Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

When Tomorrow Is Now

This essay by Jared Zabel is an entry in the L.A. Youth essay contest

Even the future will be the present someday. It’s never too early to start planning, something that’s true for people, businesses and even countries. Ten years from today, I’ll be in my twenties and – based on the way the world looks as we start 2009 – it will be the time to be alive and making a difference. I can’t wait.

In a world running out of oil, food, money and even fresh drinking water, there is one precious resource that may soon be more abundant than any time before in human history – hope.  Barack Obama just got elected president of the United States by talking about this resource.  He inspired millions to start thinking that tomorrow – no matter what our problems may be – can actually be better than today.

President Obama is on to something big here.  If enough people believe they can make a difference, they can become a force for change that will spread throughout their lives, their homes, and across every border on the planet.  If, as Gandhi said, we all need to “be the change you wish to see in the world,” then it’s time to get started.

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

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!

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.

Snakes in the Grass (and Other Locations)

I've just spent a couple of hours in my backyard with the "Hollywood Rattlesnake Wrangler" -- a great guy, Bo Slypapich. Bo is a one-of-a-kind who has hunted down rattlers for everybody from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Brad Garrett and today he came to my house after working for Sally Field.

We had started our morning with what we thought was the discovery by our gardener of two baby rattlesnakes in the back yard. We were referred to Bo and he showed up looking like a cross between Indiana Jones and the male version of Tomb Raider Lara Croft. He had gizmos, belts slung around his waist to hold the gizmos and an enthusiasm for his business that was, honestly, very re-assuring.

Bo started catching snakes over forty years ago with his neighborhood friends in Malibu Canyon. He kept his passion for snakes and built a business in the entertainment industry by clearing locations prior to the arrival of the crew, and securing locations while filming.

"One day I got a call from a local doctor who knew me, and was aware of my business. He asked if he could recommend me to another doctor whose daughter was bit while playing in their backyard by a rattlesnake, and then had crawled under the house. They had been unable to find anyone willing to search their property to find the snake or any possible dens."

Bo has been called to hunt for, track down, and remove snakes who have bitten children, dogs, and adults. Unlike others, Bo will crawl under houses, bushes and porches to find and relocate the snake or snakes.

What's great about Bo, however, is his passion to educate. Rather than a standard service call, he asked me to join him (at a safe distance) as we went throughout the backyard and he did a show-and-tell about what we were doing right and what could use some improvement. He also spoke to my gardener and my wife.

Bo had about ten snakes in the back of his pick-up truck in sealed plastic containers and, for the first time in my life, I got a truly authentic close-up look at rattlers of all sizes. He also had the harmless snakes for comparison. Now, I can actually tell them apart. Rattlesnakes have larger heads and thin necks and, well, rattles for tails. Every other snake you find in southern California has necks the size of their bodies and tails that end in a point.

As it turned out, ours were not baby rattlers which was good because it means there's probably not a nest with mom and other kids. We have, however, been tasked with some garden reconstruction and our rattlesnake fence appears to have been breached by the elements in a few key places that needs repair.

By the way, Bo has never been bitten in all his years. He does not kill rattlesnakes unless he has to. When he goes underneath houses, he has a full body armor outfit.

My friend, Michael Nadlman, also had a Bo and rattlesnake encounter only his was written up in the local paper and you can read that article here. That article, by the way, got linked to by the Drudge Report which gave it a global warming related headline and, as a result, the article got 40,000+ hits in just three hours.

Read all about Bo at his website, www.rattlesnakewrangler.com and, yes, somebody is actually developing a reality TV show for him. I'd definitely watch.

WGA Voices: Peter Lefcourt

• The contract between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) expires on October 31, 2007. Currently, the WGA leadership has called for a strike authorization vote. Here is an e-mail I received from another WGA friend and board member (we worked together on an ABC series) Peter Lefcourt.
  

From Peter Lefcourt, WGAw Board of Directors

In the mail you have received, or will soon, a ballot for a strike authorization vote. This is probably the most important Guild membership vote in the last 20 years. Some exposition: First of all, A STRIKE AUTHORIZATION VOTE IS NOT A STRIKE VOTE. It merely authorizes your elected representatives, the officers and Board of Directors, to call for a strike if we deem that management has not negotiated in good faith and/or floated a substandard contract. It is, in essence, a vote of trust that the people you helped elect will make a reasoned decision if and when a strike becomes a clear option.

A strong membership vote, 90% plus, will give the Negotiating Committee leverage and may prompt the conglommerates we are in business with actually to stop stonewalling and get serious. The fact is that up till now the only thing they seem to be interested in talking about is the dismemberment of our residual system -- something we've had for 30 some odd years and had to strike to get. They have refused even to discuss any of our pattern of demands: compensation for digital delivery; jurisdiction over reality TV, improved percentages for DVD's, etc.

WGA Voices: Aaron Mendelsohn

• As you may have heard, the contract between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) expires on October 31, 2007. Currently, the WGA leadership has called for a strike authorization vote. I'll be writing more about that, and the issues involved, on this blog, as a two decade member of the WGA, and a former member of the Board of Directors. We'll also be posting what other people have written about it, and start today with this e-mail I just received from a good friend.

From Aaron Mendelsohn, WGAw Board of Directors

I am writing to all of you -- my friends and colleagues and writers I barely know whose e-mail addresses I happen to have -- to urge you to vote in favor of the strike authorization that your WGA leaders have asked you to support.

Why are you being asked to approve a strike authorization now?

Because there has been no movement on the part of the AMPTP in negotiations.  The draconian rollbacks they are offering is untenable (making residuals profit-based, gutting reacquisition, allowing movies and TV shows to run free on the internet as "promotion" etc.), and so far they have been completely, almost belligerently intractable.  We need to let them know that we are committed to our well-considered, realistic and reasonable proposals.  With the likelihood that distribution will be shifting to new media, we are pretty much screwed unless we can secure a fair share of all future revenue streams generated by our work.

Does this mean we will go on strike?

O.J. Flashback: His Arrest in Los Angeles in 1994

It's been over thirteen years now since that slow-speed chase in the white Bronco where we all held our breaths wondering if O.J. was going to blow his own brains out on live TV.  I remember watching it in the Calabasas Sagebrush Cantina -- the Bronco was on one screen, and the Lakers play-off was on the other.  Nobody could take their eyes off either.

The racial controversy over O.J. Simpson began, of course, with the murder of a white woman and white man by a black suspect, but it was seen visually the minute the issues of Time and Newsweek first came out.  It triggered a pull-back of a cover, an unprecedented action in the publishing history of news magazines.  Here's what their initial June 27, 1994 issues first looked like:

Here's where it got interesting.  Almost immediately after hitting the stands, Time was accused of racism by minority groups for its photographic alteration of the famous O.J. arrest photo.  The editors defended their choice by saying that they had taken that creative license to show the shadow that had descended on his reputation that week.  Illustrator Matt Mahurin was the one to altern the image, saying later that he "wanted to make it more artful, more compelling."  Enough readers, however, said that they saw the white man stacking the deck by "demonizing" the black man, that Time did something it had never done before and has never done since.  They issued a second cover and pulled the first one.  Essentially this meant that only mail subscribers ever saw the first cover.  Here they are side-by-side for your own inspection.

Most of us are very familiar with the story of O.J. Simpson -- the famous athlete a criminal jury said didn't do it only to have a civil jury say he did just over a year later.  Like the Los Angeles riots which preceded the arrest of O.J. by two years, this story said as much about the state of race relations in America as they did about the guilt or innocence of the accused.  Before the racial overtone set in, however, coverage in these initial issues had a lot to do with the actual slow-speed chase.  Here's the way Time started in both versions:

When asked how they could have let one of the most famous double-murder suspects in history slip away under their noses, the angry police commander and the tight-faced lawyer and the whole choir of commentators all said the same thing, without a trace of irony:  "We never thought he would run."

Maybe people condense into their essential selves in crisis, and O.J. was one of the best runners in American football.  Here's how Newsweek began their story:

The end, last week, was off-camera.  After the bloody steps, the heart-rending funerals, the surreal chase through the twilight of Los Angeles, O.J. Simpson surrendered himself into the darkness his life has become.  He was in the back seat of his best friend's Bronco, communing quietly with his cellular phone, his blue steel revolver and a picture of his children.  As the police stood back, the shadows lengthened.

Now, of course, there's a new O.J. criminal saga starting in Las Vegas. If you had any questions about why they denied him bail, this is why. More coverage to come, to be sure...

Morning Wake-Up Call

Last night, about an hour after I got to sleep, a magnitude 4.5 temblor hit. I know people think we're all matter-of-fact about these things out here in Los Angeles, but I don't think it's true.

This one struck just before 1 a.m. about 4 miles northwest of Chatsworth, which isn't all that far from where I live. It hit with a real jolt and it went on long enough that I was wide-awake and planning where to hide when it subsided.

The thing is that you never know if it's going to be a little shaking or whether it's just the beginning of the "Big One." I was living in this same house back in 1994 for the Northridge quake and it was pretty insane. It literally turned on my stereo (which was turned off) at extremely loud volume for about four seconds. So I woke up then shaking to loud rock-and-roll. We all went outside into the cul-de-sac and worried with the neighbors, got out the flashlights and went looking to make sure everybody was accounted for. It was pretty scary, not something you'll ever take lightly.

Anyway, this recent one went away before it got serious. I checked my son's room and found out he slept through it. My daughter was out, we tried calling but it didn't immediately go through. But she was back home in a few minutes to check on us.

Then we all went back to sleep.

The "Pandemic" Crystal Ball: Quarantine, Selfishness & TB

Over the weekend, "Pandemic" aired on the Hallmark Channel across the United States, both Saturday and Sunday night. My wife and I wrote the screenplay which tells the story of a passenger who dies on a plane flight from Australia to Los Angeles of a bird-flu type of illness, infecting his fellow passengers, causing a quarantine first of the plane, then the entire city. And, without revealing the ending completely, the ending resolution has something to do with TB.

Today comes word from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about a case involving a U.S. citizen who traveled on two international flights, probably infected his fellow passengers with a rare form of TB (XDR-TB) which was recently defined as a subtype of multiple-drug resistant tuberculosis. It can be fatal. In any case, Here is the story as CNN reports it today.

As with all TB, the disease can be spread through the air. "In this case, the infected patient traveled on two trans-Atlantic air flights and, in doing so, may have exposed passengers and crew to XDR-TB," the agency said.

"A federal quarantine order has been issued and CDC is currently collaborating with U.S., state and local health departments, international ministries of health, the airline industry, and WHO (World Health Organization)."

Sometimes life imitates art and vice-versa. The Fox News article has a couple of other similarities. For starters, the man who carried the disease has been put in respiratory isolation.

"I don't recall us doing this since 1963," said Gerberding. "We want to balance personal liberties with public health and, because this organism is so potentially serious, especially to those who have reduced immunity, our responsibility is to err on the side of caution."

Imagine, by the way, if he wasn't the sole incident but was one of thousands and thousands who needed this level of care or isolation. The other thing is that this particular passenger doesn't appear to have been very concerned about anybody else's exposure.

"The patient felt his personal agenda was highly relevant to him," she said. "The CDC was not aware he was traveling. We were surprised the patient left the country."

This is very consistent with the story we told in "Pandemic." We had a character, Jack Hendler, who felt his work as a Brentwood real estate agent was more important than public safety and broke the quarantine, becoming a "Typhoid Jack" across Los Angeles. All you have to do is to observe people's selfish, immature and dangerous driving habits around here to imagine that someone who is supposed to cool it in a quarantine would decide the rules didn't apply to them.

Should we be afraid? Yeah, probably...