Sunday, May 21, 2006

Recommended Reading

Sebastian Mallaby has an interesting view of why Al Gore may be making a comeback.

• Posted at 11:44 PM · LINK

A Great, Big Broadway Flop...

What a surprise. I enjoyed the new version of The Producers in a theater-type screening room last December. I was well aware of its many shortcomings but I so enjoyed watching Nathan Lane's performance that I could mentally write off the negatives and walk out of there happy. Maybe it's just because it was my second time through but watching the newly-released DVD, the weaknesses won out over Nathan. He's still amazing, wringing every possible laugh out of every gesture and syllable, but the film still fails to come to life. (Maybe it was also the lack of an audience.)

I've seen the material twice on stage — once with Nathan and Matthew Broderick, once with Jason Alexander and Martin Short. I've also seen the movie. This was the first time I really missed Zero and Gene and Ken Mars and the less-hysterical (but still over-the-top) pacing. The previous viewings, the musical felt like a new work made out of the framework of the original. Suddenly now, it really strikes me as a remake of something that didn't need to be remade. Broadway-to-film conversions usually fail because they change too much. This one fails because what worked on the stage just isn't as good on the screen.

The DVD includes a mess of outtakes and deleted scenes, including the whole "King of Broadway" number and a shorter song called "Rio." Also cut was a short scene with Max Bialystock (Nathan) wooing a little old lady played by Andrea Martin. They apparently got to improvising as there are several versions on the DVD and they're all funnier than a lot of material that did get in. Director Susan Stroman also recorded a commentary track that sounds like she's reading a script...and not a particularly enlightening one. I wouldn't expect any director to air dirty linen and might not think much of them if they did. But you shouldn't do a commentary track unless you have something more to say than how much fun every scene was to shoot, how terrific everyone was to work with and how brilliant they are in the scene we're watching.

Here's a link to order the DVD in regular or widescreen versions. Obviously, this is not a glowing recommendation. It's a sigh of disappointment from someone who still retains an affection for the material. Just not this presentation of it.

• Posted at 9:19 PM · LINK

Magic To Do

Next Friday, Saturday and Sunday, folks in the Southern California area will have a splendid opportunity to see great magic, live before their eyes. The lovely Misty Lee and the completely-out-of-his-mind Sylvester the Jester will be performing three shows only at the Colony Theater in Burbank. We mentioned this before here and we're mentioning it again because we think it'll be wonderful and now is the time to buy those tickets. Misty does classic magic with a contemporary, dazzling twist while Sylvester is...well, twisted. And as an extra added attraction, the very funny Mr. Woody Pittman will be joining them with his witty feats. What more do you need to hear? Go to this page to order your seats.

• Posted at 1:27 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Some days ago here, I cited a Jack Anderson statement that most of the things stamped Top Secret in Washington were classified not out of security concerns but because someone thought the information in question would embarrass them or expose wrongdoing. Tom Blanton elaborates on this in an article that includes this nugget...

Erwin Griswold, who as U.S. solicitor general prosecuted the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, once explained the real motivation behind government secrecy — but only years later, when he recanted his prosecutorial passion. Griswold persuaded three Supreme Court justices to vote for a prior restraint on the Times in the case. But in 1989, he confessed in a Washington Post Op-Ed article that there was no actual national security damage from the publication of the papers. "It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another," he wrote.

I think there's an awful lot wrong with the press in this country, including a lack of accuracy — for reasons of competence, quite apart from any ulterior motives. And certainly there are legitimate government secrets that should not be splashed across Page One. But I'm unconvinced that any cries we've heard to prosecute reporters for National Security Leaks are anything more than desperate ploys by folks with a vested interest in not seeing government screw-ups and corruption exposed. And that's not just a criticism of the Bush administration and its supporters. It's more common than not in Washington and politics.

• Posted at 12:21 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

You might not want to watch it in its entirety — this one runs a little under 27 minutes — but I thought someone would appreciate the link to "Dogs of War," a 1923 silent Our Gang comedy produced by the Hal Roach Studio...and also starring the Hal Roach Studio. It begins with the kids staging war games on a vacant lot and segues to them visiting the Roach lot, though it's called something else. There, they get mixed up in the movie-making of the day and there are some nice views of the process. There's also an almost surreal (at least by 1923 standards) ending where the youngsters have made their own movie and it's full of odd visual effects. Harold Lloyd, who was then about the biggest name in film comedy, has a nice cameo about two-thirds of the way into the proceedings.

This was one of the better Our Gang comedies of the period and this copy has a serviceable musical score on it — one that is probably a lot like those ad-libbed at the time by organ accompanists in theaters around the world. There were a lot of "kid" comedies being made by film studios then but the cleverness of this one demonstrates why the Our Gang series was the most popular and the only one that has really endured.

And before someone asks: For reasons I never understood, not even after putting the question once to Mr. Roach himself, the series had a couple of different names, sometimes using "Our Gang" and sometimes not, and wasn't too picky about what it called itself until around 1932. That's when "Our Gang" became pretty much official. The films changed ownership a few times after that and there were other names and maybe someday if I can muster the courage, I'll attempt to explain the back-and-forth. Or maybe I'll take the easy way out and refer you to the definitive book on the subject, which was written by Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann, and which itself changed its name from Our Gang to The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang. Very confusing stuff.

• Posted at 10:58 AM · LINK

Copyrights and Wrongs

Matt Tauber writes...

It's interesting that in a city known for its high crime rate, this is what they've got the police working on. I wonder who was behind the initiative to arrest the video pirates.

The problem is, where does it stop? A friend of mine produces faux Aurora model kit boxes, often featuring characters who never had a kit. He was quizzed last year by Paul Levitz about them and told he was violating DC's copyright. He didn't say anything to the dealer next to my friend, who was selling drawings of DC characters and stained-glass replicas of DC character logos, for which DC receives nothing. I guess I'm asking if you want to stop the DVD bootleggers, do you also stop everyone else, even artists doing sketches? Convention operators always seem to get a pass when this debate comes up. Do you think this is something they should be policing, since they're benefiting from these dealers of unauthorized material?

To the first point: My guess would be that this was not a matter of the Detroit Police suddenly deciding they had nothing better to do than to go out and bust people selling unauthorized DVDs. My guess is that the M.P.A.A. (the producers' association) has put pressure on law enforcement agencies around the nation, starting with the F.B.I., and that senior agencies have passed the buck to lower agencies. And now that I think of it, the officers were probably less interested in the kind of bootleg I was describing — people selling shows they recorded off TV — than they were in pirated copies of current releases. No one pressures the law to take action against people pirating old episodes of Tennessee Tuxedo, though that may be an ancillary concern.

Of course, it's more important for the police to be arresting violent criminals but I don't think this is an either/or choice. It's also more important for them to be tracking down murderers than to be ticketing people who run stop signs but they have to occasionally ticket someone who runs a stop sign or else everyone would run stop signs.

Anyone who's in charge of protecting a copyright has a not-dissimilar problem deciding when to take action. There are egregious violations for which you have to summon the gendarmes (or pay legal fees) and those you decide not to pursue, either because they seem so trivial or because you're not sure some judge won't think they fall under the heading of "fair use." With the exception of a few known instances involving Disney, I've never heard of a copyright holder objecting to an artist selling a sketch or two. So my answer to the question "if you want to stop the DVD bootleggers, do you also stop everyone else, even artists doing sketches?" is "No, DC knows about it and they have the wherewithal to take action if they so elect. So if they're not bothered by people selling Superman sketches then I'm not going to let it bother me."

There are violations that even the violators would not argue were wrong and there are uses of others' copyrighted material that are considered acceptable. In between, there's an area that's extremely gray and arguable, and which often must be argued on a case-by-case basis. Its parameters get loosely defined by how proprietors object or give tacit approval...but selling a DVD of someone else's copyrighted material reproduced in full is well into the "violation" standard.

One other thing I should point out: When someone has a property and they sell licenses to other companies to exploit that property, they enter into business arrangements that are usually based on exclusivity. For example, if you go to Disney and pay them for the right to make Mickey Mouse cuspidors, the standard contract will stipulate (a) that Disney grants you the exclusive rights to make 'em, (b) that Disney has the legal right to grant you that exclusive license and (c) that Disney will defend your exclusive right. If I then go out and start bootlegging Mickey cuspidors and Disney doesn't stop me, they're in breach of their contract with you. Which is why they'd probably be more aggressive in stopping the counterfeit spittoons than they might be over some other infractions. I take a pretty liberal view of what constitutes "fair use" but I also recognize that some uses of others' property are not fair and need to be stopped.

• Posted at 9:40 AM · LINK