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SUMMARY Two teenagers come upon an apparently abandoned military installation at night. They take advantage of what appears to be a swimming pool to skinny dip. The teenagers are attacked by an unseen force in the pool and disappear under the water.

A determined but somewhat absent-minded skiptracer named Maggie McKeown is dispatched to find the missing teenagers near Lost River Lake. She hires surly backwoods drunkard Paul Grogan to serve as her guide. They come upon the abandoned compound, which functioned as a fish hatchery before being militarized. They discover bizarre specimens in jars and indications of an occupant. Maggie locates the drainage switch for the outside pool and decides to empty it to search the bottom, but the moment she activates it a haggard man appears and tries to stop her until he is subdued by Grogan. The two find a skeleton in the filtration trap of the empty pool, and learn it was filled with salt water. The man awakens and steals their jeep, but crashes it due to his disorientation, and is taken to Grogan’s home where they spend the night. They take Grogan’s raft down the river, where the man wakes up and tells them that the pool in the facility was filled with a school of lethal piranha fish, and that Maggie has released them into the river. They are skeptical until they hear a dog barking and they come across the corpse of Grogan’s friend Jack, who has bled to death from an attack on a fishing dock.

The man reveals himself to be Doctor Robert Hoak, lead scientist of a defunct Vietnam War project, Operation: Razorteeth, tasked with engineering a ravenous and prodigious strain of piranha that could endure the cold water of the North Vietnamese rivers and inhibit Viet Cong movement. The project was shut down when the war ended, but some of the mutant specimens survived, and Hoak tended to them to salvage his work. Grogan realizes that if the local dam is opened, the school will have access to the Lost River water park resort, and the nearby summer camp where his daughter Suzie is in attendance. They encounter a capsized canoe with a boy whose father has been killed by the piranha. Hoak rescues the boy, but suffers mortal injuries when the school attacks him; he dies before he can reveal how to kill them. Blood from Hoak’s corpse causes the piranha to tear away the raft’s lashings, and they barely reach shore. Grogan stops the dam attendant from opening the spillway and calls the military.

A military team led by Colonel Waxman and former Razorteeth scientist Dr. Mengers feed poison into the upstream section, ignoring the protests that the piranha survived the first attempt. When Grogan discovers that a tributary bypasses the dam, Waxman and Mengers quarantine them to prevent the agitated pair from alerting the media. After they escape, Waxman alerts law enforcement to capture them. The school attacks the summer camp during a swimming marathon, injuring and killing many children and Betsy, one of the camp supervisors. Suzie escapes due to her fear of water, and aids her camp mates in escaping.

The school continues downriver. Waxman and Mengers arrive at the water park to intercept Grogan and Maggie, but the piranha attack the resort and kill many vacationers and Waxman. Grogan and Maggie commandeer a speedboat and rush to the shuttered smelting plant at the narrowest point of the river. Remembering the empty facility pond, Grogan realizes the fish can survive in salt water; if the school passes the delta, they will reach the ocean and spread over the world. He intends to open the smelting refuse tanks, hoping the industrial waste will kill the piranha. They arrive at the plant ahead of the piranha, but the elevated water level has submerged the control office and Grogan must go underwater; he ties a rope around his waist and instructs Maggie to count to 100 before pulling him out. Grogan struggles to move the rusted valve wheel when the school arrives and attacks him. He manages to open the valves just as Maggie pulls him to safety. Maggie takes Grogan back to the water park, where a massive MEDEVAC is tending to the victims; his injuries are severe and he is seen in a catatonic state.

Mengers gives an on-site television interview, providing a sanitized version of events and downplaying the existence of piranha. Her voice is heard carrying out over a radio on the shore of a West Coast beach. As she says “there’s nothing left to fear”, the piranha’s characteristic trilling sound drowns out the waves on the beach.

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DEVELOPMENT When a former producer’s assistant named Jeff Schechtman and a onetime Japanese movie star called Chako Van Leeuwen approached the exploitation maestro with a script about folks getting eaten by piranhas, he was all ears. “I had been working for Warner Bros. for a number of years,” says Schechtman. “And as everybody else does in Hollywood, I struck out on my own, and tried to put some projects together. Piranha was one of the earliest things I produced. Originally, I developed the script, with a screenwriter named Richard Robinson (author of the Kingdom of the Spiders), then shopped that around. Chako van Leeuwen provided a bunch of the development money, and that is how she came into the picture.”

“Schechtman already had a script by Richard Robinson, but it needed work,” Dante continues. “There were piranhas in this lake, and when people found out about them, they wouldn’t go in. So there had to be a bear to chase people into the lake. Then there had to be a forest fire that chased the bear that chased the people.”

Frances Doel, then Corman’s assistant, was on the lookout for new talent. She’d read John Sayles’ novel Pride of the Bimbos, and concluded that the realist Sayles was the perfect writer for a horror thriller about fish eating people. “Doel hired him to write the script for $10,000,” Davison recalls. “He reportedly wrote the first draft on the airplane from Los Angeles to New Jersey-he’s the fastest writer I know.”

Sayles set about writing a tongue-in-cheek script in which mutated piranhas menaced a riverside entertainment park. “The thing I tried to bring was a little bit of self-consciousness,” he says. “Some of the fun is: ‘Okay, this is a dollar ninety-eight version of Jaws.’” According to one of the many legends that surround the making of the first two Piranha films, Sayles also wrote a “shadow” script in which the military—who could hardly be more villainous in the finished movie—are the heroes of the piece. Supposedly, this script was sent to the appropriate authorities at the National Guard who agreed to lend soldiers and equipment to the production. “I think what happened is they showed a different version of the script to the military,” says Sayles. “Certain things may have disappeared.”

There’s a legend that Corman offered Alan Arkush and Dante their choice of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School and Piranha to direct. The story goes that they tossed a coin and Joe Dante lost, so he had to helm the fish movie. A talented cartoonist, Dante drew his own storyboards for Piranha. “I was more interested in the science fiction aspects of the story,” he says, “so I wanted to goose those up. John Sayles was more interested in the political side, so he turned it into a pseudo-science fiction-cum-political allegory, where fish that were developed for use in Vietnam have come home along with the rest of the War to roost in America. These were atom bombs coming home and eating campers.”

The locations were scouted by Dante himself. “I was at the Telluride Film Festival, and Roger said, ‘Why don’t you stop in a few states on your own time and see where you would like to shoot?’ There was a drought that year, and there weren’t any rivers in California, so we ended up making the picture in Texas, a right-to-work state, which meant we could make it non-union.” Production began in Los Angeles, however, and the night after we shot our first scenes, Roger canceled the movie. He looked at the budget, and felt there was too much money for 2nd unit,” Dante says.

“Chako broke down and cried in Roger’s office,” Davison adds, and she cried so long that the only way Roger could get her out of there was to promise to make the movie.” The picture was a co-production with United Artists, and Davison reveals, “Roger always made sure that the pictures were somewhat cheaper than United Artists thought they were, which was about a million-one. But there was no way to make it quite as cheap as Roger wanted and have it be any good. I ended up calling Barbara Boyle, Corman’s business affairs person, and I think I cried on the phone for more money.”

Sayles’ script called for a state-of-the-art water park, but Aquarena Springs was a rather more quaint complex. Its chief “attraction” was a pig named Ralph that swam and performed tricks. Dante persuaded Sayles to come down to Texas and play the small role of a soldier so that he could perform unpaid surgery on the script to accommodate the somewhat antique nature of the resort… and an appearance by Ralph. “Ralph the swimming swine had been an attraction at Aquarena Springs for years,” chuckles Sayles “I went to a Mexican market in the town and they were selling whole pigs heads. And I tried to convince Joe that at some point we should see the pig’s head floating around after the piranha attack. He said, ‘People will put up with humans being eaten, but not pet animals!’”

So why then, did you—the king of capitalizing on a profitable idea—take so long to greenlight Piranha? Was that film made to ride the coattails of the same year’s Jaws 2? Roger Corman: No, someone brought me the script for Piranha and I liked it, so I hired John Sayles to do a rewrite. That was Sayles’ first screenplay, and Joe Dante, who had just made Hollywood Boulevard with Allan Arkush, was hired to direct it. I was very aware of the success of Jaws, but if I was really planning to capitalize on it, I would have worked right away to do so and not have waited a few years. Because really, the idea of Jaws was similar to my first film from 1954, Monster from the Ocean Floor. It wasn’t that Jaws was original, it was just really well-made.

Can you recall the first time you met Dante? Roger Corman: I met Joe because of Martin Scorsese. We were about to do the film Private Duty Nurses, and Marty was a teacher at NYU and I asked him, out of his students, who would be best to direct it. Marty said Jonathan Kaplan. So Jonathan came out, and with him came Dante, Allan Arkush and Jon Davison, and I hired them all on the spot in various capacities. Joe, I hired as a trailer editor originally.

Today, a Joe Dante film is immediately recognized for its sense of humor, evident in even Piranha’s most intense and violent sequences. Was the film always intended to be a romp? Roger Corman: Yes, I always thought about it as a serious picture with a great deal of humor. It was not intended as a parody, however. It was simply a science fiction/ horror film with lots of humor.

And it was a huge success. Roger Corman: Yes, it was. An enormous one.

PRODUCTION

Meanwhile, Davison was proceeding with casting: Mike Medavoy, then president in charge of production, sent him a list of suggested leads, with actors indicated as 1s, 2s and 3s, apparently in order of desirability. Davison still has the list among his Piranha souvenirs. “The ls were Nick Nolte, Peter Fonda, James Caan, Robert Shaw, Joe Don Baker, Peter O’Toole and Michael Sarrazin,” the amused producer reveals, “but I don’t think anybody ever took those very seriously. We basically had two cast lists-one of dead people who were not available, and people who were still living that we wanted to put into the picture. I remember that we had Richard Deacon for only one day, and promised we would use him only until noon. We couldn’t afford him, so Joe and I paid for Richard.”

Dillman, the biggest name in the cast, says, “I was very impressed by the screenplay John Sayles had written. He came to my home in Santa Barbara, and we sat down and talked about it a little bit. I had done other horror-type films-Bug, The Mephisto Waltz, The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, Chosen Survivors, that type of thing,” so he had no problem with the script’s content.

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Another little-known fact, Dante says, “is that Kevin McCarthy’s part was originally played by Eric Braeden. I was a fan of his from Colossus: The Forbin Project; I thought he was great-still do. He came down to the set at the swimming pool, and saw us kids and our jerry-built effects. He may have seen Belinda Balaski getting fake piranhas attached to her. He did his work for that day, which involved floating in the pool while the piranhas came after him, while we see him from underwater.”

“We managed to convince Kevin McCarthy to do it, somehow,” Dante continues. “He was in New York when his agent offered him the part. We called back, and the agent said, ‘Well, he’s walking around Central Park thinking it over.’ For whatever reasons-he wanted to go to Texas, needed money for an ex-wife-he decided to do it. I never met him until he showed up on the set.” McCarthy, of course, has been in many of Dante’s movies since.

When he was first approached about Piranha, Kevin McCarthy was leery. “My vanity had something to do with it,” he admits with a smile. “Joe admired my work. I didn’t want to work on these cheap little Roger Corman things. I’m an actor. I wouldn’t want to be in a non-union situation. The only union he pays is the Screen Actors Guild. The cameramen work under assumed names. But Corman gave many of these people, like Dante, their break. He helped them get started, develop themselves and find their own answers.

“So, when Dante told me how much he wanted to work with me, it was flattering. He sent me a script which sounded like something I might like to do: play a mad scientist, an ichthyologist who’s working on some sort of crazy fish which would eat up most of North Vietnam. I had some interesting scenes in the film and I got to swim the river in Austin, Texas; have karo syrup released underwater as my blood and all.”

McCarthy pauses a moment to consider making the fish fear film. “Joe was open to suggestions. “What if I do it from here or turn around?’ He would say ‘Sure.’ When you get that feedback from a director, it’s great.” film-otherwise, I don’t want to do it, and he doesn’t want to do it. So, it has been a great relationship.”

“Keenan Wynn was hired for one day, one of those color parts that give you a name for television, the director recalls. “I had suggested John Carradine, but Keenan had more of a TVQ. He showed up the day before his scene, and started intimating that he might forget his lines if he didn’t get an extra day, that he really should have been hired for two, that it’s a lot of work to do in one day, that he just couldn’t guarantee he was going to remember anything. So we paid him for two days.

“It also turned out that he was deaf as a post from riding motorcycles,” Dante continues. “Most of the stuff he did was sitting on a riverbank with a dog, while we were out in the water. He was screaming, ‘You better yell “cut” pretty loud! He didn’t suffer any unprofessionalism gladly. I never saw a crew work faster than when Keenan was working. And woe betide the unlucky crew member who happened to be in his eyeline when he was being dead and looking anywhere. He was a cantankerous old fellow, but a great guy, full of great stories.”

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Steele, of the pale skin, big eyes and great Italian horror movies, played a scientist in Piranha. “It was a dream come true to be making a movie with Barbara,” Davison claims, and she is almost as weird offscreen as she is on, but interesting, and real smart.” Davison pulls out the contract • he wrote himself for Steele’s services. “There was obviously some sort of thing where she was trying to get a little more money, so in order to get her to agree to be in the movie, we had to hire her to also be a still photographer. I don’t know if I ever saw any photos she took, but the contract does say, ‘Piranha Productions agrees to engage player as location still photographer for not less than one week consecutive with her employment. Piranha Productions will pay film and processing and the munificent sum of $200 per. She worked for a week and a day, with two of those days probably used for travel.”

“The trouble with Barbara,” Dante adds, “was that she had a habit of wandering into scenes she wasn’t in. We’d be shooting and suddenly, ‘Hey, that’s Barbara! What’s she doing there?’ She had her little boy with her, and they would just be wandering around. If you brought up her Italian movies, she would laugh and say, ‘Ohhhhh my God!’ and that would be just about as much as she wanted to talk about them, but she did say some nice things about Mario Bava.”

You started off working with Roger Corman and wrote the screenplay for “Piranha.” What did you learn from Corman about the economy of independent filmmaking? John Sayles: One of the things that Roger did that was interesting was he would test market titles. “Piranha” was a title that test marketed very well. And within the genre, he might test market a couple science fiction titles. Another movie I wrote for him, “Battle Beyond the Stars,” marketed very highly. With “Piranha,” it was obviously capitalizing on the success of “Jaws,” and so it rated very high. So he felt that, generically speaking, there’s an audience that wants to see this movie. They don’t even know who’s in it or any of the details about it, but they like the genre. So if we delivered that, there was enough of an audience for us to make the movie.

How did the challenge differ for the movies you directed? John Sayles: With independent movies that are just straight dramas, you just don’t have that. Occasionally maybe there’s a movie about vampires or something, so you have a little bit of a genre going for you, but usually you’re selling a totally new product. If you were a low-budget production, you used to rely on getting lucky and getting some great reviews.

When we started out, Siskel and Ebert had a TV show and one of the great things for independent filmmakers is they would review those movies. They only reviewed the ones they liked, whereas the Hollywood movies, they always wanted a dog of the week — I think “Piranha” got their first dog of the week, ever. They would unload on those movies, but they weren’t going to bother to say bad things about an independent movie. So you got a national show, and you got free national publicity, and there was just no way you could pay for that.

SPECIAL EFFECTS “We shot some stuff at a summer camp in Griffith Park,” says Dante, but the underwater scenes were shot at the Olympic-sized pool at the University of Southern California. “We happened to luck into a conglomerate of really great (FX) guys, the top of their profession-Phil Tippett, Jon Berg, Rob Bottin, Chris Walas-all these guys who were about to work on big movies.” Actually, as Tippett reveals, most of them had just come off another film made for less money than the director wanted, also shot under arduous conditions by people who were simply in love with the idea of making movies. That film was Star Wars.

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“We looked at other movies that had piranhas in them,” says Dante, “but there weren’t very many. And the few that did were things like Pirates of Blood River, where it was all done on the surface–you never really saw anything under the water. They just sprayed buckshot to disturb the water. The most interesting footage was something Bill Burrud, or someone like that, had of real piranhas eating a cow. The interesting thing was that they moved very, very fast.

Rob Bottin making up Paul Bartel

“We came up with these piranhas on sticks that, when photographed at eight frames a second, could look like they were moving through the water quickly, the way piranhas really do. Coupled with prosthetic limbs and pieces of flesh that could be bitten and float around in the water, it started to look pretty promising. So we did a number of days of shooting, and brought in naked girls and had piranhas try to eat their breasts. We also had prosthetic breasts with nipples that pulled away.” Dante sighs. “The things you do when you’re younger that you’d never do now…”

The fish in the movie are all rubber, and don’t entirely resemble the genuine article. For one thing, you can barely see real piranhas’ wedge-shaped teeth; mounted ones sold in novelty shops have had their lips pared away to expose the dental work. The fish in Piranha were modeled on such stuffed specimens. “The only thing we couldn’t figure out how to do,” Dante admits, *was to get masses of fish together. We could do great shots of three or four of them at a time, but to get them to come toward the camera, go away or do right and left shots, chases, was really difficult. Pete Kuran ended up doing these scenes on a stage, dry, with smoke and silhouettes and stuff, keeping the piranhas still and moving the camera past them.”

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Dante shot some water footage with future Young and the Restless star Eric Braeden, who had been cast in the role of the scientist responsible for breeding the movie’s strain of genetically engineered, super intelligent, mutant fish which are accidentally let loose into a river. They all took this dive course, which was a lesson for a couple of hours. Dressed the pool put tarps on the bottom, and added all these plants, built sets and sunk them, and dumped in lots of Fuller’s earth and dirt. Dante and his special effects team dumped so much foliage and fake blood into the pool they themselves brought to life a new creature of sorts. “We created this fungus that was apparently hard to classify,” says the director. “They had scientists down from Sacramento to try to figure out what it was. It was apparently some sort of new life form. It was in the water—and of course in our lungs as well. They had to sandblast the pool to get rid of it.” Given this, it is not surprising that Braeden decided to back out of the film. “I think Eric was just horrified by the primitive conditions we were shooting under,” says Dante. “He called me one night very politely and said, ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t do this.’”

Rob Bottin on the Piranha set adding some extra gore to actor Keenan Wynn

Finally, Dante had around two hours of footage featuring fake piranhas, and gory mayhem. “We [planned] on showing it all to Roger in a mammoth session,” says Dante. “About 15, 20, minutes in, he said, ‘Okay, it’s not bad. We’ll do it.’ He was about to leave the screening room and I said, ‘Roger, don’t you want to see the prosthetic breasts getting eaten?’ And he looked to me and he said, ‘Do I have to?’”

After Dante and Davison visited Berg and Tippett at Tippett’s home-he didn’t have a studio in those days—they were hired for the majority of the piranha FX. “We had some excruciating hours in that pool,” Tippett recalls. In addition to the diatomaceous earth and Karo syrup, he says, “we used milk and cream. I think when we started, there wasn’t enough time for the heaters to work, so the water was something like 50 degrees. Jon (Davison) ordered wetsuits that were a size too small, so we all ended up getting terrible diaper rashes. There was a stray dog we adopted who would shit in the changing room every morning, so it smelled like dog shit. We were too poor to afford dryers for the suits, so they were wet as well as too small. And because of the concoction that sat in the pool for something like three and a half weeks, it turned into this vile soup that gave everyone horrible ear infections.

“A lot of this came from us just being stupid kids and not knowing any better, and trying to make up stuff we thought would work,” he continues. “There’s one scene where Belinda Balaski gets pulled into the deep with piranha all over her. We figured the way to fasten the fish to her was to grip-tape them all over her body. Then she had to sit out in the hot sun, and the tape just adhered to her body. She was covered with yards and yards of the stuff; getting it ripped off was very painful.”

“Phil Tippett and his lovely wife Jules ran the fish factory in downtown LA,” says Davison. “They sculpted a clay model and made molds, and together with Jon Berg they made lots of fish, and were in charge of the effects. I think it was Rob Bottin’s first professional job; he sculpted the head that bobs up in the water. He would do it only if he got to be the 2nd unit director, and went on and on about this. So we let him be 2nd unit director for one day, as it turned out. We didn’t have any sound for the 2nd unit, which is not unusual, so he shot a scene on the beach about deaf-mutes being eaten by piranhas. That was the end of his directing career for a while.”

“We tried a lot of things that did not work.” Tippett admits. “We had these elaborate rigs of fish on wires between two gantries that were strung up. Then we had people on shore who pulled the lines, and the fish would run underwater. There were so many fish!” he sighs in amazed tones.

Phil Tippett Lab Creature

“Also, I had fish on poles with little triggers that made them snap and bite at the fake flesh. We had other rigs that Jon Berg built, big garage door springs with pieces of metal welded to them that could be adjusted underwater so the fish could break the surface and disappear.”

The laboratory sequence has several strange creatures in jars and tanks built by Walas, shot later in inserts. Dante was amazed by the chances everyone took. “Jules Tippett was underneath this fishbowl with her hand in this puppet with the water dripping out and pouring all over her, while other people filled the tank so it wouldn’t drain out during the shot. She was totally drenched, and could have been electrocuted.”

Phil Tippett Lab Creature

“I did some stop-motion on it, too,” Tippett adds, “a little creature in the lab. We wanted another ending for the picture, where the little Ymir-ish creature has reached the ocean and grown to 30 feet high. He was supposed to come out eating a surfer. But the executive producer didn’t want to pay for it, so we didn’t do it.” When Dillman was brought in to loop some dialogue, he saw the stop-motion beast (which may have been animated by Bill Hedge in place of the very busy Tippett), and was surprised, feeling this would harm the movie—that the audience simply wouldn’t buy it. Later, Dillman saw the finished movie in San Francisco, and sent Dante a very nice letter,” the director recalls. “He said he saw it with an audience, and now understood how it was supposed to work. He said he was very happy to be in it, and that it worked out great.”

This was your first movie with Joe Dante. What was he like, and what was your initial reaction to John Sayles’ script? Belinda Balaski: Working with Joe was a joy! First of all, he allowed everyone their creative freedom. I had just finished doing Cannonball! with Paul Bartel, and here we were on the Piranha set together in San Marcos, Texas. Paul and I had no scenes together, and we were joking around with Joe, saying we wanted to be in a scene with each other. Joe said, “OK, just write one.” So that night, I wrote the lakeside bit with Melody Thomas, Paul and I, and the next day! gave it to Joe, who loved it and we shot it! That’s actually one of my favorite scenes in Piranha. As far as John Sayles and his writing, I consider him an absolute genius. He told me on the set of The Howling that he loved my Betsy character from Piranha so much that he created my Terry Fisher role based on her! That was the day we shot the morgue scene, where he got to be in it as the mortician. John is a great writer, who had all these wonderful scripts up his sleeve just waiting for a break! I’m a playwright and screenwriter myself, and John taught me to write screenplays ”

What were one of the most fun and one of the most difficult scenes to shoot on Piranha? Belinda Balaski: The underwater scene, where it looks like the piranha are pulling me down. There were 10 crew guys at one end of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, holding onto a rope tied around my waist. They pulled me across the pool underwater, and it looks like I’m going down deep!

What do you remember of Rob Bottin’s nasty fish mockups, and did you get to keep one as a memento? Belinda Balaski: They used gaffer’s tape on my skin to tie the rubber piranha to. Then I’d get underwater and the fish would bobble around me, and I would push them away and because they were tied to me, they’d come right back! All this was good and fun till they went to take the gaffer’s tape off-ouch! And sadly, I didn’t get to keep one to remember it all by!

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PROMOTIONAL/ADVERTISING Davison also wrote the film’s pressbook, the advertising and promotional brochure sent to theater owners and newspapers. For the most part, it’s the usual material phony “news” stories, biographies of the leading players and so forth. But in the suggestions for promotion, which include what you might expect-tanks of piranhas in the lobby, goldfish-swallowing projects, tie-ins with sporting goods stores-Davison offered an idea that was probably not meant to be taken too seriously: “Create some exciting pre-publicity by leaving dead piranha at various strategic locations along the banks of your local lakes and streams…Give enterprising kids in your area a few bucks to make themselves scarce for a couple of days. Watch your grosses soar!!

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RELEASE/DISTRIBUTION But the movie was released in 1978 during a newspaper strike, and there were very few reviews and chances for advertising. “It did better in Europe,” says Dante, “and in places like Rio de Janeiro, it played tremendously-faraway places where people don’t speak English. Roger was a little upset that it made more money overseas, but United Artists’ campaign there was so much better than his.”

SCORE/SOUNDTRACK Piranha (1978) Pino Donaggio

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CAST/CREW Directed Joe Dante

Produced Jon Davison

Screenplay John Sayles

Story Richard Robinson John Sayles

Bradford Dillman as Paul Grogan Heather Menzies as Maggie McKeown Kevin McCarthy as Dr. Robert Hoak Keenan Wynn as Jack Barbara Steele as Dr. Mengers Dick Miller as Buck Gardner Belinda Balaski as Betsy Bruce Gordon as Colonel Waxman Paul Bartel as Mr. Dumont Melody Thomas Scott as Laura Dickinson Barry Brown as Trooper Shannon Collins as Suzie Grogan Shawn Nelson as Whitney Richard Deacon as Earl Lyon John Sayles as Sentry

Special Effects Rob Bottin Douglas Barnett … mechanical effects (as Doug Barnett) Jon Berg … special effects Dave Morton … mechanical effects Robert Short … special properties Chris Walas … special properties

CREDITS/REFERENCES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY indiewire.com ew.com Fangoria#187 Fangoria#296

Starlog#79

Piranha (1978) Retrospective SUMMARY Two teenagers come upon an apparently abandoned military installation at night. They take advantage of what appears to be a swimming pool to skinny dip.

#70sFilms #NewWorld

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Hamilton Ending Explained: Why Did Eliza Gasp?

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The ending of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s epic American history musical, Hamilton, is easy enough to understand. As any product of the American education system (or anyone familiar with the SNL Digital Short “Lazy Sunday”) can tell you, the story of Alexander Hamilton ends with his death in a duel against political rival Aaron Burr.

And that’s exactly what happens in Hamilton where the title character (who previously never shut up about not throwing away his shot) throws away his shot at the end in an act of mercy and pays dearly for it. Simple enough! There’s one area of the Hamilton ending, however, that has confounded folks since the play premiered in 2015. That confusion has only grown since the play was made available on Disney+ on July 3. In short – what is the deal with Eliza Hamilton’s (Phillipa Soo) gasp at the end of the musical?

As the very last notes of “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” fade away, Eliza seemingly breaks the fourth wall as she gazes out into the audience, and then places her hands over her heart and delivers a joyful, shocked gasp. What exactly is happening here? Though Hamilton winks at its audience several times throughout its more than two and a half hours (“everything is legal in New Jersey”), this appears to be the only time that the fourth wall fully comes crumbling down. Or does it? What is Eliza seeing that makes her react so emotionally? There are a couple of possible options.

The first option is the one that’s most in line with the themes of Hamilton itself. It’s no coincidence that the closing number of the entire show is called “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” because the lack of control over one’s own narrative is a major theme of the piece. Hamilton first hears the phrase “who lives, who dies, who tells your story” from Gen. George Washington when he delivers advice to Hamilton that he’s not as in control of his legacy as he thinks.

When Eliza is betrayed by her husband sleeping with another woman, the only response that she knows will truly affect him is to “remove (herself) from the narrative.” That’s why her solo at the musical’s conclusion is so emotional as she assures us that she’s written herself back into the story. Even Burr is aware of the importance of legacy, as his first thought upon killing Hamilton is “now I’m the villain in your history.”

It’s entirely possible, and perhaps even likely then, that Eliza’s gasp is at the realization that her and her husband’s story is actually getting told. She’s momentarily aware that she’s in the Richard Rodgers Theatre near Times Square, and hundreds of audience members are dabbing their eyes at her tale. Hamilton says that a legacy is planting seeds in a garden that you’ll never get to see. And yet here Eliza is gazing upon those beautiful flowers.

Another possible interpretation of Eliza’s gasp is that she is ascending to heaven to be with her departed husband and is taken aback by the majesty of the afterlife. Remember that it is the deceased Alexander Hamilton at play’s end who says “hello” to his wife and then encourages her to look out at the audience. How could Eliza be able to see her dead husband unless she too was dead? The simple answer there is that this is theater, baby. Anything can happen. In his ghostly state, Hamilton could be operating as an Our Town-style Stage Manager figure who is now able to see through the bonds of both time and fiction.

All of these explanations are getting a tad bit technical now, however. What’s important to understand is that the ultimate reason for Eliza’s gasp is designed to be unclear in the first place. Theater, particularly musical theater, is a highly-stylized, thoroughly emotional endeavor. Is Eliza gasping because she realizes Hamilton’s legacy is secure? Because she’s gone to heaven and discovered real beauty? Because she’s at the end of a grueling 150-minute musical and is relieved? The answer to all of these questions is: sure, why not.

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Hamilton: Ranking Every Song from the Soundtrack

By Alec Bojalad

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Hamilton: What Happened to Lafayette After He Returned to France?

By David Crow

To be clear, “sure, why not – all of the above” is basically the interpretation that both Soo and Miranda prefer. The concept of #ElizaGasp has been a part of the show since the very beginning and as such, both Soo and Miranda have been asked about it before. In a 2016 interview with AOL about the subject, Soo said:

“People are like, ‘Is it Eliza going into heaven? Is she seeing Alexander? Is she seeing God? What is it?’ And it’s kind of all of those things. Sometimes, it’s literally, I look out and I see the audience, and that’s what it is, but I think that idea of ‘transcendence’ is present in all of that.”

More recently, Miranda shared his own perspective with in a Wired-hosted chat with fans, saying:

“I wish I could give you a simple answer. But that would be like telling you where Godot had been the whole time they were waiting for Godot. I think it’s different for each Eliza. It’s heart-stopping, isn’t it? I do think that it traverses time in some way. Whether that thing she’s seeing is Hamilton, whether that thing she’s seeing is heaven, or whether that thing she’s seeing is the world now. I think those are all valid and all fair. I do think she is seeing across a span of time in that moment.”

Miranda’s point that the interpretation for each actress portraying Eliza is different is an interesting one. In fact, the internet might not be talking about Eliza’s gasp if it weren’t for the sincere gusto that Soo approaches it with in the filmed Hamilton movie.

To let you behind the curtain a little bit: both myself and fellow Den of Geek Hamilton maestro David Crow saw live performances of Hamilton – me in Cleveland and David in Durham. Yet neither David nor I recall an Eliza gasp at the end of our respective performances. Surely it was there, as all the available evidence indicates that it’s always been a part of the play. It’s just hard to imagine anyone embracing it with as much gusto as Phillipa Soo.

In the end, perhaps the real mystery isn’t why Eliza gasps at the end of Hamilton… it’s how Phillipa Soo makes it so damn memorable.

The post Hamilton Ending Explained: Why Did Eliza Gasp? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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recentnews18-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/maysoon-zayid-interview-i-want-to-be-the-image-of-the-american-you-dont-think-is-american/

Maysoon Zayid interview: 'I want to be the image of the American you don't think is American'

US standup comedian Maysoon Zayid likes to joke that if there were a competition called the Oppression Olympics, she would win gold.

“I’m Palestinian, Muslim, I’m a woman of colour, I’m disabled,” Zayid, who has cerebral palsy, tells audiences, before pausing a beat to hang her head, her long dark hair curtaining her face, “and I live in New Jersey”.

The joke lands laughs whether Zayid tells it in red states or blue, and puts people exactly where Zayid wants them: disarmed, charmed and eager for more. She told it near the beginning of her 2014 TED Talk, which drew nearly 15 million views, became the most-watched TED Talk that year and changed Zayid’s life. She now has a development deal with ABC to create a semi-autobiographical sitcom called Can-Can, starring her.

The show faces daunting odds; only a handful of the dozens of scripts networks order each autumn make it to air. But if Can-Can makes it all the way – Zayid told studio executives that she would end up in an internment camp if it didn’t – it may push two populations, one widely ignored, the other demonised, from the country’s margins into the mainstream.

People with disabilities make up nearly 20 per cent of the population yet account for about 2 per cent of onscreen characters, some 95 per cent of which are played by able-bodied stars. And it is hard to imagine a group more vilified in the United States than Muslims or Middle Easterners, whom, as Zayid’s television writing partner, Joanna Quraishi, said, “Americans see as either terrorists or Kardashians.”

The executive producers of Can-Can include Todd Milliner and Sean Hayes, who plays Jack on Will & Grace, itself a groundbreaking show credited with helping make gay characters mainstream. Milliner and Hayes are well aware of the envelope-pushing potential of Can-Can, but said that was not what sold them on Zayid.

Her energy filled the room, and she was self-aware, super smart, and madly funny. Crucially, she had a singular story. “The whole business is moving even more toward authentic stories that aren’t on TV right now,” Milliner said.

Zayid is a vociferous part of a small, dedicated movement calling attention to disability rights in entertainment, which are consistently overlooked in the quote-unquote diversity conversation.

Jay Ruderman, president of the Ruderman Family Foundation, a philanthropic and advocacy organisation for disability rights (it also works to strengthen ties between American Jews and Israel), said Zayid’s show could crush enduring stigmas disabled people face. “Progress is being made very slowly, but shows can be transformational,” he said.

The Can-Can character will be much like Zayid, a woman who happens to be disabled and Muslim and who grew up in New Jersey with big hair and Metallica T-shirts, navigating love and friendships and the world. “I want to get out there and be the image of the American you don’t think is American, and the Muslim you don’t think of when you think of a Muslim,” she said.

Zayid lives in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, that she shares with her husband and their cat. She likes to keep her husband’s name under wraps, and publicly refers to him as Chefugee, for he is indeed both a refugee – they met while she was working with refugees in the Palestinian territories – and a chef.

Zayid’s parents, who are from a village outside Ramallah, also raised their family here. Zayid is the youngest of four daughters, and had an idyllic childhood despite a traumatic birth. The doctor botched her mother’s C-section, she said, smothering Zayid. Cerebral palsy is not genetic; it’s often caused by brain trauma before or during birth, and manifests differently in people. Zayid shakes all the time, though yoga has lessened the severity, and can walk but cannot stand for very long (she calls herself a sit-down standup comedian).

Her parents treated her no differently from her siblings. Her father, a gregarious salesman, taught her to walk by having her stand on his feet. She was sent to dance and piano lessons because the family could not afford physical or occupational therapy, and she became a popular high achiever. “I lived in a bubble,” she told me, “and that is very much related to who I am now”.

At college, her bubble burst. She went to Arizona State University on an academic scholarship, and on her first day in an English literature class, her professor stunned her by asking, “Can you read?” She majored in theatre – her lifelong dream has been to appear on General Hospital – yet despite wowing teachers she was never cast in school productions. Even when the theatre department mounted a play about a girl with cerebral palsy, a non-disabled student was chosen over Zayid for the part.

“It was devastating, because I knew I was good,” Zayid said. “The girl who got it was a great actress. But why would anyone want to see her fake cerebral palsy, when I’m sitting right here?”

It was a light-bulb moment, and she realised that the movies she loved with disabled characters, like Born on the Fourth of July, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and Rain Man, all had visibly non-disabled stars. She pursed acting after graduation, until a forthright acting coach told her she would never get cast, and ought to do a one-woman show.

leftCreated with Sketch. rightCreated with Sketch.

1/25 Bojack Horseman

A cartoon about a talking horse, starring the goofy older brother from Arrested Development… on paper little about BoJack Horseman screams “must watch”. Yet the series almost immediately transcended its format to deliver a moving and very funny rumination on depression and middle-age malaise. Will Arnett plays BoJack – one time star of Nineties hit sitcom Horsin’ Around – as a lost soul whose turbo-charged narcissism prevents him getting his life together. Almost as good are a support cast including Alison Brie (Glow, Mad Men), Aaron Paul, of Breaking Bad, and Amy Sedaris as a pampered Persian cat who is also BoJack’s agent. Season five touches the live rail of harassment in the movie industry, offering one of the most astute commentaries yet on the #MeToo movement with an episode based centred around an awards ceremony called “The Forgivies”.

Netflix

2/25 Stranger Things

A valentine to the Spielberg school of Eighties blockbuster, with Winona Ryder as a small town mom whose son is abducted by a transdimensional monster. ET, Goonies, Close Encounters, Alien and everything Stephen King wrote between 1975 and 1990 are all tossed into the blender by Millennial writer-creators the Duffer brothers. It was clear Stranger Things was going to be a mega-smash when Barb – the “best friend” character eaten in the second episode – went viral the weekend it dropped.

Netflix

3/25 Daredevil

Netflix’s Marvel shows tend towards the overlong and turgid. An exception is the high-kicking Daredevil, with Charlie Cox’s blind lawyer/crimefighter banishing all memory of Ben Affleck’s turn donning the red jumpsuit in 2003. With New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood as backdrop, Daredevil is caked in street-level grit and features a searing series one performance by Vincent D’Onofrio as the villainous Kingpin. The perfect antidote to the deafening bombast of the big screen Marvel movies.

Netflix

4/25 The Staircase

Did he do it? Does it matter considering the lengths the Durham, North Carolina police seemingly went in order to stitch him up? Sitting through this twisting, turning documenting about the trial of Michael Peterson – charged with the murder in 2003 of his wife – the viewer may find themselves alternately empathising with and recoiling from the accused. It’s a feat of bravura factual filmmaking from French documentarian Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, which comes to Netflix with a recently shot three-part coda catching up with the (very weird) Peterson clan a decade on.

Netflix

5/25 Dark

Stranger Things: the Euro-Gloom years. Netflix’s first German-language production is a pulp romp that thinks it’s a Wagner opera. In a remote town surrounded by a creepy forest locals fear the disappearance of a teenager may be linked to other missing persons cases from decades earlier. The timelines get twisted and it’s obvious that something wicked is emanating from a tunnel leading to a nearby nuclear power plant. Yet if the story sometimes trips itself up the Goonies-meets-Götterdämmerung ambiance keeps you hooked.

Netflix

6/25 A Series of Unfortunate Events

The wry and bleak Lemony Snickett children novels finally get the ghastly adaptation they deserve (let’s all pretend the dreadful 2004 Jim Carrey movie never happened). Neil Patrick Harris gobbles up the scenery as the vain and wicked Count Olaf, desperate to separate the Baudelaire orphans from their considerable inheritance. The look is Tim Burton by way of Wes Anderson, and the dark wit of the books is replicated perfectly (Snickett, aka Daniel Handler, is co-producer).

Netflix

7/25 Maniac

If you’re curious as to how Cary Fukunaga will handle the Bond franchise, his limited series, starring Emma Stone and Jonah Hill, drops some delicious hints. It’s a mind-bending sci-fi story set in an alternative United States where computers still look like Commodore 64s and in which you pay for goods by having a “travel buddy” sit down and read you adverts. Stone and Hill are star-crossed outcasts participating in a drugs trial that catapults them into a series of trippy genre excursions – including an occult adventure and a Lord of the Rings-style fantasy. It is here that Fukunaga demonstrates his versatility, handling potentially hokey material smartly and respectfully. 007 fans can sleep easy.

Netflix

8/25 Better Call Saul

The Breaking Bad prequel is starting to outgrow the show that spawned it. Where Breaking Bad delivered a master-class in scorched earth storytelling Saul is gentler and more humane. Years before the rise of Walter White, the future meth overlord’s sleazy lawyer, Saul Goodman, is still plain old Jimmy McGill, a striving every-dude trying to catch a break. But how far will he go to make his name and escape the shadow of his superstar attorney brother Chuck (Michael McKean)?

AMC Studios/Netflix

9/25 Black Mirror

Don’t tell Channel 4 but Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series has arguably got even better since making the jump from British terrestrial TV to the realm of megabucks American streaming. Bigger budgets have given creators Brooker and Annabel Jones license to let their imaginations off the leash – yielding unsurpassable episodes such as virtual reality love story “San Junipero” and Star Trek parody “USS Callister”, which has bagged a bunch of Emmys.

Netflix

10/25 Mindhunter

David Fincher produces this serial killer drama based on the writings of a real-life FBI psychological profiler. It’s the post-Watergate Seventies and two maverick G-Men (Jonathan Groff and Holt McCallany) are going out on a limb by utilising the latest psychological research to get inside the heads of a motley assembly of real-life sociopathic murders – including the notorious “Co-Ed” butcher Ed Kemper, brought chillingly to live in an Emmy-nominated performance by Cameron Britton.

Netflix

11/25 The Crown

A right royal blockbuster from dramatist Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost / Nixon). Tracing the reign of Elizabeth II from her days as a wide-eyed young woman propelled to the throne after the surprise early death of her father, The Crown humanises the royals even as it paints their private lives as a bodice-ripping soap. Matt Smith is charmingly roguish as Prince Philip and Vanessa Kirby has ascended the Hollywood ranks on the back of her turn as the flawed yet sympathetic Princess Margaret. Most impressive of all, arguably, is Claire Foy, who plays the Queen as a shy woman thrust unwillingly into the spotlight. Foy and the rest of the principal cast have now departed, with a crew of older actors – headed by Olivia Colman and Tobias Menzies – taking over as the middle-aged Windsors for season three.

Netflix

12/25 Narcos

This drug trafficking caper spells out exactly what kind of series it is with an early scene in which two gangsters zip around a multi-level carpark on a motorbike firing a machine gun. Narcos, in other words, is for people who consider Pacino’s Scarface a touch too understated. Series one and two feature a mesmerising performance by Wagner Moura as Columbian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar, while season three focuses on the notorious Cali cartel. Reported to be one of Netflix’s biggest hits – the company doesn’t release audience figures – the fourth season turns its attention to Mexico’s interminable drugs wars.

Juan Pablo Gutierrez/Netflix

13/25 Master Of None

A cloud hangs over Aziz Ansari’s future after he was embroiled in the #MeToo scandal. But whatever happens, he has left us with a humane and riveting sitcom about an Ansari-proximate character looking for love and trying to establish himself professionally in contemporary New York.

K.C. Bailey / Netflix

14/25 Bloodline

One of Netflix’s early blockbusters, the sprawling soap opera updates Dallas to modern day southern Florida. Against the edge-of-civilisation backdrop of the Florida Keys, Kyle Chandler plays the local detective and favourite son of a well-to-do family. Their idyllic lives are thrown into chaos with the return of the clan’s black sheep (an unnervingly intense Ben Mendelsohn). The story is spectacularly hokey but searing performances by Chandler and Mendelsohn, and by Sissy Spacek and the late Sam Shepard as their imperious parents, make Bloodline compelling – a guilty pleasure that, actually, you shouldn’t feel all that guilty about.

Rod Millington/Netflix

15/25 The Alienist

You can almost smell the shoddy sanitation and horse-manure in this lavish murder-mystery set in 19th New York. We’re firmly in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York territory, with a serial killer bumping off boy prostitutes across Manhattan. Enter pioneering criminal psychologist Dr Laszlo Kreisler (Daniel Brühl), aided by newspaper man John Moore (Luke Evans) and feisty lady detective Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning).

Kurt Iswarienko

16/25 Love

Judd Apatow bring his signature gross-out comedy to the small screen. Love, which Apatow produced, is a masterclass in restraint compared to 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up etc. Paul Rust is Gus, a nerdish movie set tutor, whose develops a crush on Gillian Jacobs’s too-cool-for-school radio producer Mickey. Romance, of a sort, blossoms – but Love’s triumph is to acknowledge the complications of real life and to disabuse its characters of the idea that there’s such a thing as a straightforward happy ending. Hipster LA provides the bustling setting.

Netflix

17/25 Queer Eye

Who says reality TV has to be nasty and manipulative? This updating of the early 2000s hit Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has five stereotype-challenging gay men sharing lifestyle tips and fashion advice with an engaging cast of All American schlubs (the first two seasons are shot mostly in the state of Georgia). There are laughs – but serious moment too, such as when one of the crew refuses to enter a church because of the still unhealed scars of his strict Christian upbringing.

Netflix

18/25 Chef’s Table

A high-gloss revamping of the traditional TV food show. Each episode profiles a high wattage international chef; across its three seasons, the series has featured gastronomic superstars from the US, Argentina, India and Korea.

Charles Panian/Netflix

19/25 Arrested Development

A disastrous group interview in which actor Jason Bateman “mansplained” away the bullying co-star Jessica Walter had suffered at the hands of fellow cast-member Jeffrey Tambor meant season five of Arrested Development was fatally compromised before it even landed. Yet Netflix’s return to the dysfunctional world of the Bluth family stands on its merits and is a worthy addition to the surreal humour of seasons one through three (series four, which had to work around the busy schedules of the cast, is disposable by comparison).

Netflix

20/25 Altered Carbon

Netflix does Bladerunner with this sumptuous adaptation of the cult Richard Morgan novel. The setting is a neon-splashed cyberpunk future in which the super-wealthy live forever by uploading the consciousness into new “skins”. Enter rebel-turned-detective Takeshi Kovacs (Joel Kinnaman), hired to find out who killed a (since resurrected) zillionaire industrialist while dealing with fallout from his own troubled past. Rumoured to be one of Netflix’s most expensive projects yet, for its second run, Anthony Mackie (aka Marvel’s Falcon) replaced Kinnaman as the shape-shifting Kovacs.

Netflix

21/25 Rick and Morty

Dan Harmon, creator of cult sitcom Community (also on Netflix), finds the perfect outlet for zany fanboy imagination with this crazed animated comedy about a Marty McFly/Doc Brown-esque duo of time travellers. Every genre imaginable is parodied with the manic energy and zinging dialogue we have come to expect from Harmon.

Netflix/Adult Swim

22/25 GLOW

Mad Men’s Alison Brie is our entry point into this comedy-drama inspired by a real life all-female wrestling league in the Eighties. Ruth Wilder (Brie) is a down-on-her luck actor who, out of desperation, signs up a wrestling competition willed into being by Sam Sylvia (podcast king Marc Maron). Britrock singer Kate Nash is one of her her fellow troupe members: the larger than life Rhonda “Britannica” Richardson.

Netflix

23/25 Archer

Deadpan animated satire about an idiot super spy with shaken and stirred mother issues. One of the most ambitious modern comedies, animated or otherwise, Archer tries on different varieties of humour for size and even occasionally tugs at the heart strings.

24/25 Ozark

Breaking Bad for those with short attention spans. The saga of Walter White took years to track the iconic anti-hero’s rise from mild mannered everyman to dead-eyed criminal. Ozark gets there in the first half hour as nebbish Chicago accountant Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) agrees to serve as lieutenant for the Mexican mob in the hillbilly heartlands of Ozark, Missouri (in return they thoughtfully spare his life). Bateman, usually seen in comedy roles, is a revelation as is Laura Linney as his nasty wife Wendy. There is also a break-out performance by Julia Garner playing the scion of a local redneck crime family.

Netflix

25/25 The Good Place

A heavenly comedy with a twist. Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) is a cynical schlub waved through the Pearly Gates by mistake after dying in a bizarre supermarket accident. There she must remain above the suspicions of seemingly well-meaning but disorganised angel Michael (Ted Danson) whilst also negotiating fractious relationships with do-gooder Chidi (William Jackson Harper), spoiled princess Tahani (former T4 presenter Jameela Jamil) and ex-drug dealer Jason (Manny Jacinto).

Netflix

1/25 Bojack Horseman

Netflix

2/25 Stranger Things

Netflix

3/25 Daredevil

Netflix

4/25 The Staircase

Netflix

5/25 Dark

Netflix

6/25 A Series of Unfortunate Events

Netflix

7/25 Maniac

Netflix

8/25 Better Call Saul

AMC Studios/Netflix

9/25 Black Mirror

Netflix

10/25 Mindhunter

Netflix

11/25 The Crown

Netflix

12/25 Narcos

Juan Pablo Gutierrez/Netflix

13/25 Master Of None

K.C. Bailey / Netflix

14/25 Bloodline

Rod Millington/Netflix

15/25 The Alienist

Kurt Iswarienko

16/25 Love

Netflix

17/25 Queer Eye

Netflix

18/25 Chef’s Table

Charles Panian/Netflix

19/25 Arrested Development

Netflix

20/25 Altered Carbon

Netflix

21/25 Rick and Morty

Netflix/Adult Swim

22/25 GLOW

Netflix

23/25 Archer

24/25 Ozark

Netflix

25/25 The Good Place

Netflix

Zayid took comedy classes instead, began to get gigs, and after 11 September started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival with Dean Obeidallah. “The simplest way for me to describe Maysoon is fearless,” Obeidallah said.

She also toured with the standup comedy show Arabs Gone Wild, landed a part in Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, and became a political commentator on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, which proved a revelation.

Zayid had long understood that some non-disabled people recoiled at disabilities out of fear. “They’re one popped blood vessel or car accident away from being this way,” she said. But her Olbermann appearances drew hateful online comments calling her, she said, “a Gumby-mouth terrorist” and “an honour killing gone wrong”. It was the first time Zayid had been mocked for being disabled, and made her suddenly aware of the abuse that disabled people routinely faced.

After Zayid’s TED Talk went viral, she became one of the most booked speakers at the huge talent agency WME, and used her bigger platform to push questions forward: Where were the visibly disabled news anchors and talk-show hosts? Why, outside a handful of shows – among them Switched at Birth, Breaking Bad, American Horror Story and Speechless – were visibly disabled actors largely absent from television? Why was it OK for non-disabled stars to play disabled characters – a practice nicknamed “CripFace” – and win big awards?

While performances by, say, Joaquin Phoenix as a wheelchair-using cartoonist or Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking largely go unquestioned, and even lauded, by non-disabled people, Zayid said that for many people with disabilities, their acting looks cartoonish, exaggerated, offensive and inauthentic.

“You can put on makeup to look Asian or Latino or black, but black, Asian and Latino people know you’re not,” she said. “And disabled people watching their disabilities being poorly portrayed know it’s not them either.” Or, as she says onstage, if a person in a wheelchair can’t play Beyoncé, Beyoncé can’t play a person in a wheelchair.

Zayid will find out in January whether her show is to be made into a pilot. In the meantime, she is zipping around the world. In recent years, her gigs have included performing at the Team Beachbody Coach Summit – it’s for workout fiends – in Nashville, Tennessee; opening for rapper Pitbull in Las Vegas; and doing comedy, in both Arabic and English, in the United Arab Emirates (“They loved me,” she said).

At every turn, she slaps down people for using a particularly dreaded word. “If you think I’m inspirational because I go and do sit-down standup comedy uncovered and uncensored in the middle of the Arab world, I’ll take it,” she said.

“If you think I’m inspirational because I wake up in the morning and don’t weep about the fact that I’m disabled, that’s not inspirational,” she continued. “That’s like I make you feel better about yourself because you’re not me. I want to make you feel better about yourself because I made you laugh.”

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Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/features/maysoon-zayid-interview-comedian-standup-disability-activist-ted-talk-can-can-show-a8626201.html

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flauntpage · 6 years

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A Guide for Who to Root For in This Trash-Ass Super Bowl

At long last, we know John Wick’s impossible task: picking the more likable team in a Super Bowl involving the New England Patriots and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Wick is a New Yorker and definitely a Giants fan, so you know this to be true.

Every year, those of us who are fans of the loser teams not playing on Super Bowl Sunday prefer to have an easily identifiable villain to root against and an underdog hero we can pin our hopes on. Last year, it was easy, as the beautiful Atlanta Falcons dominated the vile Patriots for two and a half quarters before proceeding to puke all over themselves and fall into quicksand while trying to hold up their sagging pants.

The decision this year is much more difficult.

That’s why I’m here, to break down everything about the teams and help you choose your new favorite team for three hours. Patriots? Eagles? Let’s look at this logically and solve the riddle of Super Bowl LII.

QUARTERBACKS: Tom Brady vs. Nick Foles

Brady: He was brought into existence in 2001 when a scientist stuffed a football into a jar of mayonnaise and buried it in radioactive waste. While some people can be stupid in a charming way, Brady’s idiocy is more dangerous. He’s Forrest Gump if instead of chocolates and running Forrest enjoyed highly expensive potions that give sick people false hope and cheating at football with near total impunity. Brady has so completely shed his human form that he can’t answer a simple question about which Kendrick Lamar songs he likes after saying he likes Kendrick Lamar.

Foles: No idea. Is he lefty? “Nick Foles” sounds less like a quarterback and more like a strategy created by evil hunters. He’s blond, I think. Who is the last blond quarterback to win a Super Bowl? John Elway? That was like 20 years ago. Foles would have to be the blondest since Terry Bradshaw, right? Apparently he has a gigantic shlong, but that’s going to make half the people jealous and half love him. He probably can’t name a Kendrick Lamar song, either.

Advantage: Push

COACHES: Bill Belichick vs. Doug Pederson

Belichick: He’s cold, calculating, and ruthlessly efficient at cheating. If they ever make a Horrible Bosses 3, he needs to be a character that’s stalked by Tiquan Underwood. This guy either dresses like he just got done with a three-hour biceps session at the YMCA or he’s traveling back in time to participate in prohibition. He’s a man of few words where the media is concerned because he prefers to save them for love letters to Donald Trump.

Pederson: Wasn’t this the name that Cameron Frye is always using in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? “Doug Pederson, Chicago PD!” How is this team in the Super Bowl? Before becoming head coach in Philadelphia, he spent three seasons in Kansas City as offensive coordinator and guided the Chiefs to no better than 21st in total offense in his time there. Don’t you dare say the NFL isn’t a meritocracy! He got a Super Bowl ring as holder with the Packers in 1997, which is like telling people you won an Oscar for Saving Private Ryan because you played a corpse on the beach.

Advantage: Push

CHAIN RESTAURANTS: Dunkin’ Donuts vs. Wawa

Dunkin’ Donuts: Bostonians’ years of defending the watered-down piss coffee they serve turned out to be great practice for defending an indefensible football team. “There’s something about the Dunkies in Boston that’s just different!” No, there isn’t. Someone in 1948 spilled sewer water into a coffee machine in Quincy and nobody had the heart to say they were serving garbage juice. This would be the perfect #brand partnership for Brady if he didn’t think coffee beans contained ligament fiber thetans or some shit.

Wawa: It’s a 7-11 that’s not self-aware enough to realize it’s just a place to get beef jerky on a road trip or a pre-cooked hot dog when you’re drunk. Wawa is to Philadelphians what music is to people when they’re teenagers—it was there in your formative years so you think it’s better than it actually is. “Oh, but they make sandwiches!” Holy shit, sandwiches? Can you get sandwiches anywhere else in the world? It’s a fancy rest stop named for how babies say water. Get lost.

Advantage: Push

RECENT HISTORY: Patriots vs. Eagles

Patriots: This is the Patriots’ eighth Super Bowl appearance since 2002. The Patriots have won no fewer than nine regular-season games since 2001 and have a record of 209-63 over that time. With Belichick and Brady at the helm, the Patriots have become the model franchise across all sports.

Eagles: Donovan McNabb puked on the field during a Super Bowl. From 2001 to 2003, the Eagles lost three straight NFC title games, the last two occurring at home. When they finally got to the Super Bowl in 2004, they lost to the Patriots. They would go on to lose one more NFC title game in 2008, which makes them a less successful version of those Buffalo Bills teams that lost four straight Super Bowls.

Advantage: Push

FOLLOWING RULES: Cheating vs. Not Cheating

Cheating: The Patriots have been caught cheating on two occasions, Spygate and Deflategate. It’s doubtful a team with a history of cheating only cheated twice, so we will likely never know the full breadth of the Patriots’ cheating but it’s probably wild. If you told me Belichick would get nude and oil himself up so he could slide in air ducts above the visiting team’s locker room with a recording device, I would believe you and hate you for making me picture that image.

Not cheating: The beauty of being a franchise without a Super Bowl is there’s no way anyone can accuse you of cheating. Or trying. Or being good. Man, maybe cheat a little, huh? That town needs it.

Advantage: Push

FANS: Insufferable Pricks vs. Volatile Assholes

Insufferable pricks: The one thing I truly appreciate about the douchebag core of Patriots fans is their unapologetic nature. “Everyone fucking hates you!” “Good. I don’t give a shit. Go Pats.” You have to respect it. There’s never any, “Not all Patriots fans are like that!” nonsense. They know the team cheats and the players and coach are trash but all the winning is so orgasmic they go with it. Bill Simmons is a 50-year-old man who probably has a “hate us because they ain’t us” tattoo on his calf and it’s damn admirable.

Volatile idiots: Now with Eagles fans, you never know. You could wear a Giants jersey to an Eagles game and either engage in witty ribbing and banter with good-natured fans or have your throat slit while waiting to buy a beer. And unlike with Patriots fans, there are still Eagles fans who play the “every city has bad fans” card. Sure. Every city has people who intentionally puke on children, throw batteries at players, punch police horses, craft large signs that say “FUCK MILLIE” because 100-year-old people should eat shit too, throw snowballs at Santa Claus, boo the franchise’s best quarterback when he was drafted, cheer because Michael Irvin may be potentially paralyzed on the field, throw a beer bottle at the best first baseman in franchise history, or climb into a penalty box to fight Tie Domi. You’ll find all that in every sports town, absolutely.

Advantage: Push

TELEVISION SHOWS: Cheers vs. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Cheers: Really funny show about 1980s people in Boston who don’t care about anyone but themselves, hanging out in bar. It stars Rhea Perlman, who is married to Danny DeVito.

It’s Always Sunny: Really funny show about 2000s people in Philadelphia who don’t care about anyone but themselves, hanging out in bar. It stars Danny DeVito, who is married to Rhea Perlman.

Wait, should I be writing a TV show about a bar in … New York?

Advantage: Push

MOST FAMOUS FAN: Mark Wahlberg vs. Mark Wahlberg

Seriously, this moron from Boston—who claims to be a huge Patriots fan even though he left in the middle of the Super Bowl comeback last year and blamed his child for it—says he doesn’t care who wins this year! Why? Because not only is Come Awn Come Awn Feel It Feel It a huge Pats bro, he once portrayed some shitty player who only made the Eagles roster because the team was so damn shitty.

Can you imagine this idiot being asked about global warming? “I’m really rooting for humans to survive climate change but I was in a movie where trees and plants killed people, so I’ve got a special place in my heart for leaves. I’ll be happy no matter who wins.”

Advantage: Push

It turns out the lesson here is don’t root for anyone. Don’t even watch the game. There’s a decent chance John Wick 2 will be on one of your HBOs. Watch that and don’t look back at NBC until Monday morning.

A Guide for Who to Root For in This Trash-Ass Super Bowl published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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