Find My Precious-y All Over Old Media

Look where my boy Shmuely is today... New York Times, baby. With a great photo too! Ari's trying to get through on the line now, hon. Whatever you do, just don't go with MetaCafe. Ugghhh... Stick with the one who brought you to this dance. Shmuel's YouTube channel is here.

P.S. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel here. I gotta crank that YouTube product too, eh Buzz?

Wish Eddie Murphy had won last night. I haven't even seen but a clip or two of Dreamgirls, and he sure looked on fire, as always. Didn't stay up much past Cameron Diaz. She's such a great ditz. Loved The Queen. Loved it. Maybe since Ms. Mirren won, people will now discover the best show ever put on Big TV: Prime Suspect. That creepy Prince Philip dude sure pops up everywhere, eh? Especially all over our TVs. Like, tonight!

TV Tonight

Atlanta producer Gayla Jamison's film, Lives For Sale, is on WPBA tonight at 9pm. According to the site, Lives For Sale is a one-hour "investigative documentary exposes the painful, rarely seen human side of illegal immigration - including the growing black market trade in human beings."

Following Lives For Sale, at 10:00pm also on WBPA, there will be a local townhall meeting with Gayla there. Gayla has worked for years on bringing this documentary to the public, so I'm excited to see her project come to fruition. Please watch and participate in the discussion if you can.

Viewing At Manuel's Tonight

No, not a viewing of the body, but of What Not To Wear. All the ladies of the Atlanta Gorgeous Ladies of Comedy troupe will be appearing on tonight's 9pm episode on TLC, and there's a viewing party at Manuel's!

Jenny Clark will get the actual fashion makeover, and the other ladies are starring as the support team/cast, including my old College of Knowledge pal, the infamously funny-wicked Allison Dukes Gilmore, one of the Gorgeous Ladies and also a Laughing Matters vet. Tune-in tonight wherever you can and join in the loopy reindeer games.

Get Out Of Your Liturgical Comfort Zone

Here ye. Here ye. Come all ye Buckhead Episcopalians, etc. Have a moment tonight with Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Faye, those former TV creature-preachers of PTL fame, fortune and, ultimately, the Big House (for Jim).

Son Jay is a fascinating preacher-creature himself, and former Atlantan. Tonight, a docu-show about his life, well titled One Punk Under God, makes me wish I had the Sundance Channel so I could watch along. The six-part series premiers there at 9pm. We do breed such terrific oddities in America!

In keeping with simplistic God notions his parents infused him with, if not their fashion sense, here's a bit about his life's work:

Jay and Amanda Bakker relocated from Atlanta in August and Bakker quickly established an arm of his Revolution church here (Brooklyn, NY). His brand of Christianity calls for inclusiveness and embraces gays and lesbians, a recent evolvement that caused his conservative financial backers to bail.

Revolution, said Bakker, "is about letting people know that Jesus is inclusive and loves everybody and welcomes everybody. It's kind of showing that we're not all right-wing Christian Coalition neoconservatives. You can care about social issues. You can care about the poor and the hurting."

Full story here.

Good Work If You Can Get It

To those who have asked, no, that new HBO show in the works, Buckhead Betty, has yet to hire me as a consultant. Although they are free to do so. And yeah, they should. They really should, especially since the creators aren't even real Southerners! Mon Dior. Read more here. Or here. Is there any other longtime Buckhead Something blogging besides moi? I don't think so. (Of course there's always Peachtree Screed, but he wouldn't know Samantha Jones from Sam Massell. In all fairness, he can tell you Vernon Jones from Vernon Jordan fastern' most folk. And hon, do NOT get him started on Dick Williams, Jim Wooten or Judith Miller.)

Who Polishes The Best Turds?

Or rather, who best polishes the simple turd? According to the Turdpolisher's blog description:

Turdpolishing is slang we TV photogs use for turning an utterly worthless story into something that sticks to video tape -- polishing a turd. Be careful or you'll get some on you.

A perfect case-in-point is a bit from this Turdpolisher entry, Got AIDS?, about trolling for news only the suits can use:

Can I tell you... the only thing worse than attending a poetry reading about AIDS is actually having AIDS. But it gets better, the poets are 11 years old. What do these kids know about AIDS, how one contracts it, lives with it, or prevents it? Luck was on our side...we were late. We got there just in time to shoot the winners getting their checks. But there's still that nagging need for a story tonight.

Having just produced a network shoot this past Saturday, I was reminded, yet again, of just how elaborate the T polish can be applied.

See this hardworking crew dress a set for instance. The crew used-up about an hour of good manpower time creating a curtain to block light so that they could pop-off a couple of interior shots, a couple of shots inside a filthy shack. Of course, you simply can't get a good shot with full sun blaring right into your lens, whether you're using a $150 DV cam from Circuit City or a customized Betacam, as this crew was using that can run you or your network 50K or more.

We were not there to do a story about poverty though, so the camera crew could light and frame to capture a "nice" setting anyway they saw fit, conveniently ignoring the ramshackle squalor our interviewees were living in. (Filth and grime and poverty? What's that to a feature story about overcoming anxieties!? But I diverge. I was just the hired hand on this one. The folks in NYC want a story about an anxiety disorder, that's what they're gonna get. It's not the place of a freelance producer to even THINK about contributing to the editorial direction. You show up on time, you smile and nod, and you ship the NY desk their tapes immediately. That's what they want from us folk on "the ground." Nothing more. Nothing less.)

So here's your case for "real" citizen journalism. And this does not mean just giving a newsroom of highly educated journalists a DV cam and a lesson on iMovie, as only when the stories bubble-up organically from the ground, by any means necessary I suppose, and then go straight up to the suits, and not the top-down method by which we're accustomed to receiving news, will turd polishing become less important. Only then will the TV news audience begin to recognize a genuine turd for what it often is -- the crap or non-news item or PC bullshit or outright lies (WMD) it often is.

And will the print folks ever be able to simply catch up? Should they even try to catch up with video? Should writing and video be mutually exclusive? Tune-in to the blogosphere to find out more. Exciting times we do live in, folks.

NOTE: Do not miss Turdpolisher's short story either, The Blond and The Klan. Hilariously underwritten in a loopy style perfect for capturing the sheer lunacy of a Louisiana local news station. Get this guy an agent!

TV Left To The Stupid People

So TV's dead. Only stupid people watch it now anyway. More on that here.

I'll miss Larry King at 9pm. I have such a nice little night-time ritual of putting kid to bed, then savoring some Tension Tamer (Ooops. Product placement. Hello Celestial Seasonings???!!) with milk and a little A-listing with Mr. King, despite his flinching ugliness, but the guests are always good. Then a little AC 360 for a bedtime global news romp.

As strong a relationship as I've developed with the Internets, I still enjoy cozying-up with a little TV every now and then, especially since I grew-up without one. But I can easily see how that damn Disney Channel sucks the mindwind right out of the young ones. Only a moron could think otherwise. Thank goodness they don't run commercials, its only saving grace, otherwise it'd all be outta here. Still, we need TV for use as a DVD monitor, don't we? In the den?

Ultimately, lying in bed with the laptop watching something on-demand, whether it's a longer form piece from ABC News, a far-fetched conspiracy theory, a movie (The Breakup last night. Quite good.) or a clip from MetaCafe, is pretty darn compelling. All of the above I've done lately. Can't say I've had quite that intimate a relationship with my TV that's fer sure as I've never invited one into my bedroom.

WTF... bring on the broadband. What a party. Smash your TV, but put yourself doing it on YouTube, of course.

CNN Layoffs

Here's the poop on the CNN layoffs, as I hear it: At least five senior, longtime staff were hit. They seem to be aiming for the "high salary" profile this go-'round. Severance packages will likely be excellent for all. More details when they arrive... stay-tuned to the SGR.

Is it too soon to welcome such leftbehinds to the blogosphere? Oh, if they only knew of the fun and games to be trolled here they'd have come running long ago, even without a severance package! But they'll need a good one to navigate, as independents, out here until they hit, uh, warmer waters.

She Drinks

I'm hungover. Not from booze, but from the final Masterpiece Theater's Prime Suspect last night. Even given HBO and all its miserable glory, that last episode of Prime Suspect on PBS surely mined some of the lowest depths of human misery ever explored on TV. Trust me, especially you past-your-prime ladies who drink (wouldn't have a clue), you will never look at booze the same way after seeing the wretched worthiness of Jane Tennison's life as she gets ready to retire. Dear God, I know it was just a TV show, but please let DCI Tennison never drink again. For every fictional hard-boiled boozy broad like Jane Tennison, there must be plenty in reality where she came from.

Rip Yo Bodice, Ladies

Too much, too soon. Woe to the actor who would foolishly follow Colin Firth's Darcy from the 1995 BBC miniseries-adaptation of Pride and Prejudice; or to a director who stumbles into the obvious, clumsily trampling all over the Gothic fragility and self-possessed sexual smoldering Firth absolutely seared into the hearts and minds and assorted other places of the female anatomy.

A needless Darcy re-creation is almost the cinematic suicide that would arise from toying about with Clark Gable's Rhett Butler, as Colin Firth's have-your-way-NOW, poofy-shirt Darcy pretty much slammed the lid on the chest of the Darcy-ideal, for the serious Austen fan.

Women across North America are not happy with this 2005 release of Pride and Prejudice. Not having seen it yet, I'm already feeling their angst. And when American women are not happy, well, heads will... turn away.

From the New York Daily News today:

The trouble started a couple of months ago when University of Colorado English Prof. Joan Klingel Ray, president of the Jane Austen Society, slagged off the movie in an interview with the U.K.'s Telegraph, criticizing everything from Matthew MacFadyen as the male lead, Mr. Darcy, to the movie's in-your-face sexual imagery.

"The Darcy in the film does not have the quality of attractiveness that Colin Firth has," Ray asserted, referring to the star of the acclaimed 1995 miniseries.

She added: "The film is full of sexual imagery, which is totally inappropriate to Austen's novel. In one scene, a wild boar, which I assume is supposed to represent Darcy, wobbles through a farm with its sexual equipment on show."

Full gossip here.

Tags: Movies, Pride and Prejudice, Colin Firth