Dear God! Why Isn't Everyone Screaming All The Time?

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"Oh look. A body." Ginny Mayo, the dumb girl who talked.

A young woman is captured by gangsters and marched down an apartment building's stairs at gunpoint. When the police appear, the gunmen try to use her as a human shield. In a hail of gunfire, she's shoved face forward down the stairs, miraculously surviving as her captors are gunned down. Two minutes later, she's walking down the street with her best beau, cheerfully ruminating about the experience.

"You know," she says, "in his own way, I think saving my life was [the bad guy's] attempt to make things right."

This is the limp climax of Smart Girls Don't Talk, a 1948 Virginia Mayo job that I just caught on Insomnia TV. It's a classic bad ending, necessitated by the structural demands of an 80-minute thriller. We need a big shootout at the end, but everybody's gotta be smiling and lovey-dovey for the thirty-second final scene. Do you know how I would react if I were caught in the middle of a firefight? 

I would scream like a Godzilla-nibbled toddler.

Showing the reaction to trauma is a tricky balance. Subjected to the kinds of things that characters go through on stage and screen, real-life people would be reduced to a quivering pile of sweat, tears and shit. But no matter how frightened, your hero has to be back on his feet in a few minutes, ready to crack wise and keep fighting. 

I've always had a soft spot for movies that let their characters show fear. The car chase in Risky Business, for instance, is great not just because everything that features Joe Pantoliano is awesome, but because Tom Cruise—an ordinary boy in a terrifying situation—looks shit-scared. My favorite Bond movie is (no kidding) On Her Majesty's Secret Service, primarily because of the epic alpine chase that ends the film's second act. By the time Lazenby gets away, he is scared to death. This isn't Bond as Superman—it's Bond as human being. 

I like that.

(God the music in that scene is great. The dialogue, not so much.

Henchman: He's making for the village.

Blofeld: All right. We'll head him off at the precipice.

Positively crackling.)

Lots of terrible things happened to the characters in my last play. People got shot, emotionally abused, sexually trifled with and kicked in the shins. I wanted to be honest about how my characters would react to these horrors, but I couldn't have them shut down. Even though it's realistic, a shut-down character is a useless character. (See: Schuyler, in the last season of Breaking Bad, who spent the whole season too angry to talk, and basically turned into an inert mass of scowling jelly.) So by the second act, all of my characters were either in a very active form of shock, too stupid to realize what was happening, or sociopaths who were simply bemused by the horrors around them. Having them react to the trauma they were suffering made them more extreme characters, and made the whole thing a hell of a lot funnier.

If you're chugging through a script that's got action—and if you aren't, you should be—and your characters aren't scared to death by what's happening them, either your action isn't terrifying enough or your characters are inhuman. Life is scary. Life on stage or screen is even worse. React accordingly.

So there's your unsolicited playwriting advice for the day. As you were.

Why It's Okay To Like The Zany Old Spice Game

In honor of the majestic accomplishment that is "Dikembe Mutombo’s 4 1/2 Weeks To Save The World,” I typed up a few hundred words on why it's okay to enjoy something like that, even though it's nothing more than very clever advertising.

The short answer? It's okay to like stuff that's clever.

The Old Spice commercials, going back to the Bruce Campbell campaign from five or so years ago, heralded an unprecedented weirdening (my word! Don’t use it!) of mainstream ad campaigns. Their ads are spare, strange and designed to be shared—a formula that lots of brands have tried to emulate and none have managed to get right. Imitations of this kind of zaniness usually fall short either because they aren’t weird enough, or lack a charismatic spokesman like Bruce/Fabio/Old Spice Guy.

(A rare exception—those creepy fucking Sprite commercials, which are way too goddamned weird.)

I love these Old Spice ads because they are the kind of thing I should fucking hate. I despise corporate pandering, because no matter how charming a company pretends to be, there’s simply nothing cool about corporations. If a marketing campaign manages to make me forget that for a moment, I tend to have an extreme backlash to it. How dare you amuse me?! How dare you make me forget the essential sinisterness of your business practices?!

You could keep reading that, or you could just go play this delightful game. Don't stop until you get to the Twinkie song. Seriously.

The Hardest Working Man In Monologuing

Earlier this year, when monologuist Mike Daisey got himself into hot water for lying on National Public Radio, I was conflicted. Actually, no—I was giddy with the kind of spiteful joy that comes from watching someone successful take a big step forward, look down, and find they are ankle deep in shit. Plagiarism scandals amuse me endlessly, and while Mike's screw-up wasn't plagiarism, I found it compelling for the same reason: we like to see cheats caught.

Daisey apologized, saying that he should not have brought Steve Jobs to This American Life—not because it contained falsehoods, but because it was a theatrical work unbound by the constraints of journalism. That struck me as a cop out, for the show's run at the Public theater was billed as non-fiction, and the audience came to be told something true. Embellishing details was a betrayal of that trust, and the fact that Mike revised the show to remove the offending bits tells me that he understood this.

I didn't feel conflicted until I heard that the Public was bringing him back for a run of six original shows, starting in October. Screw that guy, I thought. He cheated, he lost, game over. But then I interviewed him, and I was happily reminded that artists—everybody, really—are much more complicated than the news media can comprehend. 

"At PS 122 I used to do a new show every Monday night," he told me last week. "I would give them these sort of evocative titles, but I wouldn't actually work on them until an hour before the audience was there. As they would come in, I would create the outline and perform the monologue. It was really pivotal into making me the artist I am now."

Daisey's extemporaneous style makes such speed possible, and the simplicity of his set-up, which requires nothing but a table, notes, and a glass of water, keeps it cheap.

"The work develops faster than it does in traditional American theater," he said, "in large part because we own the whole widget."

Even when off-the-cuff, Daisey's work seems scripted—polish given by a mind with an uncommon ability to quickly organize stories in a meaningful, often powerful way. Lots of people tell stories. Daisey is a storytelling machine.

It goes on like that. Mike Daisey screwed up badly, and to atone he is working as hard as he can at the thing he does best. Perhaps I was the last person to reach this conclusion, but the guy definitely deserves a second chance. I'm glad I wasn't too stubborn to give him one.

What ABC Crap-Pile Makes 'Liz & Dick' Look Like 'The Wire'?

Because no one has ever told me what planes are, I drove back to New York yesterday from a Thanksgiving retreat to Nashville. The entire ride up, my friends and I bounced with delight at the prospect of quaffing wine and cackling at the horrors of Lifetime's Liz & Dick. And then, when we settled in to eat and drink and snark after eight hours of the road, disaster struck.

For eight hours, we had dreamed of it, and I don’t need to tell you why. Every red-blooded Internet troll was sharpening its fangs in anticipation of the latest float in the Lindsay Lohan shit-parade, and we were to be first in line. But this Internet-free, bedbug-ridden, cockroach-ruled roadside inn had one drawback. No Lifetime! What the F?!

Lifetime is the premier movie channel for idiots, and you would have to be an idiot to stay in such an awful motel. Why the two have not been introduced is beyond me. But we had several hours to kill there before the red wine robbed us of consciousness, and the time had to be passed somehow. In case you’ve fallen into a timewarp and today is yesterday, you’re in Roanoke, and Twitter is blowing up with quips ranging from asinine and cruel to dead on balls accurate, you may pass the time thusly.

What happened next? Read on, fair reader. Read on.

This Holiday, Put A Connery On Your Table

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and the best thing about it—really the only good thing, frankly—is that it affords an opportunity to stuff your face with gravy and stuff your eyes with James Bond.

Christmas comes with all sorts of cultural prescriptions. Watch It’s A Wonderful Life. Drink egg nog. Read something adorable that’s features bountiful rolls of bouncing Santafat. From the start of the advent, your free time will be accounted for. But nog aside, Christmas demands much less in the way of menu planning. It’s Christmas—eat a turkey, maybe? A goose? Each year, my mom makes a big salty country ham. It’s goddamned beautiful.

Compare that to Thanksgiving, which has an endless list of culinary commands, but not much culturally to suggest. Watch football, maybe? Play Monopoly with your weird cousin? Sit?

It’s that laxness that makes what passes for Thanksgiving culture much more interesting, the same way that a Christmas menu is almost certainly going to be more palatable than its gravy-doused cousin. The fact is that there are Thanksgiving movies—they just might not have anything to do with Thanksgiving.

Because James Bond movies are typically released around this time of year, I associate the November holiday with a protracted gorging on the finer works of Sean Connery, Timothy Dalton and—yes god damn it, George Lazenby. (Seriously—best Bond theme, best Bond chase scene—On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.) Bond movies are a near-perfect analogue for Thanksgiving. Even the best of them are overrated, overblown and incoherent. Those of us who have already finished our cooking for the week could probably, if we were bored enough, track which Bond is which component of a classic Thanksgiving spread. Let’s go there now!

You want to read more? Oh yes. Oh yes you do.

Alice Cooper, John Carpenter & The Dark Days of Disco

This may not be the best thing I've ever written. In fact, it's definitely not the best thing I've ever written. But if you want a lot of links to kickass John Carpenter music—and one link to this ewok song that is actually the worst song I've ever heard—then today's Bullett post is for you.

I should hardly have been surprised to find that in 1982, Italian disco magnate Mario Boncaldo—who also gave us the Ewok Celebration 12″—worked his magic on some of the best tracks from the Escape From New York soundtrack. It’s, uh, much better than the Ewok song. In fact, I’ve been listening to the Ewok song while writing this, and it might be the worst thing I’ve ever heard. It might be melting my brain. Ah, yes, at 4:10 there’s an Ewok rap, so consider my brain melted and accept my apologies if the rest of this post is more gibberishy than usual.

(Mr. Mario’s website, by the way, is a terrifying delight. His slogan is “the House Music before the House Music.” I want that on a t-shirt now, please.)

The next year, he did the same thing with Assault on Precinct 13. The Halloween soundtracks, we can assume, were too good on their own to fool with. The songs are driving, repetitive, spooky, brutal—everything we love about John Carpenter music, but three times as long.

That wonderful repetition got me thinking about one of my favorite traits of John Carpenter movies: indifference in the face of danger. It’s a normal thing in horror pictures for the audience to realize the danger well before the characters do, but Carpenter takes it to extremes.

Shit. I gave away the ewok link. Still, hay mucho más. 

Of course, as badass synth soundtracks go, nothing Carpenter ever did could touch the opening theme for The Long Good Friday. Did anyone ever make a disco remix of that? Because I would love for it to be eight minutes long.

Main Theme - Francis Monkman - The Long Good Friday Soundtrack

Let's Stop Making Jokes About Porno Titles, Please

When The Performers was first announced for the fall season, I thought—"Gee. A porno comedy with Cheyenne Jackson, Henry Winkler and Alicia Silverstone. That's either a very good idea or a very bad idea."

Guess which one it was!

I was just wondering, “Should I go see The Performers?” when the show’s producers made my decision for me. After seven performances, the show has closed, making it the first casualty of the fall season and one of the finest flops in recent memory. It also gave headline writers around the country an opportunity to trot out sorely-underused impotence gags. Good job, fellas!

The producers tried to cast some blame on Hurricane Sandy, but the apparent ease with which the rest of Broadway bounced back from the storm suggests that the real fault might have been the hailstorm of nasty reviews. Think there’s a connection? Oh, I don’t know.

Read on if you'd like to know which of the play's jokes—as quoted in the reviews—were the lamest. Hint: They're all tied.

For Bieber, The Barc May As Well Be Shea

I live near the Barclays Center, whose opening was maligned by residents who feared that each Brooklyn Nets game would end with a tsunami of boozed-up shouting morons. As it turns out, Nets fans have been incredibly subdued. Not so Beliebers.

Speaking of vomiting in public, Justin Bieber played the Barclays earlier this week. (Can we start calling the Barclays “the Barc”? Is that appropriately lame, or unforgivably lame? Other suggestions, from Internet friends, include The Black House and The Rust Bucket.) The performance was reportedly tepid, but that did not stop the Beliebers from screaming. I assume nothing can.

After the performance, a pack of wild fans waited outside the stage door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the star’s tour bus. (Which had just spun around, we assume, on the Rust Bucket’s famous rotating trucks turntable.) Though the bus’s windows were fully blacked out, the kids lost their shit, screaming like our parents’ generation might have while being simultaneously diddled by all four Beatles. As the bus lumbered away—as their dreams lumbered away—the kids broke past the barricades and chased after the bus. It would have gotten away, too, if it hadn’t been for that street light.

Read the rest on Bullett.

And for those of you who want to get the image of Beatles-y group sex out of your head, or just feel like thinking about Shea Stadium for nine minutes:

Uploaded by McCKLENN on 2009-10-18.

Theater Subscriptions: As Healthy as Magazines

Jonathan Mandell has an excellent story in TCG about the theater subscription model, which is currently existing in a Schrodinger's cat set-up—simultaneously thriving and stone dead. Serious theater-types should take the time to read and think on Jonathan's article. The rest of you should scroll down and look at that picture of Hedy Lamarr some more. Yowza.

For me, the question of where the subscription model is heading is moot for two reasons. The first is that I live in New York, surrounded by so many theaters that it would be insane to commit to just one. I'm down the street from BAM, and so might throw my hat in the ring for them, but I've seen enough bad shows there that I don't really want to sign on for a whole season. The only place I might consider subscribing is Classic Stage, because they rarely produce bad work, and because their shows sell out so quickly that only subscribers really have a chance of getting a seat.

Despite my love for CSC, it's unlikely that I'll ever subscribe to a theater, and that's because of the second reason. Put bluntly, theater subscriptions are lame. I'm fully corrupted by the stereotype of the theater subscriber—a middle aged liberal who re-ups his or her subscription every year because going to the theater is a thing one ought to do, like listening to NPR or giving to PBS. I realize that's completely unfair, but it's the image I have in my head, and I suspect that the ten or fifteen other young people who think about this kind of stuff might be on the same wavelength.

I've seen plenty of writing about how THE OLD MODELS ARE BROKEN WE HAVE TO FIND NEW MODELS, but until people are able to offer alternatives, the subscription model remains worth thinking about. Jonathan quotes a few theater directors who have come up with interesting ideas. At Seattle's ACT, $25 buys a card that lets members see any play they want. At Mixed Blood, in Minneapolis, they've found that it's cheaper for the theater to give away seats than to sell them for super-cheap, so they just let a lot of people in for free. Mandell doesn't mention it, but the Signature Theatre's $25 ticket initiative is along the same lines—the kind of thing that makes me think, "Hey! I'd pay to see that!"

Compared to this kind of forward-thinking discount, the subscription model is undoubtedly a dinosaur. Paying $60 or so for the right to purchase tickets feels like gouging—the way the Jets and Giants charged thousands of dollars for Personal Seat Licenses that allow fans to buy season tickets. I never want to feel bound to a theater, and I think other twentysomething theater-folk feel the same way. If I'm right, in fifteen or twenty years, not only will the subscription model be dead, but so will the "IS THE SUBSCRIPTION MODEL DYING?!!!!" thinkpiece. Few will mourn either.

But for now, read Jonathan's piece. It's great. He's great. Theater's great. Let's all have fun, y'all.

Hedy Lamarr ——— Nakedest Inventor of Them All!

I've always found that most classic film beauties—your Crawfords, your Hayworths, your etceteras—were at best interchangeable and, at worst, bland. While the men of old Hollywood never have trouble making an impression, their romantic leads were usually so underwritten, so overly made up, that they never had a chance. There are a few exceptions, however—Barbara Stanwyck, Judy Holliday, Veronica Lake—but most of them were so beautiful, so lively, that they were kept out of the really famous pictures, and aren't as famous today as they perhaps ought to be.

To that list, let's add Hedy Lamarr—the woman best remembered for being a punchline in Blazing Saddles. I wrote a post for Bullett today about Ms. Lamarr, an inventor who didn't mind getting naked on camera. On the sex scene from 1933's Ecstasy, which follows a nude romp through the forest in pursuit of a horse:

Though less thoroughly benippled, the ensuing sex scene is crackerjack. Lamarr and her stud kiss a bit, lie down, kiss some more, and then he drifts downward out of frame—what may be the earliest use of what would become an incredibly tired way of signifying oral funtimes. But while the camera would normally pan up and away, here it lingers on Lamarr, and we get to watch her go through the range of facial expressions induced by this rather intense blue collar orgasm. For her performance, Wikipedia tells us adorably, “The authenticity of passion was attained by the film director’s off-screen manipulation of a safety pin strategically poking her bottom.”

Click through for a link to what may be the oldest NSFW video you will ever see—excepting, perhaps, the really racist bits of Birth of a Nation, which I bet you wouldn't want your boss to catch you watching.