Well, dear readers, here’s the thing. The thing. You know, the thing. The thing is on Facebook you can now click on Reels and Shorts in your feed. It shows up every day in every way. A lot of it is just recycled stuff from YouTube’s Reels and Shorts. And what are these Reels and Shorts? Well, let me enlighten you – the innocuous ones are usually clips from TV shows or movies. Then there are people who crave social media stardom and post videos of themselves being “funny” – one such married couple must have fifty of these cycling every day – they’re all the same and they’re all completely unfunny, although the gal has a certain charm but so does a wombat. Then there are prank shorts – vile, unfunny, stupid, all of them. All these things usually run under thirty seconds, some longer, and some as short as four seconds. But, and it’s a big BUTT – the majority are young women trying to get millions of views and shockingly they do. And what are these young women doing? Oh, sitting with their legs apart so you can stare up their dress and see their disgusting thongs. Some bend over, showing you their ASS briefly – who is titillated by this stuff? Others pour water on their skimpy t-shirts – hmmm, wonder why? The new one is the worst – breast feeding so you can glimpse their you-know-whats. I’m pretty sure the kids aren’t even theirs. Then there are the dancing vids, always shot from a low angle so you can see up the short skirt. There’s one gal who does the same dance in what must be over 100 videos, all of them with millions of monetized views. This is what we’ve devolved to. And Facebook, who will suspend your account if you do the slightest thing and especially if you even hint at nudity, doesn’t care about the ASS showing or the nipple showing – I know this, because I did a test and reported five videos for doing that. Their response? “This does not violate community standards.” Ask dear reader elmore about the hypocrisy of THAT. In any case, I think I’ll make a few Reels and Shorts where I sit on my couch like so much fish in my sleeping attire and peek-a-boo shorts – I know this will result in millions of views as I’ll be the only old Jew doing that. Stay tuned.
Otherwise, I did manage to watch a motion picture last evening and prior to that, I slept through about eight minutes of an hour and forty-three-minute movie entitled Leo the Last. I’ve always heard about this huge bomb of a movie, but it’s never been on home video so I’ve never seen it. But it’s streaming on Showtime, which I have free for a week so I tried to watch it. It’s terrible, as bad as its reputation. Surprisingly, it’s directed by John Boorman, a 1970 film that is so confused and so outré that it’s no surprise that it came and went with surprising alacrity. It played for a week or two in one theater in Los Angeles in August of 1970, where it was roundly panned by everyone. Then, on October 21 it played the bottom half of a double bill, the top half being what would be another huge flop, The Angel Levine, with Zero Mostel and Harry Belafonte, also a terrible movie. What a double whammy THAT must have been back then. In fact, there were a huge number of bombs either opening or closing that week in LA, including The Traveling Executioner (one week and goodbye), Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, C.C. and Company, Darling Lili, Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came, and more. But that very night you could see a preview of a new Mel Brooks movie – of course, that was The Twelve Chairs. However, all was not lost – you could see Anthony Newley at the Coconut Grove, you could see Barbara Rush in Forty Carats at the Ahmanson, you could see Hair, in its final two weeks, at the Aquarius Theater, you could see Charles Gordone’s play, No Place to Be Somebody at the Huntington Hartford, or, if you hurry, you can see one of the final ten performances of a new Broadway-bound musical based on Teahouse of the August Moon, Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion – good seats available! I can tell you I saw no movies that week, but did see Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen, which I actually quite enjoyed, with Kenneth Nelson, David Burns, and others. Interestingly, start times at the big legit theaters was still 8:30 and 2:30 for matinees. That would change pretty soon after.
Then I watched and stayed awake for a motion picture entitled I Am Woman, the story of Helen Reddy. Pretty standard bio-pic – she passed away about a year after its release and the filmmakers showed it to her and her ex-hubby, Jeff Wald. Tilda Cobham-Hervey, who I liked in a terrible movie called Burn, is really fine as Helen and Evan Peters does well as Jeff Wald. It only goes up to around 1989 in what it covers. You’d have thought that they’d just use her recordings but instead they have a singer do new versions – at times she sounds very close to Helen and other times not so much. Maybe the original tracks were too expensive to use. It was directed by someone called Unjoo Moon, whose only non-documentary film it seems to be – the direction is perfunctory and okay. I enjoyed it for what it was, and the songs, of course, are terrific and well produced. As you probably know, I have my own little history with Ms. Reddy, having produced her 1997 CD, Center Stage, back-to-back with producing Petula Clark’s Here for You CD. What a three weeks THAT was. I fell in love with Petula, not so much with Helen, although I did love her way with a song. We got along okay, certainly, but I never felt the kinship I felt with Petula and every other major star I worked with. I’d produced one track with Helen prior to the solo album – That’s What Friends Are For for The Burt Bacharach Album – that experience was wonderful and she was much warmer in that session. Helen was dating a much younger guy from Brazil if memory serves, and we were all treated every day to the previous night’s randy behavior with Mr. Brazil – that and how many crunches she’d done before coming to the studio. But I ran into her at one of the signing shows at the Burbank Marriott when her book came out – she was there signing copies, so I bought one and she remembered me right away and amazingly had nothing but lovely things to say about the album and working with me, which took me by surprise. We had a lovely conversation She signed the book, “To Bruce – seems like old times!”
Yesterday was okay. I only got five or six hours of sleep, got up, answered e-mails, got dressed, then went to storage, where we spent an hour moving boxes and having no success finding anything. Then I drove over to Tommy’s and got a chili cheeseburger and chili cheese fries, came home and ate it all up – very good but perhaps a few too many onions. Too Many Onions – that’s the title of my next novel. Then I caught up on stuff, got new graphics for my Emmy eBlast I’ll do today. Here they are.
Aren’t those lovely graphics. If you happen to know any members of the TV Academy, please ask them to vote for the likes of us. Then I had my viewing and here we are.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll read through the script again of the workshop I’m directing, eat, then we have a music-only rehearsal – yes, there are ditties in this thing. That will probably last three hours. We sent them tracks to work with so the hope is they’ll already know stuff.
The rest of the week is more of that – if they really are good on the songs, we next rehearse on Thursday, currently scheduled to be music-only but my plan is to probably start staging the play that night – or maybe after we run all the music once, which won’t take more than thirty minutes. Then it’s straight-through rehearsals until we do the thing on the following Tuesday and Wednesday nights.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, read a script, eat, have a music-only rehearsal, and then listen and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: Have you seen any of these Facebook Reels and Shorts or the same on YouTube? Are there any YouTubers you actually like? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, where I shall dream of my own Reels and Shorts being an old Jew sitting on the couch like so much fish in my sleeping attire and peek-a-boo shorts.