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Three Eras of Preservation and the Scourge of Magnetic Tape

In the Modern Age of Entertainment, we have — so far — sustained Three Distinct Eras of performance preservation. The First Era was Film.  The Second Era was Magnetic Tape. The Third, and current, Era is Digital. The most cursed of all the Eras, is the misbegotten second — Magnetic Audiotape and Videotape — where performances were not actually preserved, they were only perpetuated to die!

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Beware of Social Proofing for Verified Accounts on Facebook and Twitter

If you’re an author, or a publisher, or if you work in the entertainment field, getting your social media accounts Verified — or “socially proofed” for a condescending spin on a ridiculous social media marketing term — is important because Verification gives you status on the social networks and it provides you private avenues of access that regular accounts do not accord.

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Using Online Charity Auctions to Buydown Broken Dreams

In my work as a script doctor at ScriptProfessor.com — I meet a lot of people with varying talent — the saddest stories belong to the abandoned and the broken-hearted, those who wished upon a star and fell back to earth without touching the moon, and melted.  Showbiz tends to call those burnt souls “star fuckers” because they’ll do anything and everything to be noticed — let alone produced — while the kinder among us tend to label them “fame whores.” I just choose to try to have empathy for their plight as I work with them, but there’s also a certain queasiness involved as one feels like a dancing minstrel playing a part for money that will never be seen nor heard — all in the discriminatory want to try to help make someone’s script better for a fee.

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Donny vs. Derrick: Big Brother 16 Brands Your Morality

It’s that time of year again — to lament the downfall and the displeasure in how the most recent incarnation of CBS’ Big Brother “reality” television show is, once again, unfolding before us — and the thing that bites me today is the sort of person CBS lures onto the show to live an exposed life 24/7 for 90 days.

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What Makes a Neighborhood? Who Creates a City?

Way back in 2001, I interviewed Tass Michos — Director of Photography for the “Death to Smoochy” movie starring Edward Norton and Robin Williams — for eyepiece magazine, the official publication of the Guild of British Camera Technicians; and while the interview didn’t start off well, we did meet at the fancied Union Square Cafe for our power lunch, and the best part of the meeting was that the Guild was picking up the tab for what turned out to be a discomforting meal in more ways than one.

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Twitter Really Wants to Be Your TV

Twitter wants to be your TV.  Sure, we know Twitter doesn’t broadcast events — yet — and so on its way into warming up the internet boob tubes, Twitter is partnering with current television shows to bombard you with on screen commentary from Twitter users.  I find the whole process messy, embarrassing and annoying.

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Why Does Justin Bieber Want to Be a Thug?

Justin Bieber has been behaving badly lately, and we are left to imagine what’s gone wrong with the teenaged heartthrob, and why he’s so precipitously falling off the cliff of life so willfully at the peak of his fame:

Justin Bieber hit speeds of 136 miles an hour in his rented Lambo just hours before his arrest …

We’ve now obtained the FULL GPS speed readout for the evening in question — not just the period immediately surrounding the arrest.

Check it out. The GPS map corresponds to the readout. At 1:23 AM Justin was on the Julia Tuttle Causeway in Miami Beach, heading toward the nightclub. He was clocked at 108 MPH and within a minute he accelerated to 136 MPH.

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Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dylan Farrow and the Consequence of Fame

There were two remarkable, maddening, things that happened over the weekend. Both events were related to fame and the failure of human consequence against the living, but the terms of the punishments were different: Both eternal, but one forever ended.

On Saturday, we read in the New York Times about the harrowing child abuse Dylan Farrow suffered at the hands of her infamous father, writer, director, actor and movie producer, Woody Allen.

On Sunday, we learned of the early death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman who, at age 46, lived up to his earlier prescience about fame and fortune leading to a quick Hollywood death.  He made his point real in New York City with a needle jabbed in the arm of his corpse.

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Kanye West Waves the Queer Flag

Kanye West is one of our most unfortunate and disingenuous fame whores — worse even than his brittle fiancé and Baby Mama, Kim Kardashian — and he’s recently been conveniently “caught” wearing, gasp this, a “Confederate Flag” as if he were a modern redneck KKK member from the Deep South, even though he’s just a regular Black man from Chicago!

Oh, the outrage!

Oh, that Kanye!

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