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funny little guy detected

so strange

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>The plot was an excuse to show off all sorts of colorful fun shit but for all that wasn’t bad, and I could see this as a great comeback vehicle for a Tobey Maguire or Daniel Radcliffe

Crack theory: this somehow grew into the American TV version of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, with Mr. Frodo as Dirk's little mate. The whole thing was an excuse to show off all sorts of colourful fun shit and it's via the angle of living that Dionysian high life - be it via ~Vegas baby~ or Dirk's holistic presence - that our noughties short dark-haired leading man hoys himself into the colourful fun shit that is a degree more adult than he's known for but not enough to make it stick in the craw. If I remember, it even has Mr. Frodo working at a hotel in a menial capacity before all the plot starts happening.

Scripts I Have Covered

Back when I was back in LA trying to be a screenwriter I did, as a lot of people in that situation do, a bunch of script coverage. Script coverage is basically reading a script (as a rule of thumb, scripts run one page per minute of runtime, with a lot less text per page than prose) and generating a 2-4 page summary and evaluation. There are a few reasons you might have coverage commissioned: to evaluate a script for purchase and development; to judge its writer’s skills for employment on other projects; to judge its suitability for a particular actor or director; or just so you can pretend to have cared enough about it in Hollywood’s back-scratching favor economy.

The one constant is that it’s done by assistants or freelancers on behalf of executives, agents, or other “suit” variants who can then pretend they’ve actually read and judged the script themselves. Suits who make decisions relating to scripts are, as a rule, actively proud of the fact they don’t read scripts (or anything else).

On the one hand this makes sense; to them the script is a means to the end of making a deal and by treating it as a vestigal irrelevance they can attribute all glory of a successful deal to themselves. On the other hand, the hand that cares about human culture, this is worse than genocide, and would still be so even if I were particularly bothered by genocide.

Movies basically only have intelligible plots because movie stars have enough self-respect and pull to insist on only working on projects that do, which is why so often when you see a movie starring some interchangeable young models fresh off a fandombait CW series they don’t. So that said, let me tell you about three scripts I remember doing coverage on (this was mostly 2005-07ish): the one that “got around”, in that I ran into the most people that also remembered having read it; the one I considered the best (but never got made as a movie); and the only one that actually got produced. The one that got around: The Short Season This was a script about a small-market but locally beloved baseball team and its general manager who, resigned to the fact that he didn’t have the resources to field a winning team, resorted to clever publicity stunts to keep up attendance and entertain the fans. At one point he fields an all-little people lineup only to discover that thanks to their tiny strike zones they’re quite competitive. Meanwhile the owner (and/or league, I forget) are plotting to abandon the team’s home city in favor of a more lucrative market. This script was actually pretty decent and I could see it as a viable movie, but “mid-list sports dramedy” isn’t really something studios make very much anymore. Part of it is that the then-current* business model for movies was to finance films on foreign presales which were largely based on the brand recognition of star actors, and there weren’t really any A-list star roles here - I could see the manager/lead going to a Pierce Brosnan or Val Kilmer type, the love interest to a Cameron Diaz/Kirsten Dunst, but honestly I doubt there was a single player role strong enough to draw Peter Dinklage’s interest. The best: Chasing the Whale This was about a young man rising to prominence as the hospitality manager of a Las Vegas casino, and the mega-rich “Whale” super-gamblers he courted. I later read, and recognized as the source text, Whale Hunt in the Desert, the best pimp memoir since Iceberg Slim. The plot was an excuse to show off all sorts of colorful fun shit but for all that wasn’t bad, and I could see this as a great comeback vehicle for a Tobey Maguire or Daniel Radcliffe. I have no idea why this wasn’t made, particularly after The Hangover made bank and everyone in town must’ve been looking for a Vegas movie. Dumb industry politics is my guess, maybe whoever owned the rights was asking for too much money, who knows. The one that got made: August Rush I read this one with an eye towards a possible role for Aaron Carter (the managers I was working for seemed to specialize in child stars, former boy band members, and ex-SNL token brown girls. When the Family Guy movie came out and Stewie asked future-Stewie whether they ever found a role for Ellen Cleghorne I bust a gut because finding that role was literally my job at the time. Well, future-SNL token brown girls too, we also had Nasim Pedrad). My summary was “well a lot of this seems to be resting on the strength of the music, I hope it’s good because the rest is fucking terrible”, and though I didn’t see it that seems to be the critical consensus. * well, for a while there before the ’08 crash they were also funded on German and Eastern European tax credits. That explains the career of Uwe Boll - his movies were absolutely terrible but he could keep to a schedule and a budget, and with all the tax credits they didn’t actually need any sales to be profitable - whatever they got was just gravy, and acquiring recognizable video game licenses was a cost-efficient way of starting off with a built-in opening weekend audience. Also some stuff with Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Asian box office, which is why even stuff like 2008’s Dark Knight will have semi-extraneous segments with Chinese locations and stars.

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Turns out Suharto's son-in-law is the incoming President.

“Of course, the regime that Suharto set up was founded on mass violence. And by the late 1960s, Indonesia was operating a system of US-supported concentration camps comparable to the worst years of the Soviet Union.”

This one goes out to all the Americans who make gulag jokes

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St. Denis Carrying His Own Head

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You guys know what a derringer is, right? You could make a decent stab at fitting one into one of the longer Mr. Mens. Meanwhile paid-by-the-word Dickens could plausibly harbour a Desert Eagle, or one of them oversized novelty revolvers.

Good evening, Sir.

In your expert opinion, what would be the perfect book in which to keep a Derringer? My guess would be Dickens or Shelley.

I think it's all about book size.

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my three weed smoking girlfriends

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I just thought of a really good comeback for a situation I was in in 2011. This is not useful

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putting butter on toasted bread is so good has anyone else tried this shit

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In context, this is about someone being moved along by the police for being openly Jewish.

"The use of the term 'openly Jewish' by one of our officers is hugely regrettable"

- the Metropolitan fucking police

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"The use of the term 'openly Jewish' by one of our officers is hugely regrettable"

- the Metropolitan fucking police

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I don't know if it's quite as memetically robust as the 'yes...ha ha ha...yes!' sickos, but I want in on the ground floor with this one.

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BEST QUEER MEDIA TOURNAMENT FINAL ROUND!!!!!

BEST QUEER MEDIA TOURNAMENT FINAL ROUND!!!!!

[ propaganda masterpost]

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Oh, they've gotten to ALF as well, in much the same way as Stuart Millard approached Saved By The Bell. Philip Reed - ALF's own hatchet-job chronicler - suggests there's something of the love-hate blorbo-ationship to it:

ALF meant something to me when I was young. I was on its side. I thought ALF was funny. I enjoyed the show on its terms. It was something I’d rush home to watch, and while I can joke now about how poor my taste in television used to be, I certainly can’t ignore the fact that that was me. And now I did it again as an adult. I still thought ALF was funny, just not in the ways it wanted to be funny. I enjoyed the show on my terms.

As retrospective loathing of something once enjoyed goes, I can't help but think of Harry Potter - we all know why its biggest critics can quote it chapter and verse.

A minor trope that fascinates me is "80s/90s sitcom as an object of retrospective loathing" a la Bojack Horseman, Nope, and Kevin Can Fuck Himself. Or that one guy who wrote a five-fucking-hundred page book solely to take the piss out of Saved By The Bell and get quoted on TVTropes for all eternity. What inspires this level of hatred?

The obvious answer is that people are satirizing the idea that life is so simple and bright and contrived as the average sitcom, but it's not like 'simple, bright, and contrived' runs counter to the public's general taste, in fact lots of people seem to actively crave it. I suspect it's something like, the archetypal sitcom positions itself as normal, as a candid documentary of people you could live next door to or go to school/work with, and that's the thing that trips people's contempt-wires.

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My sister sent me this photo today with zero context and I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe

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LMAO