nancynall.com » CPR for “The Wire,” stat.
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CPR for “The Wire,” stat.

Ash­ley Mor­ris is many things — acci­den­tal com­poser for porno­graphic films, tenured pro­fes­sor at a pres­ti­gious Mid­west­ern uni­ver­sity (and you right-wingers who visit, please don’t read any­thing into those two items in jux­ta­po­si­tion — the for­mer is a hilar­i­ous story he can per­haps be coaxed to tell again, and the lat­ter is entirely deserved. Besides, he teaches com­puter sci­ence, for the lovea pete), sup­porter of ground-breaking television.

It’s in the lat­ter capac­ity that we praise him today. He’s set up Don’t Burn the Wire, to, ehh, encour­age HBO exec­u­tives to renew our favorite show for another sea­son, prefer­ably two. Go, fol­low instruc­tions, tell all your friends, for­ward to TV writ­ers for major news­pa­pers, etc.

Posted on Monday, December 27th, 2004 at 9:38 am
in Uncategorized.

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3 responses to
“CPR for “The Wire,” stat.”

  1. ashley said on December 27th, 2004 at 8:58 pm

    How I became a “big man in porn”.

    Well, back in the late 80s/early 90s, the music busi­ness was not exactly like it is now. Nowa­days, any­body can pro­duce a CD. Back then, demo cas­settes were king.

    I got tired of work­ing with musi­cians, as most of them are as quirkier than a 72 Mata­dor. So I decided to release a demo tape, with me play­ing every instru­ment. The advan­tage of this was that I didn’t have to deal with any other musi­cians; the dis­ad­van­tage was that I was con­strained by the limit of my abil­ity on each instru­ment. I ratio­nal­ized this out by telling myself “This is a demo — not a full blown album. I don’t need to cre­ate ‘Hotel California’”.

    So when it was done, I was happy enough with it. I had Warner/Elektra/Asylum pro­duce a thou­sand cas­settes for me, and I mailed out about 600 of them. Every sin­gle record com­pany I could find. Many were returned unopened, with NO UNSOLICITED MATERIAL stamped on the front. Some responded with things like “We like it, but it fits no genre we have. How can we mar­ket it?” Some said “I love it, my friends love it, but there’s no mar­ket for it.”. Some said “This is the sin­gle worst thing I have ever heard”. In any case, nobody wanted to give me a big dol­lar record contract.

    Finally, after months of rejec­tion, I got a pos­i­tive response. A really pos­i­tive response. Ash­lyn Gere, porno queen, some­how got a copy of the tape. She claimed to like it, like it a lot. She wanted to use a cou­ple of songs from the tape on her new fea­ture: “Real­i­ties 2″. I guess it would answer all those ques­tions left unre­solved by Real­i­ties 1.

    At this point, after hear­ing noth­ing but rejec­tion, I said why not. I asked if they wanted a DAT mas­ter, and they said no, they would just get the sound off of the cas­sette. At this point, I knew it wouldn’t be a real ‘qual­ity’ pro­duc­tion, but hey, why not.

    Ash­lyn also told me that her con­tract meant that it would appear on Play­boy. Huz­zah! Play­boy! This meant two things to me: 1) I would get paid. I wouldn’t get any money for the pic­ture, but I would get some money from BMI when it was broad­cast. It also meant that 2) I’d be a real songwriter.

    My next step was to talk to the peo­ple at BMI about the pub­lish­ing rights. Well, it turns out that there are two types of music in films/TV. First is inci­den­tal music, which is sim­ply music going on in the back­ground. The other is chore­o­graphed music. The BMI/ASCAP def­i­n­i­tion of “chore­o­graphed” was some­thing like “would the action on screen have been dif­fer­ent with dif­fer­ent music”. When I got the video, I felt that I could hon­estly tell them “Yes, the screen action would have been dif­fer­ent”. By the way, “chore­o­graphed” music gets paid at a triple rate. Boy, was that a fun conversation.

    It was a good thing that my music was used for a mas­tur­ba­tion scene — some­how if my songs made peo­ple want to have group anal sex, I wouldn’t have got­ten a warm fuzzy.

    Orig­i­nally, I thought that they would use the one instru­men­tal on the tape. Oh no. They were going to use my sick­en­ingly sweet love song. Yec­chh. My voice would also be on there.

    I asked my buddy, writer Steven Sch­neck, if I should use my real name. He said “you’ll never work in this town again”. I told him that I wasn’t work­ing there now. Besides, Ash­lyn rejected my favorite name, “Miles Long”.

    Steven was also the guy that had a Span­ish copy of Dia­net­ics: Dia­net­ica. I asked him if he read it in Span­ish. He said “Since I’m not going to read it, I might as well not read it in Spanish”.

    So, for a cou­ple of years I received Christ­mas cards from Ash­lyn (signed “all my sex”), thank yous, and requests for more music.

    I did get one check from BMI. I thought about fram­ing it, but by cash­ing it, I got to deduct absolutely every­thing musi­cally related. Huzzah.

    So there ends my foray into pornog­ra­phy — as well as my foray into the music busi­ness. How­ever, peo­ple occa­sion­ally look at my PADI Dive­mas­ter ID and say I look like Ron Jeremy. That can’t be a good thing, can it?

    Good thing I got that Ph.D., huh?

    Fun links for more backstory:

    http://​mor​risxp​.cti​.depaul​.edu/​k​n​i​f​e​b​w2.jpg

    http://​www​.ash​lyn​.com

    http://​excal​ibur​films​.com/​A​d​u​l​t​D​V​D​/​7​6​3​2​6​D​2​+​A​s​h​l​y​n​+​G​e​r​e​s​+​R​e​a​l​i​t​i​e​s​+​2​+​d​vd.htm

    http://​www​.imdb​.com/​t​i​t​l​e​/​t​t​0​1​62594/

    And don’t for­get: http://​dont​burn​thewire​.com

  2. John said on December 28th, 2004 at 7:56 am

    Great story.…and you do look like Ron Jeremy, the nasty one, not the reha­bil­i­tated one from “The Sur­real Life”…

  3. ashley said on December 29th, 2004 at 3:35 am

    I tell peo­ple I was Ron’s stunt dou­ble. Sud­denly, that joke got new life when “Orgazmo” came out.

    BTW, the easy to remem­ber link is SaveTheWire​.com

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