Hollywood Babble On & On #1263: Some Shilling Then It Gets Offensive...

FIRST SOME SHILLING!

Okay, if you're a regular reader of my blog, or my Twitter feed, you will know that I sold a novel to Fahrenheit Press of Los Angeles. Soon A MINT CONDITION CORPSE will be available. It's what I call a "nerd noir" a satirical whodunnit set at a comic book convention starring a brilliant geek detective named KIRBY BAXTER, and his Scooby gang of friends.

So I'm putting out a call to any and all people who are taste-makers in the geek community, or they know taste makers, for some help. We can arrange preview copies of the book, for perusal, and if you, or they, like it, please get the word out. 

I need all the help I can get to get people to read this book. Those who do seem to enjoy it, so the more the merrier.

If you have any leads, let me know, either by my e-mail or via Twitter, and I'll make arrangements with my publisher.

Thanks in advance.

Now onto…

SOMETHING OFFENSIVE PART ONE

For a brief period SNL alumni Will Ferrell considered and then dropped out of a gig playing the late actor/governor/president Ronald Reagan with a twist.

That twist was that it was going to be a comedy inspired by the conspiracy theory that the Alzheimer's disease that destroyed the last ten years of Reagan's life secretly happened at the beginning of his second term. The theory goes on to say that he only made it through because his staff, in the movie; a young intern, convinced Reagan that he was playing the president in a movie.

Already Republicans, Reagan relatives, and many others are saying this is an offensive idea spawned by deep seeded political malice. The outrage probably was what scared Ferrell off the project in the end.

I also have something to add.

It will be an enormous waste of money and time.

The financiers would be better off putting the budget in a pile and setting it on fire. At least that way they can maybe have a wiener roast.

An even better idea is that they could give the budget to me, and let me make something worth watching, or just to live a lush lifestyle.

That's because this film falls into the far edge of what I call the Offend/Bore Matrix. That's where a film dealing with a controversial subject, like politics and/or religion is so aggressively partisan that it can only offend the opposite side of the issue and bore those who agree with the filmmaker.

But when you get out to the far edge, like this idea, you slip into the realm of the Offend/Creep region. That means that its militant partisanship has gone too far, and has become toxic, making anyone who likes it look like a creep.

Why?

Let's say you are a partisan Democrat. You despised Ronald Reagan and think he was the spawn of hell.

That's fine, you have a right to have your opinion of a politician. But there's that little something extra to this script, and that's Alzheimer's Disease.

Do you want to be known as the person who laughs at someone with Alzheimer's Disease?

Bring in Alzheimer's disease and political affiliations tend to fall by the wayside, and it slips into the realm of intense personal suffering.

Very few would find that kind of soul-destroying suffering funny, even if it happened to a Republican, and even fewer would publicly admit to finding it funny solely because it happens to a Republican.

Imagine this conversation:

A: Did you see the new movie about Reagan. It's the funniest thing ever made. 

B: Isn't that about him having Alzheimer's? 

A: Yeah, and it's hilarious. I laughed so much at his inability to remember things like friends and family. 

B: We didn't find it funny when that happened to my Grandpa. 

A: But this a Republican we're talking about. 

B: So?

A: That makes laughing at Alzheimer's okay! 

B: I can't even look at the trailers or commercials without remembering how bad things got for my Grandfather before he died. 

A: You have no sense of humour.

That might put a damper on the word of mouth.

SOMETHING OFFENSIVE PART TWO

Actress Scarlett Johansson has been cast in the lead role of an American movie version of the Japanese anime Ghost In The Shell.

This led to cries of outrage that the originally Japanese role hadn't gone to a Japanese actor. Most of the cries of "whitewashing" came from Asian-American organizations, and a lot of angry white people.

But do you know who wasn't offended by the casting?

The Japanese.

Most Japanese pundits and media outlets don't really care about Johansson's casting, and many are even enthusiastic about it.

The Japanese aren't freaking out over Johansson because they assume that an American version of a Japanese story would have an "American" actor (translation "White"). Part of this is because the Japanese have no qualms doing a Japanese version of a Euro-American story with Japanese versions of those once white characters. Kurosawa adapted several works of Shakespeare and the tropes of the American Western movie into many of his samurai films.

Then there's the other part: Even when it's not a Japanese version of a Euro-American story, but a Japanese story featuring caucasian European or American characters they will still use Japanese actors.

Case in point...

However, cast a Chinese, or Korean actor to play a Japanese character, or vice-versa, and then they get offended.

To explain that would involve explaining centuries of Asia's ethnic politics and prejudices, and I ain't going there.

Does this mean that "whitewashing" is not a problem?

No.

Whitewashing especially of Asian characters is a real problem, and it's part of the short shrift that Asian actors have been getting in Hollywood since the dawn of the medium.

White actors in bad make-up speaking pidgin English have been used to play Asian characters for over a century.  The most infamous being the popular Charlie Chan movies of the 1930s-1940s which managed to make the character of a brilliant detective shorthand for an insulting and offensive stereotype. 

But even when Asian-American actors break through in Hollywood they still got shafted. The first Asian-American movie star,  California born Anna May Wong* was beautiful, talented, and denied most of the plum roles she probably deserved.

Why?

There were actual laws on the books against the portrayal of interracial romance or "miscegenation."  That meant that she couldn't even kiss a white co-star on screen, even if he was playing an Asian character.

That meant that she was trapped playing stock or stereotyped characters for most of her career.

Those laws are gone, but the narrow casting of Asian actors in Hollywood continues. Also the recent demands for greater diversity in Hollywood also seem to leave them out.

That isn't right.

Hollywood does need to reflect the wider audience, and to ditch a lot of the stereotypes that hold back not only actors, but the art of storytelling.

But that will take effort, and Hollywood isn't known for spending effort, they just prefer to throw money at empty gestures and hope the problem goes away.

______________________________

*Anna May Wong was also the inspiration for this classic love song…

Hollywood Babble On & On #1248: A Matter of Sex?

Director Colin Trevorrow is the latest target of the Twitter outrage mob, but it's not for stealing jokes, instead his sin appears to being successful while in possession of a penis.

Trevorrow's career is being touted as an overnight success story, ignoring the fact that he spent well over a decade struggling to get things made before he finally was deemed employable on a major gig with the offbeat and critically acclaimed sci-fi film Safety Not Guaranteed. That film got him the gig on Jurassic World, and Jurassic World went on to make over $1.6 Billion at the box office, and that led to him getting signed to direct an upcoming Star Wars movie for Disney.

Naturally when someone explodes into success like that there are critics who imply that Trevorrow's success isn't due to his hard work, that he had some sort of privileged "in" with the industry. In the old days that alleged "in" was a rumoured relationship with someone high up, be it familial or sexual, but these are modern times, and the critics now say it's all about gender, which one you have, and which one you would like to have sex with.

Overnight Trevorrow went from indie darling to twitter's favourite cisgendered boogeyman who only gets the big jobs because he has the correct genitalia.

When asked directly on twitter Trevorrow made a horrible mistake, he tried to defend himself:

Now some say that Trevorrow chose the wrong words, but let me explain something about crises like these:

THERE ARE NO RIGHT WORDS.

Nothing he can say or do, short of announcing that he's quitting Hollywood to join a monastery in Tibet, and can somehow magically force all the jobs he's signed for, and will ever would be signed for will now go to women directors, whether they want to do those jobs or not.

If he explains how he got the job then he's "mansplaining," and is thus officially worse than Hitler, and if he says nothing, then he's acting disdainful towards women, and is officially worse than Hitler.

It's the ultimate Catch-22 of the Internet. Be damned for existing, be damned for defending yourself, or be damned for not defending yourself.

Now I'm not saying that Hollywood doesn't have a gender problem.

It does have a bad gender problem. 

When Sandra Bullock, who is a pretty reliable box-office player, capable of carrying a dead weight like George Clooney into blockbuster land, has a hard time finding a decent role, Hollywood has a gender problem.

The problem's roots are not a bunch of men sitting around a conference table saying "How many qualified women can we deny employment this month?" If it was, then it would just be a matter of getting around or rid of those guys.

Only the problem is more complex, and the solutions aren't coming because of these major problems:

1. THOSE IN POWER DON'T SEE THAT THEY'RE THE PROBLEM.

Imagine that you're a studio mogul and you hear that not enough women are working in Hollywood your first thought will be: "Those other guys must be horribly sexist." That's because you can't conceive that you might contribute to the problem in any way. There are lots of women working in your office, you might be a woman yourself, you also hold fundraisers for the correct candidates and the correct causes, and you vote for the correct candidates. There's no way in your mind that you can see that you're causing this inequity, and you won't hear it from the critics because...

2. THE CRITICS PICK ON THE WRONG TARGETS.

Now Colin Trevorrow did not hire himself to direct Jurassic World. He was hired by Stephen Spielberg's production company and Universal Pictures to direct the movie.

So why is Trevorrow the target of so much anger and blame?

Because Trevorrow is essentially powerless when it comes to people's careers. Amblin and Universal are not. If they're doing a Google search on a female director they're considering hiring and find her bad-tweeting them as sexist pigs, they're not going to hire that person.

However, if they see her picking on some other hired gun, then it won't matter to them, because unless they're mentioned by name, they can't imagine that they're involved in any way.

3. NO ONE TAKES INDIVIDUAL CHOICE INTO THE EQUATION.

Trevorrow's defence mentioned cases of female directors turn down the big monster and superhero heavy blockbusters the studios are dependent on, and he might be right.

I don't know, and you don't know, because neither of us can read the minds and souls of other people, and fully understand why they take or turn down jobs.

It's the same problem with the whole women are paid 75¢ for every $1 a man is paid. People are led to believe that a female teller is paid less than a male bank teller with the same seniority because he gets a magic 25% penis bonus. 

That's not true.

The inequity in incomes comes from the simple fact that it encompasses all occupations. That means that the women who choose to take a lower paying retail or office jobs over the high paying, but dangerous male-dominant job of Alaskan oil rig roughneck because they don't want to give up a few fingers for cash, are skewing the results. 

4. ALL THIS ILLOGIC MAKES HOLLYWOOD A TERRIBLE OFFENDER.

Ironically, Hollywood who is a big proponent for the 75¢ myth is the one workplace where actresses actually are paid less and have a smaller choice of roles than actors of equal box-office appeal. 

So what can be done?

Well, many moons ago I worked out a formula to determine star power, and thus the appropriate salary, and it'll solve this problem, because it doesn't include genitalia in the calculations.

Here it is:

(A+B)-C= B.O.S.S.

B.O.S.S. stands for "Bums On Seats Status" or if you want to be more scientific sounding "Box-Office Sales Status" and is a fair and accurate assessment of what a movie star's real box-office appeal is.

So here is how you do it.

A: This is a percentage of how many profitable films the star has been the lead in for the past 5 years. 

Don't go by the studios profit/loss statements, they contain more fiction than a Barnes & Noble superstore. 

For the purpose of this formula you take the production costs of the film, double it, and add $30 million. This will give you a rough estimate of the total costs of the film, including prints, marketing, distribution as well as the theatre's piece of the action. If the box-office take is more than this amount, it's profitable, if it's less, it's a money loser.

B: Now this is the only part of the formula where market surveys are used. You do a poll of average moviegoers about the star in question and take the percentage of people who say that they would pay to see that star in a movie, and deduct 90% of that value. 

I call for the chopping of the 90% because the majority of people who answer the poll are just being polite, or so lonely they will talk to anyone and say anything to keep the talk going.

Trust me, I know how wildly inaccurate they can be having been involved with a clever sketch comedy pilot that was bastardized into a sitcom about mischievous angels based on a cream cheese commercial because of market research.

C: This is a percentage of movies that have been negatively affected by the star. Now this can be interpreted in several ways. The most concrete involve profitability lost due to the over-sized salary or unprofessional behaviour of the star in question. A star who drives up the budget isn't really worth it.

Now you add all that up together and you should get a score between 1 and 100, you then compare that score to this easy to read chart.

SCORE 0-10: This actor's next role should feature the line: "Do you want fries with that?"

SCORE 11-30: This actor might be okay cast as a wacky neighbour on a sitcom on the CW network.

SCORE 31-50: This star could be either on the way up, or on the way down. Stick to supporting roles in big-budget projects, leads in small budgets.

SCORE 51-70: You can call this person a "star" but unless you have a good script and a good director making a good film, it will still be a bit of a crap-shoot. They should get good money, but not so much that it cripples the budget, and points only if they are willing to take a cut in the up front money.

SCORE 71-90: The word 'bankable' might be used now. They have the charisma to sell a picture, and may even be forgiven the odd stinker or two, but you shouldn't push it too far. They should get good money, and a modest points deal.

SCORE 91-100+: These actors can sell out a theatre with dramatic readings of the Peoria Illinois phone book. They are worth every penny they can get, and a heap of points too because you're going to be swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck on a meth binge.

My solution is rational, logical, can be adapted to handle hiring behind the camera as well, and it leaves gender out.

Which means it will never be used.

On Comedy: Stop Thief!-- Joke Stealing Is No Laughing Matter!

Hardly a week goes by without Twitter exploding in righteous indignation about one offence or another. Be it a dead lion, or an insensitive quip, livelihoods and lives can be ruined by a wave of righteous torch-bearing mob-indignation. Normally I steer clear of such outrage, but this time I just had to comment.

It all started when someone on my timeline retweeted this:

Before this post, I had never heard of Josh Ostrovsky who tweets and instagrams under the nom-de-douche "The Fat Jew," but I felt compelled to investigate.

Why?

Because while jokes are inherently silly, joke theft is not. 

My research, thin as it was, revealed that Ostrovsky fancies himself a "performance artist" and the "curator or aggregator of the internet." Those titles require a little translation. "Performance Artist" really means unimaginative hack who seeks to get paid for acting like a pretentious hipster dickhead, and "Curator or Aggregator" is pretentious hipster douchebag-speak for "guy who steals other people's jokes and passes them off as his own." Not only has he been stealing jokes from hundreds, maybe thousands of people, he's been, according to professional Canuck shit-disturber Gavin McInnes, doing it for years.

Now if he just stuck to just tweeting stolen jokes, he'd be nothing more than a nuisance. However, Ostrovsky landed TV and radio gigs with E!, Comedy Central, Apple's Beats Radio, and representation with CAA, one of Hollywood's most elite agencies on the basis of his douchebag image, and his alleged wit on social media. 

Now he's making serious money off of the work and sweat of others, which makes his thievery more of a crime against comedy than a nuisance. He's literally taking money out of the pockets of real joke-makers.

Sadly, crimes against comedy aren't punishable under the law, but we can name, shame, not only the thief, but the media companies and agencies who are literally rewarding him for being a thief.

Joke theft is not a new phenomenon borne from the internet. It goes back to the stone age when Ag stole Ug's one about the hunter and the gatherer's daughter.

Ug responded by clocking Ag on the head with a rock.

And thus the concept of intellectual property was born.

A more civilized response was one done by Bob Hope against fellow vaudeville star Milton Berle back in the 1920s. Showbiz insiders considered Berle most famous for two things; he had the biggest schlong on the circuit, and he was terrible for stealing jokes.

Hope and a young writer, who both just made successful leap to Broadway, wanted to teach Berle a lesson. So Hope and the young writer made a careful and exact plan of attack, and waited for the right moment to strike.

That moment came on a fateful Monday night.

On Monday's the musicals traditionally go "dark" or don't perform, because they're doing an extra matinee on Sunday and the cast needs a break. Back in the 1920s they used to use the theatres on Mondays for charity variety shows called Benefits.

Benefit Night, as it was known then, was a big deal. All the top show-biz people and New York power players were in the audience, and it was the perfect spot for an aspiring vaudeville comic like Berle to get off the circuit and into a major Broadway show.

Now every theatre would be having a benefit show, and it was common practice for comics to perform in one theatre, run up the street, perform there, and so on, literally until the wee hours of the morning.

Hope and his partner arranged to perform right before Berle, which was literally the time Berle was closing his act in the last theatre and he was literally running to the next one. Berle would arrive just as Hope was leaving the stage and heading for the next theatre.

Berle would then go on stage, start his act and....cue the cricket sound.

You see, Hope would go out and do Berle's mostly stolen act, verbatim, which meant that it looked like Berle was just repeating Hope's act.

Berle learned his lesson and didn't steal another joke...for a while.

Now there isn't one kind of joke theft, and some is not really theft at all, and I'll attempt to explain most of this probably incomplete list.

• COINCIDENTAL: Now this doesn't really count as joke theft, but is often mistaken for it. The world is big, there are literally billions of people and if it's something topical, then more than one person is going to make the same joke. I know, it happens to me all the time, probably because my sense of humour is so obvious and banal, and I'm probably even a victim of it as well. When that guy threw a shoe at President Bush I sold a joke to a comedian for $50 about how the Shoe Thrower was hired as MSNBC's new pundit. The comedian used it in a web video, and two days later it was in Jay Leno's opening monologue. I'm sure that was purely coincidental, he said while rearranging the pins in his Jay Leno voodoo doll.
• SUBCONSCIOUS: Now this does count as joke theft, but it lacks one key ingredient that separates it from what I consider criminal joke theft: INTENT. It happens when you hear a joke, forget where you heard it, and then blurt it out fully convinced that you just came up with it out of the blue. Robin Williams used to be bad for this, but I don't recall anyone resenting him for it, because it was mostly because his memory and rapid fire style was better at remembering the joke itself rather than the source. 
• AMBITIOUS, YET INSECURE: Now we're delving into the realm of deliberate joke theft. Theft, and intent are arm in arm in this one, but motive can be a contributing factor. You see intent means that you mean to deliberately commit a crime, but MOTIVE is your reasoning behind your intent. Many comedians, Berle being a classic example, can often let their ambition outrun not their talent, but their faith in their own talent. They want to reach the top, but aren't sure if all their material is "A Grade" so they poach material that they're sure works because they've seen it work with someone else. Often these kinds of joke thieves present a cocky and brash exterior to hide the mouldering bucket of anxiety worms that makes up their psyche.
• MALICIOUS: These kinds of joke thieves are the lowest and worst kind. They know they are deliberately stealing material from people who burnt the calories needed to create original material, they just don't care. They also aren't acting out of insecurity, but entitlement. They assume that they are entitled to fame and success but don't want to actually work for it beyond making sales pitches to surprisingly gullible media insiders who all yearn to be one of the "cool kids." If getting that fame and success requires stealing, then that's just fine, because this joke thief's victims aren't viewed as cool enough to be worthy of consideration. When caught, they usually try to brush it off with lame excuses/double-talk, and/or jump straight into attacking their accusers.

That Josh "The Fat Jew" Ostrovsky committed joke theft is pretty much beyond doubt. What's being discussed here is what kind of joke theft did he commit, and that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury of public opinion, I leave to you to decide.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1237: NBC To Trump - "YOU'RE FIRED!!"

I'm not posting a picture of Trump so here's Ivanka instead

Donald Trump, real estate heir and TV personality, is running for President, and decided to open his campaign with a rant about illegal immigration using all kinds of inflammatory language setting back the cause of immigration reform back about a decade. 

In response, Univision, the Spanish language TV network, ended their relationship with Trump's TV endeavours. In response Trump was loud and boorish, and then NBC cut all ties to the man known as The Donald.

This makes Trump's campaign just one of the most expensive publicity stunts he's ever pulled.

And that's what I think his campaign is, it's just another publicity stunt from a man whose entire life is built on publicity and spin.

Trump's greatest successes, outside of his daughter, who beyond her aesthetic qualities, seems to have a capable head on her shoulders, is his ability to sell myths about himself.

Trump sold the myth that he was a self-made, up from nothing, entrepreneur, when he actually just walked into an already successful real estate business built by his father.

He named a casino after what was supposed to be a tomb

Trump sold the myth that he's been an unqualified success saw a business genius, even though companies in his casino empire have gone bankrupt 4 times.

Think about that, his companies have gone under 4 times in a business where people just walk in to give you money, on land he bought for pennies on the dollar from the Atlantic City government.

Which brings me to my next point, he's currently selling the myth that he's a Republican. I've been doing a little digging, and the more serious conservative outlets do more than consider him a joke, they consider him an opportunist Democrat. I even heard on pundit describe his campaign as how a liberal Democrat imagines a Republican candidate to talk and act.

Despite occasionally registering as a Republican, and endorsing GOP candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, most of Trump's political donations, endorsements, and stances are firmly in the orbit of the Democratic Party.

In the past, Trump has financially supported, endorsed, or actively campaigned very un-Republican causes like strict gun control, government run health care, and the expansion of eminent domain.

"What is eminent domain and why does Trump support its expansion?"

Eminent domain is when the government forces a property owner to sell their property to the government at a discount, sometimes at an even deeper discount if the government decides the property is considered "blighted." 

Normally, eminent domain is supposed to be only used to build projects for the public good. Things like roads, bridges, hospitals, airports, etc…

Still won't post any pictures of Donald.

However, many local and state governments have broadened the definitions of public good, and blighted. Those definitions means that they can effectively take property from taxpaying citizens and give them to private companies for their private aims. They've also expanded the definition of "blighted" to basically allow governments to use taxpayer money to take to private property and sell them to their buddies for pennies on the dollar.

The Supreme Court declared the practice legal in the Kelo V. City of New London decision, a decision that Donald Trump has publicly declared he loves. The abuse of eminent domain is how he built those Atlantic City casinos who went through four bankruptcies.

A little known fact that I gleaned from my research is that while Trump loves the Kelo decision a lot of Republicans despise it. They consider it a combo of big government abuse on behalf of their cronies. It's unlikely that they will let someone who "loves" it get the GOP nomination without a brutal fight.

It's only a matter of time before Trump's many ideological differences with the party become a campaign issue, and the 50+ other Republican candidates jump on him like a pack of ravenous dogs.

Now let's get back to Trump being dumped by NBC.

First, Trump is not being "censored" by NBC. They are a private company, they are not the government. They are also not stopping him from speaking his mind, they are simply saying that they are not going to pay him to do it.

NBC is perfectly within their rights to do that.

Donald Trump is boasting that he will sue NBC for breach of contract and win.

I doubt that.

All showbiz contracts, especially television contracts, have what is called a "moral turpitude" clause. It basically means that if The Donald does anything that might reflect badly on NBC or anything associated with NBC, they are well within their rights to can his ass.

He did, and they did.

End of story.

Now, can we please stop talking about Donald Trump?

Hollywood Babble On & On #1228: The Affleck Effect?

I've been trying to avoid talking about the leaked Sony e-mails, not wanting to feed upon that particularly stinky carcass, but this story I really couldn't ignore.

You see among the recent batch of leaked e-mails was talk between senior Hollywood folks that Ben Affleck the actor, director, and upcoming Batman, had turned an ancient sin of his ancestor into his own modern gaffe.

While participating in the PBS show Finding Your Roots With Dr. Henry Louis Gates Affleck was told he had an ancestor who owned slaves.

Affleck then pressured the show to edit out all references to this ancestor in order to preserve his image as the arch-liberal good guy.

Well, word got out, as it inevitably would, and now Ben Affleck has the image of an obnoxious hypocrite who has never heard of the "Streisand Effect."

"What's the Streisand Effect?" you ask, furrowing your brow in a feeble attempt to understand.

A few years ago a group wanted to promote awareness of coastal erosion in California. Their plan was to take pictures up and down the California shore, and use those pictures to illustrate their point. 

But there was a problem.

One of those pictures had Barbara Streisand's Malibu beach house in it. No one thought it was a problem, since it was just another mansion nestled among dozens of other similar mansions.

But that wasn't enough for Streisand.

Streisand promptly shit kittens and she did everything she could to get that picture pulled from the project.

This is where the Streisand Effect kicked in.

All of Streisand's attempts to censor the picture made that picture news. It went from a photo of coastal erosion seen only by a handful of environmentalists and legislators to a big news story about Streisand's house that was seen by EVERYONE.

Over the run of Finding Your Roots the show has had several celebrities who turned out to have slave-owning ancestors. They were discussed on the show, mentioned the next day on some websites, and then promptly forgotten. It's not like the show revealed that the celebrities themselves currently kept a slave wrapped in a latex gimp-suit in their basement, it merely mentioned something done by someone who has been dead for over a century.

With Affleck, since he is such a big activist for the Democratic Party, he probably would have been the punchline on conservative websites for a day, and then quickly forgotten.

However, that would have only happened if he just let his family tree go out unexpurgated.

He didn't do that.

He tried to cover it up, and the cover up always amplifies the original crime right out of proportion. Now Affleck has "slave-owning hypocrite" branded onto his forehead for at least the foreseeable future.

What Affleck did was just plain dumb.

__________

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Hollywood Babble On & On #1220: Two Random Topics

GHOST CORPS.

Sony has gone from flogging the dead horse of the Ghostbusters franchise to downright beating it with hammers. We've got the all-women Ghostbusters coming out soon, and it will soon be followed by an all-guy Ghostbusters that will share a "cinematic universe" with the all-women reboot.

And to top it all off, Sony is forming Ghostcorps, a specialized company designed solely to grind out Ghostbusters crap at an almost constant pace.

Oy gevalt!

Remember this is a franchise that consists of 1 hit move that people remember fondly, and 1 terrible flop that most would rather forget.

It's not a comic book company like Marvel and DC who have dozens of characters and decades of stories to fall back on. It's 1 hit, 1 flop, and if you want to toss it in an animated show that some 80s kids remember.

Anyway, I've expressed myself about this topic repeatedly.

What does Walter Peck think about this?

I have to agree with him.

TOP GEAR IN SUSPENSE.

According to reports Jeremy Clarkson, host of the BBC show Top Gear has been suspended after a "fracas" with a BBC producer.

Some are howling for his return, but many in Britain's media elite are howling for his blood, one saying he should do the "decent thing" and resign to keep from "damaging the BBC."

So why all the vitriol?

Well, if you're not familiar with Clarkson and his show there's some explaining to be done. Top Gear is nominally a show about cars, but in reality it's about three middle aged men Clarkson, and cohorts Richard Hammond and James May, doing really stupid and crazy things usually involving cars.

Clarkson is also notorious for being deliberately offensive to many of the shibboleths of his media colleagues. He despises political correctness and enjoys nothing more than poking and provoking people, groups, and even entire countries.

His reputation for provocation is so strong that the Top Gear crew was chased out of Argentina by a stone throwing mob of Argentinian nationalists fired up by a rumour that his car's license plate was commemorating their defeat in the Falklands War.

Now many in the BBC's upper management and general media community would love to be rid of Clarkson. He's not one of their community, never will be, and actually has an active dislike for them and their attitudes.

But the BBC always hesitates from pulling the trigger and canning him.

Why?

MONEY.

Top Gear is syndicated in every country in the world except France and North Korea, and in every country those episodes are rerun until the tape wears out. Every year it pulls in millions upon millions of dollars, pounds, Euros, shekels, and Yen in profits that go straight in the BBC coffers.

Even a public broadcaster, supported by a mandatory tax on owning TVs and radios can't turn away lucre of that magnitude.

Top Gear without Clarkson would be like having a chocolate cupcake without chocolate icing. Albeit hairy, oversized, oafish icing, and that cash flow would probably dry up.

So unless they have video of Clarkson beating someone with a stick while yelling racial slurs and slandering the Queen, I don't see the BBC working up the guts to fire him.

He might quit though, because he's sick of the constant fighting, and he knows that they'll be a lot worse off without him than he is without them.