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

Speed Kills: The Role of a (Short) Lifetime

Without Limits (1998) -vs- Prefontaine (1997)

The Smackdown. With the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in Track & Field coming up in Eugene, more than a few people will be thinking about the runner who pretty much owned Hayward Field back in the day, Steve Prefontaine.  It's been a decade since Hollywood made two films back-to-back about the legendary distance runner, and you may be tempted to go rent one of them to see for yourself what the fuss was all about.

Track's been on my mind for other reasons, too.  My wife and I have a film that just finished filming in Los Angeles last Friday, "Miles from Nowhere," about a high-school athlete who decides to go for a sub-four minute mile.  During the time we were polishing up our screenplay's last draft before production, we looked for a little inspiration and watched both "Prefontaine" and "Without Limits" within a couple of days of each other. It was like a film school assignment to see what different production teams and actors could do with essentially the same source material. But there was another element here, for me, that put even this challenge through a separate creative filter.

Steve Prefontaine wasn't actually a legend to me, you see, because I was there when he was breaking all these incredible records.

As a native Oregonian I had seen him win the state high school two-mile in a barn-burning race when I was just a kid, then I had gone to the University of Oregon at the same time he attended and ran, and was working at a local TV station as an intern at the time of his death. Later, I used to log a lot of miles running on the wood-chip trail dedicated to him, "Pre's Trail." I can't claim that I knew him, but I saw him on campus (vividly remember watching him chug some beer at Duffy's Tavern) and when he ran at Hayward field during my freshman year, my dorm (Douglass-Walton) faced the track and we literally watched and cheered from our room window.

I don't imagine too many people are ever going to watch both of these films so our Smackdown answers a practical question: if you want to see one single film that captures the essence of Steve Prefontaine, which one should you see?

Reflection on an Empty Chair

Tim Russert had a few years on me but not that many and so, like a lot of Americans, I'm guessing his passing isn't just about the loss of his wit and humor in the political arena but also a heads-up about mortality.

Of course, it's doubly impactful because the "empty chair" on Sunday's Meet the Press came on Father's Day and Russert has become known for his own love for his father and his son.

Today, during this Father's Day that he never got to, I took a walk, went for a swim and thought about what I can do to stick around a little longer for my own family.  There's work to be done but it's important work.  Probably Russert would approve of using his untimely death as a chance to take stock.  Can't write much more now, we've got some family time carved out...

A "Wonder Years" Story About the Arctic Circle Drive-In, Neal Armstrong and a Guy Named Harvey

A few news organizations may note that today marks the anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's moonwalk on July 20, 1969. Since it's only the 38th anniversary, though, most will let it slide and we won't get the big "special" coverage for two more years on the 40th anniversary.

Even so, July 20 is an important day in my life but not solely for the awe and accomplishment of the technological and spiritual acheivement of the moon landing, but the personal impact it had on my young life. Years later, it was on a July 20 back in 2001 that my father passed away. Both of those events are related in my own memories, making this day always stand out to me.

Let's go back nearly four decades. It was 38-years-ago that Neil Armstrong made that little jump off the ladder from the lunar lander: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."  And it was also 38-years-ago that I was fired from my first job.

Back then, I was the youngest fry-cook in Hillsboro, Oregon, having scammed my way into a job at the Arctic Circle Drive-In before I was strictly employment legal, I think, based on the fact that my older brother had paved the way. It was a sweet deal -- I was making a full $1.35 an hour, up from my starting wage of $1.10 a year before. Do the math, that added up to a whole $10.80 a day and, if overtime was involved, man, that was serious bread. Of course, those burgers only cost nineteen cents, a quarter for a cheeseburger.

The boss was a tough immigrant -- a Basque from Spain -- named Mariano Bilbao and he was living (or working) the American dream.  Work, work, work and, if you did that, life would be easier for your kids.  His kid was just a baby, and Mariano was in full pay-the-dues mode to get ahead in time for his kid to have the good life he dreamed of.

When the schedule for the week of July 20 got posted, I got a sinking feeling because I had the night shift and, if all went according to plan, Neil Armstrong was going to be moon-walking while I was slinging burgers.  At the time, I was very into the whole moon landing, even more (if possible) than the rest of the country.  Plus, I'd been raised in a house where my dad -- a strict father if ever there was one -- was also a strict American history teacher and history didn't get much bigger than this.

So I asked Mariano if I could trade shifts with someone?   No.  Maybe we could have a TV in the kitchen so we could watch with every other person within ten miles of a TV?  No.  A radio then, just to listen to hear in real time how it went?  No.

Resigned to missing it all, I accepted my fate, strapped on my apron, and went to work.  Being the boss, even Mariano was at home, of course, watching the moon-walk with his wife.  Back at the grill, I was going insane and about thirty minutes before Armstrong was scheduled to set foot on the lunar surface, I snapped.  I called my dad and told him I wanted to come home to see the moon walk.  Would he come pick me up?

There was a long pause.  If you remember Kevin's dad (Dan Lauria) from "Wonder Years," then you remember my dad, Harvey. That same gruff son-of-a-bitch exterior, always pissed off, never connecting with his kids. I waited on the other end of the phone, knowing that The Lecture was coming. About responsibility, about sticking with your decisions, about not screwing up.  Instead, he said, "You know you'll be fired?" 

I said I knew. I waited again. Surely The Lecture was coming now. Another beat. "I'll be right down."

So my Dad drove down to the Arctic Circle Drive-In on Baseline Street in a moment of high drama in my young life.  We went back home, gathered with the rest of the family around the TV set, held our breath with everyone else and watched Armstrong's ghostly image from the moon.  When it was over, dad said we had to go back to the restaurant and I had to face the music.  I had done the crime, now I had to do the time.  As I returned, it was clear that my co-workers had given me up to Mariano, who was there waiting for me and, man, was he pissed.  He was a short guy with a fiery temper and his face was as red as I'd ever seen it.

Mariano fired me that night, as predicted. My dad told him he was missing a great worker and he was a small-minded man to not understand the importance of what was happening, and how this event had changed the world for everyone. Even fry-cooks.

All I know is that my dad had never stood up for me quite like that before and never quite like that after. I remember July 20, 1969 as clearly today for turning in my greasy apron as I do for Armstrong and Aldrin doing the moonwalk. And I remember July 20 because it was also the day that my dad passed away back in 2001.

So -- that giant leap for mankind -- for me, it isn't about where I was when it happened -- but all about where I wasn't.

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...

Shooting Craps with Joel Siegel

It seems like everybody in America could recognize film critic Joel Siegel. He was the guy with the mustache on the network morning news show who reviewed films and provided comic relief, the guy who wasn't the other guy like that, Gene Shalit.

That's kind of how I thought about Joel Siegel when I first met him in 1984. When my employers at KABC in Los Angeles wanted someone to produce a half-hour with Joel in Las Vegas, they asked me if I'd do it and, of course, I said yes. The program, hazy as it is in my memory now, was an Oscar prequel hype where we would shoot his wrap-around stand-ups at a Las Vegas hotel to demonstrate the horse-race aspect of the whole thing. As it turns out, Joel had a kind of love-hate relationship with Oscar predictions which my friend and Gold Derby analyst Tom O'Neil writes about
today. Here's a tease from Tom's first-person account:

Joel, being a celebrity, could be, well, a bit fickle. Sometimes he'd turn on the whole idea of Oscar punditry — vehemently, like a damning evangelist — and resign from GoldDerby in a huff. When I'd ask him why, he'd get all flustered, give me lots of babbling gibberish about how Oscar punditry cheapens the whole discourse of great films. Then he'd march away from me, cutting off further discussion with an abrupt waving of hands.

Of course, my brush with Joel was not the long-term relationship that Tom had, but a one-of-a-kind thing. I remember meeting Joel at the airport and sharing a seat next to him on the short hop to Vegas and hearing what he had planned. It was pretty clear that it was his show and I was there to tell the photog where to point the camera, to make sure the accomodations were okay and to run interference, if needed, with the hotel and fans. Not that I expected any more because, to Joel, I was the hired gun for the show.

The shoot went just fine. Joel knew his lines, knew when he liked a take and we all just jammed the work out in short order. Of course, when you're shining bright lights on a guy in a Vegas hotel, people notice. By the time we knocked off, everybody knew that Joel Siegel was there.

What I most remember about the night is that after we finished Joel ended up at a craps table for several hours, surrounded by at least a hundred people who would shout and scream and congratulate with every roll of the dice. Joel took the time to try to explain to me how craps works but, sadly, it seems not to have stuck.

He was a lot of fun that night. He was, like all talent (including myself when I've been in front of the camera), a lot to handle when the pressure of being "on" during a deadline hits, but that's no knock at all, but almost universal. I really liked him. After working with him, naturally, I never ever again thought of him as the "other" guy on the morning shows.

ABC News, of course, has some nice rememberances of him on their web-site today. I really enjoyed this page because it's all first-person information, like what Tom O'Neil did and what I've tried to do. Here's a parting selection from film colleague Roger Ebert.

There were four kinds of e-mails from Joel: (1) Good news; (2) Bad news; (3) Encouragement involving your own problems, and (4) Jokes. Mostly we got jokes. If all else had failed, Joel could have been a stand-up comic; in early days, he was a joke writer for Robert Kennedy. On the other hand, he ran a voter registration program for Martin Luther King, Jr., in Macon, Georgia.'

From the first day I met him, when he was a network star and I was only, well, an out-of-towner, Joel was a friend. We worked the red carpet every year at the Oscars, interviewing each other when things got slow. Chaz and I had dinner with Joel and his wife, the well-known artist Ena Swansea, soon after he got the bad health news, but he wasn't downbeat; he had hope and determination.

I really enjoyed Joel's spirit both on and off camera. And I agreed with his reviews far more often than not. He was opinionated without being mean. I'll miss him. Guess we all will...

• From MOVIE SMACKDOWN! - Two Films, One Review, No Holds Barred
  

In the Land of Women (2007) -vs- Garden State (2004)

From Movie Smackdown! - Two Films, One Review, No Holds Barred

The Smackdown. Here we have two writer-directors telling coming-of-age stories starring TV stars trying to give off a semi-leading man feature vibe while projecting angst and alienation. Making his debut, writer-director Jonathan Kasden gives us our latest combatant "In the Land of Women" to take on writer-director Zach Braff's "Garden State." Braff goes Kasden one better (or at least one more) in that he also cast himself as the lead while Kasden (son of Lawrence) went with Adam Brody. Both lead characters are Hollywood wannabe's: Braff's character wants to make it as an actor and Brody's character wants to make it as a writer.

"Really great party. I slept with your mom. Not a problem, right?"

The Challenger. ("In the Land of Women") You've seen Adam Brody as the comic-loving, caffeinated nerd of "The O.C." who eventually wised up, got hunkier and started dating the hot chick of the series. In this film, he's Carter Webb, an LA writer of softcore porn who wants to write "real" novels and other important work. After his extremely hot girlfriend dumps him, he ends up in Michigan because of an ailing grandmother, ends up getting to know the woman across the street -- Sarah -- a woman who looks a lot like Meg Ryan with a face-lift and her lips done. He also gets to know her daughter, Lucy, played by Kristen Stewart. In the original cut of the film, Carter ends up sleeping with Sarah the night before she has a mastectomy and audiences went berserk and it was cut. The studio demanded certain changes, shall we say, and Kasden Senior who produced the film, as I understand it, said he'd fix it, reminded everyone of his writing credits, and demanded to know what they'd written lately. The executive said, "The check." Studio got its way, whether that was good or bad, stay with us...

"Getting off Zoloft may not have been such a great idea."

The Defending Champion. ("Garden State") This was Zach Braff's feature-film coming out party where he did everything on the film except fill in for craft services (and I'm not even so sure about that). He plays Andrew Largeman ("Large" for short) a not-so-successful actor from LA who goes home to his New Jersey town to bury his mother. He ends up re-connecting with his high-school buddies, getting off the medications his psychiatrist Dad (Ian Holm) has had him on, and finding a kindred spirit in Sam, played by Natalie Portman as a beautiful space cadet come to planet Earth in the nick of time. Braff really knew his emotional stuff for this one: back when I was running the TV Academy, I ran into Braff at an Emmy party on his first season of "Scrubs" and he looked a little shell-shocked. I think part of his psyche was still waiting tables, and he did "Garden State" partly to capture that feeling.

The Scorecard. I could be wrong but it really feels to me like there is little doubt that Kasden/Brody et al set out to make this year's "Garden State." Soulful slacker -- check. Banter -- check. Characters in the film biz -- check. "Garden State" is the kind of film that just kept getting better the longer you watched. "In the Land of Women" seemed to fall apart a bit more the longer you watched. It also jumps a bit, something that had to be aggravated by the radical script surgery required to stop Brody from having sex with Ryan on the eve of breast surgery and chemotherapy. There are compensating good parts to "In the Land of Women," in its best scenes there's a gentle humor to it all. But, man, seeing these back-to-back you realize how low the standard for tough manhood has fallen: both Braff and Brody exude an adolescent vibe that is sensitive beyond belief. When Brody gets punched out by a bully, he doesn't punch back. He makes a witty retort and the girl he came to the party with gets him out of there while some other kid stands up for him.

And the winner is...

Reign Over Me (2007) -vs- The Upside of Anger (2005)

The Smackdown. Writer/director/actor Mike Binder tells a couple of heartfelt stories about people dealing with pain, about loved ones who have left, and the power of damaged people to heal each other. Oh, and each of the main characters' families consists of three daughters.

   
"Just keep laughing. If enough people see the trailer, they'll think we're in a comedy."

The Challenger.  Apparently, the Powers-That-Be have decided that, yes, enough time has passed where we can tell stories about 9/11. In this one, Adam Sandler plays Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife, his three daughters and even his dog when the aircraft they were on smashed into the World Trade Center on that ugly day. Five years later, Sandler still needs help bad, but won't accept it from anybody, and has cut himself off from the world so much that the only constant companion in his life is a pair of noise-cancelling Bose headphones. I have some of these headphones, too, and I can testify that if you wore them all the time, you would be authentically out-of-touch. My kids wear them on long car-trips and when we arrive, I'm exhausted and they barely know we've left. Anyway, Fineman's salvation comes from, oddly, another dentist Alan Johnson, played by Don Cheadle. It isn't their shared history, or dental skills, that binds them together, but their mutual need to move beyond the broken stalemates their respective lives have become.

"No. That actually is a baseball in my pocket."

The Defending Champion. In "The Upside of Anger," the characters who need fixing are Terry Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen) and Denny Davies (Kevin Costner). Terry is trying to keep it together after he husband has run off to Sweden with his secretary, and Denny is trying to keep it together after his baseball career's end and his mid-life crisis have hit him like a perfect storm. They have one thing in common -- booze -- and they're slowly drinking their problems away. They, too, need to move on from the broken stalemates their own lives have become. Additionally,Terry has three girls who all have problems of their own, plus mom being there, and dad being gone.

The Scorecard. I really liked both of these films because they managed, more or less successfully, to blend a sense of humor with characters who are dealing with the awful problems life can throw at us. They feel like a full-course meal that makes you think, feel and laugh. And they make you believe that life will go on past the worst problems because there is, basically, no choice. Each film is manipulative, of course, and neither is perfect. "The Upside of Anger" is burdened with an ending that just didn't work for the majority of people who saw it, and "Reign Over Me" has to deal with the specialness of 9/11. But, as a director, Mike Binder gets the best out of his actors: Costner, Allen, Cheadle and Sandler have rarely been as good as they are in these two films. By the way, Binder appears in both. He's Shep, the loutish radio producer in "The Upside of Anger" and Sugarman, the nebbish attorney in "Reign Over Me." Honestly, he's so good as an actor he could have his own TV show.

The Decision. This is tough. Fortunately, a "Movie Smackdown!" doesn't have to tell you to see one and not the other. So, the short answer here is to see both of them and, given that you will only see "The Upside of Anger" on DVD now, you should pay your ten bucks and see "Reign Over Me" in the theater. But which is best? "Reign Over Me" has a great relationship at its core without the ending that makes you almost angry at the movie like "The Upside of Anger." So I'm going with "Reign Over Me" -- get to a theater and see it now.

For More Smackdowns, CLICK THIS BANNER...

Drugs Can Kill

My running partner attended a DEA "fundraiser" for fallen agents yesterday where everyone who showed up got to fire a variety of weapons including, in Zach's case, three different kinds of machine guns. Plus, there was the agent with the handgun which fired a single 50-caliber bullet.

They even got to practice breaking into a meth lab. They said that most of the guys who cook this stuff up are not rocket scientists, the chemicals are so bad that they're all losing their teeth, and a lot of them die in prison after they're arrested. They also have to use special cell phones that won't possibly trigger an explosion with all that lethal stuff brewing.

Most interesting? One of the DEA agents said that he had told his own kid that if he ended up on drugs he'd kill him because at least he'd know "how he died." I'm assuming he was exaggerating for effect, but if I were his kid, I'd stick to a beer on weekends...

*****

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Love Is Eternal: Neolithic Italian Lovers

While the world ponders the fate of spaced-out lover Lisa Nowak, I was drawn today to an enormously touching view of love from the ages.

This comes straight from Mantua, Italy, south of Verona, where archaeologists have found the intertwined skeletons of two lovers from the Neolithic period. As you can see from this phenomenal  photograph, the two bodies, which cuddle closely while facing each other on their sides, were found together locked in an embrace. What's better is that the place where they were found in the area where Shakespeare set "Romeo and Juliet." Have we found some even older and more real star-crossed lovers?

The scientists say that these two probably died young, based on the fact that they had all their teeth back in a time when dentistry, charitably, was probably even worse than that scene in "Castaway" where Tom Hanks has to whack out a tooth with a rock.

Here's what the Associated Press had to say, starting with Luca  Bondioli, an anthropologist at Rome's National Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum when he said the find has:

...''more of an emotional than a scientific value.'' But it does highlight how the relationship people have with each other and with death has not changed much from the period in which humanity first settled in villages, learning to farm the land and tame animals, he said. ''The Neolithic is a very formative period for our society,'' he said. ''It was when the roots of our religious sentiment were formed.''

Here's another point of view from that article (and another photo, taken with flat lighting, over to the left here), quoting from Elena Menotti who led the dig:

Experts might never determine the exact nature of the pair's relationship, according to Menotti, but there is little doubt it was born of a deep sentiment. ''It was a very emotional discovery,'' she said. ''From thousands of years ago we feel the strength of this love. Yes, we must call it love.''

How great is that? A reminder of love going back five or six thousand years. It's almost certain that these two were buried at the same time. That could be an indication of a possible sudden and tragic death. DNA testing will be able to test whether the two were related.

Whatever the facts turn out to be, as opposed to the sick obsession of Lisa Nowak, here is a profound example of something that looks like it might even be noble. If it's a message from the past, it's well-timed.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if somehow this image becomes a famous poster someday. Certainly it will be in textbooks forever. It should be. And that's my opinion, for what it's worth...