Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

READY TO BELIEVE: Free MP3 of Obama Fight Song!

Last January, while we were still on strike as members of the Writers Guild of America, my wife Jackie and I sat down in a Los Angeles coffee shop with our good friend, musician Cherish Alexander.

Before the coffee was cold, we decided, improbably given the time frame -- as a couple of striking screenwriters and a singer-composer -- to write, produce and distribute the song you'll soon hear.  It happened over a five day period and we released it immediately before the California primary.

So far, "Ready to Believe" has cumulatively had its video versions viewed close to 100,000 times on YouTube.  Plus, it's available on iTunes.  You, however, don't have to buy it in the closing days of the 2008 campaign.  We want you to download it for free and to send it to your friends.

It was written to stand-up for Barack to the Clinton campaign's charges claiming he wasn't ready for the presidency.  We find that the need for this song is as solidly right-on today as it was last February (only Clinton is on the team now and the argument's being made by John McCain).  It needed rebuttal then, and it needs rebuttal now. 

Please give it a listen.  Click the link below to just hear it.  Otherwise,right-click to actually... we'll say it again... download "Ready to Believe" for free.  Again, you have our express permission to download it and to give it away. 

Download_Ready_to_Believe_Song.mp3

Some have asked for a PDF of the actual lyrics.  Here you are:

Download_Ready_to_Believe_Lyrics.pdf

Here's the You Tube version:

Please also visit the web-page of singer-composer Cherish Alexander (http://www.cherishalexander.com/ready_to_believe/) where all the goodies are also available.  She and fellow producer Damian Valentine did an awesome job with this project as you can hear for yourself.

We know the hour is late but if you support Barack Obama, we'd urge you to join us and expose as many people as you can to this song.  Especially Obama volunteers.  We've received a good deal of email from campaign workers who thought it was like an anthemic "fight song" for the cause.  That's certainly what we intended it to be.

Remember to vote.  Even if the polls say he's ahead, you have to vote.  Take nothing for granted. 

Still fired up and ready-to-go for Obama!

Cherish Alexander, Jackie Zabel, Bryce Zabel

No Redeeming Value

Enough is Enough 

This essay was originally published in A Writers Life. 

I am a big LAW AND ORDER: SVU fan. I have been for years. It's consistently one of the best plotted and acted cop shows on TV. I have used episodes of the show as examples in my TV writing classes here and abroad.

That said, I thought this week's episode ("Confession") was repugnant, pointless, and vile.

It demonstrated what a joke network standards & practices have become. The censorship at the networks has nothing to do with content and everything to do with the ratings of the show and the power of the showrunner. No new show, or one with weaker ratings, or one helmed by a b-list showrunner,  would ever have been allowed to produce, much less broadcast, this episode.

Dick Wolf shouldn't have been, either.

McCain's Brows Are More Than Furrowed

At Least He's Ready For His Close-Up

There's been a lot of talk about how eyebrows were raised over Sarah Palin being plucked from obscurity to serve as VP on the Republican ticket.  Now it appears that her running mate (remember him?  the McCain guy?) is having to play catch-up to compete.  In the issues of Time and Newsweek that just came out (September 8 cover date), there's a fine full-page picture of the Senator inside Newsweek and his mug gets the full cover treatment on Time.  Here they are: take a good look before we continue...

As a producer out here in Hollywood, I've studied my share of head shots while considering actors for parts.  While I was looking at McCain to see if he seemed up for the role, it hit me.  The man had all the grey hairs plucked out of his eyebrows. 

Now we always knew that McCain was a gutsy warrior but we never would have thought to apply the adjective plucky but there it is.  Somehow, John McCain got his picture taken for Newsweek and then must have gone off to Time to be photographed for the cover shot.  Along the way, somebody got rid of all those pesky white hairs because they are gone, baby, gone.  Because of our commitment to investigative journalism here at For What It's Worth, we have gone the extra mile.  Take a look yourself and you tell me if we have a Brow-gate on our hands or not?

Above: Newsweek | Below: Time

Look, I'm all for sartorial striving and all, but there is a little irony here.  Isn't John McCain the guy who "approved" the ads that tried to make Barack Obama seem like a lightweight by branding him with the "celebrity" brush and running pictures of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton next to his?  Then this same candidate runs out and plucks his brows for his big Time cover?

Did one of his consultants tell him that the grey in his eyebrows made him look, well, a little old?  Especially compared to his much younger new running mate?  Did the famously irritable McCain fuss and fume before agreeing?  Did the Secret Service have to inspect the tweezers first?  We just ask the questions, you decide.

Here's the biggest question.  If Barack Obama had done the exact same thing before his recent cover shoot, would any of the Republican speakers last night have missed the opportunity to use that against him in dismissive and contemptuous sound-bites?

Yeah.  Probably not.

Oh, well.  It's just another trivial issue that probably won't even make it past a news cycle.

Hair today, gone tomorrow...

Get That Blimp Out of My Airspace!

My director pal, Lev Spiro, just sent me an email exchange that has to rank as one of the funniest pieces of unintentionally hilarious writing by a bureaucrat that I've ever seen. Apparently, Lev had written Goodyear yesterday complaining that their blimp was noisily circling his house for four hours.  Here's the response he got today:

Dear Lev,
I do apologize for the recent fly over of your neighborhood last evening. While flying at a safe and legal altitude, it is not our intention to upset anyone whose residential area we are flying over.  We  were working on a television show and I do not expect that we will be flying again in that area for some time, and certainly not for a prolonged period. Again, please except (sic) my apology for any incontinence (sic).
Sincerely,
Bob Urhausen
Airship P.R. Manager

Here is the reply Lev sent back:

Dear Mr. Urhausen,
Since I make my living as a television director, I can only conclude that karma is a bitch.  It hadn't occured to me that the blimp was for a production, but that makes sense. Rest assured, the blimp may have been inconvenient, but it did not cause me any incontinence.
Cheers,
Lev L. Spiro

Thank God for Goodyear that they've got the able Bob Urhausen on the public relations front.  He'll make sure the company looks good!

Dear AT&T Yahoo: Why I Really Really Hate You

Last year we received word that our internet service provider SBC was going to take the name of AT&T Yahoo.  We were assured it was just a formality, that we'd keep our old email address and nothing would really change.

Oh yeah?

First we received instructions about how we had to change some of our settings, etc. which we wanted to do but they were difficult to understand.  So we wanted to talk to someone.  That was not fun.  It was almost impossible to get a live human being but, eventually, we did and, with this tech support person on the phone, we dutifully fulfilled all their demands.

Okay, we thought, that was a hassle but now we're good to go.  Not so fast!

Maybe four months ago, we received this email with the slugline, "Message from Yahoo!"

Just Doing It

When Life Throws You Bricks

This column originally appeared in The Huffington Post.

One of the most-asked questions about the business-end of Hollywood is -- how in the world do movies ever get made?? As the level of hoops to jump through grows, it's a question that gets asked even by professionals, who can see years pass before a film comes to life.

For Rob Hedden, the answer is simple. It happens because of a brick being thrown through his car windshield.

Four years ago, Hedden was chaperoning his son and some school friends, caravaning down the California coast into Mexico on a birthday trip. On the way back, driving along the freeway, a brick came crashing into the car, thrown from an overpass above.

When you're at a standstill, this is not a good thing. When you're moving at highway speeds -- it came close to being deadly. Glass went flying, dangerously cutting in to some people. Speeding off, Hedden quickly called one of the other cars to explain the situation, headed out of the pack to desperately find a hospital, and what could have been a tragic experience, turned into a mere harrowing one that allowed for eventual recovery.

The 1968 Politics of Hope: Bobby Kennedy

Sadly, the news of Senator Ted Kennedy's brain tumor reminds of us all the tragedy visited upon the four Kennedy brothers (Joe, John, Bobby, Teddy).  Now we're also coming up on the anniversary of that time nearly forty years ago when hope (of the kind Barack Obama seems to represent for a lot of people) was crushed by another assassin's bullet. This picture you see is done by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and originally debuted as the cover of Time magazine the week before Robert Kennedy's untimely death during another hard fought, unpredictable Democratic primary season, 1968 style.

Bobby Kennedy was a pop star as Lichtenstein portrayed him,  but he was more complicated than that, too. As Time noted in that last article before his death -- "The Politics of Restoration" --

"They pronounce his boyish name with fear and derision or else with adoration and awe. To many enemies, he is more his father's son than his brother's brother."

During his lifetime, Robert Kennedy was widely seen as his brother's hatchet man, and the word "ruthless" followed him everywhere. By 1968, when he died, though, he had grown. Pat Moynihan said of him, "Much has been given him and taken from him in life, and somehow he has been enlarged by both experiences."

Although Bobby (RFK) has won the California primary on the day of his death, he had also just concluded a slugfest with Senator Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic presidential nomination where the result had hardly been pre-ordained. Kennedy had had to fight McCarthy across the entire nation. When Kennedy triumphantly claimed victory here in Los Angeles at the Ambassador Hotel, he had settled the issue of who would be the anti-war candidate at the upcoming Democratic convention. Then he was murdered. He was 42 years old, even younger than his brother when he was murdered five years earlier.

I've always loved this Newsweek cover about RFK's death ("Once Again...Once Again," June 17, 1968). The photo, taken by Phil MacMullan, captures not only Bobby Kennedy's more soulful, empathetic side but also how the ghost of his brother and that previous assassination hung over him. If you CLICK on this cover, you can see it in even better detail.

Back then, I was living in Oregon where only the week before Kennedy had lost the Oregon primary to McCarthy. It was the first election any Kennedy had lost since their family got into politics. Kennedy desperately needed a win in California to get the momentum needed to take out Vice-President Hubert Humphrey at the Chicago convention that summer. Our family supported McCarthy, but we liked Kennedy a great deal, too. It was a tough choice. I remember seeing him speak in the auditorium at Hillsboro High School right before the election. He was three hours late but we waited because he was a rock star quality politician.

Anyway, Oregon is in the same time zone as California, so it was just after midnight when my dad came and woke me up. "Kennedy's been shot in California," he said. We went downstairs and watched the TV for news and kept up the vigil until he succumbed to his wounds the next day.

Sex, Lie & Politics: Thomas v. Hill Redux

Just this month, the autobiography of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, My Grandfather's Son, was published and set off a new round of "He Said, She Said" in the media. In the book, Thomas gives his side of the nomination hearings of 1991 which, of course, led to a rebuttal by Anita Hill in the Op-Ed page of the New York Times ("The Smear This Time") and on and on.

Discriminating readers and historians have ample evidence on both sides of the story to decide who they want to believe. In that respect, nothing at all has changed in the 16 years since October of 1991 when America had a normally not-so-compelling Supreme Court nomination hearing process hijacked into something that felt like it came out of the tabloids.

If you think the current nomination and confirmation process surrounding Supreme Court nominees was rough during the last few years, just remember that it's almost impossible for it to get as awful as the Clarence Thomas hearings. We will probably never see anything quite like this again.

Although it's more on the level of the O.J. Verdict and not JFK's murder or 9/11, for those who lived through it, the Thomas Hearings still have a "where were you?" quality to them. Where were you when Anita Hill went before the Senate Judiciary Committee and publicly claimed that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had compared the length of his penis to an actor in a pornographic film by the name of Long Dong Silver? I was in a hotel room in Hawaii -- there to research an NBC pilot I was writing -- and even though I was surrounded by paradise I spent two days glued to a TV set.

Time devoted a great deal of space to this controversy in its October 21, 1991 issue, starting with an opening essay titled, "An Ugly Circus" and moving into the main article, "She Said, He Said."

It was clear that the differences in the Hill and Thomas versions on what transpired a decade ago were not a simple matter of differing sensibilities -- oversqueamishness on her part vs. bad taste on his. If Hill's description of Thomas' words and actions was truthful, then the Supreme Court nominee was guilty of sexual harassment in the past and perjury in the present. If Hill's account was a flight of fantasy, then she was delusional and a candidate for medical attention.

Notice on the cover that Time sub-titled the issue: "America's watershed debate on sexual harassment." That's my main nitpick on this issue. If both parties had agreed on what was said and done but disagreed on whether or not it was sexual harassment, well, then we could have had a watershed debate. This wasn't a debate on the issue of sexual harassment. It was a public spectacle where two incredibly bright, articulate and seemingly honest people told starkly different stories. One of them was a complete liar of epic proportion and the other wasn't. Today, 14 years later, we still do not definitively know the answer.

Cool and unflappable, Hill looked the Senators in the eye and handled every question without hesitation...No less poignant, searing or believable, however, were Thomas' anguished statements and adamant denials.

The hearings gave up lots of memorable moments. One of the "oddest episodes", according to Hill, involved an exchange in Thomas' office when he reached for a can of Coke and asked, "Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?" After Hill's testimony about this and numerous other incidents which included descriptions of Thomas discussing porno with women with large breasts engaged in a variety of sex acts with animals, Thomas came out swinging, calling the hearing "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." The article concluded:

...everyone who had witnessed Hill's and Thomas' dramatic testimony knew for certain only what they had known at the start: one was telling the truth, and the other was lying. There was no way to imagine a happy ending to this very sad confrontation. For both Hill and Thomas, it was the hardest ordeal of their lives. But one of them was shouldering the burden unfairly -- and it may never be known which one. While both had been sullied and injured by the proceedings, only one had been dragged through the mud on the strength of a very convincing lie.

So, who was telling the truth? Thomas had more to gain by lying -- a Supreme Court seat. But he also had excellent witnesses from his previous staffs who had worked with both of them saying that such behavior was never seen by them and would have been totally out of character. And it did appear that Hill initially thought her testimony to the FBI would be sufficient to derail his nomination without her having to speak to the committee. No one has definitively answered this question.

What do I think? First and foremost, I think that if Thomas did those things to Anita Hill then he's an asshole of extreme proportions (and I'm not talking about his Long Dong Silver either). And I also think that if it could be proved, even today, then he should be impeached and thrown off the court. But as I've pointed out earlier, this case isn't about sexual harassment, at least not until you can tell who's telling the truth.

I watched all the testimony on TV and whenever either Hill or Thomas was speaking, I believed them and knew the other was lying. It was maddening then, and it's maddening now. They were both brilliant witnesses. If I absolutely had to choose, I would take Thomas' denial to be the truth, but only by a very, very slim margin. Here's why. A tiny voice tells me that -- knowing know how high the stakes are over these nominations and how Democratic activists believe now (and believed then) that a woman's right to choose is literally at stake -- well, that voice tells me that it's possible Anita Hill was recruited to derail Clarence Thomas, things got out of hand, and she was basically told by a lawyer that she could either stick by her story or go to jail for perjury. But I wish I knew with more certainty...

State your own opinion in the comments. Who's the scummy liar and who's the victim? Tell it the way you feel it. And please visit Instant History by clicking on the logo below to go to www.instanthistory.net. Thanks!

O.J. Simpson's First Jury Verdict (but probably not his last)

Now that O.J. Simpson has been arrested and facing jail time yet again, it seems like a good time to think back the moment when that first verdict came down in the O.J. Simpson double-murder case here in Los Angeles. As far as newsmagazine coverage of this case is concerned, it began with controversy, prompting the only pulled-back cover in Time's history, probably created more cover-stories than any other single news story short of 9/11 related coverage.

Time led its October 16, 1995 "O.J. Simpson Verdict: Special Report" with an extended essay from Roger Rosenblatt that was titled, perhaps way too optimistically, "A Nation of Pained Hearts: Americans, black and white, may be able to use the O.J. verdict as a chance to embark on a pilgrimage toward and candor and charity."

"At least there was one moment of visible black-and-white unity last week. It occurred on Tuesday, shortly after 10 a.m. Pacific time, when crowds of citizens, gathered together in the streets like extras in a War of the Worlds movie of the 1950s, stood staring up at outdoor television screens, waiting for the word. They were united, briefly, in an anxious silence of the heart. As soon as the verdict was read, however, they split apart; they could watch themselves do it on the split screens. On one side jubilation, on the other dismay. Afterward it was said that America should have seen it coming, that the division of the races cut so deep, it ought to have been obvious that two nations had always been hiding in one."

Like JFK's death, the moon landing and 9/11, many of us have a memory of how we heard the news and what it meant. I was in pre-production on the pilot for what would become an NBC TV series, Dark Skies, and we had offices at the Lantana business park in Santa Monica. When the word went out that they were about to read the verdict, people pored out of their offices into the building lobby where there was a big-screen television. I'm talking something like fifty people, probably a dozen of them African-American. When the words "not guilty" were read, I think everybody in the room was shocked and surprised. Without exception every white person recoiled and, simultaneously, every single African-American began to applaud and cheer. Keep in mind that we were all co-workers and that everybody was well-educated and employed. The difference between everybody in the room was race and nothing else.

Back to that issue of Time. The actual coverage began after the essay, and showed us that famous photo of O.J. with the very strange smile on his face being hugged by Johnnie Cochran as Kardashian and Bailey, his other (white) attorneys, continued to listen to the verdict.

"A mug shot, two gravestones, a smile. The trial can be reduced to these emblems. Or to entries in a specialized gazetteer: Rockingham, Bundy, Brentwood. A bestiary: barking dog, white Bronco, blond Kato. Names on a list: Marcia and Johnnie, Darden and Shapiro, Fung, Lee, Scheck, Ito, Fuhrman. A weird alphabet: DNA, O.J., A.C., LAPD, the N word. All were signposts to a greater geography, one uneasily contained on the premises of the California Superior Court. Television viewers saw the proceedings and were captured by the legal dramatics; and yet there were always hints of unseen details and untold tales."

One of the things I found most interesting in this coverage is how the defense felt about Judge Lance Ito. Apparently, they disliked him about as much as the prosecution did.

"Says defense attorney Peter Neufeld: 'I was very disappointed with Judge Ito, the fact that he was so concerned with his status as a celebrity, his willingness to entertain personalities in chambers, to show the lawyers little videotapes of skits on television.' One day, says Neufeld, Ito brought all the lawyers into chambers to show them a clip of the 'Dancing Itos' from Jay Leno's Tonight Show. 'You may find that amusing on a personal level, but I can assure that on a professional level it is so unacceptable, for a judge who is presiding over a murder where two people lost their lives in the most gruesome and horrible fashion, and where a third person has his life on the line, to bring the lawyers into chambers to show them comic revues.' Ito even told the lawyers Simpson jokes he had heard. Says Neufeld: 'As someone who has tried cases for twenty years, I found it deplorable and I was shocked.'"

So now O.J.is arrested again, this time on charges related to him using a gun trying to get back some sports memorabilia he says belonged to him. Were those buyers looking to own a souvenir from a sports hero or the murderer who got away? Maybe that depends on race, too. It's sad if it does because no race should have to bear the burden of defending a murderer. But that's America these days.

O.J., of course, has had over a decade to continue searching for "the real killer" as he so famously promised and, so far, has not turned anyone up. Maybe his break with reality has been so complete that he doesn't realize he's looking right at him every day he shaves.

Cheap Haircuts

I have a confession to make. I've just had my hair cut at Fantastic Sam's. Cost me twenty bucks, tip included. There, I've said it, it's off my chest, and I can get on with my life.

I was out running a few errands with my wife, looked in the mirror, thought "That hair's lookin' a little long," and popped into the shop. The woman who was on-shift started cutting about a minute later.

The truth is, for decades now, I've been paying people in salons with fancy names like Casablanca or Savvy a lot of money to cut my hair. My latest one cost the most ever because the shampoo was done in a dark room with incense and New Age music and felt more like a mini-massage. Going to that place, though, always involved pulling out the schedule, often having to re-schedule because of my stylist's day or mine changing suddenly, and building yet another appointment in an already busy day into my life.

About five months ago, in a rush and out of time, I got my hair cut at our local Fantastic Sam's by a Persian hairstylist who was taking English lessons at the nearby community college. Two days later I went to dinner with a large group of friends and, out of the blue, one of them asks where I got my hair cut because they thought it looked so good. This precipitated a whole conversation of agreement from everybody else at the table. Now, mind you, none of these same people had ever, even once, commented on my haircut, even when I got it done by the people with the massage philosophy.

So, if it doesn't make a difference, or it even makes a positive difference, I figure why not save the money and get my hair cut when I decide on a particular day? And, no, I'm getting no kick-back for saying this, although if Fantastic Sam's wants to call me, I'm entertaining all options before I check out Supercuts.

Maybe I'll get a really, really bad haircut in my next outing but, so far, ain't been no complaints...