Jan
2
1968: Always Something Next
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
\\\\n
\\\\n\\\\nby Michael Winship\\\\n\\\\nAs two of those who view New Year\\\\\\\’s Eve as the ultimate Amateur Night, this year we hunkered down safe at home in the West Village, just out of stampede range from the madding crowd to the north in Times Square.\\\\n\\\\nBut on Tuesday, New Year\\\\\\\’s Night, Pat and I emerged from the fallout shelter and ventured uptown to see a month-old Broadway play called “The Farnsworth Invention.”\\\\n\\\\nWritten by Aaron Sorkin, who created “The West Wing” and wrote Tom Hanks\\\\\\\’ current film, “Charlie Wilson\\\\\\\’s War,” it purports to tell the story of how, as many allege, David Sarnoff, the chairman and president of RCA, stole the idea for television from an eccentric inventor named Philo T. Farnsworth.\\\\n\\\\nThe reviews of the play have not been especially kind, and as a semi-historian of television, I could quibble with some of the facts, but to hell with all that. We enjoyed it. Great acting, direction and script.\\\\n\\\\nAt the end of the first act, following the 1929 stock market crash and a series of other calamities, Sarnoff\\\\\\\’s secretary tells him that in similar straits her father used to tell the family to stop worrying because there was “nothing next.” Sarnoff, whose family was chased from Russia by Cossacks when he was ten, replies that his father said, “There\\\\\\\’s ALWAYS something next.”\\\\n\\\\n payday loan store chicago1 hour payday loanpayday loan fast no faxloan online payday quickameriloan loan paydayamerica cash loan paydayloan milwaukee payday storelow interest payday loan,low interest rate payday loan,interest loan low paydayfaxing loan no payday,faxing loan no overnight payday,no faxing instant payday loandebt get loan paydayguaranteed no fax payday loanquick faxless payday loan,low fee faxless payday loan,faxless loan paydayadvance? cash loan online payday ?emergency loan paydayfaxing loan no payday requiredadvance cash loan payday today,advance cash loan payday,payday payday loan cash advance loanloan until payday100 loan online paydaypayday loan without fax,fax less payday loan,fax payday loanalabama loan payday store,payday loan store in chicago,loan payday storeapproval guaranteed loan payday,guaranteed loan payday,faxless guaranteed loan paydayquick payday advance loanlow cost payday loan24 hour loan paydayhour loan one payday,hour in loan one payday,faxless hour loan one paydaycalculator loan paydayone hour payday loancalgary payday loan,calgary loan paydayhour loan online payday1000 payday loan no teletrack,loan no payday teletrack,200 loan no payday teletrackcash advance loancash america payday loan,cash loan payday,1000.com advance cash loan paydayquick cash payday loanadvance cash loan military,cash in advance loan,cash advance loan idahoonline casino cash advance,online cash advance,cash advance online no faxingcash advance serviceadvance cash loan payday quickadvance cash line loan,budget line cash advance,advance cash on lineadvance cash overnightget payday cash advance fast online loan,fast cash advance,advance cash fast getadvance cash faxing money no now,no faxing cash advance,advance cash faxing no paydaynational cash advancecash advance nowpayday cash advance utah,payday cash advance,advance cash payday ringtoneadvance cash check credit no,cash advance no credit check,advance cash check credit no onlineadvance advance america cashadvance bad cash credit loan payday,cash advance for people with bad credit,bad credit cash advanceadvance card cash creditpayday us fast cash loan,fast cash payday loanfirst southern cash advance,first cash advance,first time cash advance\\\\nLeggendo le revisioni di casino online, scoprirai quali sono i migliori siti di poker online per giocare.
Read more
Dec
26
‘Tis the Season to Plead Ignorance
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
by Michael Winship
This has been a difficult Christmas season. The ongoing Writers Guild strike meant moving a lot of the usual Yuletide ya-ya to the back burner. Parties and shopping yielded to picket lines, meetings and conference calls.
As I wrote in a letter to the members of the Writers Guild, East, “It’s tough as hell to be on strike during the holidays. Not only are we staging outdoor pickets and other events in the throes of winter’s cold, we’re without work and paychecks at a moment when gift giving and good times are very much on the minds of everyone around us, especially our friends and loved ones.”
But I hit the wall late Friday afternoon. I was lacking in anything much resembling Christmas spirit and felt in danger of having the holiday entirely pass me by. Two strike-related phone calls too many — one on the house phone, the other, simultaneously, on the cell — sent me over the edge.
And so, in the interest of mental health, all else was forsaken and, unilaterally and preemptively, Christmas was declared. In the last 72 hours before the day itself, I managed to jam buying, wrapping and mailing gifts; sending out cards; picking up a wreath; quaffing cider and eggnog; multiple playings of the “Christmas with the Rat Pack” CD; and screening “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas” and “The Bishop’s Wife,” the latter twice.
Read more
Dec
18
Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
by Michael Winship
“We got a very good writer. You won’t be ashamed.”
“Blacklisted?”
“Impeccably.”
– From the movie, “The Front,”
written by Walter Bernstein.
Last Thursday, at some ungodly hour of the morning, I found myself on the early train to Washington with my friend and colleague, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, and Victor Navasky, publisher emeritus of The Nation magazine.
The three of us were headed to DC for a day of events marking the 60th anniversary of the Hollywood blacklist, a list the very existence of which was denied for years. It kept writers, directors, actors and others in the entertainment business from working if they were suspected of possessing clandestine Communist sympathies or even if they just dared to have left-leaning political opinions.
Walter was blacklisted in the early 1950s, and forced to work under a variety of pseudonyms until 1960. Years later, he was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay when he wrote “The Front,” starring Woody Allen as a cashier who poses as a writer for a blacklisted friend.
Victor, now a journalism professor at Columbia, wrote “Naming Names,” an award-winning book considered the definitive account of the Hollywood blacklist.
I was with them to moderate a panel discussion of the blacklist at the National Press Club. Joining us in DC was the articulate and stunning, 90-year-old actress Marsha Hunt, whose promising career as a movie ingénue also was short-circuited by false accusations of disloyalty.
In May 1947, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had just begun. The House Committee on Un-American Activities came to Hollywood and heard the testimony of 14 “friendly” witnesses who alleged that Communist propaganda was spreading through the movies. (A suspect line of dialogue: “Share and share alike — that’s democracy!”)
That fall, 19 members of the Hollywood community — including 13 members of what was then called the Screen Writers Guild — were subpoenaed to appear before the committee on Capitol Hill.
Progressives in the movie business, including Marsha Hunt, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Gene Kelly, John Huston, Danny Kaye and Paulette Goddard created the Committee for the First Amendment and flew to Washington to observe the proceedings. They also hoped to testify.
Instead, the committee called the first of the so-called “unfriendly 19,” writer John Howard Lawson, and asked the now famous question, “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Refusing to answer, he and nine others — including Ring Lardner, Jr., and Dalton Trumbo, then the highest paid writer in Hollywood — became known as the Hollywood Ten. On November 24, 1947, all of them were cited for contempt of Congress. The next day, Hollywood studio heads issued a statement that the ten were fired “until such time as he is acquitted or has purged himself of contempt and declares under oath that he is not a Communist…”
They added, “We will not knowingly employ a Communist or a member of any party or group which advocates the overthrow of the government of the United States by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional methods.”
The Hollywood Ten were fined and jailed, the Committee for the First Amendment vanished as quickly as it had been organized, and a grand, hysterical inquisition ignited, burning like arson through the worlds of entertainment, academia, science, government, and organized labor. Thus began what the writer Stefan Kanfer called the plague years and playwright Lillian Hellman dubbed “Scoundrel Time.”
The show business blacklist was a vicious whispering campaign, a witch hunt that bullied and intimidated. It terrorized friends into betraying friends and drove some to suicide, mortal illness and economic despair. It sent writers to prison, uprooted families and attempted to crush the creative spirit of magnificent American storytellers.
In the end, with time and the bravery of intelligent men and women who dared to stand up and declare it a shameful and immoral national disgrace, the blacklist failed. Among them, Edward R. Murrow (as depicted in the George Clooney movie
“Good Night and Good Luck”), and John Henry Faulk, the Texas-born, homespun broadcaster who fought the blacklist and won, although the courtroom battle financially wiped him out.
On Thursday, we came to Washington to honor the talent and invincibility of those who survived the scourge of the blacklist with unstinting courage and grace. At a time when civil liberties are once again at risk, when anti-terrorism has replaced anti-Communism as the cloak behind which villains hide to cast ethnic and religious slurs, or to accuse those who question authority as guilty of treason, we take their experience to heart.
We remember that eternal vigilance is indeed all that protects us from those who would deny our freedom and keep dissenting and creative voices silent. The cry of “Wolf!” is never far from the door.
copyright 2007 Michael Winship
________________________
All newspaper editors want to know what their readers like. If you would like to read this feature in your local newspaper, please do not hesitate to share your enthusiasm with your local newspaper editor.
Dec
4
Rudy’s Numbers Don’t Add Up
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
by Michael Winship
Back in the days when I was a publicist, one of the people whose work I promoted was a filmmaker who frequently appeared on television talk shows. From time to time, the host or another guest would challenge his facts and figures, at which point he would spout some important sounding, supporting data from, he said, “a study by Rombauer and Becker.”
There was no such study. Rombauer and Becker wrote “The Joy of Cooking.” Still, it usually shut the other person up.
I’m reminded of this by Rudy Giuliani’s penchant for throwing around spurious statistics to attack other candidates — Mitt Romney and his one term as governor of Massachusetts, for example — and to defend his own record as mayor of New York City.
As the New York Times reported Friday, while bragging about his success reducing crime, “Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was ‘the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.’ In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York’‘had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.’ When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that ‘under me, spending went down by 7 percent.’”
The problem is, the Times continued, “All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong.” Chicago also has seen crime drop every year since ’94, New York’s homicide record averaged 1514 murders per year in the three decades before Giuliani became mayor, and for most of his tenure, spending increased an average of 3.7 percent.
Nov
29
by Michael Winship
I’ve been sick in bed for a little bit, felled by a flu more powerful than a locomotive, hastened by a few too many days on Writers Guild picket lines in the chill and drear of a Manhattan November.
One mixed blessing: too dizzy to read, I had a chance to focus on that most treacherous medium, the one in which I allegedly make a living when not on strike, TV.
I was struck by two commercials in particular that seemed to sum up the decline of civilization. One was an ABC promo for the annual rebroadcast of the gentlest of children’s specials, “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
Just a couple of weeks ago, an episode of the public television American Masters series focused on the life of Charlie Brown’s progenitor, Charles M. Schulz. At one point, it told the story of the Christmas show’s creation more than 40 years ago; how the special’s original network, CBS, resisted the program’s reverent presentation of the Nativity and its message condemning the commercialism of the holiday. Until the ratings came out the next morning — half the country had tuned in. CBS ordered four more.
The 21st century version of a network crass act was the ABC promo for this year’s airing. It began with a shot of a festive Snoopy accompanied by a shrill announcer’s voice screaming, “WHASSUP, DAWG!?” If Charles Schulz were still alive, the next day’s front pages might have read, “Peanuts Creator Guns Down TV Executives, Then Self.” I simply lunged for the bathroom.
The other amazing advertisement was for an all-bran cereal, starring an actor playing a hardhatted construction supervisor extolling the virtues of regularity. As he spoke, in the background, demolition and other activities occurred, each a not-so-subtle metaphor for an efficient intestinal system. I counted about six, culminating, I kid you not, with a dump truck tipping back and unloading its contents.
Which somehow seems an appropriate segue to Wednesday’s night’s CNN/YouTube Republican presidential candidates’ debate. You’ll recall that in July, the Democrats (in deference to our president, I personally prefer to call them the Democratics, but it’s your call) participated in the first YouTube debate. Viewers from around the country submitted their questions via videotape and computer.
It was an entertaining, freewheeling evening, as robust and energetic as an old-fashioned town meeting in a beer garden. There were queries about just about everything, from a range of interrogators that included a gun nut and a computer-generated snowman fretting over global warming.
When startled, starchy Republicans saw the unscripted result, realizing that they, too, had a YouTube debate scheduled for September 17, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and some of the others suddenly remembered that they had to wash their hair that night. Mitt told the Manchester Union Leader, “I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman.” I see — but it’s okay to answer questions from the abominable Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity?
In any case, a stunned world responded with such force that the GOP changed direction and dragged themselves kicking and wailing into the world of reality television, finally settling on November 28 for the big CNN/YouTube Florida fiesta.
Impressions: Fred Thompson’s so done he should have had a bone-handled serving fork stuck between his shoulders, like a “Law and Order” murder victim, although he did have the best single line of the evening when a munitions fan from Phoenix asked each candidate to describe their firearms collection: “I own a couple of guns, but I’m not going to tell you what they are or where they are.”
The heated opening fight between Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani over immigration included Romney referring to a worker from outside the US as “someone with a funny accent.” Duncan Hunter announced that he personally built the security fence between San Diego and Tijuana (THAT’S what he was doing all those weekends away from Congress). John McCain accused Ron Paul of being the kind of isolationist who caused World War II. Huckabee scored points by seeming the most sincere although he almost blew it with a glib, feckless response when asked what you-know-who would do about the death penalty: “Jesus was too smart to ever run for public office.” Ugh.
None fell for a question as to whether they regarded the Bible as literal gospel. Asked about gays in the military, the candidates were either opposed or supported “don’t ask, don’t tell,” including McCain. This puts him at odds with his late mentor, conservative giant Barry Goldwater, who memorably said he didn’t care what soldiers were or did as long as they could shoot straight.
Biggest surprise: no mention of 9/11 until over an hour had passed, and no question, from a disgruntled NYC firefighter or anyone, about Giuliani’s actions on 9/11 or the days and weeks immediately following, no question about the alleged lack of preparedness or proper emergency radios, or the failure to truthfully inform rescue workers and the public about the toxic air quality in and around Ground Zero. Prior to the debate, many had speculated that this was one reason Rudy had been reluctant to participate in the YouTube forum.
This on the day New York papers reported a survey from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene revealing that children who were exposed to the dust cloud from the collapse of the Trade Center are twice as likely to be diagnosed with asthma. A study earlier this year found that Ground Zero workers have an asthma diagnosis rate a dozen times greater than the general population.
It’s enough to make you sick.
copyright 2007 Michael Winship
Oct
30
by Michael Winship
When I was an adolescent, Canandaigua, my small hometown in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, got its first radio station, WCGR. You can hear it to this day, at 1550 on the AM dial.
Back then, beaming out a signal of 250 mighty watts, WCGR (announcers said it stood for “Watch Canandaigua Grow Rapidly”), broadcast music, news and farm reports to a radius extending about as far as you could throw a rock.
Nonetheless, I thought it was a wondrous and glamorous place – show business! — and often climbed the stairs to their dusty studio, up above a Main Street storefront. The twin sons of the station’s owner were schoolmates and my father bought on the air advertising time for his drugstore, so no one paid much attention to my hanging out.
One day, I came across some promotional 45 rpm records. They were interviews with celebrities – with spaces left for any given announcer at any given station to ask the pertinent questions, which were conveniently provided by the record company. In an instant, you could make it appear as if your local DJ was actually interviewing Nat King Cole or Bobby Vinton or Carol Channing.
“Carol, this is Seth Cathode at WCGR. Congratulations on ‘Hello, Dolly!’”
“Why, THANK youuu!! It’s the biggest thrill of my career.”
Beat. Next fake question. And so on.
All of which came to mind last week when it was revealed that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, held a phony briefing on the California wildfires. FEMA staffers posed as reporters, pitching softball questions to deputy administrator Harvey Johnson. Parts of it were carried live by Fox News and MSNBC.
Oct
24
Behind Closed Doors, “The Big Ask”
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
by Michael Winship
Over the last three weeks, for different reasons, I’ve had inside access to two kinds of events that usually take place privately, behind closed doors.
In the first instance, I was invited — as a non-paying observer — to small political fundraisers for two major congressional candidates, one for the Senate, one for the House. The other invitees were quite well to do, possessed of very deep pockets. As opposed to me, whose pockets only jingle shallowly with quarters for the Laundromat.
At the same time, I’ve been a participant in the contract negotiations among the Writers Guild of America, East (the union of which I’m president), the Writers Guild of America, West, and the Hollywood studios and networks, represented by the AMPTP, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.
When “Entertainment Tonight” asks, “Are the movie and TV writers going on strike?” this is the negotiation about which they’re speculating — between their fervid analyses of Britney Spears’ driving habits and Marie Osmond’s case of the vapors on “Dancing with the Stars.”
Oct
17
by Michael Winship
There’s a line in an old Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie of which I’m especially fond. It often comes to mind when I read the latest news from the White House.
Fred is talking to his best friend, Randolph Scott, who has been behaving boobishly. “Every day you act worse,” Fred tells him. “But today you’re acting like tomorrow.”
At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, with each dawn seems to come some new passing perfidy, each day a bump in magnification of the one that went before. Blackwater contractors gunning down civilians in Iraq like the Dalton Gang shooting up Dodge City. The president’s veto of increased funding for S-CHIP, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Secret legal opinions essentially endorsing the torture of terrorism suspects.
Monday’s New York Times reported that, “With only 15 months left in office, President Bush has left whole agencies of the executive branch to be run largely by acting or interim appointees — jobs that would normally be filled by people whose nominations would have been reviewed and confirmed by the Senate… The jobs are filled by people who do not have the clout to make decisions that comes with a permanent appointment endorsed by the Senate, scholars say.”
These include three cabinet positions: Justice, Agriculture and Veterans Affairs. In the words of Paul Light, a public service professor at NYU, “You’ve got more vacancies now than a hotel in hurricane season.”
Sort of puts one in mind of that old joke: how many people work in the United States government? About half of them.
Unfortunately, it often feels like even that half ain’t working for, but against us, and in ways of staggering incompetence, indifference, and hypocrisy that favor expedience over fidelity to any kind of American ideal.
Oct
11
California: Fear, Fugue and Fantasia
Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
by Michael WinshipLOS ANGELES — There is an unnaturalness to much of California’s geography that makes a born-and-bred Easterner like me nervous.
It’s not just the seismic fault lines that shear the landscape and make the dropping away of a sizable chunk of the state a real possibility, like a big piece of gaudy birthday cake sliced and hurled to the ground.
Nor is it the beautifully cataclysmic coastline or the make-believe architecture that parallels the product of Hollywood’s dream engine, all stucco and design with insufficient heft. As Raymond Chandler’s private detective Philip Marlowe observed, “About the only part of a California house you can’t put your foot through is the door.”
California’s just plain weird. And a bit unreal.
Admittedly, my feelings are mixed. There are good friends here and boundless creative energy, great food and intriguing, unorthodox ideas. D.H. Lawrence echoed just my blend of ambivalence in a letter to a friend in 1923. “California is a queer place,” he wrote. “In a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort… It’s sort of crazy-sensible.”
And so, over the Columbus Day weekend, my girlfriend Pat and I found ourselves motoring northeast several hours from LA to the Sierra Nevada — spectacular mountain vistas topping barren sagebrush desert. We went to visit my friend Louis Fantasia, who this summer became president of Deep Springs College, an alternative institution of higher learning nestled in a valley between the White and Inyo Mountain ranges.
Deep Springs is a remarkable place, a working cattle ranch and alfalfa farm as well as a school, albeit one with only 26 students, all male. Over the course of a two-year curriculum, they work the ranch and pursue an intense, classical course of study, all of it in magnificent isolation. Communication with the outside world is limited, visitors are few. And yet competition for admission is fierce. To earn a place at Deep Springs is to enter an order of fine, young, unusual — even eccentric — thinkers.
Sep
11
Michael Winship
A journalist I know who has spent a lot of time in Iraq tells the story of talking to an American infantry major in Baghdad the day Saddam’s statue was toppled in Firdos Square, almost four and a half years ago.
He asked, “What now?” The officer replied, “I expect our job is over.” He thought thousands of military police immediately would be airlifted in to patrol the streets of Baghdad. “We can’t do that with our tanks and Bradley’s and howitzers,” the major reasoned. “We’re not equipped to do that.” Surely, he believed, the United States government, which he so proudly served, had a plan.
But Washington didn’t. And so there was rampant, unchecked looting, and then the sectarian violence, insurgency, bloodshed and terrorism that traumatize Iraq to this very day.
Throughout, the Bush administration has misinterpreted or cooked or hidden the numbers that tell the real story: the number of attacks, the number of suicide bombings, the numbers of civilian dead and wounded. For politicians and generals, statistics (as I have quoted an old British truism here before) are like a lamppost to a drunk — used more for support than illumination.
keep looking »