For What It's Worth

Father's Day Is a Melancholy Day for Me

Bruce Sallan gave up a show biz career to parent his two boys and now writes about his experiences on "A Dad's Point-of-View" and is the house dad at "Mom Logic."

Father’s Day for me is now a melancholy experience.  I certainly appreciate the attention that I get from my two boys and my wife.  My younger son tends to make an artistic gift for me, since he’s the artist of the family, while my older one will scribble some sweet sentiments on a piece of scrap or notebook paper, and my wife will usually make me a glorious meal of my choosing. 

While I appreciate all this love showered my way, I also get melancholy over the memory of my late father, who was a wonderful man.  I’ve written about him before, but I want to always keep his memory present in my mind and the minds of my boys.

Writing about my dad for his eulogy was not as difficult as some might think.  My sentiments and praises came easy, just as being such a loving, good man seemed to come easy for him.  He was from that “Greatest Generation” though he didn’t serve in the armed forces during World War II, due to the military deferments because he had just had a son and his particular occupation was much needed on the home front. 

Revenge, Biblical and Otherwise

Don Clark anchored TV news in Bakersfield, California for over twenty years. He now lives at the fence line of the great Tejon Ranch with his wife, Bettie, where he contemplates retirement but never seems to get it right and just keeps on working.

Following are remarks made by Don on Good Friday, March 27, 2010, at St. Paul’s Anglican Parish in Bakersfield.

Editor's Note: Here at "For What It's Worth," we blog about everything from male bonding to Iranian politics to why the Oscars are boring. The fact that we include a religious post does not support one religion over another any more than a film review supports one studio over another. But the blog's sub-title is "Bryce Zabel & Friends" and Don is long-time friend going back to working in Eugene TV together (sometime in the last century). And, of course, Don's topic of "revenge" seems, shall we say, kind of appropriate, given FWIW's virtual location in the center of Hollywood. So there.  :-)

 

Scripture commands, “Let those who speak, speak as if they uttered the oracles of God… And those who have ears, let them hear and heed what the Spirit is saying to the church.” Amen.

One of the great classics of imaginative literature--one I am sure most of you here have enjoyed many times both as originally written and as adapted in several motion pictures-- is the timeless tale by the French writer, Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo.

It is the story of a great wrong done to an innocent man. It is the story of a great betrayal by a jealous friend -- a betrayal that resulted for the victim in the total loss of everything that make life good and of seemingly endless imprisonment and despair in a cold, stony dungeon on a desolate island prison.

But most of all, the story of The Count of Monte Cristo is the story of the most satisfying kind of revenge.

 

A strange friendship between the innocent man and a mysterious aging prisoner, coupled with an incredible escape, leads our victim to a vast treasure that gives him vast resources to lay exquisitely elaborate traps for all those who profited from his betrayal.

Dumas’ story gives us a delicious sense of justice done by deceiving the very people who deceived him and by inflicting upon them losses and suffering and humiliations as great or greater than the ones they inflicted upon him. 

What If JFK Had Lived? One Surprising Answer

LOG-LINE:  After John Kennedy survives the attack at Dealey Plaza unharmed, the resulting investigation sets events in motion that tear apart his administration.

A few years ago, alternative history novelist Harry Turtledove and I worked on a proposal and the first three chapters of a novel that describes what we think might have happened after a Dallas where JFK lives.That site, with those chapters, is still up and published for your review here.

It's called WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT: The Impeachment & Trial of John F. Kennedy. Please drop by and check it out. We still hope to complete the project in time for the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination.

What if John Kennedy survived Dallas?

Historians love to speculate on this “what-if” scenario, wondering if magically the nation would have been spared the pain of Vietnam and even Watergate.  They have missed the point. 

If he’d gotten out of Dealey Plaza alive, John Kennedy might easily have suffered the same fate as his arch-nemesis Richard Nixon -- humiliation and removal from office.

With the eyes of the world on the United States and the media in a frenzy, with JFK himself alive and not a martyr, an immediate investigation would have been launched into who might have been interested in killing our popular American President. And the Kennedy brothers would have been hell-bent to ensure their political as well as their physical survival.

Starting with the Secret Service, the blame-game would have taken on a life of its own, forcing explosive revelations in mere months that have instead dribbled out over decades. Kennedy’s reckless conduct would have become public: the lies about his medical condition, contacts with mobsters, election money-laundering, numerous attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, and even the hundreds of high-risk sexual encounters that endangered Kennedy’s safety and, by extension, our country’s security.

This alternative history novel covers the period from the November 22, 1963 near-miss assassination attempt of President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas through the events of early 1966 when the fate of John F. Kennedy was in the hands of 100 United States Senators worried about their own careers in the next election.

Funeral for a Friend

Charlotte Safavi regularly blogs on the Huffington Post, and has written for other publications including The Washington Post. Though born and educated in England, her heritage is Iranian and she now resides in Northern Virginia. 

Last year my eight-year-old son R.J. showed me a bird's nest in our silver maple. The wide-girthed tree crowns our modest backyard, an earth-bound shelter for suburban fauna, scrappy squirrels, toothsome chipmunks and commonplace feathered friends.

I decide the nest belongs to robins. Not because I saw anything through the murky blur of my kid's binoculars, but because he found blue eggshells on the ground beneath the nest.

"R.J., help me take out the trash," I say one afternoon, words that I will regret shortly.

I lug the overflowing recycle bin and he pulls the trashcan-on-wheels down our sloped driveway to the street. While I rearrange newspapers running like a creek, R.J. walks back up the drive.

"Mom, come," he shouts. "A baby bird fell out of the nest!"

Sure enough, a fledgling lies on the patio, beak gaped, neck distended, claws curled, a sad thing. R.J. stands transfixed, before breaking off and running erratic circles around the lawn. For a child who cried inconsolably at age three when a car blew up in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, his reaction does not surprise me.

Always on Your Side

Coleman Luck is a Hollywood writer/executive producer known for such TV series as "The Equalizer" and "Gabriel's Fire."  His first novel, Angel Fall, has just been published.  He posts regularly on his blog, Coleman's Strange Journey.

 In Memory of Edward Woodward, "The Equalizer"   

This morning came the word that my old friend and colleague Edward Woodward had passed away. He was 79 years old. Over recent years our contact was pretty much limited to the exchange of Christmas cards. The one he sent last year carried the note that he was still working at 79 and wasn't that a wonder? 

I didn't create the classic American television series of which Edward was the star. It was created by Michael Sloan and Richard Lindheim. Michael was a busy writer/producer and Dick was a top-level executive at Universal Television. After the pilot was written and produced, because of their commitments, neither could join the on-going staff of the show. It was turned over to others. 

I came on board the team as the junior writer/producer in the fall of 1985. It was show eleven. I had worked on only one other series and that one had lasted for just eight episodes. When it ended I was offered an exclusive deal at Universal TV. I was thrilled to be there, but for months there wasn't much for me to do. Then came a call. Would I like to join the staff of a new series that was in production called The Equalizer? The concept sounded interesting so I said yes. 

Almost immediately I ran into a false conception that plagued the show from beginning to end. When I told a woman writer friend that I was joining The Equalizer she looked disgusted. Why would I want to write for a show about a vigilante? To this day that's how many people perceive The Equalizer. But for those of us who worked on the series it wasn't about that at all. 

Technocalypse Now? What's Your Take?

 The End of Showbiz As We Know It... 

I've been thinking a lot about the end of the world lately. Not the end in a "2012" kind of way, but the end of the world in an "end of the world as we know it" kind of way. 

A few months ago, I was asked to give the keynote speech at the "What is Film?" conference sponsored by the University of Oregon that takes place in Portland next Friday and Saturday, November 6 & 7 at the new Turnbull Center. After some thought, the title of my speech hit me, "Technocalypse Now?" 

So let's get out the dictionary, shall we, and create a new word...

Technology. The application of science and engineering, especially to industrial or commercial objectives that interrelate with life, society and the environment.

Apocalypse. A prophetic disclosure or revelation of cataclysm that brings universal or widespread destruction or disaster to life and society.

This means that when we put the two words in a super-collider to see what they create together, we get something like:

Technocalypse. The cataclysmic destruction of the entertainment industry through the creation of digital products that undermine and destroy the economic models that show business was based on.

 

Although I've got a pretty spiffy presentation digitally simmering on my computer (using Mac's "Keynote" program), the more I work on this talk, the more I realize there are multiple answers to the question "Technocalypse Now?"

There is no doubt whatsoever that people are suffering during this disruption. I know or have heard of plenty of people who used to be high-level types in Hollywood who have kicked it in and moved on to try something else. Everything's in flux, downsizing is going on all over the place, and anybody who tells you they know exactly how it's all going to shake down is simply lying. There are educated guesses, informed theories, and wishful thoughts. There are few hard facts.

As I get down to the last days, I'm filling in these hi-tech digital slides with some pithy content from reading, researching and thinking. I'd love for readers, in and out of the Hollywood game, to be part of that process by posting their own thoughts about what's going on and how it's going to shake down.

Imagine This: John Lennon at 70

John Lennon would have been 70 years old this October 9 had he not been gunned down 30 years ago on December 8, 1980. No doubt last year he'd have been smiling, if he'd lived, to know that The Beatles Rock Band was kicking ass in homes across the country, and that those re-mastered Beatles CDs were, once again, burning up the charts. But that emotion has cooled, and it's thirty years, and there's not much comfort in that loss hitting such a definitive mark.

As a collector of news magazines, I note that both Time and Newsweek gave over their covers to Lennon's passing the week it happened. I've chosen Newsweek to focus on because it has that haunting portrait by Richard Avedon. Also, I had previewed the first Newsweek cover to feature the Beatles back in 1964 in an earlier post, and it's interesting to compare how the coverage changed in those intervening years.

Newsweek devoted twelve entire pages to the death of John Lennon in a special "pull-out" coverage. It contained a handful of separate articles entitled: "Death of a Beatle" which was the news coverage, "Lennon's Alter-Ego" about assassin Mark David Chapman, "Strawberry Fields Forever" about the influence of the Beatles, and "An Ex-Beatle 'Starting Over'" about Lennon's new emergence on the public scene after nearly five years of absence.

"Come together, he had once asked them in a song, and now they came, tens of thousands of them, to share their grief and shock at the news. John Lennon, once the cheeky wit and sardonic soul of the Beatles, whose music had touched a generation and enchanted the world, had been slain on his doorstep by a confused, suicidal young man who had apparently idolized him. Along New York's Central Park West and West 72nd Street, in front of the building where Lennon had lived and died, they stood for hours in tearful vigil, looking to each other and his music for comfort."

Gratitude

Bruce Sallan gave up a show biz career to parent his two boys and now writes about his experiences on "A Dad's Point-of-View" and is the house dad at "Mom Logic."

Perspective is something that allows us to appreciate our lives, our families, and our country. Lately, with so much bad news surrounding us, and after just returning from Africa where such extreme poverty exists everywhere, I find myself reflecting on one of those “People” magazine-type stories about someone living through a life threatening experience and coming out a changed person.  It’s a story I’ve shared with my boys, when they were upset about a trivial matter, as it happened to me in June 2005.

Driving alone on 395, I fell asleep at the wheel. In the middle of nowhere with only my dog as company, and the cruise control set in the low 70s, I drifted off to sleep as the sun was just beginning to peak over the horizon, in spite of a Monster drink (Red Bull equivalent) and in spite of stopping several times to stretch and do some jumping jacks. Lost in thought, I just slipped away to “Neverland.” Well, “Neverland” almost became just that; never more.

Startled awake as the car drove screamingly over the shoulder, I quickly realized what had happened. Grabbing the wheel and holding on for dear life, trying desperately to control the swerving bucking SUV, I didn’t even remember if I hit the brakes. Mind going at light-speed, the car crashed through a barbed wire barrier and headed down into a river wash. Over boulders the size of large beach balls, the car literally flew nose-first into the wash. The momentum carried the car into a front side flip, spiraling over once or twice (no one knows for sure as no one witnessed it), landing right side up, facing the opposite direction. 

Remembering Swayze: My Dirty Dancing Story

Charlotte Safavi is an Iranian-American journalist who writes for numerous publications, including the Huffington Post. 

Everyone has a Dirty Dancing story. This is mine. In the mid-80s, a year out of Oxford University and a year into an investment-banking career at Manufacturers Hanover in London, I decided to dance. I quit my job, packed my bags and moved to Los Angeles. I wanted to cut a rug in Hollywood.

My first job was at Triad Artists, Inc., one of the principal talent agencies at the time. Among a large roster of clients, they represented a young actor called Patrick Swayze, best known for his ensemble character work in films The Outsiders andRed Dawn, and for his television part in the miniseries North and South. He was about to start shooting his first movie as a leading man--Dirty Dancing--for an indie film company called Vestron Pictures.

Like 'Baby' Houseman (Jennifer Grey's character in the movie), I was seduced. My Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze's role of a lifetime) was Hollywood. The town dirty danced to a different beat and it did not take much to be smitten. As I shimmied up the ranks, from delivering scripts in the mailroom to getting on a desk as an agent's assistant (sort of a glorified secretary), I made the metamorphosis from agent trainee to motion picture literary agent.

After my promotion, my old boss Joe Rosenberg took me out on the town to introduce me to the players. The first breakfast I had at the famous Polo Lounge in The Beverly Hills Hotel was with Joe and Steve Reuther. At the time, Steve worked at Vestron Pictures and Dirty Dancing was his baby.

Remembering Larry Gelbart

Screenwriter Robert J. Elisberg writes about culture and technology issues for the Huffington Post.

Some days, you wish you didn't answer the phone. Today was that day. It was a friend telling me that Larry Gelbart had died.

I can't do justice to Larry Gelbart, even if I had several months to write something about it. He was an amazing writer and probably a better person. There may have been more renowned writers in a single medium, but his versatility was breathtaking, and so he may have been the most successful and best writer ever in America who wrote in all three major media -- the theater, movies and television.

On stage, he won Tony Awards for his musicals, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and City of Angels. And he wrote the big hit play, Sly Fox.

For television, he had an amazing 12 Emmy nominations, and an additional one, wining the award for M*A*S*H, the series he developed. He wrote the HBO movies, Barbarians at the Gate, Weapons of Mass Distractions and ...and starring Pancho Villa as Himself (all three of which got Emmy nominations). And he was part of the legendary writing staff for the equally legendary series, Caesar's Hour.

And for movies, he got Oscar nominations for Oh, God!, and his co-written script, Tootsie.

And none of this gives a hint who Larry Gelbart was. None of that even gives a hint to all that he wrote, he was that prolific, and talented. Do yourself a favor and check out his film and TV credits on IMDb. As a friend said, describing Larry Gelbart would take Mount Rushmore.