Today in history 1941

Labor pressures had been building in the Magic Kingdom since promises made to artists over the success of Snow White were reneged on, and Walt Disney’s lawyer Gunther Lessing encouraged a hard line with his employees.

On May 28, in defiance of the Wagner act, Disney fired animator Art Babbitt, the creator of Goofy, and 13 other cartoonists for demanding a union. A motion to strike was made that evening.

The picket line with major cartoonists began the next morning.

  Zinn Education Project

With neither side willing to give in, the event lasted into the fall, turning uglier and lasting longer than either side had ever imagined. In the end, the workers won, and neither the Disney company nor the animation industry would ever be the same again.

[...]

While a union seems like a no-brainer for keeping employees happy and content, they are still resisted by people in positions of power, whether that person be the co-creator of Rick and Morty or Ed Catmull, the current president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Catmull is staunchly anti-union, and has fought tooth-and-nail to keep the company he co-founded, Pixar, a union-free shop. As a result, even though Pixar is now owned by Disney, and even though Pixar has been the most financially successful animation studio in America for the last twenty years, the average starting wage for animators at the studio remains below unionized feature animation workers.

It also shouldn’t be a surprise that Catmull has emerged as the mastermind behind a wage-fixing scheme that has rocked the feature animation world over the past year, with evidence emerging that Catmull has worked for decades to prevent the industry’s employees from advancing their careers or being paid what they were truly worth.

[...]

[Disney Corp] today is worth $163 billion, making it the most valuable entertainment conglomerate currently in the world.

  Cartoon Brew

Animator Art Babbitt, one of the strike leaders, leads a picket 

at the premiere of “The Reluctant Dragon.”

Yes, many of the women are marching the picket line in skirts and heels, and men wear sport coats and ties.

More images here.

Trump 2.0 - Destroyer of worlds

 

A statement from the Michelada Fest team shared Tuesday said in part that “we’ve made the difficult decision to cancel Michelada Fest 2025,” and attributed the reason to concerns over visas and travel for music artists.

  Chicago Tribune

Nobody's jealous of us now

Wouldn't be happening if Trump were president, right?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The world as a ratings instrument

Truly the age of Trump.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

" A heckler"

Additional proof that we've turned politics into entertainment: disgruntled citizens are now called hecklers.

Video.  How long before no one is allowed in the White House?

The One Thing Doing Well in Trump Era

For more than two years now, it's been obvious that Donald Trump is a disaster on almost every level except one – he's great for the media business.

[...]

Many execs and editors [...] have convinced themselves that the ratings and the money are a kind of cosmic reward for covering Trump responsibly. But deep down, most of us know that's a lie. Donald Trump gets awesome ratings for the same reason Fear Factor made money feeding people rat-hair tortilla chips: nothing sells like a freak show. If a meteor crashes into jello night at the Playboy mansion, it doesn't matter if you send Edward R. Murrow to do the standup. Some things sell themselves.

[...]

Trump even sells on the level of those Outbrain click-addicting photos of plastic surgery failures. With his mystery comb-over and his great rolls of restrained blubber and the infamous tales of violent fights with his ex over a failed scalp-reduction procedure, Trump on top of being Hitler and Hulk Hogan from a ratings perspective is also a physical monster, the world's very own bearded-lady tent.

[...]

Many in the business are of the opinion that, having created Trump and let him loose in the village, we in the press now have a responsibility to hunt him down with aggressive investigative reporting, to make the world safe again.

That might indeed be a good idea. But that take also implies that slaying the monster will fix the problem. Are we sure that's true?

[...]

We learned long ago in this business that dumber and more alarmist always beats complex and nuanced. Big headlines, cartoonish morality, scary criminals at home and foreign menaces abroad, they all sell. We decimated attention spans, rewarded hot-takers over thinkers, and created in audiences powerful addictions to conflict, vitriol, fear, self-righteousness, and race and gender resentment.

[...]

And when all else fails in the media world, just show more cleavage somewhere, and ratings go up, every time.

[...]

What's left of Trump's mind is like a parody of the average American media consumer: credulous, self-centered, manic, sex-obsessed, unfocused, and glued to stories that appeal to his sense of outrage and victimhood.

We've created a generation of people like this: anger addicts who can't read past the first page of a book.

[...]

What the hell did we expect would happen? Who did we think would rise to prominence in our rage-filled, hyper-stimulated media environment? Sensitive geniuses?

We spent years selling the lowest common denominator. Now the lowest common denominator is president.

  Rolling Stone

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Academy Crap

Last year, the Motion Picture Academy caught a lot of flack for its near black-out of black film makers and artists. I noticed this year that they made up for it in spades. (Sorry for the puns, they just seem to flow.) Lots of black actors/movies were paraded through this time. And, you may have heard that the final moment when Best Picture was awarded got flubbed. La La Land was announced winner, and after three acceptance speeches, it was then confusingly announced (by the La La Land filmmaker who was holding an Oscar statue) that in fact, Moonlight (a black cast movie) was the actual winner.

Here's the explanation and resolution that is as equally offensive as the over-the-top correction for last year's slight to black actors. (Please note, I am not dissing the black actors/movies this year - I haven't seen any of them. I'm just saying that it all seems bogus and driven by something other than performance. Of course, that's a given, isn't it?)

The president of the film academy says the two accountants responsible for the best-picture flub at Sunday’s Academy awards will never work the Oscars again.

Cheryl Boone Isaacs said Wednesday that Brian Cullinan, the PwC representative responsible for handing over the errant envelope that led to La La Land mistakenly being announced as best picture rather than Moonlight, was distracted backstage. He tweeted (and later deleted) a photo of Emma Stone in the wings with her new Oscar minutes before giving presenters Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway the wrong envelope for best picture.

Cullinan and his colleague, Martha Ruiz, have been permanently removed from all film academy dealings, Boone Isaacs said.

[...]

PwC released a statement late Sunday and another Monday taking “full responsibility for the series of mistakes and breaches of established protocols” during the Oscar show.

  Guardian

Who cares other than Hollywood movie makers, but the reason I'm posting this is: why in Hell is Martha Ruiz being punished from Brian Cullinan's failure?  She was on the opposite side of the stage when he messed himself.

Apparently, this is the answer:

PwC had taken full responsibility for the fiasco. "Once the error occurred, protocols for correcting it were not followed through quickly enough by Mr. Cullinan or his partner," the firm said in a statement.

  RT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

"Reverse McCarthyism"

My brain just froze.  What is "reverse McCarthyism"?

UPDATE:

On “The O’Reilly Factor” Tuesday, the conservative host evoked the name of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), who in the 1950s fueled paranoia that liberal people, in particular Hollywood types, were communists out to subvert the United States. That led to a show business blacklist “where people were not hired because McCarthy smeared them,” O’Reilly said.

Fast forward to the upcoming inauguration, which at the moment features such low-wattage acts as Jackie Evancho from “America’s Got Talent” and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. (A fellow mormon launched a petition imploring them not to appear at the Jan. 20 event and one choir member resigned in protest against the president-elect.)

“The harsh truth is that there is reverse McCarthyism going on in the entertainment industry,” O’Reilly said.

  HuffPo

I would have called it a protest.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Four More Years of Petulance and Whining

[Actor Alec] Baldwin reprised his impersonation of Trump on the show for the first time since Trump won the election.

  The Hill

That won't be the end of it.

And, Alec, I don't think he's ready to be President(ial):

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Modern Day Cassandras

Finally got around to buying this: pic.twitter.com/nMrA1HMkcA

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) November 14, 2016

That's a great thread of quotes from the 1935 Lewis novel It Can't Happen Here.  (Click on the graphic to get the whole thread.  If the graphic doesn't show up on your browser, click here.)

I recently stumbled upon a 1992 film I'm surprised I didn't see or know about earlier: Bob Roberts. It, too, was eerily prescient. Here's a trailer, but you really need to see the whole thing.

I think we are living in a time warp.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Cult of Celebrity

Yes, we should, and I think we'd be safe betting he would have granted an interview without the petition.

Even without the campaign contribution.

Maher made a $1 million contribution to a super PAC supporting Obama in 2012.

  The Hill

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The Universe Is Funny...Like George Carlin

On Sept. 10, 2001, George Carlin [...] recorded a bracing hour of social commentary for his new HBO special. The next day, he shelved it.

[...]

It wasn’t only the title, “I Kinda Like It When a Lotta People Die,” that seemed in bad taste after nearly 3,000 people were killed a day later in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Mr. Carlin also told a joke about a fart so potent it blew up an airplane. “You know who gets blamed? Osama bin Laden,” Mr. Carlin joked.

[...]

If timing is everything, Mr. Carlin had nothing.

  NYT

What do you mean? Sounds like his timing was brilliant.

While this can seem like cheap provocation compared with his more famous bits, [...] gleefully imagining mass destruction had been a regular part of his stand-up for years. “I watch television news for one thing only — entertainment,” he said in “Jammin’ in New York,” his 1992 special. “My favorite thing is accidents and fires. I’m not interested in the budget. You show me a hospital on fire and I’m a happy guy.”

What Mr. Carlin is doing here is satirizing American blood lust, bringing to the surface the impulse that makes professional wrestling and crime stories so popular.

Or maybe he really meant it. I used to argue with my brother about whether the world is overpopulated. He said the earth can support a lot more people. My contention was that would be true only if they're all third world people who aren't sucking up all its resources. We first worlders are killing her. And we're killing third worlders while we're at it.

Fifteen years later, his lost special is finally being released. (It is on Sirius XM, though it will be for sale as a download or on CD or vinyl on Sept. 16, at Amazon and iTunes, among other outlets.) [...] It’s a polished hour of new jokes with a virtuosic centerpiece, an intricate and elusive nearly 10-minute story that inspired its title, firmly in the tradition of Mr. Carlin’s comedy but also a fascinating departure.

A quantum performance. Like Schrödinger's cat, I guess. We'll know which it is only when we observe it.  ("New" jokes?  I think you mean, jokes we haven't yet heard.)

What really distinguishes this from Mr. Carlin’s previous work is that it becomes totally unhinged from logic. He was nothing if not a rigorous thinker [...] . But in “I Kinda Like It,” his arguments gradually unravel, deconstruct and are interrupted by supernatural details and then pure nonsense. What begins as satire devolves into madness, culminating in a nightmarish dinner party attended by bitter, resentful zombies, all named Uncle Dave.

That's not logical?

At the end of this parade of catastrophes, these bitter men gather around a table and spew resentments about their children, parents, the government and minorities. Their disgust spins out of them into what Mr. Carlin describes as a swirling “pool of hate” that expands beyond the universe and explodes in a kind of second big bang. The new world that emerges is utopian, and every Uncle Dave wins the lottery every week. Out of disaster comes nirvana.

So, mythological.

Hillary the First

Hillary the First is a history play in progress about the 2016 presidential race, written in the style of Shakespeare.

A new scene is posted every Friday. The play is written in real time, history-as-it-happens.

  Hillary the First

Read it here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

You Dare Not Ridicule the Prophet Mohammed!

Or the Ronald.

News that Will Ferrell optioned Reagan as a starring vehicle — it's a spec comedy script in which a dementia-addled Ronald Reagan is led to believe he's an actor playing the president — has set off a firestorm of controversy.

The project has drawn condemnation from Reagan's children Patti Davis and Michael Reagan, who called the movie "cruel" and cautioned that "Alzheimer's isn't a joke," as well as the Alzheimer's Association, who are "appalled" at the comedy's premise.

On Friday, not 24 hours after the story broke, Ferrell announced that he had scuttled the project, with a rep saying, "While it is by no means an 'Alzheimer's comedy' as has been suggested, Mr. Ferrell is not pursuing the project.'"

  Hollywood Reporter

OK, I'll buy that Alzheimer's is not a laughing matter. It's a debilitating and destructive disease.

So why in the world was it okay to have as president of what is touted as the most powerful nation on earth a man who is afflicted with it?

Then, again, how much difference was there between an Alzheimer's addled president with scheming handlers in charge and George W. Bush?

The one thing that makes Hillary Clinton seem like a decent choice is that SHE won't need a Dick Cheney.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Sex, Nudity and Smoking

There is a curious class action lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco that seeks an order to force movie studios to use a minimum of an R rating for movies depicting the smoking of tobacco. The lawsuit cites various movies like The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug as warranting an R rating. Not all that gruesome decapitations and gouging mind you. It is the fact that characters like Gandalf smoke.   Jonathan Turley

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Is He Still Around?

And did he rip this off from Churchill?



Clever.



Ha.



Oh, clever.



Brilliant.

Joseph Fiennes???

September 2001 was allegedly witness to one of the strangest road trips in history: Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando driving from New York to Ohio in an attempt to get home following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando '

The saga is now being dramatised in a one-off special for Sky Arts, starring Joseph Fiennes as Jackson, Stockard Channing as Taylor and Brian Cox as Brando.

[...]

After being originally announced in December, Fiennes has now described the script as “a challenge”, adding: “It’s a fun, lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek road trip of what celebrity of that kind is like. But also it’s rather beautiful and poignant about their relationships.”

  Guardian

And you're going to need a nose bob, dude.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Excuse Me?

I didn't see it, but from what I understand, The Martian is not correctly categorized in Microsoft's Bing search engines 2016 Golden Globe winners.

 

Okay, E Online says it's a comedy, too.  Doesn't look like it's very funny in the trailer.



Were there really no actual comedies this year?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Booooooooooooooo

And she was twice as good (okay, she was waaaaaaaaay too whimpery in the last stories).  And the arrogant, sex-addict Duchovny left the show thinking he was such a hot commodity that he'd become a silver screen star.  (How'd that work out?)  Left Robert Patrick to fill in - and do a much better job.

But, hey Gill, they didn't even bring Robert Patrick back for the revival.   (That article indicates Annabeth Gish - Patrick's counterpart in the show - won't be in it, either, but she is.)

The studio initially required Anderson to stand a few feet behind her male partner on camera, careful never to step side-by-side with him. And it took three years before Anderson finally closed the wage gap between her pay and Duchovny’s, having become fed up with accepting less than “equal pay for equal work.”

“I can only imagine that at the beginning, they wanted me to be the sidekick,” Anderson says of Fox’s curious no-equal-footing rule. “Or that, somehow, maybe it was enough of a change just to see a woman having this kind of intellectual repartee with a man on camera, and surely the audience couldn’t deal with actually seeing them walk side by side!”

[...]

The work Anderson put into securing equal pay back in the ’90s seemingly came undone when it came time to negotiate pay for this year’s event series. Once again, Anderson was being offered “half” of what they would pay Duchovny.

[...]

“Especially in this climate of women talking about the reality of [unequal pay] in this business, I think it’s important that it gets heard and voiced. It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be paid fairly. I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it.

“Even in interviews in the last few years, people have said to me, ‘I can’t believe that happened, how did you feel about it, that is insane.’ And my response always was, ‘That was then, this is now.’ And then it happened again! I don’t even know what to say about it.”

[...]

(Sources told the Hollywood Reporter Anderson and Duchovny ultimately took home equal pay for the event series.)

  Daily Beast

The revival starts tomorrow, if you want to believe....

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Turn Off Your TV

Or blow it up.

A video news release (VNR) is a video segment made to look like a news report, but is instead created by a PR firm, advertising agency, marketing firm, corporation, or government agency. They are provided to television newsrooms to shape public opinion, promote commercial products and services, publicize individuals, or support other interests. News producers may air VNRs, in whole or in part, at their discretion or incorporate them into news reports if they contain information appropriate to a story or of interest to viewers.

Critics of VNRs have called the practice deceptive or a propaganda technique, particularly when the segment is not identified to the viewers as a VNR. Firms producing VNRs disagree and equate their use to a press release in video form and point to the fact that editorial judgement in the worthiness, part or whole, of a VNR's content is still left in the hands of journalists, program producers or the like.

  Wikipedia

Crazy Cassandra Frank Zappa described it in the late 80s in an appearance on Arsenio Hall's program, giving an example. He said he'd seen a CNN report purported to be about Dan Quayle preparing to take on a bigger role as Vice President. The image they showed for this segment was one of George Bush in the foreground with a box of popcorn and Dan Quayle walking around in the background. Behind Bush were Dan Akroyd and Kim Bassinger. They're all at the premiere of "My Stepmother is an Alien", a movie produced by Weintraub Entertainment Group. Jerry Weintraub was a friend of George Bush.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.