Nathan Gotsch, one of those young squeaky-clean Fort Wayne guys for whom the phrase “you went to Concordia, didn’t you?” was coined, is trying to produce a TV pilot far away from the Man, man. It’s an expansion of his Josh Jennings for Congress spoof of 2006 — he produced a campaign commercial for a fictional character who decided a job in the House of Representatives would be way better than one at Subway. He got a little attention, if “being mentioned on Tucker Carlson’s show” counts as “a little attention,” and I think it does.

Anyway, Nathan got some attention from the Man, and after considering what going the traditional route would entail, decided to blaze an indie trail. He’s put together a budget for a $25,000 pilot production, and is trying to raise the dough via Kickstarter. Here’s his fundraising page.

I read the script and it’s pretty funny. (Funnier than “Reno 911,” anyway.) If you’d like to help Nathan, go to his Kickstarter page, watch the video, marvel at how much he resembles the absolute essence of a Concordia graduate, and, if you’re so inclined, kick him a few bucks. He has a week to raise about $15K. Goad to my fellow Hoosiers, past and present — although the pilot script never explicitly says so, the story’s set in Fort Wayne, and I can assume this would come up in subsequent episodes. However, if it gets picked up, I think we can expect to see Nathan’s crew in Michigan for exteriors shooting, because we have the fat tax incentives. (For now.) So win-win all around for my Midwest playas.

No pressure, just a chance to use a Web 2.0 idea for good, for a change. (You know how Kickstarter works, right? Nathan only gets the money if he reaches his goal. If not, you’re not billed. That way you aren’t giving him cash to drink away his sorrows because he didn’t get enough to make his pilot.)

Given the bummer tone of recent days, let’s make this Twinkle Thursday, and strive for optimism in all things. It’s what Josh would do.

While this isn’t exactly a happy-news sort of thing, I’m calling it out because it makes me feel optimistic about the future — of journalism, anyway. One of our readers, Kim, left it low in the comments of yesterday’s post, but let’s drag it out into the light of day:

Bob (not Greene) and all the other journos out there who have been accused of making it up: Here’s the story we used from a student journalist who was at the boring press conference but paying close attention (and recording it) because she didn’t want to get it wrong. Note the link to actually listen to the state delegate saying the words he now says were “poorly chosen” and misinterpreted. As you might expect, there’s been a fecal avalanche as a result. Rachel M., HuffPost, Sally Quinn – everybody’s weighing in. There’s a movement to skewer the student reporter because she is a student and because much larger, “actual” papers were present and totally missed it. Why’d they miss it? My guess is they were just making the doughnuts, going to a conservative legislator’s press conference about de-funding Planned Parenthood and filing that Saturday feed-the-beast story. Similar to the reason a local delegate who was present as a supporter of de-funding PP did not hear it – she admitted to not paying attention because she was talking to another delegate. Quite a lesson for the student. I’d say for public officials everywhere, too, but that would make me seem much younger than I am.

The story, if you’re not inclined to click through, quotes a state delegate’s interesting opinion about why there are so many disabled children in the world:

“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” said Marshall, a Republican.

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Marshall, well, he now says he didn’t exactly say that:

“No one who knows me or my record would imagine that I believe or intended to communicate such an offensive notion. I have devoted a generation of work to defending disabled and unwanted children, and have always maintained that they are special blessings to their parents.”

In other words: Shit. And you were recording? Double shit.

I love it when Roger damns with faint praise. In this case, reviewing “The Crazies.”

“The Crazies” is a perfectly competent genre film in a genre that has exhausted its interest for me, the Zombie Film. It provides such a convenient storytelling device: Large numbers of mindless zombies lurch toward the camera as the hero wreaks savage destruction; they can be quickly blown away, although not without risk and occasional loss of life. When sufficient zombies have been run through, it’s time for a new dawn.

“The Crazies” stars NN.C crush object Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, two actors who class up the joint, although I watched the trailer and it uses the old “no signal” cell-phone trope. As they say in that other zombie movie: One more for the bonfire. (That link doesn’t go to an imdB page, by the way, but to a great “no signal” montage, via John August, which he credits to FourFour. Has all due credit been passed around? I hope so.)

It’s 9:47, which means my Flex Appeal class starts in 13 minutes and I must away. The sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and so are you, dear readers. So I’m going out to play.

From the number of times this story turned up in my Facebook feed yesterday I have to assume everyone’s seen it by now, but not all of you stay online all day, so what the hell. It’s about Roger Ebert, and what his life is like now that he’s lost the ability to speak, eat and drink. (He lost his jaw to cancer four years ago, and reconstructive surgery has been one failure after another.)

Ebert posed for a picture; with his imperfectly fixed face, that requires no small amount of courage in and of itself. I’m glad he did, not just because it’s better to show one’s broken face than to hide it, but because even a face that’s half-gone can still show the man within. Look at the eyes, squinched a little in what looks like merriment, although you can’t say for sure at first glance — the mouth has been shaped by surgeons into a simulacrum of a smile, and maybe that’s what leads your impression. But once you read the story, you know: This is a man who smiles, who still smiles, who in fact seems to be smiling much of the time. He’s angered not by the fate of his physical body, but by the same things he was angered by before, that anger us all — petty bullshit, money-grubbing, spotty internet service.

There is no need to pity me, he writes on a scrap of paper one afternoon after someone parting looks at him a little sadly. Look how happy I am.

I came late to my appreciation of Ebert. I was a Siskel partisan, once upon a time. Siskel was like me — snooty, irritable, a fan of Art. Ebert, the tabloid critic, was more of the hoi polloi, giving three and a half stars to action movies, space epics and other crap. It was a while before I realized he was as difficult to please as any discerning arbiter, but he knew enough about movies and why people see them to judge them as individuals. “Con Air” is not “Citizen Kane,” but he didn’t see any reason to rub anyone’s nose in it if they preferred action to Orson Welles. Mostly, I was in awe of his productivity. It’s pretty common — or was — for large newspapers to have an A critic and a B critic, the latter of whom was sometimes a freelancer. The A critic does the big-movie reviews and most of the related stories, roundups and the like, while the B critic sweeps up behind him or her, or just lightens the load. It’s not unusual for half a dozen movies to open on a summer weekend, ranging from blockbusters to art-house fare, and that’s a lot of stuff to see, consider and review in a week. Five years ago, I changed planes in Chicago on a Friday and picked up a Sun-Times. Ebert had bylines on six reviews, and I believe they covered that range of ambition. His take on the barrel-bottom straight-to-video entry was as considered, and as respectful, as his thoughts on the $200 million tentpole playing in all the multiplexes.

Respectful doesn’t mean boot-licking, by the way. Like my old screenwriting teacher Terry, who was also a critic, he walks into every film expecting to enjoy himself. (That’s what the audience does, after all; why would you pay eight bucks to be punished?) To the extent that the film fulfills or disappoints that expectation is what he bases his reviews on. It seems like a small thing. It isn’t. You might think you’re a movie fan, but imagine what it would be like to be required to see everything, and then write about it afterward, to have to form an opinion, support the opinion, and then present it to a general audience in a more stylish way than merely saying whether it was awesome or sucked.

Now imagine doing it for 40 years or so, never losing your enthusiasm, and in fact adding to your workload with extra assignments like his Great Movies series (which began as a Sunday column, swapped off every other week with the music critic, who wrote about the Great Albums), and the TV show, and the teaching gigs, and the film-festival work, and all the rest of it.

Now add cancer and facial mutilation, the literal loss of your voice. Tell me how you feel about it then.

The fact Ebert is still at work in any capacity, much less at full speed, is nothing short of a miracle. His last extended leave, when he nearly died, he missed months of movies. When he came back, he resumed his old blistering pace, and then watched the movies he’d missed, a few at a time, writing reviews of them, so that the record would be complete. I think he knows what his opinion means to the moviegoing public. I don’t see a lot of movies in theaters, but I try to catch up with the bigs eventually, and I never feel like I’ve watched it all the way until I’ve opened the laptop afterward to see what Roger thought of it.

Lord knows he’s not perfect. I disagree with him on many films, and his fondness for Spike Lee will always come between us. But in every other way — expertise, attitude, practice — he is nothing short of a hero.

Ebert is dying in increments, and he is aware of it.

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear, he writes in a journal entry titled “Go Gently into That Good Night.” I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

Years ago, I was watching the cultural kerfuffle over “The Passion of the Christ,” probably on Amy Welborn’s blog, because that was the sort of thing she wrote about a lot, back then. Ebert gave the film four stars, but the review is hardly worshipful, and he states outright that “it is the most violent movie I have ever seen.” I mentioned this review somewhere in her comments sections, and someone else retorted, Roger Ebert is an old man and he’s dying. His opinion no longer matters, or words to that effect. This was before his illness had taken its most serious tolls (he’s fought it for years), but I was amazed by not only the cruelty of that remark, but its utter ignorance. Roger Ebert’s opinion not only still matters, it will matter for a long time after he’s gone. If that isn’t the best epitaph a writer can hope for, I don’t know what is.

If luck smiles on my schedule today, I hope to make it over to the Detroit Ice House. The managers of the project haven’t announced its location yet, so I won’t, either. But I know. It’s difficult to keep an abandoned house that has been carefully covered with ice much of a secret. They’ve surrounded the place with police tape, so the snow doesn’t get disturbed before the official project photographs are taken. Or so I’m told. It’s close enough for a quick lunchtime hop, and by then the temperature should be high enough that things should be a little drippy. High pressure promises preservative temperatures until the big reveal.

There are enough of these guerrilla art projects going on around here — a previous cadre of hipsters painted abandoned houses, from roof to foundation, including windows, in shades of safety orange and green — that I wonder if we’re on the tipping point of becoming a playground for this sort of thing. I once wrote that only in Detroit could a bartender become a real-estate developer, but now it’s even easier. In “The Farmer and the Philosopher,” the short film we saw the other night, Toby Barlow remarks that Detroit is a pretty big canvas. True dat. But I share Jim Griffioen’s oft-stated concern that poverty porn is not, in the end, a good thing, and attaching a food drive and other do-gooding to a project, while certainly worthy, can’t make it entirely right.

But I’ll reserve judgment until I see it. One of the very few conservative critiques of art I agree with is the idea that art shouldn’t have to come with a big explanation text, that when an artist has to post a signboard telling the viewer what he was after and whose blood the red paint signifies, the work has already failed. The Ice House may or may not “reference the contemporary urban conditions in the city and beyond,” as its blog states, but I do look forward to seeing it.

Which is a very long-winded way of saying, “I know what I like,” so there it is.

On Saturday, I’ll check out the Belle Isle Ice Tree, which makes no claims about urban conditions, other than, “Cold enough for you?”

I need to get out of the house, anyway. I’ve reached the stage of winter where feeling bad is a loop: I feel bad, so I skip workouts/eat too much/don’t get outdoors enough, which leads to more of the same. I should change my name to Ursa and just hibernate the season away, but then, who would dig up stuff to show you every day? Like…

Oh, the things you miss when you don’t watch Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had Jon Stewart on? And Stewart said Fox has “taken reasonable concerns about this president …and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao”? I’d have paid to see that.

You’ve seen the generic TV report and the generic blog post. Here’s the generic Oscar-nominations story. If everyone is hip to this, why do these things keep getting done? (Thanks, Vince.)

I hate it when a story emerges that requires me to suddenly read a million words to get up to speed, and several hundred of the words involve morons whining that they should have to pay for something and why can’t they just steal it the way they did in the good ol’ days, but that seems to be what the Amazon/MacMillan fight last weekend seems to be. For those of you who weren’t tuned in, it involves a price war over e-books that broke out in the wake of the iPad announcement. Amazon is using cheap e-books to sell Kindles, and MacMillan is trying to hold the line on selling its inventory at a loss, for obvious reasons. Here’s Virginia Postrel at the Atlantic with something of an overview. Here’s John Scalzi on Amazon’s screwup. And here’s Scalzi again, being funny, on the many, many stupid things people are saying in the wake of last week’s events, including (in so many words), “it’s not like writing a book is that hard” and “I won’t pay for anything I can steal with impunity.” (I’m thinking this is maybe the only thing you need to read about this.)

May I add one more thing? All those people saying, “E-books are great, because then the last barrier standing between the dedicated amateur and his vast readership will fall to pieces” are invited to sign on as slush pile readers any any publisher within driving distance. And please, in keeping with your views about the real work of publishing, work for no pay. Report at the end of one week. Yes.

Oh, and while we’re at it? I read this thing in Slate about YouTube’s penny-ante rental proposal to help little-seen independent films get a little more-seen, offering feature-length films online for $3.99, and I see that the comments have already started:

“The beginning of the end,” wrote one user in comments; “i thought the purpose of youtube was to watch videos for free.” Another wrote that “Youtube is seriously [sic] selling out,” apparently unaware that YouTube, in fact, already sold out to Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Only in a world where people think nothing of paying $4 for a cup of coffee could they balk at the idea of paying a penny less to watch a movie.

OK, now I’m inspired. I’m going to get dressed, floss the spinach out of my teeth — healthy breakfast, step one to improving one’s perspective on winter — and off to the Ice House! You enjoy Thursday.

A great time was had by me at the Mitten Movie Project last night (and probably at least some others). The monthly festival of short films featured the director’s cut of “The Message,” our December 48-hour challenge short, and please don’t laugh — unlike most director’s cuts, this one really was better than the original. (Yes, of course it grew. By two minutes.)

The Mitten is curated by one of our producers, Connie Mangilin, who keeps a relentlessly upbeat attitude about film in Michigan, large and small. She frequently works on the large productions, in part to finance her participation in the small ones. Knowing how much work goes into even a very small one, it’s always amazing to see how many people even bother to do it, and gratifying that so many do it well.

(Of course, many do it not-well, too, but now that I’ve done this a time or three, I can almost always see what the problem was, and forgive them for it. When you can’t pay people, you get people willing to work for nothing. When they are actors, it’s a coin flip. Amateur actors are more likely to have grating upper-Midwest eeaccents that can reduce even well-written dialogue to cole slaw. And nearly all of them are young and most are arty hipster types, which becomes a problem when you’ve written a role for, say, a gangster. A word to directors: Putting sunglasses on a guy with a soul patch and a visible piercing doesn’t make him look particularly threatening. He just looks like an arty hipster douchebag. By the way, many professional actors have voice problems, too. Brad Pitt is from Nebraska southern Missouri, but has a persistent contemporary burr in his voice that works in the “Oceans” movies but sounds ludicrous in many roles, particularly as Achilles.)

Among the highlights last night: “The Farmer and the Philosopher,” a short about Toby Barlow, author and Detroit ad man, and Mark Covington, the inspiring soul behind the Georgia Street Community Collective, a reclamation of a battered neighborhood on the east side. A long-overdue note: Sweet Juniper has featured the GSCC a time or three, and when I mentioned it here some months back, one of you fabulous NN.C readers hit their Paypal button and donated $50. I learned of this sometime later, and while I know whoever did it wasn’t looking for credit (at least, I assume so — I don’t know who it was), here, have some: CREDIT.

Another fave was “Dr. Reddy,” a goofy story about a bad doctor but an awesome karaoke singer — in Telugu! Dr. Reddy was played by an actor — sorry, I didn’t get his name — who has actually worked in various Telugu-language films; it’s the one spoken in southern India, and the videos playing during his karaoke performance featured himself in a big Bollywood-style song-and-dance number. And the karaoke takes place in a biker bar, so what you end up with is a sort of Peewee Herman-goes-to-Hyderabad-via-Sturgis thing. That’s entertainment.

And then there was our film, with extra footage that wouldn’t fit into our 48-hour time limit. One of these days we’ll get it up on Vimeo and you folks can watch it. One of these days.

Until then, there’s a poster:

The existence of this poster just cracks me up. Both my co-writer Ron and I plan to hang it in our houses to impress our easily impressed friends. And if it isn’t a finalist in the competition (we find out any day now) I will stain it with bitter tears.

So, then, bloggage? There must be some:

I was struck by this picture of she-who, presumably taken on the set of some Fox News show. She may not have the Fox Lips yet, but she definitely has the Fox Parentheses, the styling of the hair into punctuation marks framing the face. For some reason this is the preferred hairstyle of TV news, mostly on blondes, but now on the world’s most famous right-wing brunette. I think we’ve seen the last of the messy updo, boys; if that’s your favorite look, hang on to your pictures and be careful how often you kiss them. I predict we’ll start seeing a lot more caramel-colored highlights in the future, too. Just be advised.

Hmm, Hoosiers: Dan Coats to take on Evan Bayh? We’ll see. Non-Hoosiers: The former Sen. Coats was one of the birdbrains behind the Communications Decency Act, an early attempt at regulating smut on the internet, a staggeringly dimwitted piece of legislation that was overturned by the Supreme Court unanimously. When you can get Justice John Paul Stevens and Justice Antonin Scalia to agree on something, you know you’ve got a hit on your hands.

And that’s it for today, folks. Let’s hope for a better tomorrow.

A story in Sunday’s NYT makes the case for George Clooney, movie star AND actor. I agree 100 percent. As a withered crone, of course my hubba-hubba interest in him is, in a word, gross, so I lay that aside and concentrate, like the writer of this piece does, on how he does it. We saw “Up in the Air” over the weekend, and there were several points where I noticed what isn’t appealing about his physicality — he’s a little too thin, and has the big Hollywood head first pointed out by LAMary some time back. (As an Angeleno who has seen many in the flesh, she called actors “the lollipop people.”) There was an angle here and there where you could see his neck is getting crepey, although he retains the Clooney sparkle and will until he dies.

What I like about him is his (seeming) professional pluck, uncommon in a movie star capable of phoning it in until retirement. He comes across as not only a nice movie-star guy, but one who really is all about the work. He takes chances, stretches himself, is unafraid of both failure and unflattering camera angles that show his softening neck. He has the self-effacement and good sense not to whine about how hard it is to be him, at least in public. I know a few people who’ve had personal encounters with him and say he’s pretty much as advertised, and if it really is all bullshit and he’s just very good at snowing fangirls like me, then, well-snowed, sir.

Terrence Rafferty gets it right at the very beginning:

He’s the kind of actor who could float along forever on his genial presence alone, coast on charm. But he doesn’t. (Or doesn’t always.) That’s the mystery.

That is, indeed, the mystery. It’s hard to imagine another actor carrying “Up in the Air” as capably as he does, even when you look closely and see where he gets help. He plays a son of a bitch who happily fires people for a living, but gains our sympathy through the early introduction of an even bigger monster, a young underling who wants to fire people for a living via teleconference. He makes a pitch for the comparable dignity of doing such ugly work in person, and you almost forget that he’s the guy who makes his living through outsourced terminations in the first place. It’s the Don Corleone trick; he’s happy to make his living from violence, gambling, prostitution and protection, but not from drugs. He’s the best bad guy in the room.

I try not to read too much about movies I intend to see in theaters, but it was hard to miss the chatter about “Up in the Air,” particularly as it was partially shot here and touches the raw wound of job loss. I read beforehand about how Jason Reitman, the writer and director, had to make a tonal shift in his script as the story was, as we say in journalism, overtaken by events. But whatever he had to rewrite or rethink, he did it exceptionally well. It’s so sure-footed. I think one reason I liked this movie so much is, we don’t see enough stories onscreen about people’s work lives (unless they’re doctors or lawyers or police, that is). We certainly don’t see many about people who work in white-collar office jobs, and I found myself moved by shots that weren’t even particularly fussed over — the pans of offices already half-empty, the extra chairs pushed into a vacant cubicle, the phones piled up on the floor, the way everyone sees Clooney walk in and immediately cower in fear. I’ve been there; my office looked like that when I left, and one of the exciting new ad hoc committees for 2005 was supposed to be the rearrangement and removal of furniture so it didn’t look so tumbleweedy.

I also like Rafferty’s career assessment of Clooney, as he called out my two favorite performances — “Out of Sight” and “Michael Clayton,” and the best part of the latter film. It’s the final, two-minute shot of the Cloonester in the back of a cab:

He flags a taxi, slumps into the back seat and tells the cabbie to drive, and it’s only then that you understand how eloquent Mr. Clooney’s body language has been throughout the preceding two hours — how tensely he’s been holding himself, how warily he’s been sizing up his dangerous world. As he sits in the cab, just riding, the camera stays on him for two full minutes. He does nothing, apparently. His expression hardly changes. But you can feel the weight of what he’s been through in his blankness, his emptied-out eyes. You can’t stop looking at him. It’s a great, daring piece of acting. Only a movie star could get away with it.

(I disagree with that last sentence, by the way. Bob Hoskins, “The Long Good Friday,” end of discussion.)

OK, then. Movie Monday it is, I guess. We also caught an oldie I’d never seen before, “Bound,” on cable Friday night. More on that when I recover from how good it was.

Bloggage? Sure:

The Harry Reid story is leading the weekend news cycle as “Game Change,” the new book about the 2008 presidential campaign, gets circulating. But don’t miss this excerpt in New York magazine, about the meltdown of another handsome man, John Edwards, who fell for the oldest trap in the world.

Speaking of Reid, who still says “Negro,” anyway? Doesn’t he know the code word yet? “Articulate?”

This NYT Styles story was so stupid it made my brain hurt. Thank God for Terrence Rafferty.

I’m late getting to the big New Yorker profile of John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods and, it would seem, the model for Steve Martin’s character in “Baby Mama.” Note well:

His belief in the power of the individual is such that blame falls on individuals, too. In his view, it tends to be the fault of the unhealthy or fat person that he or she is unhealthy or fat. People just need to eat better. He told me, “If I could, I would wave a magic wand so that Americans ate better, because the diseases that are killing us—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s—these diseases have a high correlation with diet. And that is something that most people do not understand.”

It matters less to him that our food system, for a dozen reasons, as Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and many others have chronicled, has been rigged to deliver unhealthy food at artificially low cost to a misguided public. People have the power and the means to choose rice and beans over Big Macs, and when they fail to do so they bring ruin on themselves, and on everyone else. In his Wall Street Journal column, Mackey wrote of “the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health. Unfortunately, many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight, and one-third are obese.” Inarguable as this assertion may be, it struck a discordant note. People who may look to Whole Foods to agitate for changes in the food system, or who have been bankrupted by medical costs despite eating right, might wonder if it was quite the moment to be preaching personal responsibility.

Worth your time.

And another week begins. At least it was a pretty weekend. Enjoy it.

Well, we got our snow. The world is white — I’d guesstimate we topped out at three inches or so — and the neighborhood resounds with the blast of two-cycle engines. No, wait — the last one just stopped. That would be ours, and don’t give me any crap about it, Lance Mannion, because we have a long driveway and this ain’t Atlanta. So now the world is white and quiet, and our little part of it is safe for pedestrians. Winter is on. Temperatures remain low, and I’m hoping the snow is safe for a while. It’s been a while since I went out in my North Face and mirrored Ray-Ban aviators. Winter’s own bad-ass.

But today’s question concerns indoor activities: Do you buy movies on DVD? Why or why not?

I ask because I don’t. Or hardly ever, now that Kate is past childhood and the time-for-mom technique of parking her in front of a video. In Ann Arbor a few years ago I came across a tent sale for Border’s warehouse stock, a real Blondie-goes-to-Tudbury’s free-for-all, and they had unsold or cutout or made-obsolete-by-the-director’s-cut DVDs for sale for $5, the magic price point for me, and I think I bought three — “The Producers” (and if you wonder whether it was the original or the remake, you don’t know me at all), “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” and “Taxi Driver.” I have watched the first two once, and the third maybe three times, mainly for the featurettes. That’s the most DVDs I ever bought at a sitting, but I have maybe a handful more, mostly Criterion Collection classics, that I never or rarely watch.

I wonder because someone must buy DVDs, beyond Blockbuster stores. I see DVDs at garage sales. They’re never, ever, a movie anyone with half a brain would want to watch, even on cable. Being hoodwinked into spending $8 on a ticket before the reviews buried it, sure. And yet someone said, “Ellen DeGeneres in ‘Mr. Wrong’? Yeah, that’s worth $20.” Most movies are crap, and most do their briskest DVD sales in the first month. And the only DVDs I’d buy are things like “Rashomon,” 60 years young.

A few years back I did a story on the great American paperback book, and had a fascinating chat with the author of a coffee-table book devoted to the subject. The paperback, he said, is truly a democratic wonder, and pointed out that the standard price point of mass-market paperback has, over time, tracked amazingly close to that of an hour of work at minimum wage. Before paperbacks, Americans who weren’t wealthy enough to buy hardcover books — and there were millions of them — patronized lending libraries, which were not the same as public libraries, more like video stores for books. You paid a fee to check a book out for a few days, and brought it back. The paperback dime novel, printed on cheap paper and easy to stick in a lunch pail or back pocket for a few minutes’ break time, represented a revolution in bringing books to the masses.

Of course, the masses don’t always want to read the Harvard Classics, so then we got the glorious genre of pulp fiction, about which I will one day write at greater length. It so happens that in the last year I read collections of two of my favorite writers’ early work for the pulps (Elmore Leonard and John D. MacDonald), and boy was that interesting. Your English teacher tells you fiction is art, but there’s a special kind of art created by having to get a lot of exposition up top, before the reader has to turn the page. I’ve always admired fiction writers who could make their living entirely from writing and not teaching, and you get a glimpse of how it’s done — by pleasing the reader. Those who can do it and make it fun to read are well and truly artists, if you ask me.

I guess buying John D. MacDonald’s pulp collection would qualify as buying the DVD. (Although I didn’t. It was a gift.)

I am no longer making sense. I’m distracted. I’ve been thinking about a story I’d like to pitch, which really interests me. Now to find a functioning publication that might pay me for it. That’s the challenge.

So, what do you have cued up for the weekend, besides getting out your shiny aviator shades?

One bit of bloggage: I see John Goodman has been added to the cast of “Treme,” by our fave David Simon, now shooting in New Orleans. Goodman will play a “college professor,” I read. Let’s hope his character is named Ashley Morris.

That is all.

I don’t know if any of you had a chance to read J.C.’s rant yesterday, on his blog, about the public self-scourging news executives are given to these days. In particular, this passage set him off:

Tom Rosenstiel and others pointed out [that] those journalists and news organizations that don’t drop the pose of lecturer and learn how to genuinely engage the audience will be lost.

The pose of lecturer!? Perhaps you’re confusing that with, uh, reporting the news.

We’ve all known one of those people who’s inclined to be apologetic — takes all the blame, defers all credit to others, calls herself no great beauty, calls himself only half-bright. And sooner or later, we all discover there’s a very fine line between self-effacement and cringing, just as there’s one between bold confidence and Donald Trump. I think John found it in the news executives who fret over “lecture-based journalism.” I can’t remember where I first heard that expression, of “old” reporting as a lecture and “new” reporting as a conversation, but it was a few years ago, and I think it was from none other than Jimmy Lileks, who only took a few more years to allow comments on his own blog. Heh. Indeed.

But that’s not important. The idea is that somehow journalists aren’t really journalists until they engage readers in “the conversation” and stop “lecturing.” Well, OK. I mean, I get it. But I think, in getting it, too many editors and publishers are forgetting about professionalism.

I swear, I don’t think for even a minute that I’m a screenwriter, but of late I’ve been in a screenwriting state of mind, and have rediscovered John August’s fine, fine screenwriting blog. Yesterday he had an item about a startup company called Scripped, prompted by an interview with one of its founders, who seemed to be saying that the problem with screenwriting today is that the people who do it make too much money, and the way to fix this “problem” is to make free screenwriting software available to all, and open it up to real-time “collaboration” with other users who fancy themselves the next Richard LaGravenese. Sunil Rajaraman says:

Two problems are solved with web-based screenwriting software. The first is collaboration. Many of the scripts of the films we see in movie theaters have undergone dozens of rewrites before they make it to the screen. For example, for the original of Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck put the screenplay together with more anecdotal stories about South Boston and friends they grew up with. Characters were eliminated from the screenplay and it underwent a very detailed rewriting process. Who knows how many writers had their hands on that screenplay before it was made — and it eventually won an Oscar. Collaboration is made easier with web-based software…. That goes for people collaborating across different locations. Let’s say you are working with writers in China or India and you are here in the U.S. Scripped makes it easier to share drafts, track real-time changes and so forth.

The second problem online software solves is access to writers. If you give the software away for free — it is very cheap to provide the software — you can attract all sorts of talent that would have otherwise not been interested in screenwriting. All of a sudden, they are looking for free screenwriting software on Google. A plethora of options are available. By creating access to more writers, the software becomes a mechanism to aggregate talent.

I don’t know much about screenwriting. I took two university classes, wrote one feature-length screenplay for one class and rewrote it for the other. I’ve written four short scripts for which no one will ever give me an Oscar. I’m at work on another feature-length piece, which faces the usual overwhelming odds of even being read, much less produced. I’ve never earned a dime from it. It’s strictly a hobby that I do to give me and my friends something to goof around with. But if everything I know can be carried in a very small basket, I must know more than Sunil Rajamaran, who apparently raised venture capital based on the idea that the cost of screenwriting software is somehow a major discouragement to people who might otherwise be inclined to try it. I paid $49 for my copy of Final Draft, the industry-standard software. Granted, that was at steep university discount, with further markdowns for a coming new version, but even today, full retail is only $200. Apple’s word processor, Pages, contains a screenplay template and, as August points out, you can write a script on anything from MS Word to a typewriter.

What’s more, August further points out, the “Good Will Hunting” story is untrue, and even if it were, what’s the revelation? That many people get their hands on a script under consideration? You don’t say. Writing is rewriting? Stop the presses. It’s not uncommon for a script headed for production to be rewritten a dozen times or more. I learned this from reading the New Yorker, not as a secret handed down by the faculty mandarins at the University of Michigan. Sometimes a rewrite improves a script; other times it ruins it. My rewrite professor liked to pass out early drafts of “The Truman Show,” when the story was set in New York City and Truman was a greasy creep who jerked off in public. By the time the cameras rolled, it was set in Seaside, Florida, and starred Jim Carrey as a sunny charmer. Hooray for Hollywood.

But this idea, that collaborating with other Scripped users in China or India is the key to your successful career, touches on something else I found through August’s site, and wraps up with what the news executives are saying, too — the difference between professional and amateur. August posts the text of a lecture he gave three years ago on the subject. It’s long, but it’s worth reading, because he makes a powerful distinction between the two, to wit:

When we say “professional,” I think what we’re really talking about is “professionalism,” which is this whole bundle of expectations about how a person is supposed to act.

Exactly. It’s not about whether you get paid. It’s about whether to take your work seriously enough to hold yourself to a certain set of standards. He points out the key difference between people who care enough to give a crap and those who don’t, in this passage:

When would you choose to be an amateur? Well, probably the moments in which you obviously suck, either because you don’t know what you’re doing, or you’re just not very good at it. Or at least in the moments when people are criticizing you. You’d say, “Hey, what do you expect? I’m only an amateur.”

You’re basically saying, “Don’t judge me.”

And here’s where this indirect proof falls apart: People will always judge you. You can’t control that. You can’t control what scale they’re going to judge you on, or which criteria are most important.

Exactly. For years, journalists who have been following the top “citizen journalists” have noted this difference. Say one screws up, gets pinned to the wall on a mistake or undisclosed conflict or whatever. Sooner or later, they try to wriggle out by throwing up their hands and saying, “Hey, I don’t get paid for this. I’m just a blogger.” They essentially undercut their own status, while at the same time asserting their right to be both outsiders and insiders. Read my reporting, but don’t hold it to your bullshit MSM standards, because I’m an amateur. They can assert whatever they want. But a professional shouldn’t do that. (I say this fully aware that I’ve done it myself.)

So I guess I’d join with J.C. in telling the news executives of the world to stop worrying so much about changing the lecture to a conversation, and just do your damn jobs. Take pride in them. Man up. Listen to feedback, consider it carefully, but stop cowering under it.

I’ve gone on way, way too long on this. This piece could use a rewrite, I see now. But I have to take a shower and get some work done. If you’ve come this far, how about a punchline?

Don’t judge me. I’m an amateur.

The film challenge came right on time, and was pretty simple: The end of the world. Free-choice genre, no prop or dialogue, only a story about the end of the world. You can see why this would make a Detroit crew feel they were halfway there:

Yes, it’s our old friend the Packard plant. But how can you not use it? If you needed a vast, already-dressed set suitable for the end of the world, duh. So we went there for a few shots.

Our main character is a teenage girl reduced to scavenging the ruined, depopulated city. She lives in a hovel. Our art department constructed one in the basement of another building, a former printing plant converted to lofts and performance spaces. Fortunately, the basement retains that “Silence of the Lambs” feel. I went down there as they were building her pallet:

God, these people are good. (The art department.) It was simultaneously post-apocalyptic and human. That light over the pallet felt precisely like weak winter sun coming through a skylight. It’s such a pleasure to work with people who are good at what they do. Like our makeup guy, Dan Phillips:

Dan used to be an autoworker. Took the buyout, went to makeup school, and is now working pretty often on the many productions going on here. He has some good stories. That’s Robert Young III, in his cameo role as Vacant Lot Corpse, showing off Dan’s handiwork. Photo by Connie Mangilin, another producer.

The film? Haven’t seen the final cut yet. I’ll keep you posted. This is the point in the process where I get crabby and it’s best that I keep my distance. Otherwise I might be striding around the office like a tyrant, channeling my inner newspaper cuss. One of our news editors in Fort Wayne would, when the desk fell behind, call out in his rich southern accent, “People! We ain’t puttin’ up a shuttle here!” I don’t think that would be helpful.

I’m not helping out much here, either. I commend to you today some words by our own J.C. Burns, who has beheld one too many grovels by broken-down, dispirited news executives, and has something to say to both the executives and the bored-bored-bored news consumers they allegedly serve.

I’m off to encounter Busy Monday.

Never ask an idle question on a blog, unless you want it answered. In this case I did, and I’m grateful to my old pal Vince for checking with his own pal Eddie, a native speaker of…I think Mandarin Chinese, although it could be Cantonese, and it may be both. (He’s a smart guy.) Anyway, I asked yesterday if anyone knew the meaning of the Chinese character in the “Red Dawn” remake, seen all over town these days.

And guess what, Eddie does: “It’s the date when the Communist Party told the Chinese people, regardless of their party affiliation, to stand up and fight against Japanese invasion” in 1935. (If you’d like to read Chairman Mao’s statement in its entirety, it’s the second footnote here, and let me warn you, Chairman Mao did not write in bumper stickers.)

So: Inside joke to those savvy enough to understand, key to some plot point, or just something the graphic designer liked? Whatever, thanks Vince, and thanks Eddie.

On edit: Vince writes: Eddie speaks Mandarin. (and Taiwanese, English & Japanese.) But reading the text has no regard for Mandarin vs Cantonese. The symbols are the same.

Noted.

I had an errand downtown Saturday, but alas, the block I was trying to reach was closed off. Parked police cars with lights flashing sat at either end, and in between were what appeared to be either soldiers or the baddest-ass SWAT unit in the tri-state area. Bomb scare? I thought, but only for a few seconds. Because lo, we are in Michigan, and Michigan is Hollywood’s sugar daddy (for the time being).

At first I thought it was more “Red Dawn,” which is seemingly everywhere these days. The “police station” is still wearing its wardrobe:

The red star with the whatever-it-is Chinese character is a logo throughout the film. If anyone speaks the language, I’d be interested in knowing what it means. Probably “tax incentives.”

Ah, but this is the conquered America of Barack Hussein Quisling Bow-down Obama, so this police station is well-fortified against the people it protects and serves. Street level:

And just in case you wanted to know what city our fair one is standing in for, the front door:

I tried to take a shot of the set that was working Saturday, but alas, the iPhone has no telephoto function. And I don’t think it was “Red Dawn.” The Guardian building is where they’ve been shooting this Wesley Snipes actioner, “Game of Death.” Imdb synopsis:

After a botched assassination attempt on a Diplomat, everyone from the Diplomat and his bodyguards to the group of assassins behind the attempt ends up at the same hospital where they fight it out.

Someone I know is working on this production. She calls it, “‘Die Hard’ in a hospital,” which is either the ten-thousandth or ten-thousand-and-first “Die Hard”-in-a-(fill in the blank) thumbnail. Did the people who made “Die Hard” v.1 know what they were doing? Maybe. I still stop to watch it, and all of its sequels, when I surf past them on cable, if only for a few minutes. Wouldn’t be the movie it was without Bruce Willis, of course, but he was well-served by the various British straight men they threw up against him, particularly Jeremy Irons. When Alan Rickman quotes Plutarch to the Japanese industrialist before busting a cap in his ass, well, that’s a moment that sticks with you, too.

But the genius of it was to simply ask the question everybody with half a brain asks when suffering through most action movies: Wouldn’t it hurt to pound someone in the skull with your bare fist like that? Bruce Willis stops from time to time to say “ouch” — that’s the ground broken by “Die Hard.” So simple. So successful.

That’s about the end of the verisimilitude*, however, and “Die Hard” was the beginning of action-movie loot hyperinflation. The first installment was about the theft of $600 million in bearer bonds, whatever those are. (Bearer bonds were very big in ’80s/’90s action movies, and that link explains why — they’re popular for money laundering — but I think their popularity is also tied to the alliteration of their name, as everyone from Alan Rickman to 50 Cent can sound cool saying “bearer bonds.”) By the third “Die Hard,” Jeremy Irons was plotting to steal all the money in the world, or at least all the gold held by the Federal Reserve in lower Manhattan; he had to carry it away in a convoy of dump trucks. This raises so many questions in the mind of even a half-bright moviegoer — how does one launder a dump truck full of gold? (Bearer bonds!) Hell, how does one even get it out of North America? — you could even forget that this is a summer movie and you’re not supposed to think about it.

But it was too difficult to top, and by the last “Die Hard” I don’t even remember what the bad guys were after, only that Bruce brought down a helicopter with a fire hydrant, and it was awesome.

* My personal quibble with action-movie reality: The noise factor. People are always firing machine guns or having explosions happen five feet away, and no one ever stops to say, “I can’t hear you! My ears are ringing from that explosion!” I spent one measly hour on a firing range Friday, wearing foam earplugs and earmuff protection, and every round above .38 caliber still made me just about jump out of my skin.

Oh, well. Monday bloggage? Sure.

Lots of blogs are reading “Going Rogue” so you don’t have to, but few are striking the perfect tone that Lawyers, Guns and Money is. They’re up to Chapter 4 now, but it’s all on the main page, still, so just scroll down and work your way up. I was interested to read this note about Chapter 3, which calls out the She-Who/Lynn Vincent casualness with her chapter epigraphs:

So far as bungled epigraphs go, the third chapter is arguably the winner so far, attributing this nugget of wisdom to the renowned former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden:

Our land is everything to us…. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember than our grandfathers paid for it — with their lives.

Now, if that’s not the sort of thing you’d expect a hall of fame basketball coach to say, that’s because, of course, he didn’t. Students of American Indian history might recognize that passage as belonging instead to John Wooden Legs, the post-WWII Northern Cheyenne tribal leader who — though a contemporary of John Wooden’s — was not the same guy.

Yes, yes — it’s absurd to expect much from Sarah Palin, but imagine if these sorts of gaffes had appeared in books by Hillary Clinton or Obama himself.

Exactly. Confusing John Wooden, the basketball coach, with John Wooden Legs, the Indian? That’s funny.

Ah, Monday. Police rounds, Russian lesson, followed by abs/glutes class in the evening. My life is sometimes indistinguishable from Paris Hilton’s.

Which reminds me of a story I forgot to blog, about a team of teenage burglars in Hollywood, who broke into various stars’ homes when they knew they’d be out partying. Among the victims was Paris Hilton, hit on multiple occasions, aided by this killer detail: She keeps her house key under the mat. No kidding.

Later!