Hollywood Babble On & On #1258: 2015 - The Year In Stupid

2016 has finally stumbled into our lives like an alcoholic uncle who shows up late for the holidays with a bottle in his hand screaming for everyone to keep the party going even though all are still hungover from the last year.

Anyway, 'tis the season for looking back in list form and I'm not immune for that sort of easy clickbait, so let's look back at the year in stupid.

THAT'S OFFENSIVE: 2015 was the year when EVERYTHING was declared offensive. In fact, I'm pretty sure that someone, somewhere is offended by my mentioning people finding things offensive.

It was also the year that a select few saw that no matter what they try, popular culture will always be in the wrong to the new class of professionally offended people who write thinkpieces for websites.

Let's use sexism as an example.

Hollywood does have a sexism problem. They don't know what to do with female stars and female audiences like they did in the allegedly more sexist Golden Age, when both female stars and audiences were much bigger box-office players. However, modern Hollywood sexism is trapped in a never ending circle of offense. Even when they try to appease or even please their critics they still get crapped on.

Critics complain that there are not enough stories being made about the accomplishments of historic women. Hollywood responds with SUFFRAGETTE a lavish period drama about the fight of women to get the vote. SUFFRAGETTE is almost immediately condemned that the suffragette movement was too white and middle class to matter to modern audiences. (Ironically, a complaint made about the real suffragette movement at the time)

Critics complain that there are not enough competent female heroes on the screen, so they give them Rey in STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS who is tough, competent, and capable of tackling any problem. Many of the same critics then condemn the film and the character as a "Mary Sue" a female character who is "too perfect" to be believed.

There is literally just no pleasing some folks. 

The greatest irony is that when there is something that just reeks of sexism, it's treated as a victory. I'm talking about the all-women reboot of GHOSTBUSTERS. Hollywood is literally tossing women the scraps of a franchise that's been dead for over 25 years, instead of creating something new and original, and it's seen as a victory for feminism.

To borrow a phrase from Admiral Ackbar: "IT'S A TRAP!"

If the film succeeds, the credit will go to the affection people have for the GHOSTBUSTERS franchise.

If the film flops, the blame will be put on its female stars. 

Yet I appear to be the only person who sees this.

Ironically, I'm not offended by it, just saddened.

GEORGE LUCAS: Lucas called Disney "white slavers" after they dropped $4 billion on his lap for Lucasfilm because they revived the long moribund and once creatively bankrupt STAR WARS franchise sans Lucas and his whims like Jar-Jar Binks.

George, I love ya for creating STAR WARS, but you're driving me crazy with this sort of spoiled brat chatter. It was nice that you apologized, but maybe you shouldn't have said it in the first place, right when people were about to forgive you for the prequels? 

SLOW WEST: My problem is not with the movie itself. It apparently got lots of good reviews. My problem is with the title.

It's hard to sell a Western, but calling a Western SLOW WEST is about as smart as naming a play THEATRE CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS. 

It's going to turn audiences away.

What producer or distributor allowed themselves to be convinced that it was a good title for a Western?

It makes the film sound pretentious, annoying, and, most of all SLOW, and audiences hate slow and will avoid anything that literally promises slowness in the title and makes the film lucky to pull in the $200,000 it did at the box-office.

Not seeing that means those who green-lit that title should probably reconsider their career choices.

MARTIN SHKRELI: Now this isn't an entertainment or pop culture story, but it does have some lessons people in any business can learn.

In case you're living in a cave Martin Shkreli is a millennial multimillionaire who took over a drug company and immediately jacked up the price of a drug for people with compromised immune systems by about 7,000%. He claimed he was going to kick the profits back into research and development, but his lifestyle, business record, and overall attitude about everything made everyone doubt his word.

In fact, when he was arrested and arraigned on running a high financed Ponzi scheme the internet pretty well cheered in unison.

Which brings me to the lesson.

A little known fact about business life is that no matter how honest an American businessperson strives to be, they commit on average several felonies a day without even knowing it. This number goes up exponentially the higher up you go in the financial food chain.

The majority of these felonies are violations of obscure Federal regulations that even the regulators don't fully understand. 

That creates an interesting situation.

First, there are laws that everyone breaks, but since they're so complicated and obscure they're selectively prosecuted.

Second, if you want to be prosecuted for something, be a business person that makes himself a politically attractive target.

Which means that Shrkreli was nowhere near as smart as his ego told him was, or he would have seen that coming. If Conrad Black could be convicted of a crime that never happened, then any businessperson can become a pelt on a prosecutor's wall, so be honest, be straight, and for the love of Xenu, don't make yourself a target.

There's been a lot more stupidity this year, but I've decided to just let it go, and pray that 2016 will be a lot smarter.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1255: Can Amazing Stories Be Amazing Again?

Cult TV showrunner Bryan Fuller has been given the green light by NBC to bring back the 1980s anthology series Amazing Stories.

If you're one of those millennials with no knowledge of your pop culture heritage Amazing Stories was an anthology TV series inspired by Amazing Stories Magazine, the first science-fiction and fantasy magazine founded by Hugo Gernsback. The show was brought to television by Stephen Spielberg at a time when he could literally do no wrong on the big screen and NBC was hoping to bring some of that to the small screen.

Like most Spielberg related TV projects it had a huge beginning with lots of big names appearing in front of and behind the camera, but like so many other Spielberg TV projects it fizzled out in the second season, and was cancelled. 

This is because Spielberg has two things against him when it comes to producing a TV show. He is too busy making movies to be much more than a name in the credits after the pilot's been shot, and Spielberg has a notorious aversion to conflict, which means that unless he has a strong partner and showrunner, the network will walk over the show and grind it into the dirt. That's why the only Spielberg-branded show to have any real success after its first season was ER, because he had Michael Crichton's name on it, and they had showrunners with balls and clout.

Now, hot on the heels of cancelling Fuller's critically claim and hyper-stylish horror series Hannibal, they want him to bring it back.

Now Fuller can do Amazing Stories in one of three ways:

STORY OF THE WEEK: This is the traditional approach made famous by The Twilight Zone. The problem with this traditional approach is that tradition can very quickly become a rut. The tendency is to not exactly do what The Twilight Zone did, but a vague memory of what they thought The Twilight Zone did. They slip into a comfortable trap of stories of things that seem normal at first, then they go weird, and pow, there's a twist in the end.

That can get really boring, really quick. There is a way to avoid this, and this is to go literary. 

There is literally a couple of centuries of short fiction in the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror. That means that they don't have to be reliant on TV writers and their vague memories of another TV show for stories. Of course that would take effort to find the stories, and money to buy the ones not in public domain, which means that plan probably won't be done.

STORY OF THE SEASON: This format is pretty popular through shows like True Detective and American Horror Story. Basically, you do each season like a novel for television where a story goes for X number of episodes of a season, it ends when the season ends, and new story runs for the next season.

This is popular, but it too has its pitfalls. If you have an incredible first season story, the odds are really good that if the second season story isn't light years better, it will be declared a total failure.

Plus, networks are tempted to take a successful story that originally had a set ending, and then say: "Hey, let's have a second season of just that" and then they flog it until it's dead and stinky.

MASTERPIECE THEATRE IT: This is a hybrid of the other two formats. Basically you set the show up as a sort-of brand that covers a range of science fiction, fantasy, and horror productions that range from stand-alone one-episode stories, to multi-episode arcs.

This can give the writers the leeway they need to experiment with long form and short form stories, but the hazard is that the audience might find the format jarring, and tune out, or that only certain stories and their sequels catch on, and come to dominate the show's run, thus killing the whole "anthology" idea.

Anyway, that's what I think, let me know what you think in the comments...

Hollywood Babble On & On #1254: Let Die Hard Die Out.

20th Century Fox has announced that they're developing a 6th Die Hard movie, but this one will be different. Franchise star Bruce Willis will only bookend an "origin story" about a rookie John McLain in 1970s New York and most of the heavy lifting, running, jumping, and shooting will be done by a younger, cheaper actor in the hope that they might get the budget within a range that'll someday make a profit.

There are a two conundrums with this idea.

1. The original Die Hard is the origin story. It's about how an average joe police detective becomes a butt-kicking terrorist killer, not because of mad ninja skills, or superpowers, but solely through ingenuity, toughness, and a refusal to ever give up.

2. There already is a prequel to Die Hard in existence, and it's this:

You see the Die Hard franchise has a complicated history. Back in the 1960s the novelist Roderick Thorp wrote the original novel The Detective and sold the movie rights to 20th Century Fox. They made a movie starring Frank Sinatra and it was a big hit. Naturally, Fox wanted a sequel, and so did Thorp, so he wrote a new novel called Nothing Lasts Forever.

But there was a complication, Frank Sinatra wasn't available to make the sequel movie when the time came. The project languished in development hell until the mid-1980s. 

Producer Joel Silver, who was on a major hot-streak at the time, wanted an action thriller property that he could do with Fox, and found Nothing Lasts Forever in their archives. They offered the part to Sinatra, who said he was too old for all the running and shooting, so they offered it to Robert Mitchum, who declined for the same reasons.

It was then they decided on a rewrite.

Retired NYPD detective Joe Leland was transformed into active-duty NYPD detective John McLain, and instead of a rescuing an estranged daughter and grandchildren, he was rescuing an estranged ex-wife. They also tweaked the novel's ambiguous ending where Joe Leland succumbs to blood loss, collapses, and possibly dies.

They cast Bruce Willis, who was also on a burgeoning hot streak from his hit TV show Moonlighting, and movie history was made spawning thousands of imitators and movie pitch shorthand  with "It's Die Hard on a---".

Sadly, Fox has decided that repeating history is a good business model. They took what was a neat, tight, trilogy that ended on a high with Die Hard With A Vengeance, and enforced the laws of diminishing returns. 

There is only one reason to keep making Die Hard movies, and that's because they can still pull in about $200+ in the foreign box-office even though domestic grosses are decidedly lacklustre.

However, there's a catch.

The post-Vengeance Die Hards cost between $90-$115 million to make, and about that amount again to distribute and market internationally. That's an overhead of about $200+ million per picture.

Domestically, the studio gets roughly 50¢ on the box-office dollar as the "rental" the rest goes to the theatre. Internationally, it depends on the individual country or territory, but averages out to about 25¢ to 30¢ on the box office dollar.

That means that at best the more recent movies broke even at most. I also don't see folks clamouring to get them on home video or on television airings. I got the first trilogy on Blu-Ray and I just try to ignore the others.

But I see where Fox is going with this plan.

They know how beloved the first Die Hard is, and how many watch it every Christmas as a sort of antidote to the more saccharine holiday fare. They also know that announcing a remake with a new star would be received with screams of "blasphemy" and a lot of bad press. That's why I suspect they start a new series with the proposed Die Hard: Year One, and hopefully segue it into a full on Die Hard remake with lots of CGI explosions as a hundred buildings are seized by ten thousand terrorists and only superhuman John McLain can stop them. They hope that audiences will be so used to this new franchise, they'll somehow accept it over the original.

Which brings me to the point of all my rambling.

What made the first Die Hard such a classic was not the quantity of the action, even though it did deliver quantity, it was the quality. Each set-piece was carefully constructed to deliver the maximum emotional impact on the audience without having to resort to size. Die Hard 2 slipped into the "just make it bigger" trap, and was the comparative low point for the original trilogy. Die Hard With A Vengeance found the right mix of size and dramatic impact, which was why that original trilogy ended on a high.

The latter two sequels, I haven't been able to sit through one to completion, seem to be just after quantity and not quality. There's no tension, no dramatic impact, no reason to give a shit.

My suggestion to Fox is to look at what made the original so beloved. The mechanics of suspense, action, and story are all out there to be carefully studied, and use that as a template to develop new original action properties that could find an audience all their own.

Of course, that would take work, and I doubt they're interested in that when they can just throw money at the problem.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1250: Deserving Better Than A Remake?

Here's a great video about Remakes from Good Bad Flicks (h/t Nate Winchester):

Which is a good segue to today's topic, which is the news that MMA fighter Ronda Rousey will star in a "re-imagining" of the 1989 Patrick Swayze vehicle Roadhouse for MGM.

When I heard the news my first thought was that she should beat up her agent.

Why?

Because if she's serious about a movie career would remaking a movie that marked the death knell of the 80s action movie golden age that started with The Terminator.

You see, by 1989 Hollywood was worried that action movies about cops, soldiers, and secret agents were passé and tried to reinvent any occupation that might throw a punch as some sort of ninja-combat master.

Which is how we ended up with a movie about a ninja-bouncer taking on a small town gangster whose whole operation looked like it came from a rejected script from the A-Team.

The film fizzled at the box-office, but gained a cult following on home-video and cable by those who watch cheesy movies to enjoy them ironically. It also marked the beginning of the end of mainstream street-level action movies that went on to become more and more dominated by special effects and eventually superheroes.

This has given MGM the delusion that the general audience is hungry for more Roadhouse, ignoring that they already had a 2006 sequel that came and went on DVD without even the studio noticing.

I think shoving her into an over-priced un-imagining of a film that left most of the audience cold when was first released is a big mistake when it would be so easy to come up with a catchy original premise for her to star in, that would be hers and could mark the beginning of a new franchise.

She's young, attractive, and can kick ass with extreme prejudice. Coming up with starring vehicles she can call her own would be the easiest thing to whip up.

To show you how easy it is I will pull some out of my ass right here, right now:

THE LONG DROP: Rousey's a rookie detective sent to pick up a witness working in a half-completed skyscraper. The witness is the only one who knows where a fortune in laundered money is hidden. When she arrives the place is crawling with hired killers, gangsters, and thieves, all out to find the missing money, including her own partner.

Ass-kicking, rescuing, and dangling from great heights ensues.

There, you got everything you want to kick off a good two-fisted action franchise without the baggage and nonsense associated with a remake.

THE STARLET: This is more of an action comedy premise which would depend heavily on her comic talents. Rousey plays a seemingly harmless and slightly klutzy actress who is targeted by crooks either to be kidnapped for ransom or because she has or knows something they want. What the crooks don't know is that, despite appearances, she has a devastating punch and a knack for foiling their schemes even unintentionally.

Naturally, lots of slapstick insanity ensues.

See, two very different and lively original premises that are guaranteed to work better than remaking some old nonsense.

Plus, my premises are for sale. 

Cash up front please.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1247: Friday The 13th The Series?

Flush with success from DC superheroes, magicians, and a pregnant virgin, the CW Network now thinks it can work miracles by raising the dead. The stinking foetid corpse in question is the Friday The 13th franchise which they hope to adapt into a TV series about the people of Crystal Lake facing the return of a more "grounded" version of the unstoppable killer.

Now I've never been a fan of the franchise, it came to embody the worst of the 1980s slasher-horror boom, coming up with lamer and lamer excuses to ramp up the gore and keep Jason coming back no matter what happened to him. It got very silly and very boring, and it showed in the diminishing returns at the box office.

Even a big budget remake failed to revive interest in a franchise that was deader than a Voorheez victim.

The funny thing is that the franchise had already branched into TV back in the 1980s.

Sort of.

Back in 1987 the producers of the Friday the 13th movies were branching into television with a Canadian-USA syndicated late night horror series that was originally going to be called The 13th Hour.

They decided that title was too obscure and went with the more famous "brand" even though the show had nothing to do with Jason Voorhees.

The premise of the show was pretty straightforward. An antiques dealer named Louis Vendredi made a pact with the devil for wealth and immortality. To cash in the stock in his store had been cursed to lead those who buy them into madness and murder by bombarding them powerful temptations.

But in the pilot Louis had an attack of guilt and broke the pact, and ended up dead and in hell.

Two distant relatives then inherited the store, which they then cleaned out in a huge sale. Shortly afterward, with the help of their uncle's ex-partner, they discover the curses and spend the rest of the series trying to get the stuff back and locked up safely in a supernaturally fortified vault.

Now I was just a kid when I saw it, and it ended 25 years ago, but I remember that it was one of the scariest things I had ever seen made for TV, and that includes Dark Night of the Scarecrow.

As far as I can remember, it sure was scarier than anything the Friday the 13th movies dished out.

Which is why I'm not holding out much hope for the CW's idea.

They should stick to DC superheroes.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1245: Don't Let Your Dungeon Be Draggin'!

Warner Brothers has announced that they're going forward with a Dungeons and Dragons movie based on the long popular flagship role playing game. This comes after a long legal battle between Warner Brothers, Hasbro, and Universal pictures that I described as akin to two junkyard dogs fighting over a broken fan belt. A lot of noise, dust, and blood over something the winner wouldn't know what to do with when they got it.

That's because Dungeons and Dragons isn't really the story/characters combo that makes a successful film franchise, it's merely a set of tools to enable players to make up their own characters and stories. No adventure on the screen will ever match the millions of adventures that have played out in player's heads of the last four+ decades.

We know that's a fact since there's already been one unsuccessful big budget feature film, and two direct to video sequels that were forgotten even before they were dumped in the Wal-Mart $5 movie bin.

Now while it's likely that Warner Brothers will repeat history, I'm going to offer them a way out. A way to use the D&D game to make a movie that won't suck the balls of a beholder.

THE PREMISE:

The chief reason the last attempts at a D&D movie franchise failed was because they tried to be straight up fantasy adventures using elements from D&D which D&D cribbed from fantasy literature and mythology, so it came across as a bland mishmash rather than a vivid original world like Middle Earth.

So here's what you do, incorporate the game into the movie, and here's how:

It begins with a group of Dungeons and Dragons players who meet every week and have done so for years. They are:

JACK HARDCASTLE: Been a player since college, and his day job is as a police detective. He used to be the department's top ass-kicker, but for the last two years a knee injury has trapped him in a desk job. His D&D character is Hardrock, a dwarf barbarian-fighter.

CYNTHIA MACKY: She's a therapist and marriage counsellor, and the stress of her job, dealing with other people's misery, has left her with a raft of anxiety issues. Her D&D character is Illyria, an elven magic user.

BUCK WELLER: Used to be the proverbial 98 pound weakling, but got super-buff in college. Now he runs a chain of fitness clubs and shills the "BUCK THE SYSTEM FITNESS SYSTEM" on the shopping channel. Since his transformation he's become a bit of an egomaniac and a womanizer. His D&D character is Silverblade, a human paladin.

DENNIS CRANE: Is a chemist for a pharmaceutical company. He dropped out of the group a long time ago when he married his college sweetheart and had a family. He's rejoined the group recently after his divorce, but doesn't feel like he fits in anymore. His D&D character is Greymalkin, an elven rogue.

LINDA BAILEY: Civil lawyer, and is on the fast track to partner in her firm. She's career driven and treats the weekly game as a substitute for vacationing and socializing. Her D&D character is Redleaf, an elven ranger.

Every Wednesday night they meet in the back room of a comic/game store owned by their Dungeon Master SPENCE. 

To add some atmosphere to the game room, Spence has kept a strange looking orb he found in a junk shop in the middle of the table. One night while Spence is in the bathroom the orb starts to glow, then it unleashes a blinding flash and...

POOF!

Our players are in a strange magical fantasy realm. An aging sorcerer has been listening in on their games, through the orb, and thinks they're just recounting real adventures. He's brought them to his world to save it from a rival who wants to do the usual conquering and enslaving. He's even given them gear just like the ones in their games, but there are some problems.

JACK is not really a dwarf barbarian, so his armour doesn't fit.

CYNTHIA can now cast spells, but her aim is not exactly...exact.

BUCK is given the unbeatable Speaking Sword, but it will become literally harmless if he breaks a vow of celibacy, which Buck will find impossible to keep in a world with real life elf babes. Whenever he violates the vow he has to recharge the sword by doing a humiliating penance ritual, goaded by the increasingly sarcastic sword.

DENNIS is supposed to be a master thief, but he is not built for stealth, and pretending to steal in a game turns out to be a lot easier than stealing in real life.

LINDA is supposed to be an expert in living in the wilderness, but her idea of "roughing it" is settling for a hotel with only a four star rating, and she's scared of not only monsters, but animals in general.

Naturally what follows is a mix of comedy and adventure in a world full of monsters, magic, and mayhem, where the locals play a game called Spreadsheets & Supervisors about office workers. The lead characters have to learn to work as a team, beat the bad guys, save the world and return to Earth before Spence gets out of the can.

THE DAMN THING WRITES ITSELF!!

So call me Warner Brothers if you don't want another serving of turkey.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1244: Random Drips From The Brain Pan.

THE STEWART CONUNDRUM

"I'm just a comedian, except when I'm not."

Jon Stewart, the outgoing host of The Daily Show, has been getting criticized, mostly in conservative media for meeting with President Obama in the run-up to and during the 2012 election. Stewart's been trying to deflect the criticism with his usual defence of "I'm just a comedian" that he brings out in between telling people that he's the most trusted source of news for the millennial generation for which he's paid $30 million a year, more than Leno & Letterman despite averaging 1/3 of their ratings.

All I really have to say is to offer a little thought experiment: How would Jon Stewart react if a rival satirist had secret meetings with a Republican president and his material was seen as having a pro-Republican slant?

He would shit kittens and go after that rival with both hands as a craven political toady.

You know he would.

FEAR THE WALKING SPIN-OFF

AMC is doing a spin-off from their mega-hit The Walking Dead, called Fear The Walking Dead, and are hoping to have some sort of crossover with the flagship in some future season.

Here's what I would like the spin-off show to do.

At the end of the first season, they find a solution to the zombie problem, and clean it up to the point where life quickly goes back to normal. However, they run out of money to clean up the zombies in a narrow corridor between Atlanta and Alexandria. For the rest of the show's run it's just a family-based kitchen-sink drama with only occasional scenes of characters wondering if any living people are still in the zombie zone and then going, "Nyah, we run the evacuation instructions during every PBS pledge break, they're bound to have seen it."

That also opens the door for The Walking Dead finale to feature the last surviving character finally stumbling out of the quarantined zombie zone and going "Aw shit."

PEZ ME OFF

"AAAAAGGGHH!! MY THROAT!"

Some producers are planning to make a Pez Movie. Yep a movie about those little candy dispenser that look like candy's being ripped out of a cartoon character's throat.

Time to put a big "CLOSED: OUT OF IDEAS" sign out on Hollywood.

Hollywood Babble On & On #1226: In Cold Blood…Again?

The Weinstein Company has bought the rights to adapt Truman Capote's "non-fiction" novel In Cold Blood for television as an "event series."

This news has inspired one question:

WHY?

In case you spent the last 60 years in a cave I'll do some explaining.

In 1959 two recent parolees Dick Hickock and Perry Smith slaughtered four members of the Clutter family in rural Kansas because they heard a nonsensical rumour that the family had a mythical stash of money in their house.

Truman Capote, already a successful author, and his childhood friend turned personal secretary Harper Lee, travelled to Kansas to write about the case, and Capote got to know the killers very well as they waited for their execution in 1966.

The book was a monster best-seller and opened the door to a flood of "True Crime" books that sell well even to this day. Ironically it was the last substantial work Capote ever wrote, producing only short pieces, one unfinished novel, while transforming himself from an author who became a celebrity into a celebrity who was once an author.

Despite some disputes over its accuracy In Cold Blood became his most famous and enduring work.

Which brings us back to the question: Why do it again?

The first adaptation was in 1967 and is considered a classic due to the powerful performances and Conrad Hall's vivid black and white cinematography.

Then it was done again in 1996 as a TV miniseries.

Then two other movies, Capote and Infamous, were made and released almost on top of each other and they were about Truman Capote's writing of the book.

So, it's not exactly as if the story's never been told on screen.

In fact, it's been told FOUR TIMES.

Even by remake-crazy Hollywood standards that's a little extreme. Even reboot nutty superhero movies they at least try to change things up with different villains and situations.

This is not that kind of story.

It's a story that's been told, repeatedly, and often pretty well, so why try again?

Hollywood Babble On & On #1222: Comebacks, Questions & Shameless Self Promotion

Network television is in a bit of a pickle.

Every day they lose viewers to their rivals be they cable channels, or streaming services like Netflix and Amazon.  The key to the success of these upstarts is that they produce bold original programming that the once mainstream networks don't deliver.

So what do the networks do?

They bring back shows from the dead.

Fox is bringing back The X Files, complete with original stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson.

Meanwhile NBC is bringing back 90s sitcom Coach with Craig T. Nelson.

Now the reaction to the return of The X Files has mostly been a big collective "Hell yeah!" A lot of people loved that show but was terribly dissatisfied with the way it fizzled out. Dying of over-extension, creative burnout, and network meddling. 

X-Fans, and they are legion, wanted the show to have a proper ending, something they didn't get from the jumbled mess of the second X Files movie. So a return would mean a lot to them, because it gives the beloved show, and its complex mythology a second chance at a proper ending.

Which brings me to Coach, and the question why?

I never watched the show myself, but I knew that it was popular, but not exactly ground-breaking or revolutionary. When I heard it was coming back I looked it up and saw that when the show ended after a very long run, they gave the characters some happy endings and wrapped it all up nice and neat.

There was no clamour for the return of Coach, no one griping online about how unsatisfied they were by the ending. So why resurrect it like The X Files?

The only explanation I can think of is the Twenty-Eight Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, or by it's more familiar name The Nelson-Bakula Amendment which was passed in 1986.

That Amendment states that actors Craig T. Nelson and Scott Bakula cannot be off television for more than six months at any given time. They're not getting any younger, and need to bank lots of episodes to rerun into infinity, because if they ever run out, then the government must nuke every state capitol.

Not sure why they passed and ratified it, seems like a silly thing to put into the Constitution, but who am I to judge?

In other news...

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Hollywood player Carter Bennett is losing friends fast. They're dying young, in the weirdest ways, and there's a strange old man showing up at their funerals and leaving the same cryptic message.

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Buy them, read them, leave reviews, and tell all your friends and family to do the same.

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.