Saturday, April 21, 2007

Rich and Famous

You may remember that last year around this time, Stephen Colbert caused something of a ruckus with his performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner. I meant to alert you but forgot that this year's was this evening, with Rich Little performing what everyone expected (correctly, it would seem) would be less controversial material.

I haven't watched it yet. I have my TiVo set up to record a rebroadcast in a few hours on C-Span. You can find the schedule and the video can also be watched online at the C-Span website, which doesn't work for me insofar as video clips are concerned but may for you. I imagine the clip will show up on YouTube or Google Video in the next day or so. If this report is correct though, you may not want to take the time to watch. Bush, they say, made no attempt at humor, apparently out of respect for the Virginia Tech shootings. Rich Little, they say, didn't do so well. I'll let you know if I disagree.

• Posted at 11:01 PM · LINK

Labor Pangs

I believe Hollywood is heading, much in the manner of a runaway train, towards a big, crippling strike over how residuals will be paid and revenue streams divided for the new marketplace of DVD, digital delivery, Internet podcasts, etc. There are many possible scenarios over when the strike could come...and even which labor organization(s) will lead the way, though the smart money is on the Writers Guild with the Screen Actors Guild tagging along if it can get its leadership squabbles in check. In any case, the issue is out there and it seems unlikely that it can be resolved by the producers being reasonable.

Strikes have not been settled or prevented through sheer reasonableness for a long time in this town. Some of the labor actions of the fifties and sixties were but that was before the main entertainment companies were international conglomerates. The legendary Lew Wasserman, the super-agent who used to run MCA and Universal, ended or headed off several strikes by getting on the phone to the heads of MGM, Disney, Warner Brothers, Paramount and others and working out a deal. But there is no more Lew Wasserman, nor do Time-Warner, Sony, the current Disney and the rest operate on that kind of personal level nowadays.

I hope I'm wrong but the only way I can imagine there not being a major conflagration is if the Writers Guild and S.A.G. both experience internal collapses and their memberships decide not to fight for a fair share in these new revenues. That doesn't seem likely. In fact, if it does happen, we will probably see all-out war, anyway. We'll just see the members of those unions firing at one another, rather than at Management.

The other day, a group of studio and network heads announced a proposal that their side and the unions jointly fund — and I quote — "a showbiz version of the report from the Iraq Study Group" to study and propose new formulas. I suspect this will be about as effective as the real report from the Iraq Study Group and I wonder why they would liken their idea to that. Here are some details on the proposed report.

• Posted at 12:16 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Ordinarily, I'm wary of the "everything you know is wrong" article. Almost any time anything happens in our world and a conventional, obvious wisdom emerges, you're never more than two clicks away from an article on the Internet telling you why the opposite is true. If some candidate makes a horrific gaffe and plunges in the polls, someone will pen a piece that will explain that while this may look bad for that candidate, it is actually a bit of brilliant strategizing that has guaranteed his/her election in a landslide. I'm all for examining all possibilities but most of these articles seem forced and contrived and usually intended as attention-getting, separate-yourself-from-the-herd exercises.

That said, it is worth considering this article by Dahlia Lithwick, whose premise is that Alberto Gonzales did a great job with his testimony the other day.

• Posted at 9:57 AM · LINK

Question Answered

Boy, you people are fast. I just posted the question in the previous item and here comes Dave Sikula with the answer, which we can all find in this article. Basically, it's that stations all over the country have put in delays on live broadcasts for fear of F.C.C. fines if a naughty word gets on the air. Seems silly to me. Vin Scully has been broadcasting Dodgers games since 1950. How many obscenities have snuck in during that time?

My impression is that when there is outrage over naughty words or content on TV or radio, it's either over prepared content or cases like the Janet Jackson breast incident where someone felt the broadcasters could and should have pre-screened what was going to happen. Almost every week it seems, some forbidden word slips onto a news program or other live show somewhere and if it's clearly an accident, even the people who go way out of their way to get outraged about obscenity on TV or radio don't get outraged. I'm more offended by the delay than I would be about anything it could prevent.

• Posted at 1:18 AM · LINK

That Syncing Feeling

Speaking of "out of sync," I have a question which will probably have to be answered by a baseball fan in Los Angeles.

When I was a kid and occasionally following the L.A. Dodgers, one of the big appeals was Vin Scully, who called the play-by-play. He's still the most important person in the stadium whenever that team plays. My father, who followed baseball more than I did, wouldn't dream of watching a game without Scully in his ear. Whenever we went to a game, he took along a transistor radio so he could listen to Vinnie describe what we were seeing...and even if he hadn't brought the radio along, so many other Dodger fans did that you could often hear Scully throughout the bleachers.

Even watching the Dodgers on TV, he had to have Vin Scully. For a time, Scully's co-anchor was a guy named Jerry Doggett, who was probably a decent-enough sportscaster but he wasn't the Ol' Redhead. Scully and Doggett would switch off. One would call a few innings on the TV broadcast while the other did the radio narration, then they'd swap. Whenever Scully was on the radio, my father would mute the sound on the television and haul out his radio so he could hear Vin.

The other day, I was discussing this with a friend who, unlike me, follows the Dodgers these days. She said that you can't do this now. According to her, they have the radio transmission of Vin Scully on a five second delay. So if you listen to him, he's not describing what you're seeing live or on your TV screen. He's a few seconds behind and it doesn't work.

I guess this is a multi-part question, then. Is this true? And if so, is it being done intentionally to discourage people from listening to Vin Scully on the radio while they watch the game at the stadium or on TV? I can't imagine why Vin Scully would need to be broadcast on a delay, nor can I fathom why anyone would care if you listened to him this way. Can anyone clear this up for me?

• Posted at 12:41 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Congressguy Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was the chief sponsor of the Executive Compensation Act, which passed in the House yesterday by a vote of 269 to 134. The bill gives shareholders of public companies the right to cast an advisory ballot on the compensation awarded to the company's executives. Here, in case you're interested, are the details.

Before it passed, there was a last minute attempt by some Republicans to insert a provision that Frank felt was ill-timed. Here we see him objecting to it. It's about four minutes, it's rather entertaining, and it's a bit out of sync. For some reason, most of the clips on YouTube of Barney Frank have him speaking out of sync. This is apparently a side effect of being gay.

• Posted at 12:08 AM · LINK