Ink Stained Wretch Fight Tonight!!!
An interesting kind of double team from Traditional Media, fighting for the value of the internet.
First, there is Cathy Seipp in the L.A. Times, writing in an Op-Ed piece titled,
April 19, 2024
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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?
So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.
And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.
There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.
I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.
So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.
But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”
My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher
“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.
~ David Simon
Traditional Media must never disappear. New Media would be forced to find something else to talk about.
We can do this all over again in a hundred years when Digital Media is complaining about telepathy chips inserted into peoples’ heads and how it’s just going to lead to chaos.
Schickel is dead wrong. The internet has been a great force for the resurrection of history and context in public discourse. Everything can be googled and everything can be hyperlinked. Blogs face almost constant critique from their commentaries which are then given unlimited space like this on the same blog! If there’s any medium that strives to take away history and context, it’s TV…screaming talking heads who spout rhetoric without much recourse…except the Daily Show.
Regardless of his swipe at bloggers, Schickel’s review of the Giddins book really makes me look forward to reading it. I have really tried to follow Giddins’ work since I read the first installment of his two-part biography of Bing Crosby but didn’t know that this book was being published.
What Schickel seems to forget is that the majority of moviegoers are “history-free and sensibility-deprived”. To see the disconnect between movie critics and movie audiences, one has to look no further than the record smashing Dead Man’s Chest and realize that it has a Metacritic rating of 53.
While there is a place for cinephiles and reviews and essays addressing those who have the “history and sensibility”, it’s not in the mainstream media, either print or electronic. Roger Ebert perfected the formula of hitting both audiences – without talking down to either of them – a long time ago, but no one since has come close.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought that when Roger Ebert “perfected” the ability to publicly engage with film in an accessible manner that didn’t negate his intellectual discipline, nobody had the option of googling around to find out if a movie was any good. Online junket-hoppers now have the opportunity to use a major public venue that is shared by more qualified film journalists, even those who only write in print (since most of their stuff goes online now anyway). So doesn’t this make the people who want to go beyond the crass notion of being a publicist’s lackey just work a lot harder to prove their worth? Isn’t that a good thing? And won’t all the cranky old timers either get over it or just adapt to the process of natural selection? Army Archerd sorta has a blog, you know. At the very least, it’s a more valiant effort than Schickel has made.