As I expected, he’s a thoughtful and well-spoken guy. I won’t quote the letter in full but I will give you this, because it’s important.

i think you should include the REASON why we don’t allow our show to be filmed:  we don’t own the synch rights to the songs we perform, so we do not have the right to be filmed performing them.  if someone films us doing so, we get held responsible and liable.

Don’t think this is a minor point. The music industry has sued a 12 year old girl, an eighty year old woman and a laser-printer in a campus office for downloading music illegally. Cheese has every right to protect his livelihood.

He also adds this:

i didn’t “spit a glass of water” out into the audience.  This implies that a full glass of water was sprayed, which it was not.

Quite so. It was about the same amount of liquid in a typical spit take (see the work of Danny Thomas or John Ritter for reference) which is roughly half a swallow. Point taken, sir.

He also adds that he does the camera confiscating thing at a lot of his shows, whenever someone is watching him through a device instead of just, you know, watching him. He says he’s never broken a camera or damaged a cellphone in the five years he’s been doing the act. And contrary to what I’ve read around the ‘net, he didn’t wreck any hardware the night I was there. I was pretty close, and I’d have heard the crunching.

As a side note, Cheese also pointed out that I left out the word “like” in my previous entry, as in “a voice LIKE Steve Lawrence.” I have corrected this. One other thing I left out because it simply wasn’t apropos: the guy does an eerily accurate impression of Bjork. Seriously, it’s creepy. Check him out live sometime. But for God’s sake, remember that the only round glass thing between you and him should be a highball tumbler.

-daniel k.

It does something no Pixar film has yet done: mix live-action inserts into the realistically animated scenes. WALL-E, the incredibly cute robotic protagonist of the piece, has a job compacting garbage in the ruins of an abandoned city and stacking the trash cubes into immense towers. He spends his nights obsessively watching an ancient VHS tape of Hello Dolly! (d. Gene Kelly, 1969). And not a CG-imitation version: the real thing, an actual clip of Michael Crawford and Marianne McAndrew (and interestingly, not Barbra Streisand: cheaper appearance residual payments!). Fred Willard also makes a sly on-camera cameo as an ineffectual George W. Bush type. The combination of live action, incredibly vivid computer animation and visual design assisted by Roger Deakins (The Coen Brothers’ favored DP) has resulted in a film that is at times breathtakingly beautiful and cinematic.

The first half of the story is stark and simple, a tale of a lonely robot meeting another one in a desolate cityscape. The second half takes place in a humongous spaceship in which humanity has escaped their polluted, used-up home planet. And as this half develops, I recognized a strangely familiar premise being presented.

WALL-E takes place 700 years in the future. Between now and this time, a large Costco or Wal-Mart like corporation called Buy-N-Large takes over everything everywhere. It’s hyper-consumerist ways eventually produce so much garbage, pollution and environmental degradation that its customers (that is, the human race) are ferried off-planet, leaving an army of robots behind to clean up. Meanwhile, the people on the ship have evolved into the ultimate consumers: Sessile blobs who cannot move off their floating couches, constantly staring at a video screen which floats in front of their faces, unaware of their very surroundings.

The Mike Judge film Idiocracy (2006: I reviewed it here a few months ago) painted an almost identical dystopian scenario three years ago (it got delayed a year in release). In the future of Idiocracy the story actually gets into gear when the protagonist’s suspended-animation casket is delivered via an avalanche from an immense tower of trash. There are more companies in existence in this universe than in WALL-E’s, but a centerpiece location is a gigantic Costco, so vast it stretches off into the horizon and so cavernous crashed planes stick out of it. Brawndo, a sports-drink manufacturer, also figures into the plot, as a corporation so large they bought the FDA and basically replaced all sources of drinkable water with its beverage.

Future humans are basically represented the same way in both films: hyper-consumers who have become hopelessly dependent on the machines that keep them alive. And the point of depicting them as such is the same in both films: these pampered, infantile, soft people are obviously us. These two films look so much alike in some scenes they could conceivably be the same storyline. Idiocracy is part 1, before the Earth is evacuated: WALL-E is part 2, after we’ve taken off for space.

But there are differences, mostly in the attitude of the filmmakers. Mike Judge is cynical: We are a stupid, doomed race, and the efforts of the relatively smart, present-day hero to save humanity only delays our inevitable extinction. The folks at Pixar believe people are basically good and kinda smart, and the creative efforts of robots and humans alike are a constant source of hope.

Legend has it WALL-E is the final project generated at a single idea session at Pixar, one that also generated Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. No doubt that may be so, but the details look a lot like something from a 3-year-old failed satire.

–Skot C.

In other words: The strike is starting to do what it promised to do– that is, affect everyone, even you.

The labor action seems to have no end in sight, either. The more recent DGA negotiations are proving more ominous than hopeful. So expect television to become worse. Movies can hold out a bit longer, but if this goes on for another eleven weeks the Christmas movie season will start to thin out. If, God forbid, the writers hold out for six months… Let’s just say you’d better develop a taste for Canadian cinema and zero-budget indies.

Almost every Guild member, save those lucky enough to fall under side deals, are gamely sticking it out. Good on ‘em. But have you ever wonder how this affects NON-Guild writers?

I sure have.

See, me and my writing partner John have been toiling away on a screenplay for just about two years. Yeah, that’s right, I said TWO YEARS. Twelve complete drafts. I have a storage box in my office I toss finished drafts and outlines into: It’s full. A rough estimate tells me there are about 4000 printed pages in there. Still, most studio people I told this to didn’t even flinch at the fact we’re on the thirteenth draft. Most spec scripts worth buying are only considered well-honed after ten drafts. And if we were writing it full-time, rather than evenings and weekends, we’d have been at D13 sixteen months ago.

(And to anticipate your next question: NO, I’m not gonna tell you what the script is about. It’s just too darn cool to share right now. I’m not being egotistical: we have LA people who think it’s cool too, and are waiting to read it if we ever finish it. So I’ll describe it as a commercially viable feature-film manuscript that has killed every time we pitched it.)

We’re steadily getting to the point when the thirteenth draft will be final– and the time will be nigh to make this enormous creative investment pay off. But… There’s this Writer’s Guild strike going right now. What to do?

The WGAw Strike Rules are long and exhaustive and cover all aspects of the profession of media writing. But most of the rules specifically apply to Guild MEMBERS. John and I are not WGAw members. We’re the very definition of Hollywood outsiders: Some serious connections, but we both live in the Bay Area and only work peripherally in show business.

How to proceed? The very last section of the strike rules– Directive 13, as it turns out– Addresses schmoes in our position, and then only barely.

13. Rules pertaining to non members

The Guild does not have the authority to discipline non members for strike breaking and/or scab writing. However, the Guild can and will bar that writer from future Guild membership.

This policy has been strictly enforced in the past and has resulted in convincing many would be strike breakers to refrain from seriously harming the Guild and its members during a strike. Therefore, it is important for you to report to the Guild the name of any non member whom you believe has performed any writing services for a struck company and as much information as possible about the non member’s services.

So the threat is: Break the strike, Mr. Nobody, and you’ll never take a lunch meeting in this town again. But doesn’t “strike breaking” or “scab writing” refer to purposefully displacing a striking writer? The Strike Rules are addressed to Guild members, not the public: Directive 13 seems to be in place to bolster the ranks. It also seems to address the protection of higher-profile, writing-staff, weekly paycheck Guild work. I suppose one could interpret the action of trying to sell a spec as vying for an opportunity that a Guild writer is normally entitled to. But if so, that doesn’t also sound like old-fashioned patent entitlement, one that favors membership over literary merit?

At our outsider/spec script level, the prudent moves is to get the story optioned– that is, agree to give a person or company agency to solicit the property for a fixed amount and period of time. The person or entity we’d be optioning to are almost certainly NOT going to be an AMPTP signatory, so this transaction cannot conceivably violate any WGAw strike rule. But optioning just transfers the problem: The option-holder is also prevented by Directive 13 from selling our script to a struck studio. If we are hoping for any decent measure of success, this means we’re effectively stalemated.

Then again, it’s not like we’ve been reduced to sitting on our hands and patiently waiting for the WGA labor action to end. There is still a dizzying amount of work to do to get the thirteenth draft final– more editing and line fixes. And we’re seriously considering a staged reading of the manuscript, so we can listen to real actors deliver the dialog we wrote. It’s a good way to workshop a script: Actors love it, give surprisingly good feedback, and gives us more control than being part of a peer-reading circle.

Hopefully, the end of the writer’s strike and the end of the writing process will coincide. I get the feeling that if goes on much longer than the time we have allocated to the end of the scripting process, we won’t have a WGA to worry about anymore.

–Skot C.

Very exciting news! Was a pretty big Nirvana fan back in the days. That’s not entirely true– I actually started out as a modest fan, but my desk-mate at the design firm I worked at back then was a glassy-eyed devotee, and spent every not-actually-working moment advocating his rabid fandom. I inevitably had the opportunity to listen to every release, single, bootleg, fart and burp Nirvana produced, transferred eagerly to me as newly invented MP3 files.

Needless to say, the day Kurt offed himself in April 1994 my desk-mate didn’t show up for work, causing our boss Lars to make a few rather worried calls. (Musical place, that old design firm. Our boss Lars was the producer of record for Peter Schilling’s Error in the System, and thus the 1983 international hit “Major Tom (Coming Home).”)

According to Variety, they haven’t actually nailed down every corner of this deal yet:

The producers and studio would not address whether they had locked down music rights, or the nature of the story they are trying to tell.

Still, It’s pretty far into development. Just how did Universal get this going? Compromise. Standing out in particular among the package’s populous pack of powerful, prominent and plenty proud producers (whee!) are none other than Courtney Love and Howard Weitzman, Courtney Love’s attorney.

The screenplay is to be based on “Heavier Than Heaven,” a biography by Charles Cross. It is considered a fairly definitive chronicle of Cobain’s life, mainly for Cross’ exhaustive research and the remarkable level of access he had to Kurt’s diaries. Access granted by Cobain’s widow Courtney Love.

I’m not going to say one thing or another about how this fact might shade the objectivity of the pending Cobain biopic, but I will quote a passage from Tom Sinclair’s book review of “Heavier than Heaven” posted on the EW website:

Indeed, the frequently vilified Love emerges from these pages as, if not exactly every man’s dream mate, certainly a loving wife. There’s nary a hint of the Courtney-killed-Kurt talk that swept through certain corners of the music industry a few years back. (Could it have anything to do with the exclusive access to Cobain’s unpublished diaries Cross was granted, presumably by Love? Just asking, mind you.)

I do know that control over Nirvana’s music is shared in common with Krist Novoselic*, David Grohl and Courtney Love. The acrimony between the two Nirvana members and Love is infamous: The Nirvana box set was held up for years because of it.

So do not be surprised if Universal releases a long-awaited movie about one of the greatest legends of American rock music– sans any of his actual music.

–Skot C.

*About a year ago, I was checking out a rehearsal space in Oakland for my band. As I walked down the main hallway checking out the rooms, Krist Novoselic was walking the other way. Wow. He gave me a very practiced nod: “Yeah, I know. But you’re cool, too.” Wow. He looked a lot like somebody who didn’t have to work another day in his life. Oh, and I got to see his people wheel in his bass amp stack– the same padded Ampegs he used in the In Utero videos! Wow. –s

I had the pleasure of watching a Netflix DVD loaned to me by Chris, my business partner: Matango (1963). It was known in the US as “Attack of the Mushroom People.” It scared the living crap out me when I was a wee lad watching “Chiller Diller Matinee” on Channel 44. Remarkable to see this film fresh and uncut, in 2.35:1 TohoScope, bright Fujicolor and subtitled Japanese. The Channel 44 version was the one we ALL saw as kids: A heavily edited, clumsily dubbed, 16mm pan-and-scan film-chain so washed out my recollections are in black and white.

This film was directed by Ishiro Honda, The Kaiji Eiga (Giant Monster Movie) master who directed Godzilla, Rodan and countless others. Matango is an unusual Honda film, an atmospheric horror movie with people-sized monsters.

The things that scared the piss out of me as a kid are still there: the ghastly, faceless mushroom people, the distorted laughter on the soundtrack, the air of gloom and slow death. Justifiably a cult classic.

I have heard all effective horror films play on primal phobias: violence, heights, enclosed spaces. (Daniel’s brother Ed once surmised that someone could realize a fortune if they could make a horror film exploiting the number one fear in America: Public Speaking.) Matango works as a horror flick on several levels:

• The lumbering mushroom folk, they’re pretty scary in a monster-movie sort of way.
• The fact these fungal folks were once people and the characters are going to turn into them unless they can escape plays into primal fears of loss of humanity and self.
• Finally, it captalizes on fears of germs and filth and disease. The island the principals are marooned on is lush and tropical: the abandoned ship they take up residence in is covered with mold, dry rot and fungus. They manage to clean it, but the mold soon returns. For the fastidiously clean Japanese audience the film was designed for, the creeping corruption and rot must have been harder to take then the prospect of turning into a ambulatory chantrelle.

This film was based on “The Voice in the Night,” a short story published in 1907 by William Hope Hodgson. Conversely, it has long been rumored that the rough premise of Matango was swiped for “Gilligan’s Island,” that iconic, unlikely comedy series that premiered the year after, in 1964.

Just to lay such rumors to rest: It was. “Gilligan’s Island” creator Sherwood Schwartz had a motive, opportunity and even tacit permission to do so.

The basic story common to both movie and TV show involves seven people from various walks of life on pleasure cruise, which gets caught in a storm, marooning them on a deserted tropical island (See exhibit A). Schwartz basically took the first half-hour of Matango and pitched it, adding “and then hilarity ensues!” He left off the violence, greed, lust, starvation, and death, replacing these with coconut shortwave radios and funny guest stars.

But the cast is all there: Skipper, First Mate, Professor, Chaste Young Girl, Glamorous Bombshell, Rich Guy. He made one cast change, and this is a very telling one: Instead of Mrs. Rich Guy (”Lovey” Howell), the seventh castaway in Matango is a writer. He’s the first character to steal food from the others, and the first to eat the fateful mushrooms. He’s a morally weak character who, in a flashback scene, plainly admits to plagiarism (See exhibit B: Actual subtitles from the DVD).

Puzzling evidence.

–Skot C.

P.S. What, no “Gilligan’s Island” movie? My friend Scott said it best: “Gilligan’s Island, the Movie will happen sooner or later. In the meantime, we’ll have to settle for ‘Lost,’ which has unintentionally descended into Gilligan’s Island-like silliness.”