Like, Life And All

The Bard aside, there are seven stages in a typical showbiz career. I’ll use my own name to illustrate them.

1. Have you seen Tom Dupree?
2. Let’s go see Tom Dupree.
3. Let’s hire Tom Dupree!
4. Can we get Tom Dupree?
5. Can we get a Tom Dupree type?
6. Can we get a young Tom Dupree?
7. Whatever happened to Tom Dupree?

And that, my bruthas, is showbiz.

I’ve also observed that there are stages to SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE fandom, thusly:

1. You’re excited about the host and the musical guest.
2. You don’t get everybody in the cast, but the host is OK and the musical guest still rocks.
3. You still like most everybody, but you’ve never heard of the musical guest, who rocks, I guess.
4. You’ve never heard of the host OR the musical guest.

Since that day, SNL has hipped me to acts I would certainly have otherwise ignored, including Dream Academy [sue me!], the Corrs, and now, the Lumineers. I am a fogey. You got to do two hot live spots on SNL before I will even consider. The Ls did. They rock. End of line.

Music To Look At

One afternoon in December 1981, my partner John Maxwell and I were at the Bottom Line in New York, prepping two performances of our one-man show in which he played William Faulkner. Several expat friends from Mississippi wandered in. I remember my delight at welcoming Clif Dowell, who was working for Geraldo Rivera at the time and whom I hadn’t seen since college. Another was Alan Hunter, whom John and I knew from theater circles back home. “Whatcha doin’ these days, Al?” He flipped me a business card that read:

MTV

MUSIC TELEVISION

Alan Hunter

Video Jock

Four months earlier, Alan and four other “video jocks” had launched MTV – but of course, like most people we’d never heard of it. (In fact, it wasn’t yet available even in New York City: the staff had had to schlep out to Fort Lee, New Jersey to watch MTV go on the air at midnight on August 1.) I was laughing inside as I read Alan’s card: all I could think of was the Rick Moranis “video jock” character on SCTV, pushing a fader bar and spouting an exaggerated radio-announcer intonation. But, my friend, in the fullness of time, the joke was on me.

The lively, entertaining I WANT MY MTV is an oral history of the channel’s early days, from ’81 to 1992, when MTV debuted THE REAL WORLD and kind of became something else. It’s perfect for me, and for anyone else who was watching the young “national radio station.” The past two decades have seen MTV morph into irrelevance as far as I’m concerned (of course, I’m no longer within its target demographic), and I truly don’t care to go backstage for those years. But this book is about the era in which MTV actually played music videos (it quietly removed the words “Music Television” from its logo in 2010) and shook up the entire record business. There have been other books about this period, even other oral histories. This is the best one by far.

MTV was just feeling its way when we met Alan Hunter that day. Even that initial broadcast began with a flub: he was supposed to be the fifth and final VJ (their segments were taped separately; nothing about early MTV was live), but a technician loaded the tapes in the wrong order, so Alan became the first MTV VJ to appear on camera – by mistake. It might have continued crawling along had not Bob Pittman, one of the founders of the channel, hired famed adman George Lois for a marketing campaign.

In those days, local cable providers – mostly serving rural viewers who were too far away for over-the-air signals to reach – held all the cards, and not a few of them didn’t care for the sex, drugs and rock & roll menu MTV was serving. Lois reasoned that it was a mistake to market “top-down” to the cable companies; MTV needed to go over their heads, to the viewers themselves, and create demand. One of Lois’s best-known campaigns was for a breakfast cereal. Based on an idea by animator John Hubley, the ads had famous sports stars sobbing into the camera, “I want my Maypo!” Lois simply trotted it out again thirty years later – but the key was turned by MTV’s Les Garland, who convinced none other than Mick Jagger to say, “I want my MTV!” into the camera. Other rock stars followed, and it didn’t take long before the cable operators were inundated. Round One to MTV.

Those heady let’s-put-on-a-show days are exhilarating to read about, because nobody was aware they were causing a sea change in the music business; they were just making it up as they went along. MTV was existing on a total library of just a few hundred already-produced videos when its executives made the rounds to try and convince the record labels that shooting a video was a legitimate bit of promotion. It took comparing sales to MTV playlists, but the correlation was so obvious that soon the labels were financing more and more elaborate videos themselves. In retrospect, perhaps that was an unwise decision, but MTV continued to get its programming for free. Round Two to MTV.

This book is especially useful in showing how music videos also affected the film business. The list of successful directors who started in music video is long and impressive, but unfortunately we only hear about David Fincher and Michael Bay in the words of colleagues (other directors, like Steve Barron, Russell Mulcahy, John Sayles and Tarsem Singh, are only too happy to talk). Video shoots even served as film schools for other people who just took the opportunity and ran with it, and since nobody at any label had any experience supervising videos, the job often fell to women, advancing their power in the industry.

MTV caused harm as well, and these issues are also covered. In my opinion, the worst thing about music video is that it prescribes a visual template onto a song. Whereas once music inspired different imagery for each listener – one of its most pleasant attributes – now a video director is, in a way, telling you what a particular song looks like. For example, it’s hard to forget the animated kaleidoscopic video for Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” on subsequent hearings. Also, the kinetic editing style that’s supposed to keep you glued to the set has seeped into feature films, with Bay being the poster boy, and made storytelling so much harder to follow, the technique even descending lately into cliché. Time and again we read about parties at which MTV played in the background with the sound off; I can even remember hosting a few.

Another consequence of MTV was more pernicious. It caused musical acts to worry more about how they looked than how they sounded. The term “hair metal” brings to mind dozens of lousy videos from lousy groups, and that’s strictly a cosmetic issue. Some people think the video era stunted the careers of perfectly great musicians who didn’t look so hot (and even one who did: the collective evisceration of Billy Squier’s “Rock Me Tonite,” considered by many to be the worst video ever made, is hilarious). When your only view of a rocker was from the 40^th row at an arena, appearance didn’t matter so much. But it didn’t take long for the MTV audience to tire of “performance” videos – in other words, just shoot them on stage playing a song – in favor of hot chicks and stripper poles.

But that’s all water under the bridge by now. And the full-force cultural flow is right here, those first insane ten years, from the Moonman to Dexys Midnight Runners to Michael Jackson to Madonna to YO! MTV RAPS. This is the story, from the people who were present at the creation. It’s one of the most delightful reads out there.

Maher Messes With Mississippi

I enjoy REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER, even if I don’t always agree with the host, or with many of the conservative guests he books to help balance out his panels, a trait of the show I particularly admire. (The late Andrew Breitbart, for example, was a regular, as are several of the current young Republican turks in the House.) But I have to call a foul on something Bill did last Friday night.

While introducing some man-in-the-street interviews from filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, he disclaimed any “cherry-picking”: he said the interviews left on the cutting-room floor were just like the ones used, and I believe that. I’m paraphrasing here: “She just walked up to people. Everybody knew it was for my show. And they all think I’m going to hell.” (Maher is not just an atheist, he’s evangelical about it.) Then he proceeded to roll the clip, interviews from — I believe he said Senatobia — Mississippi.

The point of the exercise was to show that less fortunate people in the nation’s poorest state were still likely to vote against their economic interests. The subtext was that racism is alive and well in Mississippi. Nobody used the N-word (nobody except for Maher himself, just after the clip), but one man said he didn’t like the President because “his name is Obama.” When asked if it was because the President was black, he said, “it’s not because he’s black. He’s a halfbreed.” The “button” at the end: some guy tells Pelosi “the South’s gonna rise again.”

OK, fine. Then why did I sit up in my chair in irritation? My beef is with Maher’s disclaimer: everybody we talked to was the same. Trust me. This is what it’s like down there.

All interviewees were white men, unless I misremember some lady. (Demographically unsound for a “cross-section” of Mississippi, and that’s an understatement.) On the economic scale, all were blue-collar at best. By virtue of where she went fishing, Pelosi was selecting for poor or paycheck-to-paycheck white – not trash, there was definitely dignity displayed by some of the interviewees – but a representation of Mississippi that plays directly to the typical liberal stereotype. Despite polls that indicate otherwise, there are plenty of thinking, feeling people in Mississippi, of all races and creeds. The state has the highest percentage of black elected officials in the country, yet its ruling Republican Party is still country-club white guys who look and sound more like Romney/Gingrich/Santorum than Gomer Pyle. There are even progressives in Mississippi! (Sorry, Sen. Santorum: they already done got ‘em some goldarn colleges, grglblagit!) Racism is still easy to find down there – you could make the argument that this Muslim canard is nothing but dog-whistle coded anger against a President who dares to be black – but I’ll bet the same thing goes where you live, too.

I grew up in Mississippi, which is why the issue hits me personally. Whether I agree politically with most of the people in that state isn’t the point. (I took their advice: if you don’t like it here, then leave. I don’t agree with most of the people in Utah either, but Park City is still beautiful around Sundance time.) This is about fairness. Bill Maher and Alexandra Pelosi furthered prejudice by what they systematically elected to put on the air, but only people who know better can tell the difference. Now Bill says they’re going to continue this during primary season, going next into the “inner city.” I hope they have the down-low and what-what, or whatever the hell it is they say up in there, aight? (see what I mean?) to warn viewers that the margin of error of this “representative sample” is off the frickin scale.

3/15/12: Stanley Graham (see comment below) was the first one to confirm to me that as the Alabama and Mississippi returns were coming in Tuesday night, Bill Maher tweeted: Toothless Tuesday too tight to tally! We’re gathered around the magic picture box with a bowl of grits watching the returns come in! Two WordPress blogs (not the bloggers directly below) had linked to me overnight, but at that moment, those links were all I knew. In case you’re wondering, I think Maher’s tweet is even more reprehensible than the Pelosi piece, since it was done, as they say, with malice aforethought. Bigotry isn’t the sole province of the right.

“In Brightest Day, In Darkest Night…”

It was what cinematographers call the “Magic Hour,” when golden late-afternoon light is at its most gorgeous. I had just refilled the iced-tea glass and returned to my office when I stumbled upon something I don’t think I was supposed to see. I think Tom Servo just became a Green Lantern. 

The One And Only Thing I Like About Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck likes books.

He writes ‘em, sure, all his little friends do. But what I mean is that he reads them too, invites his favorite authors on his show and sells books after their appearances. It’s not just serious nonfiction and redemptive Oprah reads, either. Beck enjoys thrillers (especially if there’s a juicy government conspiracy involved, but that’s not a requirement) and other commercial fiction alongside the conservative Jeremiads you’d expect.

No matter what you think of Beck’s politics, and I think he’s so wrong there that he’s silly, it’s great to have another effective tv outlet for authors. As this piece points out, progressives don’t have the equivalent of a guy who can thunder on the air, “Buy this book,” and have the audience actually obey. The wimpy attitude is, this is the flip side of demagoguery; it’s not so bad if it’s for a good cause. But, vide Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. I cringe, as do most people, when Beck decides to hold a rally on the anniversary date of, on the same steps as, Martin Luther King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, thus desecrating the historic event as only a grinning galoot possibly can. (He claims, preposterously, that he was unaware of the connection during the planning stages.) But his audience takes him seriously, and if he says buy gold, they do. If he says buy books, they do that too. Let’s hope he doesn’t tell them one day to buy suitcase nukes.

Stewart and Colbert do a great job with authors: they are the rule as guests on these shows, not the exception. But they usually feature serious nonfiction, on both sides of the political spectrum, and though they can sell books (one I worked on, a very long book, went into multiple printings after George Lucas appeared on THE DAILY SHOW to promote it), they’re not in Beck’s league. Even more to the point, Beck is promoting reading as fun. That’s something that all little Obama-haters can take away – and if they get into the habit while they’re still young, they might even discover that there’s a whole wide world out there beyond the artificial reality of Fox News. Keep it up, Glenn: not only is reading a noble cause to champion, you also might actually be forming a few progressive minds along the way.

A Tale Of Two Headlines, Part II

As part of our continuing quest for journalistic edification, compare these Tuesday morning headlines, reporting the same story, Monday’s overnight ratings for the series finale of LOST:

‘Lost’ Finale Lifts ABC To Big Night

‘Lost’ Finale Finds a Base, But Not Too Many Others

Students, which headline came from a newspaper that does not own a television network, and which from a newspaper whose sister company is a direct competitor to ABC?

For extra credit, how huge will the overnights for the series finale of 24 seem Wednesday morning in at least one of these papers?

But Now I’m LOST

Frank Torres did it.

Not quite five and a half years ago, I was watching the pilot episode of a new ABC series out of idle curiosity. It opened on an extreme closeup of an eye. Pulled back to reveal it’s a guy. A guy on his back in a suit. In a suit in a jungle. He gets up, staggers, then runs toward a beach. There, we find the scattered pieces of a crashed airliner, a big one, and now we can see and hear utter pandemonium, because there are more survivors, most of them going batshit. Then Frank Torres walks in front of a huge, still-spinning turbine. Somebody yells at him and he turns back, but it’s too late: he’s sucked into the engine, and just like that, at 5:03 in the opening episode, he’s gone. Nothing but an asterisk, because the hysteria doesn’t stop at his demise; there’s much more also going on elsewhere, and we don’t waste as much as a music sting on this unfortunate guy. Holy moley: life is cheap on this show!

At that instant, I said to myself, I’m gonna keep on watching this, and so I have, for five full seasons. Because of a hotshot stuntman named Frank Torres, and a simple wire gag that’s been simulating the effect of shotgun blasts and big explosions for decades, I’ve never missed an episode of LOST. That turbine sucked me in, too.

Like DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, ABC’s other hit of the same TV season, LOST turned out to be one serial story, rather than individual episodes which return the situation to stasis each week, as most other series do. The CSI gang will be back at their posts at the start of next week’s show, ready for the latest outrage. But events in every LOST episode will have a bearing on what is still to come. We also found that this epic story opens up like a blossoming flower: first externally, as the survivors discover their tropical island is a very strange place. There’s a polar bear. A plume of black smoke which seems to be alive and malevolent. An anomalous metal hatch leading down to…where? And the gradual suspicion, then realization, that they are not alone. But there’s also a very important internal element: as we learn the survivors’ backstories, one by one, we find that they’re eerily interconnected. We’ll see another member of the ensemble walk by in the background as we’re learning what brought one particular character to the fateful plane flight. An ominous series of numbers appears again and again in various guises. And – I’m not spilling any beans here – we already know that at least some characters manage to escape the island and return home, but the experience has marked and changed them, and now they’re part of the powerful and warring forces in the outside world who are intent upon this outré place. The series ladles questions upon questions, and offers a constantly burgeoning mythology in which an offhand line from the fourth season will illuminate something from the first. LOST’s creators love to tantalize with stray references from science, philosophy and literature (THE WIZARD OF OZ figures strongly and repeatedly, and one of the central characters is named “John Locke,” for crying out loud!), but such details are just window-dressing: most importantly, there’s a “ripping yarn” to entertain those who fail to catch the eye-winks. (By the way, those are LOST’s actual two showrunners in the video clip I just linked you to. Above all, they’re having fun.)

LOST is filmed in Hawaii, and the remote location and large cast make it one of the most expensive TV shows ever, maybe the costliest. But I’ve read that none of the principal actors ever presumed to buy real estate, because their characters might be killed at any time. They’re all renters, and rightly so, for we’ve, er, lost some beloved recurring characters over the past five years. Nothing is certain, except for one thing. The show is about to end.

Midway through LOST’s run, even ardent fans like me noticed that the writers seemed to be exhausting themselves in their constant need to widen the story. Then, in May 2007, at the end of the third season, they made a startling announcement: LOST would conclude with a sixth and final season three years hence. They’d repeatedly assured us that an ending had always been in sight, and they knew the answers we craved – chief among them, what is this mysterious island? Now they drew their line in the sand. We’ll finish the story in 2010, they said. And that time has come at last.

The final season begins tonight, and four months from now we’ll have some answers. Maybe not all of them, but at least the kind of conclusion put forth by people who don’t think their audience is stupid. The respect comes right back at them, and I can’t wait to see what they’ve come up with. But with 16 final episodes to go, I guess I’ll have to — no, I get to — luxuriate in the wonderful spell they’ve cast for just a little while longer.

The Lunatic Cringe

I passed on BRUNO (just add virtual umlauts wherever you wish) for the theatrical run last summer and, after watching the DVD, I’m so glad I did. “Cringe” comedy was around long before Ricky Gervais newly popularized it on THE OFFICE in England: Allen Funt’s CANDID CAMERA in the Fifties was the first example I noticed as a kid. The American OFFICE (with the assistance of Gervais and his writing/producing partner, Stephen Merchant) has kept it up and, in many ways, is superior to its beloved Brit counterpart, because now we have a real sitcom: that is, after five seasons, we can almost predict how the various office denizens might react to a new stimulus, thus it’s up to the writers to surprise us. But each episode features at least one of those awkward pauses that made the BBC series so essential: we can’t believe what we’ve just heard, and the Voice of Reason (Martin Freeman in the original, John Krasinski in the U.S.) gives the camera a forlorn look: I heard it too…welcome to my world.

Sacha Baron Cohen.

The audience is also in on the joke with Sacha Baron Cohen. His specialty, besides a chameleonlike ability to utterly alter his appearance, is rock-solid devotion to his character no matter what idiocy issues from his mouth; Harvey Korman and Tim Conway could not have made him break. He’s one of the greatest talents at improv that I’ve ever seen. It was all new on his wonderful DA ALI G SHOW, in which he played (1) a privileged English kid who affects the persona of a Third World rapper (Ali G), (2) a clueless TV reporter from Kazakhstan (Borat), and (3) a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista (Bruno). In character, Baron Cohen interacts with real people – some of them celebrities – in order to test their appetite for appearing on TV (1), push the boundaries of courtesy toward foreign customs (2), and unearth homophobia (3). In short bursts, all three characters were quite amusing: an entire episode only lasted about thirty minutes. And it was fun to see how much foolishness a Newt Gingrich or Buzz Aldrin could stand before deciding it just wasn’t worth it (some of Ali’s guests never reached that point). DA ALI G SHOW was such a sensation in England that it became prohibitively difficult to find more unwitting patsies, so HBO brought it to the U.S., where the pickings were again fat.

Now, all three characters have been expanded to feature length. ALI G INDAHOUSE (of Parliament) was much too British to make any noise in America and was barely released here. BORAT: CULTURAL LEARNINGS OF AMERICA FOR MAKE BENEFIT GLORIOUS NATION OF KAZAKHSTAN, on the other hand, was a surprise hit in 2006 – it didn’t hurt that it was essentially an American travelogue – and it got Baron Cohen a major deal for the third feature, the one that just appeared, BRUNO. Fans of DA ALI G SHOW are no doubt flabbergasted that the filmmakers were able to stretch the latter two characters to feature length, and in BRUNO, they damn near weren’t; even with a star-studded “music video” at the end, it barely clocks in at 80 minutes. Even so, the three films reveal disturbing undertones in the three characters that are harder to read in five-minute increments.

Ali G. Note the “playa” cap twist — with a bike helmet.

Ali G is the simplest, because we infer a very recognizable backstory. Alistair Graham actually lives in Staines, a middle-class London suburb. “Ali G” represents his fantasy life. Not only does he appropriate what he imagines to be West Indies-laden language (Bob Marley, in his mind), but he peppers his speech with American slang as well. It’s hard to tell whether the character is as dumb as he sounds, because presumably his lessons came from the schools, not the streets. (Come closer, I have a secret to tell you: Sacha Baron Cohen is actually…tee hee…a graduate of prep school and Cambridge!) But Ali’s besotted with junk food and ganja, and his girlfriend (“me Julie”) can only be described as long-suffering: misogyny is part of the package. I’ve read that on a typical Ali G interview, the bling-laden Baron Cohen at first appears to be a crew member, adjusting lights and all, then plops down in a chair next to the guest and engages him in friendly conversation while “waiting for the host.” But the tape’s already rolling. Because Ali G’s witlessness is actually funny in and of itself, the cringe factor is dialed way back. The game is to determine, how long can he keep this up? For Ali G’s movie, the spotlight was entirely on the character, in hindsight a mistake since buffoonish interviews were actually a big part of his popularity. Perhaps realizing this, the Ali G team decided to fix things with its next feature.

Borat.

At first glance, Borat Sagdiyev comes across as just as dumb as Ali G, but it’s not so. He’s simply a stranger in a strange land. You imagine that by Kazakh standards – for that’s the running joke – he’s probably a pretty good reporter. But despite his “undeveloped country” crudity, and one particularly nasty bit of bigotry, those around Borat cannot escape his essential sweetness. He loves America, he’s thrilled to be here, so if you’re a patriot, you have something important in common. Unlike Ali G, who projects the rapper’s disdain for authority and tries to sound as much like a “playa” as possible, Borat yearns to join your society. And so there are chinks in the armor of our ironic detachment from his victims: many of them are simply trying to be hospitable toward this mound of bizarre customs. Baron Cohen reportedly refused to wash his worn gray suit during the entire shoot, so that whenever Borat leaned over to kiss the next uncomfortable redneck on both cheeks, a stench would precede him, and just maybe cause an involuntary grimace or flinch. Is that loading the dice? Doggone right it is.

On one of his TV appearances, Borat leads the gang at an Arizona country-music bar in his own composition, “In My Country There Is Problem,” with its now-famous chorus, “Throw the Jew down the well!” For our sweet Borat also happens to be a fierce, stalwart anti-Semite. “Borat” used the same rolling joke when he visited Jon Stewart’s desk and tried to find his horns. But back in Arizona, did Borat really stumble upon a nest of like-minded cowboys, or was it only just a group of beer-drinking shitkickers who were trying to be nice by singing along? Some charge that the crowd had been warned it would be a comedy song, and at least one Jew in the audience was singing herself. Only the crew knows how much of the reaction to Baron Cohen is genuine and how much is staged. (Come closer, I have a secret to tell you: Sacha Baron Cohen is actually…tee hee…an observant Jew!) There certainly is rampant bigotry in America, and some of it is shown in BORAT. But my ire is reserved for those self-important “teachers” and “motivators” who try to lure sad, gullible people into an undeserved sense of superiority over something. Those are the true creeps, not the folks who whoop it up with the funny-looking guy in the cowboy hat.

Bruno.

And now we have Bruno, the nightmare of every homophobe, not to mention every gay person who wants to be taken seriously. He swishes, he shakes ass, he renders his wrists limp. He explores every possible manifestation of the gay-basher’s imagined stereotype. This is by definition the most repulsive and aggressive of Baron Cohen’s three characters, but one of the actor’s formidable arsenal of weapons is sheer courage rivaling Andy Kaufman’s. He goes on a Dallas TV talk show with an overwhelmingly black audience and shows them his new adopted black baby from Nigeria, wearing a T-shirt that reads GAYBY. He tells them he traded an iPod for little “O.J.,” and makes them angrier with every passing second. (Hmmm: how much of that was staged?) As a modeling agent, Bruno interviews the parents of infants and asks them if they’d permit their babies to wear a beard made of bees, appear in a crucifixion scene, and more. Everyone answers yes, and we think it’s a funny comment on stage mothers, but then we see the resulting photos later! (Ginned up or not, they’re still eyeball-widening.) Bruno goes to boot camp, a hunting expedition where he tries to sneak naked into a fellow hunter’s tent, a martial arts teacher who helps him learn how to defend himself against homosexuals, a swinger’s night where a dominatrix repeatedly whips him with a belt to get a hetero reaction, and finally an extreme sports cage-match event where Baron Cohen and his co-star wind up rolling around on the mat together and scandalizing the redneck crowd so mercilessly that some of them actually start crying on camera. Still, the only real blood that’s spilled comes when Bruno visits a “recovered homosexual” who claims to be able to cure him, and a minister who feels the same way, and they need nobody’s help to look ridiculous. (Oh yeah, come closer, I have a secret to tell you: Sacha Baron Cohen is actually…tee hee…not gay at all! In fact, he’s engaged to, and a papa with, red-hottie Isla Fisher!)

Sacha and fiancee Isla Fisher.

Now the ironic detachment gets perilously close to a cliff. Being played by a Jew might give Borat a little license that others might not have. But Bruno’s played by a straight man. Where’s the line between satire and genuine homophobia, either felt or induced? What gives him the right? When all’s said and done, it’s just an exercise, and it doesn’t really matter, because BRUNO is one and only one joke, and the most important thing is that after a while it simply isn’t funny any more. Are there homophobes in America (and by the way, even our own country’s supply of patsies must be shrinking, because the lion’s share of BRUNO takes place in the Deep South)? Of course there are, but I don’t want to spend another hour and a half watching a man point to a barrel full of fish, produce a revolver, and fire – again and again and again.

Baron Cohen is also notable for declining interviews out of character when promoting a movie. If you’re Letterman or Leno, you book Borat, not Sacha Baron Cohen. I’ve only heard one non-character radio interview in all the time I’ve been following him: an NPR piece when ALI G came to the U.S. But this summer, notably, he bounded on the Letterman stage as himself, and told very entertaining stories about the making of the movie. Outside of the traditional clip, Bruno himself was nowhere to be found. Maybe somebody decided that ten minutes with Bruno was quite enough. After going the full 80, I agree. Let’s retire all three characters, and ask this very talented man for something new.

MST And Me

One of the best things about being a book editor is that you get to help bring beautiful literary babies into the world, and quite a few of ‘em last a long time. Just the other day, on a five-hour flight, I sat on my hands while I watched my seatmate chuckle at a worn paperback copy of Christopher Moore’s LAMB. I wanted to say, “You know, I edited that book,” but then I would have had to interrupt Chris’s beautiful prose, point to the acknowledgment at the end, and produce some ID to truly non-impress him. There is a downside, though. One of the worst things about the job is that you have to do most of this off the clock, at home, on nights and weekends, because when you’re at the office, phones are ringing and meetings are calling constantly. You can’t actually edit a manuscript there. Some fine companies allow a “reading day” during the week. I was at home on one of those occasions, deep into another Bantam book, when my assistant called to tell me I had won the auction to publish the official book by the writers of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, which also happened to be my favorite television program. It was one of the happiest moments of my publishing life. I did a brief “victory dance,” then I had to go back to work.

I’d been after these guys for quite a while. The first time I saw MST3K (that’s the aficionado’s abbreviation), years earlier, I thought I had caught a local broadcaster’s error – in Jackson, Mississippi, where I was visiting my mom, that was entirely plausible. An ancient, awful movie was running on the air. It sounded like someone had left a mike open in the control room, and a couple of station employees were making fun of their own flick while it was rolling! My first indication of monkey business was aural. Once I started paying attention, the local heckling was perfectly timed and really funny: it was deliberate, they’d actually rehearsed it! Then I noticed three bizarre silhouettes at lower screen right: that’s where the rat-a-tat stream of wisecracks was coming from. At the next commercial break, I discovered I was watching something called MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, and I was forever hooked; I never missed another episode. Once I became an editor, I began writing letters to MST3K’s production company, begging them to let me do their official book and telling them how much I “got” their concept. Like Andy Dufresne, I heard nothing back, until they got a movie deal and decided to hold that auction for publishing rights. But when I finally stuck out my hand in person to Jim Mallon, the chief executive of their company, he said, “We meet at last!” He had read my letters – he just wanted to find out how much an MST3K book was worth.

The MST wiseacres vs. FORBIDDEN PLANET.

MST3K existed in the world of show business, but outside it as well. It began in 1988 as a simple do-it-yourself program at KTMA, a Minneapolis cable channel, where Jim and Kevin Murphy, a gifted and creative production chief, spat out banal stuff like commercials for local retailers and a weekly wrestling program on next to nothing. At that time, Minneapolis’s comedy scene had one genuine star: Joel Hodgson, a magician and prop comic (think Gallagher, only with brains: Joel didn’t smash stuff, he “invented” wacky stuff). He’d moved to LA, done LETTERMAN and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, and returned to the Midwest disillusioned at the dough which clueless tv execs were throwing at him for what he considered inferior potential sitcoms.

It was Joel who had the idea. Jim Mallon asked, what could we do great and cheap? Joel’s notion was simple: when we watch bad movies at home, particularly with friends, we tend to talk back to the tv. What if you codified that behavior by featuring the heckling? Joel being Joel, he created a backstory about a man and two robots marooned on a space station while mad scientists torture them with awful movies (don’t ask; as the silly surf-music theme song goes, “Just repeat to yourself, ‘It’s just a show / I should really just relax’”). The first few shows, only seen locally, stated the template: the movie rolls while Joel and two puppets are seen in silhouette. But el cheapo: the movies came from KTMA’s pathetic film library, and the heckling was by and large improvised. A DIY “space” set was the location for “host segments,” needed to give the audience periodic breaks from the mind-numbing banality of the movies. They had complete freedom —  just as long as they were finished in time to dress the studio for wrestling.

And now it began.

Jim says they knew they’d struck a chord when they ran a telephone number on-air one week and filled the answering machine to overflowing (it was 1988, people!). At the same time, cable channels were desperately looking for programming. So it was that MST3K went national, though you still needed to (1) find it on an obscure cable channel, (2) grok it, as Heinlein put it, and (3) start telling your friends about it. The show’s new production company, Best Brains, Inc., did some creative housecleaning with its brand new production budget(!) from Comedy Central, formed by the merger of all-comedy competitors The Comedy Channel and HA! First came its own studio space in Eden Prairie, just outside Minneapolis. No more KTMA, no more wrestling. Next, the company hired professional comedy writers from the local stand-up scene. No more on-air improv. And finally, they could afford network-quality equipment, sets and props – though MST3K always maintained its handmade look and feel.

The other serendipitous event was the simultaneous rise of fan communication via computer. In the era of bulletin boards and listserv, MST3K’s core devotees began talking to each other, sharing their favorite wisecracks and arcane information about the show. Best Brains even encouraged viewers to share VCR tapes with each other: a super during the end credits every week read, KEEP CIRCULATING THE TAPES. This close connection to its fans turned them into fanatics, and by 1991 or so, when I discovered the show, they were an honest-to-God cult. A few years go by, even more fans come in, and now I get to do their book! After we signed, they even acknowledged our new partnership on the air: during the overly lengthy end-credit roll on a particularly amateurish movie, we heard, “Read the Bantam book!”

Mike Nelson and the “bots,” about the time we became their book-pubbing partners.

Salt-of-the-earth Midwesterners that they are (“we’re like any other TV folks, except we have to get up to milk the cows”), the hard-working book team (Jim, Mike Nelson, Trace Beaulieu, Paul Chaplin, Mary Jo Pehl, and Kevin, who organized it all from their end) had already completed most of the first draft by the time I came on board. It would be an “episode guide” that would lead fans through the 120-odd (and I mean very odd, muchachos!) movies they’d already eviscerated. To give myself credit, that was my suggestion during my phone interview – required of all prospective editors – but a toddler would have had the same notion. (“Do episode guide, Unca Tom!”) The writing was very funny. I made some notes and suggested some additional material – after all, I was a fan too. Now came the matter of illustrations, so in September 1995 they invited me over to Eden Prairie to look through their scrapbooks for photos and memorabilia.

Best Brains was located in one of those pre-fab industrial parks you find everywhere. From the outside, it could have been an ad agency, or an MRI facility. Inside the doors was not the controlled chaos of cliché, but a business whose business was funny business. Their Peabody Award (the highest honor for achievement in electronic media) was on the wall, all right, but bizarrely decorated in the MST manner. Their offices looked like anybody’s offices. What would have been the main conference room anywhere else, however, was a huge open space with a kitchenette, a massive table on which were spread all sorts of heavily-thumbed newspapers and magazines, and, at last, a big television monitor ringed by comfy couches. This was the nerve center, the kundalini power spot where lousy movies came to take pies in the face, more than 700 times per episode.

The beauty of the MST concept was that, as Joel intuited, it seemed like something anybody could do. Au contraire, gentle reader. I’m a pretty quick guy and pride myself on blasting out the bon mots, OK? But no sooner had I sat down at the big table with the whole writing team during their lunch break – sandwiches served from the kitchenette – than I met an incredibly fast hive mind that could shut you and me down in milliseconds. These words came from different mouths:

“Hey, Tom, you didn’t see today’s Washington Post, right? They published the Unabomer manifesto.” “The New York Times too.” “Guccione offered to print it too.” “Why not an advice column?” “Dear Unabomer: I hate my boss.” “Dear Unabomer: I have trouble meeting people.” “How scraggly is too scraggly for the winter?” “Thank you for calling the Unabomer. Press 1 for explosives, 2 for chemicals, 3 for postage.” “To speak to the Unabomer, get off the grid!”

All this came out while I was opening my mouth to take the first bite of my baloney sandwich, and it’s a good thing, too, because an instant later I would have either spit food out or aspirated it up my nose. I thought, these are trained professionals on a closed course, folks; don’t try this at home. Years later, one MST writer told me I probably could have sat on that couch with them, but I think this individual was just being nice. Every writer seemed to have a specialty that complemented the others’ deficiencies, and there was a system that allowed them to fight for references even more obscure than the one I made way back in the second paragraph. As Kevin once put it, maybe five people might get a particular joke, but those five would say, jeez, they’re INSIDE MY HEAD!

They showed me around and let me stand in the host’s spot on the “Satellite of Love” set. Joel Hodgson had already left the show, as had writer/performer Frank Conniff (who we still coaxed into the book), so I never got to meet either of them. Joel was replaced as host by Mike Nelson, to tremendous fan agita, which I always thought misplaced, because as much time and effort as the gang spent on its increasingly elaborate and gorgeous “host segments,” it was the movie riffing which made MST “sticky,” and the quality of the writing rarely waned. I never found out exactly why Joel left his baby, but I sensed some measure of bad blood when I asked Kevin if we could get Joel to at least do an introduction for our book. The return email read, “Joel won’t be participating.” However, not once in all the time I worked with the MST group, including three more books with Mike (MIKE NELSON’S MOVIE MEGACHEESE, MIKE NELSON’S MIND OVER MATTERS, and MIKE NELSON’S DEATH RAT!) and one with Kevin (A YEAR AT THE MOVIES), did I ever hear a single critical syllable spoken about Joel.

See, these were, and are, ladies and gentlemen, not showbiz putzes, even if they are in tune with their inner Bart Simpsons. For years, they had resisted pleas to move either east or west so that the gnarled fingers of the suits could be a little closer; wisely, Best Brains stayed at home with the cows, just under the radar. Their word is their bond, and they respect that quality in others. While I was doing what became THE MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 AMAZING COLOSSAL EPISODE GUIDE (take that, cable execs who thought their show’s title was too long!), they completed a movie which subsequently got a halfhearted indie release because the distributor was concentrating its marketing money on Pam Anderson’s BARB WIRE; how’d that work out for you, dickweeds? I know they were working on a MST3K CD-ROM and a comics series, both of which encountered huge problems and to my knowledge never appeared at all. (I heard one nifty idea for the CD-ROM, a “Flight Simulator”: the kid behind you keeps kicking your seat, etc. Funny!) Of all the stuff they had going on in 1995, the sole and single MST project that turned out exactly as promised was my book. I think that’s why I got Mike and Kevin’s projects later: they knew they could trust me to actually do whatever I said I would do. Not that I didn’t make a mistake. I should have included an index, so you could turn directly to the particular episode you’ve just watched. But at least it was an honest mistake.

From left: Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy, beloved authors and good friends.

I still keep up from afar; these are funny, talented people who are genuinely nice to be around. They remain busy on this and that, and most of them are still riffing on movies through two main channels: RiffTrax, and Cinematic Titanic. I may even be assisting one MST writer with a brand new project, but you’ll have to wait till it gets closer for more details. (Okay, ya got me: it’s Mary Jo Pehl.) If you meet a lot of musicians, as I have, or authors, or actors, or anyone whose work you’ve really admired, you occasionally arrive at the inevitable feet of clay; sometimes you wish you hadn’t met them at all. Not so with the posse from Eden Prairie. I count them all as friends — and they can sure count me as one too.

Back To Beck

I love it whenever conservatives turn on each other, which is kind of a mini-fad these days, as, absent a clear right-wing leader, the nutjobs seem to be taking charge and filling the void with more void. But the nuttiest of them all, Glenn Beck, is so out there, so mega-”conservative” (I honestly suspect he has no ideology; he just spews whatever acid-reflux detritus is closest to his mouth at any given moment), so sizzlingly hot in the media sense, that he’s actually causing that kind of cannibalistic reaction in the GOP’s shrinking thinking base, to what must be his immense delight. This guy can contradict himself in the same one-minute spot, pander to whatever audience he imagines is watching (he’s visibly cowed by Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg on THE VIEW, then demands an apology from those mean women only hours later when he’s alone in his radio studio; for Katie Couric, he sez he would have voted for Hillary over McCain, who would have made a worse president than Man-Goat spawn Barack Obama! “How’s that [for a quote]?” he then asks Katie), and repeatedly reveal himself as an idiot to a viewership which is saying, damn: Glenn’s just like us! His Time cover last week just overfed the ego of this classic bully, and I can’t wait for the moment when he finally gets rhetorically punched in the face. He’ll have to do that to himself, though, a la Larry Craig, because his fellow harpies at Fox News will never call him out. But you just watch: one day he will. Unlike Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly, the guy has nothing in reserve. What you see is all he’s got. He’ll eventually start believing his own press, if he hasn’t already, and decide he must be bulletproof. But Glenn Beck has already used up about half of his fifteen minutes of fame. Many more tears shall flow. Only this time, they’ll be real ones.