Monthly Archives: September 2009

Just filmed an interview for a documentary on books with Ray Bradbury. A warm, smart man at 89, still sharp even after a stroke nine years ago and speaks lovingly of his deceased wife often. He is literally all about libraries.

However, I was struck that the guy who wrote the ultimate book on censorship with Fahrenheit 451 said he watches FOX News all day because they are a good replacement for dying newspapers. The man always loved his science fiction…

It’s come to this?  Soldier who re-enlisted to provide health insurance for his family is killed in Afghanistan.

This is Fargo with your Daily Roo: Fargo has a bone.

When I moved to L.A. at the turn of the century, I noticed something about this ‘industry town’ almost immediately. All outdoor advertising — billboards, bus ads, bus shelters, bus benches, building wraps — is entirely for entertainment marketing campaigns for TV and movies (save the occasional realtor headshot). You can speculate that this is as much for industry exec egos as market saturation.

But do so many of these ads have to be so awful? And worse: so enduring? When a new movie marketing campaign starts, it is everywhere you look, even if you try to turn away. Look at this ad from the ‘Sluttiness is Something Special’ marketing blitz for the new Melrose Place: You can actually see a billboard for Melrose Place reflected in a bus shelter ad for Melrose Place. Read More »

Here is a supportive message from my Governor to the hardworking firefighters who have been battling some of the biggest fires in years at the Station forest fire.  The smoke and heat has been looming over L.A. for days, but my thoughts keep going to the much braver, tougher guys who are hauling ass and risking their life to beat this sweltering 20 mile-long beast.

My thoughts were still with those brave firefighters, until I started listening to Ahnold speak, and kept expecting him to announce how he was going to seek revenge on the fires, rip off his coat and shirt, and charge off camera.  He is clearly reading off a teleprompter, and if you slipped part of the Conan speech into his remarks, it is quite possible he nor anyone else would notice.  Is it wrong that I still can’t take seriously that Kindergarten Cop is our crisis management?

A ribbon cutting ceremony for the brand new johnennis.tv!

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Just saw a great doc I would like to recommend, It Might Get Loud by Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth.  It is actually very similar to that film: primarily centered around a live shoot of a simple talk, some bio clips and VO to give color and background, but about Jack White, The Edge, and Jimmy Page instead of Al Gore.

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Update: Black Box Voting is filing an antitrust complaint to challenge the consolidation of ES&S and Diebold.  In 1997, The SEC prevented a consolidation by ES&S to prevent a monopoly on voting machines.  Stay tuned.

After much attention, most of it negative, Diebold has sold off its election machine division, which had been renamed Premier Election Solutions a couple years ago in hopes of re-branding and dodging the bad name Diebold had earned.  This doesn’t really mark the end of their nefarious line of products, because it was purchased by ES&S, Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Nebraska, the only other elections company with a rap sheet as bad as Diebold’s.  But the good news is that because they pawned off the toxic asset for a paltry $5 million, Diebold has lost about $50 million on the company.  Granted, a presidential election is worth more than that, but tell that to the shareholders.

If I knew Diebold was going for $5 million, I would have scraped together the money from donors, bake sales, and Craigslist to buy Diebold myself, then audit that fucker.

In tribute, here is the Diebold section of my doc FREE FOR ALL! that outlines the company’s conflict of interests and includes me cluelessly crashing the Diebold offices in classic Michael Moore inefficacy.

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Today, former Rep. James Traficant is released from federal prison after a seven-year stint for racketeering, bribes, and corruption.  He was as colorful and daft as a Sopranos character, as this video of his expulsion hearing shows.  And how disrespectful to the beloved late Stephanie Tubbs Jones! This is like a comedy sketch in a real government setting, where you could see Rip Torn hamming this up beyond believability.  But the hair piece alone makes this terrifyingly real.

As I embark on my next Ohio doc Pay 2 Play, I think I will have to track down the former Rep. Traficant from Youngstown….

I guess it is a real tribute to documentary film making that people love the stories and characters so much that they want to adapt them into Broadway musicals, like the Maysil Brothers’ cult favorite Grey Gardens. Being of the same age and sensibility as Trey Parker, musicals strike me as the ultimate parody of anything.  That said, I am now open to negotiations to turn my doc FREE FOR ALL! into a musical theater piece, with songs and dance numbers about voter disenfranchisement.  Ken Blackwell would have a solo, and Matt Damschroeder would get his own dance number.

As reported by Variety, yet another doc is being re-imagined for the stage: Hands on a Hard Body, the great doc from the late 90’s that covers an annual competition in Texas where contestants have to stand touching a pickup truck for days on end, and the last person touching it wins the truck.  This film was ably made by some college-aged kids for $37,000 who endured through the competition to film the contestants as they peeled away.  This challenge is far more grueling than you would imagine, and the characters are much richer than the Texas types this premise would allow them to come off as.   I recommend the doc as a modern equivalent of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but with a happier ending.