The untimely death of child actress Erin Moran over the weekend — at age 56, her body was discovered in an Indiana trailer park — leaves an abyss in each of us even though we may not recognize the depth, and the severity, of the hole. For those of us of a certain age, Erin Moran, will always be Joanie — the spunky, spicy, daughter on the first season of Happy Days.
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.
Continue reading → Using Online Charity Auctions to Buydown Broken Dreams
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.
Continue reading → Why Does Justin Bieber Want to Be a Thug?
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.
Continue reading → Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dylan Farrow and the Consequence of Fame
How many of us live to be defined by our possessions? How many of us find value only in what we have achieved and won and coveted? I wrote about this nagging issue of human governance on November 22, 2006 — “Worthy of History: Only Expensive Things Survive” —
The perversion of the historical accuracy of how our ancestors lived, and how we currently live, is created by preserving only expensive possessions — tokens, icons, valuables – and in the purposeful construction of indestructible architectural monuments used by the privileged few.
History is skewed by this preservation technique because it only pretends to tell future generations how people actually lived. When we visit museums we are only seeing what the powerful majority of the culture of that time deemed important enough to save and pass down.
We only get to know what they thought was worth saving and inevitably those things are the expensive, the pretty, the unique and the tokens of the wealthy. Even pioneer and Native American museum dioramas are idealized with hardy items and the most beautiful things. The ordinary is forsaken for the power of the inherent value in the preservation of the perceived best.
Continue reading → Cracking the Fiery Core: We are Not What We Have
In today’s New York Times, Angelina Jolie shares the story of her decision to have a double mastectomy after her BRCA1 and BRCA2 tests came back with bad news:
My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.
As a red-blooded American boy back in 1998, I remember when Angelina Jolie set the world afire in her debut as Gia, the star-crossed SuperModel. The hallmark of Angelina’s performance was the baring of her beautiful and natural breasts that became their own phenomenal meme in the lives of all young men long before there was an active internet. The Google now preserves that original beautiful and naturalistic naked memory — and here’s the start of the stunner that became the star:
Continue reading → Bidding Farewell to Angelina Jolie’s Beautiful Breasts
Dick Clark died yesterday, and the news of his passing is covered in the disingenuous and condescending lede — “Oldest Living Teenager is Dead at 82 from a Heart Attack” — and I just stand there and why why the lamestream media have to live up to their cloying, and earned, nickname every single day.
On January 2, 2006, I wrote about Dick Clark in Urban Semiotic — Dick Clark Human Speech — and his amazing comeback from a stroke that adversely affected his speech:
We’re imperfect and sometimes human speech is breezy and sometimes you have to struggle to understand what is being spoken. There is no doubt, however, that Dick Clark was brave and daring to make such a bold return to television — brave and daring and bold are also hallmarks of Clark’s career — and the lesson many of us now know is if Dick Clark can risk his legacy, reputation and quality-of-life to show us just how devastating a stroke can be to a personality, a family and a man, then we’re all better off for having him triumphantly return to network television to stare down Death with us live on the air.
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