art viewing part of the Duncan Phillips collection and the painting was The Road to Vétheuil, painted by Monet in 1879. It's not the most famous painting in the collection, but it was the one that made my heart soar. The longer I looked at it, the more glorious it seemed. The audio tour headset I wore said something about Monet trying to paint light itself. The attached photo does not come even close to capturing the glorious explosion of color and light that this canvas posesses, but it is the best I could find...

Not Really a Beatle Question

As John Lennon said, "Picture yourself in a boat on a river..." Only, you're in a war zone and people are shooting at you. Now who do you want in that boat with you? A guy who will pull your ass out of the water if you fall in? Or a guy who tried everything in his and his daddy's power to see that he never found himself "in a boat on a river?" Pretty simple choice. Now, "picture your country in a boat on a river..."