It's been a quiet week. The town celebrates the 1st of May, and a few memories of post-prom parties at the Bunsens' cabin.
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I went to the Magic Castle for lunch today with Mark Evanier, who's been a member there for almost 35 years. They have a pretty nice buffet, and yes, we made our food disappear. It felt like going to a family reunion at the Evanier household, though, since about every third person there knew him and came by to say hello. Mark even knew the magician we went to see, and had gotten him on the show That's Incredible years before, when Mark worked on the show. Actually, the performer Richard Turner isn't precisely a magician, but is really more a self-described card shark. (He says in his act, “Some people think they can learn how to do this by practicing for an easy 5 to 10…years. You can’t. I’ve been doing this for 50 years, since I was a little kid.” He then goes on to explain that he initially practiced for 20 hours a day (okay, that's what he says) seven days a week for 26 years. And adds, "No, I wasn't in prison." But even if that's an exaggeration, you have to think it's not by much, because it shows. He's quite stunning. And it's all the more stunning when you know that he's legally blind. There might be an occasional "trick" in his arsenal, but mostly it's just a display of card manipulation and a lot of unearthly dexterityl, not illusion. The room was packed (as was the show before us), and everyone are magicians (or their guests, like me), because Mark says that everyone at the Magic Castle are in awe of him. He always calls two women from the audience to sit on either side of the table and help during the act – and if there had been members of the National Organization of Women there in the audience, they would have left running out of the room in embarrassment. They were among the stupidest people you could want. One of them had what seemed to be difficulty adding up the numbers on the cards whenever there was a Blackjack trick. And the other never quite grasped the concept of shuffling and handing over cards to him. And it seemed like it wasn't until about three-quarters of the way through that she figured but -- maybe -- that he was blind. (All the times he asked, "Are the cards face-up or not?" apparently wasn't a giveaway...) But still, the performance was remarkable. Here’s a video of him, oddly enough as it happens, several years ago at the Magic Castle. The other day, I got a press release in my email box about a new video game. The subject line was "Gabriel Knight Remake. Pre-orders Now Available." Something got me scratching my head. There was a familiarity to it, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I sort of honed in on what I was thinking, but it just didn't, just couldn't be that, I thought. So, I read through the press release. It began -- "The highly-anticipated Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers® 20th Anniversary Edition, a modern remake of one of Sierra ‘s greatest adventure games of all-time, will be available on October 15th, 2014." Oh, my God. The "20th anniversary edition." It has to be the same thing. Around two decades ago, I reviewed games for a variety of computer magazines. And one of them stuck out in my mind for a very particular reason. It was a game that mixed video with interactive play about some character, who I thought was named something like Gabriel Knight, a young, really hip guy who investigated some murders in a mystical world. Skimming through the press release, I eventually came to this -- "Hailed by Adventure Gamers as one of the most well-written games ever and given an Honorable Mention in the AV Club’s Top 100 Games of All Time, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers 20th Anniversary Edition invites players to relive the classic voodoo murder mystery that's captivated generations of game enthusiasts for two decades. In the game, players will take on the role of roguishly handsome Gabriel Knight, a struggling author and owner of a bookstore in New Orleans, who is investigating the Voodoo Murders for his new book:" That's it! That absolutely has to be it! As I said, the game was basically like a movie -- scenes filmed between actors, and it would stop for you to make decision and decipher clues, which impacted the direction the game went. If you couldn't get the clues, you could replay the scenes over and over again. And over and over. And what I remembered about the game and about my review, even from 20 years past was that it was pretty well-produced, okay acted (with even a few character actors I recognized), and moderately intelligent -- and it starred a "roguishly handsome" guy who was likely a fashion model in his other life, because he couldn't particularly act, and had longish, flowing, oh-so-cool hair...that he had this incredibly annoying habit of relentlessly head-flicking off his forehead. And while it's one thing to see that repeatedly in a full-length "movie," it is gut-wrenchingly horrific when you're trying to solve a game and relentlessly replaying scenes over and over again. And over and over and over and over and over again. And what I remember about my review most is that I took what might be the only cheap shot I ever took in a review, though a) it was deserved, and b) I believe I acknowledged beforehand that I was about to take a cheap shot. While giving it a generally positive review, I then wrote something like -- "And if and when they do a sequel to this game, it is my hope that it will be called Gabriel Knight 2: The Search for Gabriel Knight's Killer. Because I can't stand watching another head-flip." Apparently, it turns out Gabriel Knight survived. Not just for a variety of sequels, but ba-ack after 20 years. To solve Voodoo Murders. Talk about bad mojo. I do have to assume that they have a new actor to play the roguishly handsome fellow this time. So, it might be safe for impressionable young children. Then again, for all I know the "sins of the father" they're talking about are those freaking head flips...
Taking a walk yesterday (well...yesterday here. Still today where you are, probably) -- I strolled back through Potsdamer Platz, a once-historic area that got bombed out in WWII, but is now a sort of thriving business community of restaurants and high end-ish shops. (I have to assume that the name in some way is related to Potsdam, which is nearby and where Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin met after the war.) I've passed through here numerous times, it's a crossing point for the way to my hotel. But yesterday I passed a little sign that I'd never seen before. It's small, so I could have missed it, or it could also be something that's somewhat new. It also was easy to miss because there's some construction going on around it. Though maybe it was the construction which caught my attention, and then I noticed the sign. Whatever the reason, I was standing at a stoplight, waiting to cross busy Potsdamer Strasse, and looked up and saw it. I did a double-take at first, but could only laugh. The Hollywood Walk of Fame, Berlin style, for our sister city! I was wondering what that entailed. Perhaps they're planning to have stars in the sidewalk for Horst Bucholz and Maximillian Schell. I was going to name another performer, but then I realized something, and laughed again. Because about two blocks away, down the quiet Alte Potsdamer Strasse that angles off the plaza, at the very end of the street, only about 30 feet from the hotel where I'm staying is...this! So, who knows? Maybe I'd better start looking around in the sidewalks nearby to see what stars they might be honoring there...
This is a very interesting segment on the Santa Monica NPR station, KCRW, for their show The Business with Kim Masters, who's an excellent long-time reporter and book author on Hollywood. In this interview, she talks with comedian Rob Schneider who has a new TV series he's trying to sell, Real Rob. But there's something unique about how he's doing it.
First of all, rather than just pitch the idea, or shoot a pilot -- Schneider made all eight episodes. They're completed. Second, the shows aren't 22-minute episodes for a half-hour timeslot. These are about 45 minutes each, that work out to an hour slot. ("Why can't a comedy be an hour?" he asks. "As long as it's funny.") And third -- he largely broke the cardinal rule of show biz: Never use Your Own Money. Though he did get some investment, much of this has been done with his own money. It certainly was a far-bigger risk, but it meant he had full creative control. (He directed all the shows and co-wrote them with his wife, who plays his wife in the series.) So, he's trying to find a distribution outlet. Interestingly, by virtue of having the entire series shot, it's made it much easier to sell overseas, and so he already has commitments there, meaning some of the money is already scheduled to be coming in. His model on this is Louis C.K and John Cleese with Fawfty Towers (all the more apt since Cleese wrote and co-starred in the show with his then-wife, Connie Booth). I liked Schneider's answer when asked why he didn't do this as a Kickstarter project and get money there from his fans. "My fans have already paid for this," he says, explaining that he means the money he's made during his career and is therefore lucky enough to try something like like that. Unfortunately, I can't embed the broadcast. To listen to the 12-minute segment, click here. Then look on the right side of the "Real Rob" black banner, and click on the white right-arrow sitting on a light blue background. The Coeur d'Alene Tribe had a concert scheduled at their casino in Idaho on August 4. The planned performer was Ted Nugent. "Was" being the operative term, because the tribe cancelled the concert, for reasons it said were the performer's "racist and hate-filled remarks." The tribe also made clear that it had booked Mr. Nugent without knowing his "racist attitudes and views." Ted Nugent, you will recall, is the guy who has been investigated by the FBI for making statements against the president which were seen as potentially threatening, and who once called President Obama a "subhuman mongrel," before sort of apologizing for it in his own way. And who likes to get attention by saying things on stage as racist and hate-infested as one could imagine, provided one chose to have a racist and hate-infested imagination. If the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, though, could only make one employment change, I'm not sure it should have been to cancel Ted Nugent. After all, it's anyone's right to listen to a performer despite his or her racist and hate-filled remarks. No, I think a better choice might have been to fire the person who books acts for the casino. I mean, seriously, how could someone whose job it is to book entertainment for their stage overlook the news headlines Ted Nugent has made for the past two years?? I'm not saying everyone should know. I'm not even saying that an entertainment booker should inherently know every controversial performer. But -- if your actual job is to book talent, and you have decided to consider hiring Ted Nugent for a show, how in the world could you possibly miss the controversy surrounding Ted Nugent? Most especially because venues go out of their way to avoid controversy at all costs. Most have morals clauses in contracts. They want to know. They want to protect themselves. Casinos today are catering to families. They really want to avoid controversy. How hard is it to find out about Ted Nugent? This isn't hyperbole. I mean, literally, how hard is it to find out? And so I did a test. To test my question, went to Google and typed in "Ted Nugent controversy." I think that's a reasonable and incredibly easy search term if I was booking talent and wanted to find out if there was anything controversial about an artist. The first result was about the Coeur d'Alene Tribe cancelling Ted Nugent, so we can discount that. The second entry was his Wikipedia page, which is basic for just about everyone in the world, so we can skip past that. And here is what came next on the result page -- As I said, if I was in charge of hiring at the C'oeur d'Alene Casino, I might consider at the very least re-assigning my booker.
In fairness, Tribe officials all might have known from the very first, and simply didn't mind signing a hate-filled racist to entertain their fellow Indians and the general public. Only after word got out what they'd done, and they all got slammed and had outraged phone calls did they then concoct the flim-flam that "We had no idea that Ted Nugent was controversial." Of course, if that's the case then they might be too stupid to be Tribe officials, and members might want to re-consider who's representing them. I have no idea which of these scenarios is correct. I can make a fair case for either. I'm only sorry that Ted Nugent won't be performing. It would have been nice to see what he would have come up with surrounded by Indians. |
AuthorRobert J. Elisberg is a political commentator, screenwriter, novelist, tech writer and also some other things that I just tend to keep forgetting. Feedspot Badge of Honor
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