Some WGA members are disappointed that the late night hosts are going back to work despite our strike. I think it hurts the strike effort but only a little. The networks still cannot produce most of their prime-time shows. The movie studios still cannot deliver most of the desired product to their marketplace.
One upside to Dave, Jay, Conan, Jimmy, Craig, Jon and Stephen restarting their shows is that the news coverage in their country will be less impaired. Earlier today, I was talking to a friend of mine who I'd consider well-versed in what's going on in the world. He had not heard of the recent embarrassment where Mitt Romney was found to have fabricated a tale he's been telling for years about watching his father march with Dr. Martin Luther King. Romney's staff has admitted it's not true — one spokesperson said "He was speaking figuratively, not literally" — which sure doesn't square with the actual quotes.
A candidate for public office lying? I have a feeling it's not the first time. But Mitt is lucky that Dave, Jay, Conan (etc.) aren't on to make it into the week's running gag. Not all that long ago, Al Gore said a few things that were not really lies but could be viewed as such if you were out to slam the guy. His opponents did a good job of selling the idea that the alleged fibs proved not just that Gore said something untrue but that they were proof that he was a congenital liar, incapable of speaking the truth...someone not to be believed if he just told you what time it was.
And now here we have Romney getting caught telling a truly untrue tale and repeating it on many occasions...and he may get a pass on it because the late night hosts aren't taping. People aren't hearing about it the way they'd hear about it if The Daily Show was current. Hillary Clinton and her husband have said some embarrassing things lately in besmirching her opposition and they're not paying much of a price for it, either.
So while I'm disappointed those hosts are coming back, there is this. Maybe now more people will know what's going on in the world.
Wade Sampson reminds us that today is the seventieth anniversary of the opening of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the movie that changed animation (and maybe more than that) forever. It debuted on December 21, 1937 at the Fox Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles. Like most of you, I first saw the film after seeing several of Mr. Disney's later (and probably, better) animated features so I didn't appreciate how revolutionary Snow White was at the time of its debut; not until the early seventies when I attended a screening hosted by, of all people, Chuck Jones.
He seemed like an odd choice since Jones had not worked on Snow White. (His total experience at Disney was many years after it was made...a few months spent working on Sleeping Beauty.) This wisdom of his selection as speaker became apparent when he delivered a little talk after the film — a talk that could have been titled, "What Walt Disney Could Do That We At Warner Brothers Could Not." Much of it had to do with slow, subtle character animation and a wider, muted color pallette. He cited moments in Snow White that could never have been done in one of his seven-minute Looney Tunes extavaganzas. The budgets at Warner's did not allow an animator to spend as much time on a sequence as Walt allowed his crew...and the need to tell a story in seven minutes necessitated much swifter, broader action.
Anyway, I wish I had a recording of Chuck's speech because it contained a lot of fascinating observations — with admitted jealousy, a great creator of animation was discussing a cartoon from the standpoint of an onlooker. I came away with a new appreciation of the film.
Wade mentions the Carthay Circle in his article. It was a great place that in the fifties and sixties, alternated between housing live shows and movies. My parents must have taken me to a half-dozen films there. Situated in what was largely a residential area, it had impossible parking, which was probably what caused it to close. In fact, it became rather well-known as a theater to avoid because it had 1,500 seats and about a tenth as many places to leave your vehicle. Still, if you got there, it seemed worth the ordeal. It was a palace and just being in it was an experience, regardless of what was showing. (I seem to recall seeing Around the World in 80 Days there. I was four and a half when that movie was first released, but perhaps what we saw there was a reissue.) The place was intermittently open and closed in the late sixties and then finally demolished around 1971.
In fact, they not only razed the theater but they plowed through many of the surrounding streets. The name "Carthay Circle" referred to an area with several circular avenues with the theater at the approximate center. The city decided to straighten things out so they connected this to that and that to this and now you can drive through that area and watch some streets change names inexplicably from block to block...but there's no trace of the Carthay Circle Theater or even of the circular topography in which it was situated. Kind of a shame.
December 22, 2007
