Friday, June 6, 2003

No News Is Better News

Around 5:00, I watched a little of the local news coverage of the aforementioned plane crash. I was amazed how poor a job the stations were doing of reporting a pretty simple event that occurred on their home turf. Makes you wonder how accurate they can be with complex events or those in far-off lands. Over and over, they kept telling us to stay away from the area because the streets were swarming with spectators, so emergency vehicles were having a tough time getting through. You have to wonder if maybe part of the problem was that there were eight thousand reporters there with camera crews and mobile unit vans. At one point from my window, I could count eight helicopters hovering above the site. On the ground, news personnel were packed in so densely that you'd see a guy from Channel 4 reporting and in the same shot, you could see reporters from Channel 2 and Channel 7 talking to their cameras.

The multiplicity of correspondents might have made some sense if there had been an involved, complicated tale to tell...but it was one of those cases where they could have told us everything that was known in about four minutes. Alas, since it was Breaking News, they had to stay with it so they kept saying the same things over and over — though not the one fact I wanted to hear, which was if there had been damage to surrounding homes. (As mentioned, I have a friend who lives practically across the street from where the plane hit. He's fine, by the way.) The time was filled via two means. One was by grabbing neighbors, some of whom had helped folks trapped in the burning apartment house, and trying to wring out of them either horrifying accounts or tales of heroism. The other time-filler was pure, unadulterated speculation, particularly as to whether this was an act of terrorism. They kept trying to get police and fire officials — and an obliging councilman who came by for a photo-op — to theorize as to whether the plane flying into the apartment house could possibly have been the work of organized terrorists. Everyone said the same thing; that there was no evidence of any sort to suggest that. But I guess the angle was too intriguing not to keep bringing it up, if only to say there was no reason to believe that...yet. (As I write this, the 11:00 News is on and the lead story, at least on the channel I'm watching, is that police say it wasn't terrorism. Good — but no one except TV reporters ever said it might be.)

I remember local TV covering fires, riots, quakes, floods, shoot-outs, and other plane crashes, and I won't say they were always models of restrained journalism. There was one period when reporters seemed appallingly eager to ask people who'd just suffered tragedies, "How does it feel to see your family killed?" or "How does it feel to see your house go up in flames?" But those were isolated cases and after local TV critics complained about it a few times, the stations seem to have told their correspondents not to ask that. For the most part, the goal back then seemed to inform. Now, it seems to be to impress you that they're all over the story and that there's no point in changing the channel. In that, they succeed...because I don't change the channel. I turn the set off.

• Posted at 11:15 PM · LINK

Plane Crash in L.A.

A small airplane crashed into a three-story apartment house in the Fairfax area of Los Angeles this afternoon. Here are some details.

I'm getting calls and e-mails from friends asking me if this occurred near me. No, it didn't. But it's about two blocks from the Golden Apple bookstore, which many visitors to this site probably know well. It's also about half a block from the home of a prominent fellow in the animation field. I think he'd prefer I not mention his name here but since folks are also asking me if he's okay, I'll say that as far as I know, neither he nor his home have been harmed.

• Posted at 6:00 PM · LINK

Counter-Terrorism Tactics

Here's an article. And here's a quick summary of that article: Boy, the present administration is sure taking its own sweet time about enacting measures which might prevent a major terrorism attack.

• Posted at 2:04 PM · LINK

Executive Fibbing

Here's an article by David Corn, not so much about Bush lying but about the fact that no one seems to care much.

• Posted at 1:10 PM · LINK

Syndication

I've just added links on our main page for syndication in RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 format. If you don't know what this means, don't ask me because I'm not sure I do, either. But thanks to Jason Bergman and others who alerted me that Movable Type (the software that brings you this site) configured it for me without my asking. If only anything else in life happened so effortlessly.

• Posted at 12:46 PM · LINK

Going Loopy...

You know what an improvisational comedian's greatest nightmare is? Being on stage and knowing his lines. No, but I wanna tell ya...

Saw a bunch of very good improvisers last night. My pal Vince Waldron is the director of a show called Totally Looped that does (sadly) but one performance a month here in Los Angeles. Coming from me, this is high praise because I've seen good improv and bad, and even phony improv, which is the most common variety. Phony improv is kind of like what Morey "The Human Joke Machine" Amsterdam used to do, though he had the integrity not to pretend he was making it up. You'd say "three-toed sloth" to Morey and he'd tell you a joke about a three-toed sloth. He readily admitted it was a feat of (a) memory and (b) switching. If he didn't recall a joke about a three-toed sloth, he'd just tell the one he did remember about the horny rhinoceros and make it into a three-toed sloth. That was clever but it wasn't improvising.

I once heard a great improv teacher describe the art as follows: If you think of the line and then say it, you're not improvising, you're just writing on your feet. The essence of improvisational comedy is that you respond to the scene immediately and react as the character would. An improv performer must be continually challenged and not merely playing Mad-Libs, fitting a few nouns into a predetermined template.

Unfortunately, a lot of folks don't get that. Around the time people from The Groundlings (a fine L.A.-based improv troupe) began getting on Saturday Night Live — and performers from there and Second City began getting movie deals — a lot of wanna-be actors began thinking that improv training on the old resumé might net them the kind of deals Chevy Chase was getting. Improv classes were flooded with folks who either couldn't learn the basics from scratch or didn't want to bother. They just wanted to learn that trick of looking like you were making it up. I went to a couple of "improv" shows that might as well have been using TelePrompters.

So it was great to see what Vince has come up with in Totally Looped. The title refers to the fact that much of the show involves the performers being shown film and video clips they have not seen before and having to loop (dub) them live, working in a preselected title or plot point. There was a clip from Valley of the Dolls, for example, that they had to turn into a movie called Who Stole My Platypus? — a title suggested by an audience member. Amazingly, they did it. (Instead of weeping about her addiction to pills and plummeting career, Patty Duke was now sobbing about how she left the back gate open and the family platypus disappeared.) Very fast, very funny...and genuine improv.

The genuine improvisers in Vince's show are Dan Castellaneta, Richard Kuhlman, Joe Liss, Deb Lucasta, Gail Matthius and Angela V. Shelton. Kuhlman was out last night but the rest managed to become a cast of thousands without him. My favorite moments came when Liss was portraying Turner Classic Movies host Robert Osborne (introducing the clips) and Castellaneta wandered on as his vastly less-successful younger brother who works in a shoe store. Dan is an amazing actor. As fine as he is voicing Homer and other characters on The Simpsons, that still taps into only about 30% of what he can do. At least, that's the ballpark number that came to mind as I watched him rattling off spurious cast lists to the movies the Osborne boys were introducing, all performed with a solid underscore of sibling rivalry. Actually, everyone in the troupe is terrific but improv comedy doesn't really survive being quoted the next day. You have to be there.

If you want to be there: They do it once a month at the little Second City stage directly next door to the Improv on Melrose in West Hollywood. The next scheduled performance is July 12 but I'll remind you when we get closer to that date.

• Posted at 11:50 AM · LINK

Tony Twists

The 2003 Tony Awards are Sunday night and the only real suspense seems to be how low will the ratings go this year. The pundits are all predicting that Hairspray will win Best Musical, that Take Me Out will win Best Play, that Nine will win Best Revival of a Musical, that Long Day's Journey Into Night will win Best Revival of a Play, that acting awards will go to Harvey Fierstein, Marissa Jaret Winokur, Dick Latessa, Jane Krakowski, Denis O'Hare and Vanessa Redgrave, etc. Oh, a few categories might be horse races. Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play might be Brian Dennehy for Long Day's Journey Into Night and it might be Eddie Izzard for A Day In the Death of Joe Egg, and there are one or two others that could go either way. But only one or two. Since the winners won't matter to anyone who is not connected to them by either blood or financial arrangement, it won't impair the broadcast.

The interesting thing about the Tony Awards is that it's the opposite of the Oscars. When they give out the Academy Awards, we dread the musical performances between envelope-openings; they feel like filler and they delay us getting to know who won Best Actor. On the Tonys, we pretty much know who's going to win Best Actor and don't much care. The musical performances are the show — a rare chance to see what is often the best moment from what's currently playing on Broadway.

And I guess there's one more slight bit of suspense, which is whether they'll get the whole show in. Unlike most other live awards ceremonies, the Tonys are forbidden to run over. CBS has assured its affiliates that it will not delay their local late news broadcasts for the spillover of such a low-rated program, so it ends precisely when it ends. If someone's in the middle of announcing an award, tough. In past years, it has occasionally been necessary to drop the last musical performance of the evening in order to get all the trophies distributed, and one year Nathan Lane practically gave himself a hernia trying to present the Best Musical award in about eleven seconds. Since the last awards of the evening seem to be obvious, the race to finish on time may be the closest thing we get to a cliffhanger. Enjoy.

• Posted at 10:25 AM · LINK