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msclaritea · 11 months

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HBO Chief Casey Bloys Says “A Sameness Of Storytelling” Has Bogged Down Recent Superhero Outings – Deadline

"HBO and Max Content CEO Casey Bloys isn’t buying the notion that audiences have tired of major comic-book tentpoles, despite recent signs of a dropoff at the movie box office and some streaming outlets.

(That's what WBD is now hoping, after they helped to spread the toxic message, through trolls, of superhero fatigue, for years)

“I don’t know that it’s necessarily tentpole fatigue as much as it is a sameness of storytelling,” he said during a 2024 programming showcase in New York.

(What WB really objects to? Diversity, lack of realness. See Hyper violence, and clearly defined good & evil roles)

One of the shows to get significant billing at the event is The Penguin, which stars Colin Farrell in the title tole. The Batman helmer Matt Reeves is an executive producer of the Max Original, whose original spring 2024 launch will be delayed by the WGA and actors strikes..

(Another show surrounding a villain and using a mid actor)

DC is the main supplier of superhero fare on Max, but Bloys largely demurred during a press Q&A when asked for details about the state of the comic book corporate sibling’s production slate, including James Gunn’s new take on Superman. Thematically, though, he said DC definitely fits into his programming philosophy when it comes to keeping genre fare interesting.

(OF course he'd say that)

“I think the key, even within DC, is trying to tell different stories in different styles, to not try to do the same show over and over and over again,” he said. “I would say Peacemaker is a very different show tonally than The Penguin. So, there’s not a uniformity to the storytelling and I think that helps.”

Bloys volunteered a thought about a major rival. “Unfortunately, Marvel, as good as their shows are, there’s probably been a lot of them. That’s one of the advantages we have at Warner Bros. is it’s not just one set of stories. There’s a lot of stories you can go to.”

While Peacemaker, The Penguin and other shows in development are from the DC stable, Bloys said, the slate also features spinoffs from Warner Bros. films like It and Dune, with a Crazy Rich Asians spinoff also in the pipeline.

Let's see here:

Snyderverse, a mess

Wonder Woman 1984, flopped

The Flash, flopped

Black Adam, SO flopped

Aquaman, ABOUT to flop

In the tradition of sportsmanlike behavior in competition, Warner Bros Discovery would be booed off the court. Who the hell are they to give advice to Marvel?

I'd also like to bring up one more thing: Heath Ledger died as a result of playing the Joker. The psychological stress took such a toll on him, that that's when he went on prescriptions.

#Warner Bros Discovery #No morals and a house full of mid British actors #Casey Bloy #Doesn't want diversity #He wants hyper violence and sympathy for saud violence #WBD #DC Comics #HBO

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insanityclause · 4 years

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In the longest scheduled extension to date of the blackout of Broadway theaters prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, trade organization the Broadway League announced Tuesday that the 41 top-tier New York theaters that went dark March 12 will remain that way at least through Sept. 6.

That's a full three months beyond the last extension, which bumped back the original April 12 end date for the closure to June 7. However, few pundits are expecting to see theaters open for business Sept. 8, the day after Labor Day, which falls on a Monday when most Broadway theaters remain dark. The situation seems likely to be reevaluated as that date approaches, with producers and theater owners adopting a wait-and-see policy in accordance with state guidelines and other safety and economic considerations.

"No one wants to get too far ahead of the governor on this," said one prominent producer who spoke off the record.

"While all Broadway shows would love to resume performances as soon as possible, we need to ensure the health and well-being of everyone who comes to the theater — behind the curtain and in front of it — before shows can return," Broadway League president Charlotte St. Martin said Tuesday in a statement. "The Broadway League's membership is working in cooperation with the theatrical unions, government officials and health experts to determine the safest ways to restart our industry. Throughout this challenging time, we have been in close communication with Gov. [Andrew] Cuomo's office and are grateful for his support and leadership as we work together to bring back this vital part of New York City's economy — and spirit."

The League's decision follows last week's announcement from the Society of London Theatres, extending the shutdown of live entertainment venues in the British capital through June 28. Like Broadway, that date appears to be a marker rather than a set plan for reopening. West End theaters have been canceling performances on a rolling basis, which seems certain to continue through the summer.

Broadway was the first sector in New York to impose a blanket suspension of operations on March 12, and most insiders expect it to be one of the last to come back.

In a sign that producers are approaching reopening with the utmost caution, the Broadway revival of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite, starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, announced Tuesday that it will be pushed back by a full year, with the limited engagement now scheduled for March 19-July 18, 2021, at the Hudson Theatre. Directed by Tony-winning actor John Benjamin Hickey, the comedy was originally scheduled to begin previews March 13, the day after the Broadway shutdown, and was one of the fastest-selling productions of the spring.

"We remain deeply committed to bringing Neil Simon's Plaza Suite to New York as promised and cannot wait to help welcome audiences back to our beloved Broadway," said Broderick and Parker in a statement. "Until then, everybody please stay safe."

While some have floated the idea of theaters reopening with socially distanced seating plans, few if any producers think that model would work given Broadway's exorbitant running costs. The more likely scenario involves temperature checks for theatergoers along with compulsory masks and gloves, no intermissions and deep-disinfectant cleaning of auditoriums between performances. But many questions remain, including how to provide adequate protection for actors in productions that don't allow for social distancing.

The famous William Goldman quote about the film industry seems especially applicable to post-pandemic Broadway: "Nobody knows anything." But the smart money seems to point to an early-2021 reopening, with anecdotal estimates ranging from January through March.

In what could turn out to be a harbinger of things to come for many of the country's stages, Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater, one of America's largest and most respected nonprofits, last week took the bold step of announcing that operations will resume with a compressed mini-season of just three productions running March-August 2021. That represents a massive reduction from the originally scheduled 11 shows, with a budget slashed from $31 million to $12.6 million. Those drastic measures make necessary allowances for the time required to build and rehearse productions, underscoring the complicated logistics for the theater sector of emerging from lockdown.

A Shugoll Research industry survey this month indicated that only 41 percent of New York theatergoers say they are likely to return when theaters resume activity, while almost 1 in 5 people, or 17 percent, say they are very unlikely. More than half those polled, or 58 percent, said they will wait at least a few months before attending a show.

When theaters went dark, the 2019-20 season was just a little beyond the midway point, with another 16 productions scheduled to open before the April 23 cutoff for 2020 Tony Awards consideration. An announcement was made March 25 that due to the coronavirus shutdown, the Tonys would be postponed to a later date to be set once Broadway resumes activity.

Two Broadway shows that had begun previews when the lights went out — Martin McDonagh's Hangmen and a revival of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — have already announced they will not reopen after the suspension ends. Other shows from nonprofit producers that were about to begin performances have been pushed back to next season, including Roundabout's Birthday Candles and Caroline, or Change; Lincoln Center Theater's Flying Over Sunset; and Manhattan Theatre Club's How I Learned to Drive.

With Plaza Suite also now postponed, that still leaves nine incoming productions in limbo, some of which had minimal advance sales and muted buzz at the time of the shutdown, even less so now. How many of those will forge ahead with opening plans remains to be seen. Uncertainty also hangs over established shows that had started to see a slight decline in business after the initial boom period — Mean Girls, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and even Disney's Frozen among them.

Many are quietly wondering about the wisdom of coming back to half-empty houses even for long-running behemoths like The Phantom of the Opera, which relies heavily on tourism for the majority of its traffic. Even the most optimistic estimates don't anticipate the return of tourists to New York in sizable numbers before summer 2021 at the earliest.

If most of Broadway's 41 houses do reopen, the likelihood of swift financial casualties and prompt closings could mean many prime venues will sit vacant for the first time since the slump of the 1980s and early '90s. The steady growth since then, which propelled Broadway to a record $1.8 billion in grosses last season with attendance of 15 million, now inevitably seems headed for a major reset. Some industryites are asking whether this will mean renegotiating ticketing price scales, landlord percentages and union rates to bring down the prohibitive costs that put Broadway off limits to many entertainment consumers.

Losses to the sector are difficult to calculate, especially with no certainty about a reopening date, but 2019 box office grosses for mid-March through Labor Day totaled $915 million. Industry analysts generally estimate that factoring in the losses to theater-district businesses fed by the Broadway economy — hotels, restaurants, bars, parking garages, taxis and car services — means multiplying total ticket sales by three. That would peg the overall financial blow for the six-month period at a staggering $2.7 billion. At any rate, the impact on one of New York City's principal economic drivers and job pipelines will be devastating, with the fallout sure to be felt for years to come.

As for the Tony Awards, there are two principal schools of thought about which way to go.

Some are lobbying to put a cap on the partial season and present awards for the shows that opened before March 12. This, however, would handicap recent openings like West Side Story and Girl From the North Country given that not all of the Tony Nominating Committee will have seen them and certainly not the majority of voters. Shows that opened early in the season, on the other hand, like Moulin Rouge! and the limited-engagement, Tom Hiddleston-led revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, would have an advantage.

The alternate plan is to combine the truncated partial 2019-20 season with any shows that open between the resumption of Broadway operations and the late-April cutoff for 2021 Tony consideration, presenting the double awards at a ceremony in June next year. That option also has clear disadvantages for some, however, given that voters have notoriously short memories and shows like Betrayal or The Inheritance that have long closed will be ancient history by then.

Whichever route the Tonys choose to go, there are sure to be disgruntled players. But even a partial ceremony of outstanding Broadway artistry right now could serve as a much-needed morale booster to a sector facing unprecedented challenges.

#Broadway #Tonys #Tom Hiddleston #Betrayal

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thefederalistfreestyle · 7 years

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Hamilton: how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical rewrote the story of America (New Statesman):

[. . .] Because of the success of Hamilton – it has been sold out on Broadway since August 2015, won 11 Tony Awards and the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and is on tour in Chicago and Los Angeles – there is now an industry devoted to uncovering and explaining its references. Yet the sheer ebullience of the soundscape is not enough to explain why it became a hit. To understand that, we need to understand the scope of its ambition, which is nothing less than giving America a new origin story. “Every generation rewrites the founders in their own image,” says Nancy Isenberg, a professor of history at Louisiana State University and the author of a biography of Aaron Burr. “He [Miranda] rewrote the founders in the image of Obama, for the age of Obama.”

In doing so, Miranda created a fan base that mirrors the “Obama coalition” of Democrat voters: college-educated coastal liberals and mid-to-low-income minorities. (When the musical first hit Broadway in 2015, some tickets went for thousands of dollars; others were sold cheaply in a daily street lottery or given away to local schoolchildren.) He also gave his audiences another gift. Just as Obama did in his 2008 campaign, Hamilton’s post-racial view of history offers Americans absolution from the original sin of their country’s birth – slavery. It rescues the idea of the US from its tainted origins.

[. . .]

There is, of course, a great theatrical tradition of “patriotic myth-making”, and it explains another adjective that is frequently applied to Hamilton: Shakespearean. England’s national playwright was instrumental in smearing Richard III as a hunchbacked child-killer, portraying the French as our natural enemies and turning the villainous Banquo of Holinshed’s Chronicles into the noble figure claimed as an ancestor by the Stuarts, and therefore Shakespeare’s patron James VI and I.

James Shapiro, a professor of English literature at Columbia University, New York, and the author of several books on Shakespeare, first saw the musical during its early off-Broadway run. “It was the closest I’ve ever felt to experiencing what I imagine it must have been like to have attended an early performance of, say, Richard III, on the Elizabethan stage,” he tells me. “But this time, it was my own nation’s troubled history that I was witnessing.”

Shapiro says that Shakespeare’s first set of history plays deals with the recent past, ending with Richard III; he then went back further to create an English origin story through Richard II and Henry V. “Lin-Manuel Miranda was trying to grasp the fundamental problems underlying contemporary American culture,” he adds. “He might, like Shakespeare, have gone back a century and explored the civil war. But I suspect that he saw that to get at the deeper roots of what united and divided Americans meant going back even further, to the revolution. No American playwright has ever managed to explain the present by reimagining so inventively that distant past.” And where Shakespeare had Holinshed’s Chronicles, Miranda had Ron Chernow.

There are Shakespearean references throughout his play. In “Take a Break”, Hamilton writes to his sister-in-law, Angelica:

They think me Macbeth and ambition is my folly. I’m a polymath, a pain in the ass, a massive pain. Madison is Banquo, Jefferson’s Macduff And Birnam Wood is Congress on its way to Dunsinane.

Shapiro says that these “casual echoes of famous lines” are less important than the lessons that Miranda has taken about how to write history. “Another way of putting it is that anyone can quote Shakespeare; very few can illuminate so brilliantly a nation’s past and, through that, its present.”

[. . .]

I love Hamilton – I think the level of my nerdery about it so far has probably made that clear – but I find it fascinating that its overtly political agenda has been so little discussed, beyond noting the radicalism of casting black actors as white founders. Surely this is the “Obama play”, in the way that David Hare’s Stuff Happens became the “Bush play” or The Crucible became the theatre’s response to McCarthyism. It’s just unusual, in that its response to the contemporary mood is a positive one, rather than sceptical or scathing. (And it has an extra resonance now that a white nationalist is in the White House. One of the first acts of dissent against the Trump regime was when his vice-president, Mike Pence, attended the musical in November 2016 and received a polite post-curtain speech from the cast about tolerance. “The cast and producers of Hamilton, which I hear is highly overrated, should immediately apologise to Mike Pence for their terrible behaviour,” tweeted Trump, inevitably.)

Hamilton tries to make its audience feel OK about patriotism and the idealism of early America. It has, as the British theatre director Robert Icke put it to me this summer, “a kind of moral evangelism” that is hard for British audiences to swallow. In order to achieve this, we are allowed to see Hamilton’s personal moral shortcomings, but the uglier aspects of the early days of America still have to be tidied away.

There’s a brief mention, for instance, of Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings – whom he systematically raped over many years. But the casting of black and Hispanic actors makes it hard for the musical to deal directly with slavery, and so the issue only drips into the narrative rather than being confronted. There’s a moment after the battle of Yorktown when “black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom – not yet”. Another sour note is struck in one of the cabinet rap battles between Hamilton and Jefferson, in which the former notes acidly, “Your debts are paid cos you don’t pay for labour.”

In early workshops, there was a third cabinet battle over slavery – and the song is available on The Hamilton Mixtape, a series of reworkings and offcuts from the musical. When a proposal is brought before Washington to abolish slavery, Hamilton tells the cabinet:

This is the stain on our soul and democracy A land of the free? No, it’s not. It’s hypocrisy To subjugate, dehumanise a race, call ’em property And say that we are powerless to stop it. Can you not foresee?

Ultimately, though, the song was cut. “No one knew what to do about it, and [the founding fathers] all kicked it down the field,” Miranda explained to Billboard in July 2015. “And while, yeah, Hamilton was anti-slavery and never owned slaves, between choosing his financial plan and going all in on opposition to slavery, he chose his financial plan. So it was tough to justify keeping that rap battle in the show, because none of them did enough.”

***

In March 2016, Lin-Manuel Miranda returned to the White House. This time, one of the numbers he performed was a duet from the musical called “One Last Time”, sung with the original cast member Christopher Jackson playing George Washington. After Alexander Hamilton tells the first US president that two of his cabinet have resigned to run against him, Washington announces that he will step down to leave the field open.

It is the political heart of the play’s myth-making, comparable to Nelson Mandela leaving Robben Island. The decorated Virginian veteran was the only man who could unite the fractious revolutionaries after they defeated the British. Washington could have become dictator for life; instead, he chose to create a true democracy. “If I say goodbye, the nation learns to move on./It outlives me when I’m gone.”

For a nation just beginning to think that Trump could really, actually become its president, seeing the incumbent acknowledge that his time was nearly over was a powerful moment. For Obama watching it in the audience, it must have felt like his narrative had come full circle.

Towards the end of the song, Hamilton begins to read out the words of the farewell address he has written, and Washington joins in, singing over the top of them. It was a technique cribbed from Will.i.am’s 2008 Obama campaign video, in which musicians and actors sing and speak along to the candidate’s “Yes, we can” speech.

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama had written, “I learnt to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.”

This was the promise of his presidency: that there was not a black America or a white America, a liberal America or a conservative America, but, as he said in his breakthrough speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, “a United States of America”. The man who followed him clearly thinks no such thing, but nonetheless the nation must learn to move on.

In his farewell address in January 2017, Obama returned to the “Yes, we can” speech, using its words as the final statement on his presidency:

I am asking you to hold fast to that faith written into our founding documents; that idea whispered by slaves and abolitionists; that spirit sung by immigrants and homesteaders and those who marched for justice; that creed reaffirmed by those who planted flags from foreign battlefields to the surface of the moon; a creed at the core of every American whose story is not yet written: yes, we can. Yes, we did.

For the playwright JT Rogers, this is the true triumph of Hamilton – giving today’s multiracial America a founding myth in which minorities have as much right to be there as Wasps. It is political “in the sense of reclaiming the polis” – the body of citizens who make up a country. “The little village we live in outside the city, everyone in the middle school knows the score verbatim,” Rogers adds. “They recite it endlessly and at length, like Homer.”

the full long-read here!

#hamilton #meta #u.s. politics #obama #new statesman #history #shakespeare

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ofgunsandlipstick · 7 years

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So this is what I’m working on if you want to read it and figure out why I’m not here. It’s because suddenly this dumb thing is eating my life.

Welcome to another episode of >>, a podcast that explores the lesser-known histories of Hollywood’s Golden Age. This season, we’re focusing on the so-called glamour girls of the forties and fifties, what most people consider the classic era of Hollywood. And today, we’re focusing on one of the first stars to really come of age and stardom in this era.

At one point, she was the most sought-after star at MGM, one of the highest paid actors in the world. She made her image and her mark in her seeming contradictions. British and yet exuding that all-American pluck, an innocent sexpot, the femme fatale with unshakable morals, and at one point the sexiest woman on earth whose down-to-earth persona made her seem completely accessible and available to those who loved her.

That’s right, darlings. Buckle up, we’re talking about Peggy Carter.

. . .

Before we can get to Peggy Carter’s time at MGM, we have to understand who she was before she got there. Born Margaret Carter to parents in Hampstead, England, she was a tomboy for most of her childhood, wearing her hair short and constantly running around the neighborhood. She would later write in her 1992 autobiography, “I was a terror- my mother couldn’t have been more worried.”

And she wasn’t lying. Amanda Carter was, by all accounts, a rather exacting woman. She was raised by a naval officer and raised from the time she could speak to be a hostess, especially after her own mother passed away. As the eldest of three girls, her father’s hosting duties often fell to her. Amanda spoke of ten of the importance of a cleanly and organized home and she strove to raise her own children to value it as much as she did.

Unfortunately for Amanda her children with Charles Carter, a well-to-do business man with a taste for adventure, took more than their brown hair and complexions from their father. Charles could be boisterous, loud and loving. He often refused to chastise his children for behavior that their mother deemed unacceptable. He encouraged their roughhousing and mud tracking to the point that Amanda was clearly fed up by the time Margaret was ten. Not that she’d ever leave him.

Amanda had always wanted a daughter, but Michael came first and she doted on him. Still, he wasn’t exactly a little one she could dress up and share her wisdom with. When Margaret was born, Amanda was convinced she needed to be the mother of a little girl. Unfortunately, Margaret would never quite live up to her mother’s ideal.

Margaret was a difficult child. She didn’t like the traditional things that a girl in the 20s should be expected to like. She much preferred running around, slaying imaginary dragons with her brother than help her mother tend house. Her father indulged her entirely, allowing her to learn to shoot alongside her brother and often treating her as a second son. Amanda would always complain that mud and dirt were impossible to keep out of the house.

This continued until Peggy- still called Margaret- hit puberty. While she was once slim and boyish, her frame filled out. And kept filling. By 14, Margaret’s hips and chest had firmly placed her out of vogue for the 20s boyish fashion, but certainly caused the boys of the neighborhood to take notice. Suddenly her playmates of her youth wanted to hold her hand. Boys three or four years older who had never had time for her now. They looked at her differently.

In short, Margaret had become beautiful. And she wasn’t quite prepared for it. Skirts had to be worn now, as well as a bra. She’d never wanted to be too feminine and now her body was aggressively so.

But Margaret learned quickly. She’d always been smart and strategic. And she quickly learned that a little bit of flirting could get her a long way.

This alarmed the Carters. Their daughter was quickly growing out of a stage they were comfortable with. At Charles Carter’s insistence, his beloved Margaret was sent to an all-girls boarding school some miles away.

There are conflicting accounts of how successful Margaret was at school. She was certainly smart and always earned top marks. However, she also always seemed to be in trouble one way or another.

In her biography she recollected an incident involving the headmaster’s booze… and his wife’s knickers. On a dare, Margaret snuck into their quarters and stole a handful of the wife’s panties, only getting caught when she returned to getting caught when she returned to knick the bottle of brandy she had seen on the counter. She was severely punished—the school was a proponent of corporeal punishment—but Margaret didn’t mind. Rather proudly, she bragged in her book that she was the only one lashed and “I deserved every one. It was greedy to go back for the liquor.”

She made friends at school, albeit perhaps ones who encouraged her wild streak. They would sometimes sneak into town, flirting with the soda jerks for free milkshakes or sneaking into movie theaters.

It was on one fateful trip into town that Margaret Carter, of Hampstead, England was set on a crash course with Hollywood and becoming Peggy Carter.

How much of her origin story was real and how much was part of the star-making mythos is unclear. What is clear is that an extraordinary amount of luck came into Margaret’s life very quickly.

Producer-director at MGM Hugh Jones was in England scouting locations for an upcoming picture centered around a boarding school and he came to the town. Sitting in a diner, eating a burger, he evidently spotted sixteen-year-old Margaret sitting at the counter flirting with the “acne-ridden burger flipper.” In his autobiography, Hugh would claim that the sun burst through the clouds at that moment and a beam illuminated Margaret’s face. This probably isn’t true. It was England, after all, and Hugh Jones was prone to flowery language and over exaggeration, especially when it came to the woman he considered his biggest star.

In any case, Jones approached Margaret and asked if she wanted to make a picture. She’d become world-wise in her time at boarding school and wary of any man who approached her. So Margaret immediately shot back, “Not the kind of picture you’re thinking of, mister.”

But Jones wouldn’t be dissuaded and in two weeks he’d convinced her that he was legitimate, going so far to visit the headmaster with a letter of introduction from the great Louis B. Mayer himself—MGMs head.

By 1935, Margaret was in Hollywood. Newly 18 and safely installed at MGM, she underwent the standard star treatment. That meant plucking her eyebrows, learning to do makeup, and a whole new wardrobe. Her hair was to be pin-curled and set each night, giving her hair body it never had before. Her teeth were straightened and she was given acting classes. And suddenly, little tomboy Margaret became glamorous.

Her signature red lips wouldn’t come until later, but Hugh Jones was convinced that his discovery would become a star. Louis B. Mayer had to be a bit more hesitant but he was sold when he saw her screen test. Still, Margaret was a common name and it wouldn’t do. Margaret, however, was adamant that she would keep her name or something like it and when Margaret Carter decided on something she usually got it. Especially where Hugh Jones was concerned.

And so, though Mayer was insistent, Margaret would not become Andrea or Gloria. Instead, she became Peggy, a quiet homage to Peg Entwistle, the star who had become more famous in death than life when she jumped off the Hollywood sign and Bette Davis’ idol.

Peggy Carter would get her first chance at stardom when Jones put her in a small but crucial role in his movie XXXX. Peggy’s role was as an innocent girl next door who becomes corrupted by her no-good boyfriend until she is a fallen woman, despite the protagonist’s, played by Roger Dooley, best efforts.

This seems unbelievable in light of Peggy’s future star turns as surprisingly liberated women given the times. But in the mid 30s, in a Hollywood governed by the Hays code, this is what was expected. And available. Besides, at this point, Peggy Carter had no cache.

She stole the picture out from under the nose of veteran actor Dooley and became a sensation almost immediately, though not exactly on the strength of her acting. Her wardrobe, though perfectly modest and in code, was particularly tailored to show off her… um, assets. Wearing a sweater and full skirt, tightly belted, there was no mistaking the allure of her character and therefore Dooley could be forgiven for falling for her early in the film, regardless of her increasingly unwholesome behavior and for wanting to save her.

Peggy Carter was essentially the sweater girl before the sweater girl was Lana Turner. But unlike Lana, her career hardly took off.

Hoping to recreate the success, Carter was paired again with Dooley, this time as his true romantic interest, even though he was clearly old enough to be her father, and with director Jones.

But Jones, an avowed womanizer, began to obsess over his star in a way that would make her truly uncomfortable. Ostensibly helping Peggy to run lines or character, Jones would invite her to his apartment late at night or out to dinner. He constantly found excuses to touch Peggy on set. And while at first Peggy tried to grit her teeth and bear it, she hated it.

So Peggy did the unthinkable. She went over Jones’ head and straight to Mayer. And in a shocking turn of events, he sided with Peggy. Of course, this was still the 30s, so siding with Peggy meant taking her off the picture without breaking her contract and getting her away from Jones. Veteran Broadway actress Angie Martinelli would step into the role to glowing reviews.

#★ COFFEE AND LIPSTICK (ooc)

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adambstingus · 6 years

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6 Actors Who Tried To Teach Lessons (And Madness Ensued)

A celebrity public service announcement seems like a fine idea in theory. People love having a popular, attractive person tell them what to do — that’s how God-Emperors are made. So how can you screw that up? Well, let us count the ways …

Mario Tells Kids That They’ll Suffer Hell On Earth

“Captain” Lou Albano had the honor of being both a professional wrestler and Mario on The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, which to children is about as impressive as being a crimefighting dog who can magically summon ice cream. So it’s not surprising that Albano was seen as a great choice for an anti-drug PSA aimed at kids. It is surprising that they filmed the whole shebang in a closet while Albano looked like he was wasted on a whatever he was telling kids to stay away from.

Albano crams a lot of words into 19 seconds, and while it’s mostly standard PSA stuff (“Don’t be afraid to say no,” “People who want you to take drugs aren’t really your friends,” “You’ll probably stop giving a crap about what Mario says when you go to college and some cutie invites you to smoke weed with them,” etc.), there’s a last-second twist. Albano warns that if you do drugs, “you’ll go to hell before you die,” while fading into a corner of a screen and whispering the word “please” in a way that would really mess with your head if you were tripping.

Always remember, kids: According to a professional athlete who played a hero whose power comes from magical mushrooms, drugs have no benefit whatsoever and will send you to a nightmarish plane of brimstone and fire.

The Cast Of The Wire Wants You To Wear A Condom

Teenagers, generally speaking, are the demographic that most need education on sexual safety, both because they’re lacking in life experience and because they’re getting laid way more often than we are. So if you had to make a hip safe sex PSA in the mid-2000s, what celebrities would you work with? The stars of a teen drama? Maybe the cast of a reality show? How about the heroes of their dad’s favorite gritty police drama, The Wire?

Luckily, a whole chunk of The Wire‘s cast is here to prestige people into practicing safe sex. Unfortunately, this PSA is less of a coherent call to action than a laudanum-induced fever dream. There are no statistics or stern lectures — merely the dying hallucinations of a ’80s music video director made surreality.

Monique Richert/YouTube “Why, I’m practicing safe sex right now!”

The whole thing comes across like aliens have kidnapped humans and are trying to make a soothing simulated reality for them based only on the trivia that we like sex, award-winning television, and outdated music. Clarke Peters looks like he’s about to teach us either Tae Bo or how to use your orgasm to ascend to a higher plane of existence.

Here’s Jackie Chan Hanging Out With A Giant Condom

“You all know me as an action hero,” is how Jackie Chan walks into this PSA. But he wants to introduce us to another action hero: Mr. Condom, who sounds like the stuffed bear of a Victorian British child — something to keep in mind the next time you use one.

Mr. Condom and Jackie clearly have a strong and respectful master-student relationship, and Chan explains how this strong warrior prevents STDs. Meanwhile, an energetic Mr. Condom shows off his fighting moves. Because if there’s one thing you want a good condom to be, it’s flexible enough to move around wildly on its own.

Mr. Condom then launches himself into the air, spins around, and stretches himself out, in case you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when a condom has its own orgasm, before reminding us to use him when you have sex. Chan then wraps up the PSA by telling us that while he can fight visible enemies, even he needs Mr. Condom’s help in keeping HIV at bay, which can definitely be a risk when you cheat on your wife. Then Jackie and Mr. Condom embrace, and Jackie definitely doesn’t die a little inside before they punch the camera.

Don’t Drive Angry, Or Evander Holyfield Will Beat You To Death

If you make the wrong decision while driving, you can end a person’s life. Someone’s loved one could be snuffed out in an instant due to your carelessness. But apparently some people require a more “What’s in it for me?” incentive than that, so Evander Holyfield made a PSA about how he’ll beat the shit out of aggressive drivers.

Scene: A car pulls into traffic and cuts off another driver, who then angrily honks and forces the car over. The man gets out of his truck and reveals himself to be a redneck stereotype whose string of profanity makes it clear that he intends to beat the fuck stuffing out of his new nemesis. But then, surprise twist! The man he wants to murder is Evander Holyfield! Now who’s about to die?

The moral clearly ought to be “Avoid road rage. You never know who you might run into. But counterpoint: If you can clearly see it’s some soccer mom or a grandpa, feel free to go full King Immortan Joe on their asses.” If the only way you can think of to appeal to violent maniacs is to remind them they’ll sometimes cross paths with a professional fighter, you haven’t made a PSA against road rage, but one in favor of keeping a gun in the glove compartment.

Mel Gibson Doesn’t Want The Feds To Take Away Our Vitamins

Holy shit, check out this thrilling Mel Gibson movie set in the grim future of 1993!

Whose fancy house is being raided? A corrupt politician? An unscrupulous CEO?

No, they’re arresting Mel Gibson. And while it was prescient for Gibson to portray himself as being in trouble with the law, here he’s being hauled in for the simple dystopian crime of owning vitamins. “Guys, guys! It’s only vitamins!” he protests. But what he doesn’t know is that the government wants to make vitamins illegal. This video is here to warn good American citizens that their supplements are under attack. Now, you probably don’t know anyone who has been dogpiled by a SWAT team for cracking open a bottle of Flintstone’s, but in the chilling, stupid reality of Mel Gibson’s world, the answer is “It’s already happening.”

As shown in this obviously based-on-real-events footage, the fascist pig cops are unimpressed when Gibson explains to them he was only taking Vitamin C, “like in oranges.” He’ll have plenty of time to adjust his mindset during his four-month stay at a Dietary Supplement Reeducation Camp. But that future doesn’t have to be ours, the cards say, if we just call our senators.

If you’re wondering what the hell is going on, this “PSA” was funded by the Nutritional Health Alliance, a lobby group formed by the supplement industry to prevent the government from looking into what a huge scam supplements are.

Specifically, in early ’90s, the FDA wanted to crack down on supplements that made completely unsubstantiated health claims on their packaging and in ads, because if there’s one thing the Man loves to do, it’s pushing around honest, hard-working Americans by forcing them to stop buying dangerous products that hospitalize tens of thousands and might accidentally kill people. It’s unclear if Gibson actually believed in the supplement industry or was letting them supplement his income, but luckily, Gibbers was unable to terrify Americans with his vision of a vitamin-hating police state. The FDA’s new regulations went through, and Gibson found himself on the wrong side of history — a position he’s since become intimately familiar with.

Kid Rock And Sean Penn For Generic Unity Between Americans

It’s no secret that America is a politically divided country. And who better to bridge that bitter gap than Kid Rock and Sean Penn, two of the most beloved and kind artists in the world. Between Kid’s political savvy and Penn’s famous calmness, only these two could ever unite Americans across the political spectrum — mostly by making all of them ask “Wait … what the fuck?”

This nearly 11-minute (no, seriously) public service Sundance entry is called “Americans,” and it features one of America’s favorite (alleged) spousal abusers sitting down with one of America’s least-favorite aural abusers for a conversation that absolutely no one asked for.

We open with Penn sitting at a bar and ordering vodka, even though he already looks and sounds completely shitfaced.

Mitt Romney (this was made in 2012) is giving a speech on TV. Penn asks for the channel to be changed, but the justifiably scared female bartender ignores him, just in time for Romney to introduce his special musical guest. It’s Kid Rock, and for a moment, we are all Sean Penn:

Then, gasp! Old Man Rock appears in the bar! How Penn failed to notice a six-foot-tall overall-wearing Americana scarecrow right next to him is left unexplained.

But Mr. Rock, who also seems drunk, plops himself down next to Penn and starts complaining about “Obummer’s” tax policies, like a totally relatable middle American. The two start sniping at each other like YouTube commenters — Penn quotes Goebbels, while Kid Rock says “Fuckin’ suck it, commie.” They both take turns delivering incoherent tirades, although Penn seems to be winning the debate. After all, it’s hard to take Kid Rock seriously when he’s dressed like he’s on his way to play the Country Bear Jamboree.

They nearly come to blows, in a fight we could only hope they somehow both lose, until a random sassy bar patron tells them to shut up and appreciate everything America has to offer. Her passionate speech about what American citizenship means to her is somewhat undercut by the fact that she finishes by calling them “fucking pussies,” but never mind that –there’s some breaking news on the bar TV that inexplicably isn’t just on ESPN. 26 marines have been killed in Afghanistan! Cue sad music and Kid Rock failing to act!

Thankfully, those soldiers didn’t die in vain. Rock and Penn are inspired by their sacrifice to toast “to freedom” and apologize to each other — while babbling over everyone else’s respectful moment of silence. Naturally, the next step is a wacky montage! The first thing Kid Rock does is sell his car and buy a Prius, as any relatable conservative American who wants to learn more about his liberal friends could totally afford to do at the drop of a hideous hat.

Next, we get a shot of an environmental protest, Kid Rock urinating in the background, and Penn catching his urine in a bucket because … Kid Rock’s dehydrated lizard juice still counts as potable water? No time to reflect, because it’s time for Penn to trade places! Kid Rock teaches him to drink a beer instead of a girly cocktail! As the day is winding down, Penn takes Rock to a gay wedding, which, according to this movie, involves one of the men wearing a wedding dress! Are we seeing this wedding through Rock’s Republican eyes?

They then buy each other T-shirts and exchange them on the beach! Kid Rock and Sean Penn are totally about to fuck! After the pair leaves the beach to go bone down, the message of this inspirational tale appears onscreen for the benefit of the slower viewers: We’re all Americans, whether we love PETA, own guns, or are a sassy black woman. Those are the only three kinds of Americans. You too can put aside your cavalcade of liberal and conservative stereotypes and stop yelling crude insults at each other long enough to bond over some dead marines and go car shopping. Because in the end, aren’t we all just South Park jokes without the irony? Fuck yeah, Sean Penn and Kid Rock. Fuck yeah.

Mark is on Twitter and has a book.

Also check out The 6 Most Counterproductive PSAs of All Time and 7 Safety PSAs (That Were Clearly Made By Serial Killers).

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 6 PSAs Way More F#!@ed Up Than Any Drug Addict, and other videos you won’t see on the site!

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/6-actors-who-tried-to-teach-lessons-and-madness-ensued/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/182980603822

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samanthasroberts · 6 years

Text

6 Actors Who Tried To Teach Lessons (And Madness Ensued)

Mario Tells Kids That They’ll Suffer Hell On Earth

The Cast Of The Wire Wants You To Wear A Condom

Monique Richert/YouTube “Why, I’m practicing safe sex right now!”

Here’s Jackie Chan Hanging Out With A Giant Condom

Don’t Drive Angry, Or Evander Holyfield Will Beat You To Death

Mel Gibson Doesn’t Want The Feds To Take Away Our Vitamins

Holy shit, check out this thrilling Mel Gibson movie set in the grim future of 1993!

Whose fancy house is being raided? A corrupt politician? An unscrupulous CEO?

Kid Rock And Sean Penn For Generic Unity Between Americans

We open with Penn sitting at a bar and ordering vodka, even though he already looks and sounds completely shitfaced.

Then, gasp! Old Man Rock appears in the bar! How Penn failed to notice a six-foot-tall overall-wearing Americana scarecrow right next to him is left unexplained.

Mark is on Twitter and has a book.

Also check out The 6 Most Counterproductive PSAs of All Time and 7 Safety PSAs (That Were Clearly Made By Serial Killers).

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 6 PSAs Way More F#!@ed Up Than Any Drug Addict, and other videos you won’t see on the site!

If we’ve ever made you laugh or think, we now have a way where you can thank and support us!

Make a contribution

Source: http://allofbeer.com/6-actors-who-tried-to-teach-lessons-and-madness-ensued/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/02/22/6-actors-who-tried-to-teach-lessons-and-madness-ensued/

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allofbeercom · 6 years

Text

6 Actors Who Tried To Teach Lessons (And Madness Ensued)

Mario Tells Kids That They’ll Suffer Hell On Earth

The Cast Of The Wire Wants You To Wear A Condom

Monique Richert/YouTube “Why, I’m practicing safe sex right now!”

Here’s Jackie Chan Hanging Out With A Giant Condom

Don’t Drive Angry, Or Evander Holyfield Will Beat You To Death

Mel Gibson Doesn’t Want The Feds To Take Away Our Vitamins

Holy shit, check out this thrilling Mel Gibson movie set in the grim future of 1993!

Whose fancy house is being raided? A corrupt politician? An unscrupulous CEO?

Kid Rock And Sean Penn For Generic Unity Between Americans

We open with Penn sitting at a bar and ordering vodka, even though he already looks and sounds completely shitfaced.

Then, gasp! Old Man Rock appears in the bar! How Penn failed to notice a six-foot-tall overall-wearing Americana scarecrow right next to him is left unexplained.

Mark is on Twitter and has a book.

Also check out The 6 Most Counterproductive PSAs of All Time and 7 Safety PSAs (That Were Clearly Made By Serial Killers).

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out 6 PSAs Way More F#!@ed Up Than Any Drug Addict, and other videos you won’t see on the site!

If we’ve ever made you laugh or think, we now have a way where you can thank and support us!

Make a contribution

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/6-actors-who-tried-to-teach-lessons-and-madness-ensued/

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classicfilmfreak · 7 years

Photo

New Post has been published on http://www.classicfilmfreak.com/2018/03/22/20624/

Young Winston (1972) starring Robert Shaw, Anne Bancroft and Simon Ward

Indolent student, Bore War soldier, prisoner, fugitive and Member of Parliament—all from the life of a young Winston Churchill before the age of 27.

The critically successful Darkest Hour (2017) concentrates on Winston Churchill’s leadership during the Dunkirk retreat and evacuation in World War II. Young Winston, made almost half a century earlier, represents a somewhat broader time span in the great man’s life, from boyhood to his first parliamentary election in 1900.

The release of the British film in 1972 was partly the result of a renewed interest in Churchill’s life, inspired by his passing in January of 1965. Some people saw his death as the last vestige of the glorious British Empire, though, in every practical sense, the Empire had ended with World War I. Then called “the Great War,” who could know there would be one even more catastrophic! To historians and intuitive citizens at the time, the Empire’s decline had already begun by the turn of the twentieth century.

With England’s antiquated film industry in the 1930s, it was Hollywood which championed that country’s past—its mastery of the seas, its imperialistic success (and arrogance), most evident in its abuse of India, and its amassing an empire upon which the sun never set.

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Hollywood made Mutiny on the Bounty in 1935 and its remake in 1962. It filmed The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), climaxed by the infamous British blunder in the Crimean War. The studios seemed fascinated by the British exploits in India: Clive of India (1935), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935) andGunga Din (1936).

In 1940, it was Hollywood which contrived a morale-building script for the Errol Flynn swashbuckler The Sea Hawk, relating its story of King Philip II’s sixteenth-century Armada to England’s current attacks by Hitler’s Luftwaffe. In much the same way, Mrs. Miniver (1942) extolled the bravery of the island’s citizens against Nazi fighters and their courage and national pride during the evacuation from Dunkirk.

From the ’60s to ’80s, before epics became largely too expensive, the British themselves began glorifying their past on film, either on their own or, usually, with American financial backing. They made Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 and remade The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1968. Khartoum (1966), about another Empire misadventure, now in the Sudan, stars an American, Charlton Heston, as Englishman General Charles George Gordon, the central character, but it is a Brit, Laurence Olivier, as Gordon’s nemesis, the Mahdi, the supposed redeemer of Islam, who, in history, does him in and, on screen, out-acts him.

And there is always the British indulgence in the Edwardian period and its attempted continuance, at least in thought and spirit. Film scholar Leslie Halliwell refers to the E. M. Forster adaptations of A Passage to India (1984), A Room with a View (1985) and Howards End (1991) as “filmed in a mood of nostalgic Edwardiana.” This can also be applied to the milieu of many other British films that relive the past—Chariots of Fire (1981) and The Remains of the Day (1993).

More recently, Edwardian aristocratic life is microscopically detailed in the British TV series Downton Abbey (2011-2016 on PBS). The six-year-long screen diversion begins in 1912 with the sinking of the Titanic and ends in 1926; in between comes World War I, the rude intrusion of the modern age, British estate taxes and the dissolution of most of the landed gentry.

Young Winston, which takes places in both the Victorian and Edwardian periods, has a fine ensemble cast—all British save American Anne Bancroft as Churchill’s beautiful mother, Jennie. It can only be assumed that John Gielgud was otherwise occupied, reason he didn’t join the impressive cast of Robert Shaw, Jack Hawkins and John Mills and Patrick Magee as two generals.

There is also Edward Woodward, Robert Hardy (who would play Churchill in five separate British TV series), Laurence Naismith, Colin Blakely (a reliable Dr. Watson to Robert Stephens’ detective in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1970), Jane Seymour, Anthony Hopkins (here as Lloyd George), Nigel Hawthorne and Ian Holm (the athletic trainer in Chariots of Fire).

Relative newcomer at the time, Simon Ward is the mature, mid-twenties Churchill. Two other child actors play Churchill at seven and thirteen, and Ward dubbed the voice of the thirteen-year-old (Michael Audreson). Ward was deprived, for whatever the reasons, of any great movie success, and the small part in the poorly drawn Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973) somehow symbolizes his career.

The story line of the film moves from 1881 to 1901, the year the namesake of that age, Edward VII, came to the throne. When the movie opens, for it is a flashback with a reflective Winston narrating, it is already 1897 and the twenty-four-year old is in India. As a journalist for London’s Daily Telegraph, he craves battlefield glory and a writer’s fame.

While he is annoying the commander, Lord Kitchener (Mills), who cries out, “Who’s that bloody fool on the gray?,” Winston recalls his life in a boarding school. Lonely, he writes his parents fallacious letters that everything is jolly fine. He repeatedly asks them to come and visit, but they rarely do. (At about the same time, an unhappy fifteen-year-old Franklin Roosevelt is also writing home, he from Groton School, about the “wonderful” time he, too, is having. In the 1940s, the two men’s lives would cross in a way that, some say, “saved the world.”)

When Winston is physically abused in the boarding school, it is “Wommy,” as the child calls his beloved nurse, Mrs. Everest (Pat Heywood), who insists to his mother, Lady Randolph, that he must be removed. Later, at the British military academy of Sandhurst, he proves a poor student.

His father, Lord Randolph (Shaw), while highly disappointed in his son’s performance yet professing love for him, begins acting erratically and becomes unreasonably angry toward him. Soon after he resigns as Chancellor of the Exchequer over an issue in Parliament, two doctors (Clive Morton and Robert Flemyng)—in a frank discussion, even for 1972—inform Lady Randolph that her husband is suffering from syphilis.

After Lord Randolph dies, money lost in the American stock market leaves the family destitute. Thanks to Jennie’s connections, Winston receives a commission in the British Army, which enables him to continue as a reporter, now for The Daily Mail.

His later transfer to the Sudan satisfies, at least for the moment, his appetite for action and bravery. When he warns Kitchener of advancing Muslim warriors, the Dervishes, he is regarded as more than a naive nuisance.

Back in England, thanks to pressure from Jennie, Winston runs for Parliament, but lack of experience and a stuttering speech impediment lead to defeat. At the start of the Boer War in 1899, Winston receives another military commission, now in South Africa. He is captured by the Boers and imprisoned, but miraculously escapes, hides on a train and eventually returns to England.

He is hailed as a hero and wins a seat in Parliament where he gives a resounding speech in the House of Commons. Soon afterward, Jennie, in discussing his future, happens—not so coincidentally, perhaps?—to introduce him to a young lady, soon-to-be wife Clementine Hozier.

Young Winston’s musical score, by Alfred Ralston, basically an arranger, is saved by the use of music of Sir Edward Elgar, the Edwardian composer par excellence. The Caractacus and Imperial marches enliven some battle scenes, the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 4 is fortunately substituted for the famous No. 1, everyone’s graduation march, and “Nimrod” from the Enigma Variations serves well whatever a composer needs a bit of ready-made British solemnity.

As a final footnote, actors who have played Winston Churchill over the years are copious, and a complete list is far beyond the limits here. One of the earliest names, Dudley Field Malone, is attached to Hollywood’s now notorious, pro-Russian propaganda, Mission to Moscow (1943).

Later come Patrick Wymark in Operation Crossbow (1965), Leigh Dilley in The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Howard Lang in the TV series Winds of War (1983), Albert Finney in the TV movie The Gathering Storm(2002)—title of the first of Churchill’s six-volume The Second World War, Timothy Spall in The King’s Speech(2010) and, most recently, Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour.

While these titles represent the Winston Churchill of World War II, Young Winston provides glimpses into the earlier life of this soldier, writer, historian and statesman. Already a full, exciting life at twenty-seven, Churchill’s next sixty-three years would make him world famous, with his unheeded warnings of the menace of Hitler and his defiant leadership of the British people during World War II.

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#Anne Bancroft #Robert Shaw #Simon Ward

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