Quite A Week
So what could be a more intriguing insider story this week than Nikki Finke being hired for large dollars by the next wannabe Gawker? The Academy moves to 10 Best Pictures. Top Farrah Fawcett, dead and documented at 62? goodbye Michael Jackson. Transformers: Revenge of Another Robot Thingy That Cant Be Distinguished From The Rest opening to mega-business? Yawn. Public Enemies dissapointing many as not bad, but not enough? Yawn. Even Bruno, whose embargo seems to have held, gets outed for having a MJ moment. (The LA Film Festival – and any filmmaker with a premiere – must have suffered last night, being in Westwood in the middle of the MJ mess.)
Busy busy.
One more note about the Oscar thing. Roger Ebert does a very good job of getting the story of how this all happened. But he starts a little late in the game. Even before Bill Condon and Larry Mark were hired last year, the obsession of the Academy Board was – as it still is – saving their TV show. It is the fiscal engine that makes everything good The Academy does possible.
The most wanted thing, which was dismissed over and over and over again was to shorten the show by doing fewer categories on the main show’s air. The problem was/is that “smaller” categories board members would vote in a block to keep every category in the main show. The best that Condon & Mark could do was to create the packages of awards with one presented keeping them together in a tight block during the show. But the show still ended up running over 3 hours and slightly past the 3:13 target. Part of the fill were the packages of genres of film… and these ran even as other packages were cut from air.
The new 10 BP law will play out as it does. No one knows what the precise outcome will be… more genre… more indie… more art… docs… foreign. But we do know that the show is now a little longer, not shorter. And we do know that there are still branches pushing for new awards.
The Academy still faces the Old to New Media challenge. Like others, they have to either make strong leaps or they will end up left behind. The 10 was a very interesting start.
I skipped out on the Midnight Cowboy screening yesterday, which was AT UCLA, because I didn’t want to deal with the turmoil.
OK, this may be a naive question, but: Isn’t it to the network’s advantage for the Oscarcast to run long? I mean, the longer it runs, the more commercials can be aired — right? Or am I missing something? Sure, I know that a year-by-year erosion in viewership is bad. But on a single evening, wouldn’t ABC (or whatever network airs the show) benefit from having 10-20 more minutes of time in which to stuff ads? I’m not trying to be funny here — I’m sincerely curious.
QUITE A WEEK, LEX STYLE!
Monday: Worked 11 hours, all the takeout places were closed at midnight, ate cereal, got drunk.
Tuesday: Worked 11 hours, all the takeout places were closed at midnight, ate two-year expired canned tuna, got drunk.
Wednesday: Saw T2, got a boner, worked 11 hours, ate nothing, got drunk.
Thursday: Probably the same shit. Made it the entire day without speaking to a single other human being.
Friday: Who fucking cares. Life sucks.
Next week (if I don’t kill myself tonight):
THE SAME FUCKING THING.
Must be nice to have interesting shit happen to you or friends who are interested in you.
Joe: And the less people who watch, therefore the less $$ made on the ads.
I had no problem whatsoever getting to Westwood from Hollywood yesterday, at about 6 pm.
Where’s Ebert’s article?
LexG: OK, sport, look: E-mail me, and I will give you my cell phone number, and you can call me and we can talk on days like Thursday. And if I don’t answer, leave a voice mail message, and I swear on my mother’s grave — well, OK, her crypt — I’ll call back ASAP.
@Joe: ABC sells a fixed amount of commercial time on the Oscar telecast. If a 3-hour show runs 3 1/2 hours that’s the Academy’s problem.
So no advertiser signs a deal where they agree that, if the show runs long, they’ll pay for another ad placement?
It seems like, if they did that, then the show got run deliberately long and the advertisers would be paying big bucks for ads running at 1am EST.
I mean, ‘the show would run deliberately long’. Yeesh.
Lex, anytime you want to get a drink, you still have an open invitation from me. Of course, your apparently bizarro 2pm-1am working schedule might hamper that. Good thing you still have that job you hate!
Lex,
I have been where you are with a job I hated with shite hours. I do know what that is like. It is soul sucking. I get that.
Are you at least looking for other work? I know it is rough but when I was at my lowest I used every waking moment to find another gig…even if it meant using the computers at the place I hated so much and looking over my shoulder (maybe that’s how I became paranoid š
You – can – get out of it. What is it that you would like to do and what are you doing now? I think I read once that you work in a dubbing house. I have done that…I get the frustration and monotony. I know the feeling of looking at a patch bay all day.
Is there at the very least another place in LA you can look into where you have reasonable hours?
Yes there are a couple other jobs I want:
1) ACTOR.
2) FILMMAKER.
3) MEGAN FOX’S MASSEUSE.
Everything else is bullshit.
Joe: The Oscar show is laid out in, usually, twelve acts, with commercial breaks between the acts. A certain number of ads are sold for each break. If the show runs long, ABC doesn’t add additional breaks — it just means there’s more time between the ads that have already been sold.
It’s not like an overtime baseball or football game, where suddenly you have additional breaks that need to be filled with ads.
Lex,
Hmmmmmm. Still wondering how much of you is real and how much is an act.
The 1 presenter doing 3 awards was excellent.
The tributes thing can’t happen every year – clips are essential anyway and dopn’t take any longer (and may even be shorter.) The genre shit was shit so could be scrapped completely. Get rid of Best Song and Best Animated Feature and you’re under 3 hours.
Yawn? Really? What a douche maroo this post makes you out to be, and explains the other members of this blog all so well.
Lex doesn’t want a better life. If he did he’d have nothing to complain about and his entire shtick would be pointless.
Get over it and stop complaining about your job that surely isn’t as bad as you say (or you really would be trying to find a new one – no excuses) or your inability to fuck models since even if you managed to bed one you’d probably be clueless as to what to actually do.
Get rid of the fuckin’ montages from the Oscar show. NOBODY – and I mean NOBODY – cares.
Here’s a thought: why not start the damn show 60 or even 30 minutes earlier? Earlier start means an earlier end, and apart from the host’s monologue, nothing much happens early anyway.
“Yes there are a couple other jobs I want:
1) ACTOR.”
And yet when I invited you to actually be in a movie, you declined, worried that you wouldn’t seem cool in person.
Of course, if this is all an act, then you certainly have talent.
Lex suffers from chronic depression. It’s not his fault. What is his fault is his utter refusal to seek out the help that he needs, in terms of medication/therapy/whatever. There was a point a few months back when he said that he was actually taking acting classes, and I was amazed – Lex was actually taking action!. And then he stopped. Readers here have been more than generous in giving him advice, suggestions, support. He just refuses to take it.
This has nothing to do with anything else on this thread, but: Take a look at the TV schedule for tonight. I know that the networks are simply burning off episodes of cancelled TV shows, but note that there are ORIGINAL episodes of Kings, Harper’s Island and Eli Stone airing tonight. That’s right: Three ORIGINAL episodes of scripted dramatic series, airing on a Saturday night. Never mind that it’s summer: When was the last time that happened at ANY time in recent years?
Right on, Joe. Each of those shows had a few million viewers who were invested in them and would be glad to see them play out. Plus, why let the stuff rot on the shelf when they can air it and get at least some of their costs back?
wow. I was in the wilderness (really) for a few days on a boat and I hear Michael Jackson died when I got back today, I thought it was a practical joke at first. There’s a good BBC2 show on him right now…maybe y’all in the US can get it on satellite.
Just what is the Academy Board “saving their show” for?
It is a rewards program for showbiz people and they should leave the small awards in…they deserve their minute in the lights. Keep it in and so what about the long-running time.
I liked it with Jackman.
Cadavra: That’s something I’ve never been able to figure out — why a network would refuse to air any completed episodes of a cancelled series. I mean, OK, just burn them off on Saturday nights. But is there something I’m missing here? Like, they don’t have to pay as much for an episode that is never broadcast? Or do the producers figure they’ll be able to hype compilation DVD sales if they can advertise “Contains episdoes never shown on TV”?
And goddammit: Where are my complete-season DVDs of Raines and Peacemakers? I see they put out the Law & Order: Trial By Jury DVD, so what’s the hold up?
I assume it’s a numbers game. If a CSI or L&O rerun delivers better ratings than a first-run ep of a long-gone series…