The Screens: A Photonic Scroll

     This could be about anything.  I don't know the subjects just yet.  Working my way towards them.

     Obeying the concept of a screen, a place defined usually as a rectangle, I write here this time about what I've seen on screens, weaving ideas together and so on, the usual Neptunian mishmash.

     I've seen videos of war drums beaten by people on CNN and MSNBC.  On my iPhone screen, I've seen and read articles in the Wall Street Journal, Popular Mechanics, CNN, NBC News, all gung ho for military maneuvers, airstrikes, and force exerted and displayed by the U.S. and NATO.

     Ukraine 2022, Hunter Biden's War!!!

     After the 2014 coup in Kyiv carried out by the Obama administration, Ukraine's internal political processes bloomed hard rightward.  The Ukrainian Army has a Nazi battalion, supplied at least in part just recently by the United States in a 200 million dollar shipment of "lethal aid."  U.S. military advisors in 2017 were in Ukraine meeting with the Azov Battalion.  U.S. military and Nazis, not the first time.

     Think of the word aid.  It means help.  The help we offer Ukraine is death, rather, not food aid or vaccine aid, but something lethal to feed the Ukraine War caused by the Obama administration to further tensions with Russia.

     Vice President Joe Biden ran Ukraine after the 2014 coup.  His son Hunter wove his greedy cocaine way through business ventures there, like having a seat on the board of the oil corporation Burisma, netting him 80,000 a month for being a sperm of his father Joe.  

     The ghost flame of non-truth approaching mainstream news consumers these days is Ukraine, the new Cuba.  

     Will Russia invade?  Are you so propagandized that you believe the answer is yes? 

     Several articles I've read in mainstream publications use the same term:

     "Russia masses troops at the border with Ukraine," or "There are x number of troops massed at the border."

     They don't write this: Russia masses troops inside their own country.  

     No one in corporate news, furthermore, will ever write: American troops massed at Fort Bragg in a state bordering the Atlantic Ocean.

     From Fort Bragg, though, can come American military personnel, lethal forces with surveillance backup technologies, the ability to call air strikes, the ability to plant themselves in other countries that don't want them.  This same military never has a decent plan for accomplishing its stated goals because profiting from war is the plan, so it doesn't matter how the war goes, as long as it goes.

     Its purpose is to expand American influence, act as muscle to flex against stubbornly independent minded states, crush and destroy, dominate and occupy, overthrow regimes, establish a new order, but also to guard poppy fields to help facilitate the international heroin trade, among other nefarious activities.

     Ironically, it's not in Putin's interests to invade Ukraine at this time.  It does make for some hysterical theorizing on screens showing made-up millionaires hosting news programs, peddling propaganda as they've been doing for decades, slaving for elites.

     

     Something nicer to think about...

     I saw a video about Aruba, for travelers.  A man with a Greek accent (like I know what that sounds like) and his wife travel to a destination, give advice on what's worth doing, what's not, how much food and drink, activities and services cost.  Beautiful scenery, old buildings of Dutch design painted in vivid bright colors, like buildings in Miami (I noticed this about that city from watching Burn Notice, a good spy drama TV show shot there).

     Aruban buildings look like color spaces in Fauvist paintings.  What is it about the South that produces such a predilection for colorful buildings?  African garb is such that a light blue garment will be so light blue it almost blinds you.  The pure essence of blue is present in these fabrics, these dyes, the art of making clothes in West Africa, of mixing paint in Aruba and Florida.  

     The video did not dwell on any of the many attractive people to be seen on the beaches and in background shots.  The occasional image of Mrs. Traveler, who had control of the camera sometimes, showed an average-sized woman of about thirty with a smile and a nice body.  Brown hair, but mainly we see Aruba, lots of beach roads (this online video, like all such, exists in the past--what's been shot and edited and other tasks--the present as one watches it--and the future, as others will watch it.  In the video,  we see past Aruba, but if you go there this year it'll look the same, the Antarctic mega-glacier hasn't melted yet!!!

     About Aruba.  It looks like a place starved for culture.  I believe the narrator said the original inhabitants aren't there anymore, Arawaks.

     Coming face to face with European invaders and plunderers for the first time, indigenous tribes of the Caribbean met the Spaniards first.  Empire struck down many.  Gold, they were crazy for it, those Spaniards, those Europeans.  

     A TV ad I remember shown on a screen: actor William Devane, who played John F. Kennedy in The Missiles of October (1974), encouraging viewers to buy gold.  Big front upper incisors, can do party tricks with those, a human squirt gun.  William Devane, who played a sinister crook in Alfred Hitchcock's last film, Family Plot (1976).

     Now he peddles gold, bright massy gold, gold such as McTeague, Frank Norris's poor schlub dentist anti-hero, would rob and kill many men to acquire.  William Devane believes in gold, but bear in mind, he's an actor, experienced at saying made up things convincingly.  Any guilt he may feel peddling gold isn't visible on his face, not heard in his tone of voice, as he practices his deceit, never saying the obvious:

     Advertising is bullshit.

     Alec Baldwin, another actor, within a few weeks after shooting to death a cinematographer and wounding the director of the film he was working on, was interviewed by his friend, George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton's former press secretary; thus, an always truthful man.

     Stephanopoulos interviewed his buddy gently.  The famous actor buddy insisted he didn't "pull the trigger," yet I saw a video by Dukes of Hazzard actor John Schneider debunking the notion the gun went off by itself.  Schneider obtained a gun like the one fired by Baldwin and demonstrated thoroughly how that gun couldn't have just "gone off," ergo, Baldwin pulled the trigger.  He may remember it differently, but Baldwin's too soon interview with Stephanopoulos quieted some Hollywood minds, perhaps.

     Movie set murder gun?

     Manslaughter handgun?

     Gun not behaving like a gun?

     One thing is sure.  Alec Baldwin, net worth 60 million dollars, is insulated from serious life consequences, mostly.  He didn't sexually abuse or make passes at underage girls, so he'll return to the screen.  He won't wreck his career exposing himself to underage girls, as did Stephen Collins.  Collins, First Officer Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) the first film in the series, not much paid attention to anymore.

     Did you wreck Star Trek, too, Collins?

     As Jake Cutter in Tales of the Gold Monkey, a one season TV show (1982-1983) taking place on a Pacific island soon before World War Two, Collins played a pilot getting into adventures.  His romantic interests, with adult women, only.  Light-hearted intrigue, peril, a not very sinister scheming princess, cute dog, cute nightclub singer, Roddy MacDowell as a French hotelier and a stumblebum alcoholic mechanic with a terrible memory (Jeff MacKay, whose performances in the show are always good).

     I thought Gold Monkey had potential.  It starts in 1938.  Subsequent seasons could've followed the unfolding historical background, year to year, season by season, developing the show over time, deepening everything as was allowed with Magnum P.I., a show created by the same people who did Gold Monkey.  

     TV executives don't know a good story from a bad one, don't usually know what to do with a show struggling in the ratings, but a program with good actors and actresses and a likely potential to get better.       Instead, cut from the lineup, as when a punter's roommate is also a punter on the same pre-season team.

     We can only have one punter during regular, and, it can be hoped, post-season!

     Cut Tales of the Gold Monkey!

     Thirty-eight years later I watched fourteen Monkey episodes on YouTube, haven't seen the remaining seven or eight.  I still haven't seen three episodes of Season Two of The Bionic Woman on a DVD set I bought for myself along with Season One.  In the pilot, she gains the respect and awe of her unruly elementary school class when she rips in half a Greater LA phonebook.  They love her then, and so did I from that episode onward.  

     Lindsay Wagner possessed a 1970s look and invisible essence of a naturally beautiful fresh-faced young woman with deep eyes and a listening face.  Put her in bell bottoms or a disco outfit, Lindsay made it work.  

     Oh, I can't conceal it!  I fucking love Lindsay Wagner, she's awesome!

     

     I was never into Catherine Bach as Daisy Duke because I didn't watch her show.  

     Charley's Angels, yes, first three seasons, saw nothing of the Shelley Hack and Tanya Roberts years but preferred, overall, Cheryl Ladd, Farrah Fawcett-Majors' replacement.  I had a wallet sized cut out from Newsweek magazine of the Cheryl Ladd poster with pink background, Cheryl wearing a silver gown.  

     I saw all five seasons of that show on MeTV a few years ago.  These women were desired by young men and teenaged boys.  I was of the male generation that wanted to get down and dirty with Cheryl Ladd, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Farrah, the only one of the group to be able to go by her first name only and be instantly recognized inside the mind.

     Today I saw Leah Remini, actress, former Scientologist, interviewed by Joe Rogan, a conversational duet from 2017.  She makes Scientology sound like a cult controlling its parishioners, brainwashing them, tracking their movements.  Tom Cruise, net worth 570 million dollars, doesn't come off well, but hey! maybe Scientology is like the ministry of Jimmy Swaggart, net worth 10 million dollars?  You gotta love the boldness and up front smiling nature of a Tom Cruise or a Jimmy Swaggart!  

     Remember Jimmy?  He got into trouble.  I've forgiven Jimmy and his wayward penis.

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     What I want to see on a screen...

     An image formed from what's there, no CGI.

     More black and white, more experimental color tones.

     End credits that go on for only ten or twenty seconds.

     Small or no crew to make setting up shots quicker.

     Lack of obsession with perfection.

     Drive forward, make things happen.

     Use accidents, work them into the film.

     Actors and actresses speaking like their characters, as regular humans, would speak.

     Improvised dialogue based on an understanding of the scene's thrust.

     As director, steering the dialogue, unblocking it when it gets stuck.

     Wide coverage, a forty-five minute conversation, video camera handed back and forth, yielding many facial expressions.  These can be tipped without sound into the main shot of the speaker.

     In a scene in Godard's Made in U.S.A. (1966) Paula Nelson (Anna Karina) interacts with men in trench coats and 1940s hats, the dialogue full of movie references, historical figures, amounting to three or four compressed narratives in one scene.  

     Is it possible to capture a real train sound?  Or a refrigerator humming at night?  Just naked microphones, no Foley sound work?  Strike that price from the budget.

     Production cost, a few bucks, more if you go somewhere.  My most expensive film, The Quadium Factor, cost 800 bucks because I traveled to make it, my own transportation captain, such an official sounding title.

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     Premise: (I Promise Nothing).

     The last day of summer, a court in Europe, 1491, Bavarian Alps, a summer home for a Royal family, the Schneiderbockers.  Craft beer makers, alchemists of zymurgy, the Schneiderbocker Dynasty ruled Bocklinville from A.D. 1010.  Bocklinville, a principality the size of East Timor but in south west Germany, hilly, craggy in spots, lots of hiding places for outlaws, goblins and witches, dangerous weirdos, too.  

     One of these weirdos, Peter Jobst, the Blood Drinker, attacks willy-nilly, anybody and everybody.  Walk past where Peter Jobst is, you'll likely be attacked.  He bites, he drinks your blood.  He's a land vampire, strictly in man shape, shaggy, long beard, formerly a kindly face, but he broods a lot, his brow is furrowed.  He smiles when he attacks, arms outspread.  To be smothered by his runt bear weight and bloody greasy smell is a special experience, indeed.  

     A town cryer finishes reporting on this monster.  

     Two killed so far, will you be next? the cryer concludes, steps down from the limestone walkway projecting out of the fountain, turned off during the man's announcements and warnings, as well messages from the Prince's public relations office, for which he proudly labors, so he said.

     The crowd disperses, rumbling to each other.  A man in green hunting suit had listened to the cryer's report of the Woods Blood Drinker.

     Hans Keller, the man in green, had robbed, with Peter Jobst, travelers, sometimes joining with gangs.

     Peter Jobst caught the eye of a tavern woman while he spent large amounts on others and himself a week after a big haul. 

     Got himself recognized on the way to her place, fled to the woods and Hans, who never suspected something cracked inside Peter Jobst.  No one knew when, or why, but he got worse, fast.

     Hans Keller believes he can persuade Peter Jobst to stop murdering people willy nilly and terrorizing those he doesn't kill.  A hypocrite, Hans conveniently dismisses from awareness the 225 people he had killed in his thievery career.  

     That night, about four in the morning, Hans slips out of the city, climbing a low spot un-repaired for two years now.  Hans feels this is getting an early start to the day.  Still dark, he walks into the forest, no idea what to expect, East by Northeast of the city, over grass lengthening, approaches to numerous hills, places with trails to walk around some of them.  At Noon he halts and eats lunch in a glade, takes off his boots and massages his feet, takes a nap, wakes up robbed and naked.  Tracks of many outlaws, among them, maybe, Peter Jobst...

LUCIFER MADE HIM?...OR...

     The Woods Blood Drinker, out NOW in extra thick paperback!

     I remember a college class in which the teacher distributed a blank-pages journal to a student, who would write stuff in there for a few days, then give it to another student, until the journal was mostly filled with writing most of which wasn't worth reading.

     Think of how much bad writing and uninspired execution in written forms a teacher has to read in a long career.  My father, an English professor, had to read towers of dreck.  Around that, he read lots of books of almost all genres and categories, watched TV shows like All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Rockford Files.  He'd watch late night movies.  At work he graded papers, taught classes, finally wearied decisively of the indifference for learning about English language literature among people not long out of high school, still in the molding stage, that's college.

     College, or University, presents an ideal of life: studying, attending lectures, learning, becoming good speakers, going to State finals, getting laid with others from outside one's own small town.  

     College has nothing to do with the real world, except when the bills come, many years for some after they've graduated, that condition called Student Loan Debt, which Joe Biden promised in his campaign that he'd forgive those loans in part, though not in full.  Why?  Because he's an asshole who labored on behalf of the credit card companies, raising interest rates, contributing to the Student Loan Dept crisis directly, himself, Joe Biden, who can, with a signature on an executive order, eliminate student debt.  

     I see such stories on my TV screen.  

     Advice to artists uncertain of their presentations, whether writing or whatever.  Don't hold back in expressing your thoughts and feelings, intuitions, memories; don't hold back from inventing scenarios with imaginary people or imaginary qualities and conditions placed on real people.  Push forward, keep fingers moving.

     A writer's block is an unwillingness to make any words appear on the screen, or sheet of paper, or in the sand.

     The cure for writer's block is to write a word:

     Permian

     290 to 245 million years ago, hot and dry climates, trilobites went extinct.  I saw one in my local public museum.  There were millions of these little horseshoe crab-like animals for millions of years, they ruled the planet, then they were gone, big reptiles arrived.  Mass extinction at Permian Era's conclusion.  245 million years ago, most of life on Earth snuffed out, a great dying bigger in animals killed than the asteroid collision event of roughly 65 million years ago.  

     Precarious

     Along the knife's edge.  A shot of Hoover Dam from above, a black ant on the curving walkway topping the dam.  The black dot shows then as a speck traveling down, like a spider dropping from its tether.  Impact, roll, black dot inert.

     Premature

     The killed in this case had fifty-five years to live had she not propelled herself off the dam's lip, not all of the fifty-five years she had left would've been bad.  

     Prognostication

     He can look at a person, see how long they have to live, catch fleeting images of future events in their lives.  He's taught himself to concentrate on not having his ability on all the time.  Actually the premise of an episode of The X Files.

     Peter Boyle

     Played the far-seeing doomsayer in that TV episode, also was the sewn together creation in Young Frankenstein.  He uses his boots to good comic effect in that film.  In The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Peter Boyle plays a bartender "in the life," but now informing for the FBI, though playing both sides.  

     Hollywood in the 1970s made its best films.  2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Easy Rider (1969) suggested the way: big budget but polished in story too, or small budget and free-wheeling, character-driven pieces, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975).  A man who isn't crazy enters a psychiatric ward run by an iron-willed bitch, rebels, gets lobotomized, but there's an uplifting ending.

     The Conversation (1974) Francis Ford Coppola's film about surveillance and invasion of privacy in the Watergate era, but resonating truthfully today, and even more so.  Gene Hackman's lead performance is one of a convincing everyman with his own hangups.  Hackman retired to paint and enjoy the mellow world of a rich man resting on his laurels.  

     Buddy Ebsen also retired to paint, as did Tony Curtis.  When this happens, inevitably Entertainment Tonight or Inside Edition or CNN does a segment on the actor who paints, the actor who's become a champion gamer, the actor who married an unknown person, and why.

     

     Buddy Ebsen's private eye show, Barnaby Jones (1973-1980), starts out usually with a murder.  We see the murder take place.  We know the identity of the murderer, although his or her motives may be obscured until later, when Barnaby digs into the case, rural anecdotes always at hand.

     Barnaby drinks cold milk, no coffee or booze for him.  He has a beautiful secretary, Betty Jones, daughter-in-law to Barnaby, whose son isn't in the picture.  Is he dead?  Did he go on an expedition to a remote area of Indonesia and never come back?  

     Barnaby's incorruptible, he's kind, he's not tempted to fuck his gorgeous secretary (Lee Meriwether, the Catwoman in the first Batman film).  Barnaby has amazing luck, too.  Clues fall into his hands.  A cat burglar leaves on a bollard of a balcony railing a few fibers from his rope, which happens to be rodeo rope or something.  It isn't long before Barnaby figures out the burglar has rope-swinging abilities.  

     I watch the show because of the stories, I watch it for the cars, the decor, houses, parts of beachfront LA I've seen back in the 1970s when it wasn't so built up with residences.

     In Barnaby Jones there are good character actors and actresses, when Hollywood had access to a large pool of performers playing background and supporting roles for many years, many of them as or more experienced than the main stars, although Buddy Ebsen was dancing with little Shirley Temple in the 1930s.  He was also first choice to play the Tin Man in the 1939 Wizard of Oz, but the silver makeup caused a severe, and what may have become a fatal reaction, so it came off PDQ. 

     Jack Haley, whose Tin Man performance comes off well, had skin that could tolerate the silver, 

sucking in the silvery coin associated with the job, a role known down the decades by several generations, including mine.  I saw the film several times on my parents' black and white TV with antenna.  The effect of Dorothy going from a black and white Kansas to a Technicolor Oz was lost on me, but I could still marvel at the variety of Munchkins, the Yellow Brick Road, bright in black and white against surrounding grass and countryside.  

     The Flying Monkeys, the crystal ball like a Palantir, the seeing stone from Tolkien's legendarium, a Thielstone in our time.

     This essay, if that's what it is, comprises a journal, if not entirely of film, but of screens showing recorded reality and manipulated reality.  The screens of my mind, too, where dreams originate, inspired by real life but also by their own natural imagination.

     As I write ideas, images, and words occur to me flashing-like.

     On my Instagram screen I read that Monica Vitti died, age ninety.  She was famously in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura, L'Eclisse, La Notte, and Il Deserto Rosso.  Serious films, mysteries, relationship dramas, films exploring emptiness, disconnection, madness, infidelity, loss of faith, perfect subject matter for the early 1960s, an Italian reflection of modern post-World War Two philosophy.

     I picture Monica Vitti with a copy of The Plague by Albert Camus in her hand, or The Conformist by Alberto Moravia.  I see her in a white dress laughing on a sailboat with turquoise blue water flashing gold.  I see her wanting to call Alain Delon in L'Eclisse, talking to herself, getting into restless poses.  I see her in the same film stopping in the street, turning to look at a passing man, remarking upon what an interesting face he has.

     Mundane moments in films I welcome, for that side of life (more time-consuming than anything else that happens in our existences here) is so ever present.  A President makes his State of the Union, then pees.  What's going through his mind as he watches himself, the leader of the free world's own urine stream on this most important night of projecting an optimistic and bloodthirsty message, pissing into clear toilet water, the same toilet used by John Kennedy a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis.

     

     Next on CNN:

     PRESIDENT BIDEN HAS SOMETHING TO SAY AFTER TAKING A CONTEMPLATIVE PISS

     March 1, 2022, will be when Biden gives his State of the Union.  He'll have time to work through the word-based kinks in the speech he didn't write, to not stumble on words like "humanity," "peace," and "independence."

     In a film, the villain need only be someone we the viewers must put up with for a couple of hours.  Real life villains we see on our screens every day; the process is slow, they mostly don't get punished, and interest in a scandal wears off.  

     MSNBC and the other cable news and mainstream outlets suffered a ratings hit after Donald Trump wasn't in the White House anymore.  Their villain quit the show, preparing a sequel, I've heard.  

     The Trump II miniseries would be most welcome to corporate news media.  I have a feeling Biden's job performance doesn't impress even his apologists.  Trump will beat him.  

     Two old men going at it, when the fuck is this going to stop?  

     The Boomer generation has proven they can't govern in a moral way.  Generation X won't be much better, nor will subsequent generations seeking power because seeking power is the problem; it makes shits of everyone, but many of them are shits to begin with.  Have you ever known (or been married to) someone who talked big, but their boasting never panned out?  Political candidates are like that.  A presidential candidate can promise Medicare For All, as Trump did at one time during his presidential run, but to actually make that happen is something else entirely, for he'd have to oppose the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, both of which own large segments of government, including enough politicians to ensure everything will always go their way.

    Watching these power brokers who mis-run the country on purpose because that suits their benefactors, shows them to be marionettes of their controllers, the oligarchs.  

     Mitch McConnell, haven't heard much from him lately, though he's got his eye on rejecting every pick Joe Biden puts before a Senate confirmation committee to decide who wins the next Supreme Court power politics show. 

     Mitch gets ready for next season of Senate Decision Makers, starring Mitch, Charles Chuck Schumer, Ted Cruz, Dianne Feinstein, almost dead and brain-addled, and Elizabeth Warren, existing unaware of why anyone would hate her.  

     I make my screen show something else:

     Whoopi Goldberg, suspended from The View for saying the Holocaust wasn't about race; it was a "white on white" thing.  ABC, broadcaster of that show, hopes Whoopi Goldberg will spend her two week suspension reflecting on how she hurt feelings with her words. 

     Whoopi, how about reading a book?  The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, will give you a broad but fascinating overview of Nazi Germany, its players, its philosophies, the circumstances leading to the Holocaust, how Hitler and his bunch thought of Jews as a different and inferior race. 

     Whoopi was suspended for talking, the show's key ingredient.  

     Ideas may not be exchanged on ABC.

     I would not have suspended her.  In defense of the First Amendment, I declare that Goldberg had the right to say what she said.  People say shit on TV all the time.  Rachel Maddow used her platform, the number one rated cable news channel program in its time slot, to lie about Russiagate.  Per the First Amendment, she had the right to lie on behalf of her corporate masters, as I have the right to say what I think of her, and other professional liars working for corporations with their own television news networks and millions of dollars at their easy disposal.  

     Keep Whoopi Goldberg on, encourage a real conversation on the show, make the program interesting for the first time in its twenty-four year run. 

     Allowing Silicon Valley tech plutocratic values to prevail is like giving a socially awkward college boy billions of dollars to create a virtual universe where a significant portion of humanity may someday be ensnared.

     The entertainment complex (including news media) can be, and has been, repurposed to shape minds on a subliminal scale far beyond the skull images in magazine liquor ads.  Every one of us probably has at least one viewpoint in our minds, currently, that was made up by someone else and propagated through entertainment/news media.  For millions in the past, weapons of mass destruction in the possession of Hussein, constituted a reality but turned out to be a mirage, but a useful one, for it allowed Dick Cheney and George W. Bush to wage a war with popular support.  

     Remember the excitement of the (staged) uprooting of a Saddam statue in Baghdad?  Not as dramatic or tearjerking as the dismantlement of the Berlin Wall, but it's hard to resist the cuteness of a little boy sitting on top of Saddam's statue's severed head, nominee for news photo of the year!

     That little boy's face says, "We welcome the Americans!"

     That was April 9, 2003, three and a half years before the Surge.  With the aid of an American tank, a statue of Hussein, a symbol of autocratic rule (supported by the United States from 1979 to 1990, let's be real) came down today and look at this little boy, so happy with his liberators who don't speak his language, a linguistic difference that will prove deadly in days and years to come, as families at checkpoints don't understand American guards, foreigners stressed out and eager to squeeze triggers.

     

     Not on my screen much these days is Joe Biden.  It took him ten months to do a press conference.  I heard his answers were disjointed, as is our democracy.

     We are "living in a TV show that controls our lives," said Russell Brand, comedian and podcaster.

     Repeating lies fed to our heads by millionaires on television.  Change screen to Jeffrey Hunter on the Cross.  

     Brochures we've looked at while bored on a plane trip.  Tablets written in cuneiform.  Babylonian library like a collection of stones.  Records of Cyrus's coming.  Scribes and those writers who author articles in airline magazines, the same type of person, or at least, possessing the same patience and listening skill.  

     A film along the lines of the sword and sandals genre, about Cyrus the Great, "my messiah," says English Bible God of this Persian.  Starring Richard Egan and Audrey Meadows, Victor Buono, Rosanna Schiaffino, James Dean four years after he crashed into a big tree.  

     Every movie needs a wildcard to elevate its factor of being unique.  Eddie Constantine in Beware of a Holy Whore acting as a film noir weight holding down the movie with a feel of melodrama.  The antics of the film crew and actors and actresses in Holy Whore, production halted in Ischia, a resort island off of Italy, amount to a film within a film doomed to end while in production, the director left alone, deserted by everyone.  

     Some people, like that director, are insufferable.  I've been insufferable to others, too.  I bet you have as well.

     When I see well-paid and overpaid performers of today, I wonder how they access emotions of despair, chronic anxiety, such as a poor person feels.  Where is the struggle for Gwyneth Paltrow?  Can Meryl Streep convincingly play a homeless woman?  

     

     Meryl Streep! in an astonishing performance, Matty Branch, nominated for an Oscar!  Ms. Streep conducted 158 interviews with homeless women to research her role, for she couldn't use her imagination or exercise the cultivation of empathy over a lifetime to help her wonder what it's like to be homeless.  According to People, she even spent one night on the streets, in character as feisty Matty Branch (really she was out there from 9:00 pm to 3 am). 

     But the Oscar goes to...Shirley Booth!  Now a two time Oscar winner!  Shirley Booth IS Mrs. Hudson, Sherlock Holmes's landlady.  This Mrs. Hudson sticks her nose into Holmes and Watson's affairs, straightens Holmes's things to his perpetual exasperation, hides his cocaine, but he likes her toast and eggs.  She calls him Mr. H, just as Shirley Booth as Hazel called Don DeFore's character Mr. B.

     

     Best Picture of the Year: Catching Flak.  

     President Hartley Benton the Second (Alec Baldwin), a cold rage man, goes off explosively with corrosive impact during a press conference with many questions about the shitty economic state of America.

     His communications director has a private meeting in the Oval Office, reveals to him his dropping popularity rating, his decreasing chances of getting reelected--the only reason to be a politician, just keep the cushy job going!  

     How to put fog over "these circumstances beyond our control," as the communications director phrases it, results in a five hour brainstorming session, with Domino's Pizza, the Vice President, Chief of Staff, and Secretary of Defense brought in. 

     Start a civil war in Central America, get into it to save democracy?  

     Talking point: the economy is, in fact, good. (Figure out ways to argue this).

     We're getting a grip on hunting domestic terrorists and killing less innocent bystanders?  

     There are a host of things to brag about re the job we're doing!  

     "Covid-19," the Secretary of Dense begins, Domino's napkin crunched in a fist, "let me start again.  Do I have everyone's attention?  ANYBODY WANT TO MURMUR???  All right, that's better.  Covid-19 is less deadly than it was."  He sits back, smiling slightly.  

     "That's the message?" the Chief of Staff says, voice jumping high. 

     The Secretary of Defense continues: "Yes, the decline in deadliness of the virus has nothing to do with anything we've done, but it will look awfully good on your face, Mr. President, when you announce it to the American people.  Come on, Hart!  Give em that toothy grin!" 

     Hearing through her East Wing Intelligence Service about the brainstorming session and its subject, First Lady Sandy (Sandra Bullock) finishes a taping of her own cooking and home economics tips show on C-Span.   

     Passing through the President's outer office, smiling at the secretary's objection, the First Lady opens the door to Hubby's play room.  Conversation stops immediately.  The President had just suggested throwing out the first pitch in the upcoming Major League Baseball season, to boost the American people's morale.  

     The Defense Secretary, a sentimental man in charge of a death machine lubed by taxpayers' hard-earned money, whistles the theme of 

     "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet."

     

     The President gestures to a spot near him on a couch.  

     "A slogan," she suggests, "for your campaign.  Building togetherness, together!"  

     They love it.

     Though mocked by some, the slogan takes off, becomes the title of an epic narrative film paid for by the government. 

     

     D.W. Griffith, out of work since 1931, can't understand why he's been "canceled" for having made Birth of a Nation (1915).  

     In a studio head's office, Griffith says, "It covers many subjects in addition to the birth of the Ku Klux Klan.  You do know the film was based on a novel called The Clansman?  How that might not give a viewer a clue as to the film's content I have no idea, for the crazy-mindedness of the cussed human race, though I dare say we are redeemable, wins every time over reason."

     This studio head suggests to his old friend and fellow Mason, President Benton, that Griffith make the film, a grand comeback for a pioneer of motion pictures.

     

          B U I L D I N G  T O G E T H E R N E S S,  T O G E T H E R!    

     

     "We had to make it up as we went along, the techniques in those years," Griffith muses while the studio head takes a call from the Governor of Texas, where some of the film will be shot.  

     "There were no precedents!" Griffith shouts, pounding the desk with his fist.  "Think of it!  A new art form, an open frontier!  Can you picture it?"

     "Relax, D.W.," the studio head says.  "Let me give you the good news."  

     

     President Benton wants Griffith, he's seen Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, twice both.

     Building Togetherness, Together! the movie, (BTT), the budget: 500 million dollars.

     6,000 technicians, 

     State of the art crew, 

     Panavision 70.

     Lillian Gish must play the lead role, no matter what the role.

     "She'll play an FBI agent heading a squad of investigators searching for hackers to recruit into the FBI," the studio head reveals.

     "Interesting," Griffith says.  "I don't understand the politics of this era, but I will pursue the project like Nathan Bedford Forrest's Klansmen, robes flowing as they pursued runaway slaves!"

     "Keep that to yourself, D.W."

     

     Alec Baldwin, playing himself, plays a cavalry officer in D.W. Griffith's film, Building Togetherness, Together!  

     Baldwin, as mentioned, also plays Hartley Benton the Second of Benton College, founded by Hartley Benton the First, the great-grandfather who was old enough to have known Nathan Bedford Forrest, but hadn't.

     While casting, Griffith, silent film celluloid still pumping through his veins--it's just the way he sees cinema, no sound, stories with pictures--sees an actress he likes as "a face" in two movies, The Color of Money, and The Abyss.

     

     From Screen Money, the Online Magazine:

     "Who could bring Mary Elizabeth Mastantonio, hey! I thought she was retired!? back to the screen other than D.W. Griffith?  Apart from Mastrantonio, the movie stars Lillian Gish, Judd Hirsch, Robert Redford, Jonathan Frakes, Sondra Locke, and Sandra Bullock.  Oscar-nominated song sung by Cher, "If Home is a Cage, I Don't Mind Cages."

     

     Meanwhile, President Benton makes a gaffe the cartoonists depict with accompanying mushroom clouds.  Joking (?) on a hot mic with the Premier of Russia, Benton says, "You know we should just go ahead and do it, blast the whole thing sky high."

     The Premier smiled slightly, probably thinking his colleague in the running of countries might be losing his mind.  

     Yes, very funny Mr. President, you who have the power to make the dreadful happen.

     D.W. Griffith, most ancient director in the world, won't be rushed on the cut of his new masterpiece,

title now changed to Bark Beautiful, Dogs of America!  He has final cut, he thinks.  

     The film starts with Benton's great-grandfather, Hartley Benton (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, brooding even more than usual), his membership in the Ku Klux Klan, his participation in cross burnings, threatening a merchant with a gun, starting a feud, going on plunder raids in Mississippi and Louisiana.  Flash forward to Hartley Benton the Second.  Ambitious, hard-working, graduate of Smithtown College, a tiny place but well-renowned, where his head got filled up with liberal arts info and intelligence agency recruiters' good drugs and real belief in remolding the world in favor of the "good guys."  

     He learned by observing his uncle's friends.  These crazies worked hardcore for the CIA.  Two of them had helped frame Lee Harvey Oswald.  One of them was "Derek "Headshot" Newcomb, a tall thin man with well-developed arm muscles and a squint.  

     Howie (Edward Norton), group spokesman, explains, "The Company [CIA] has long wanted to field its own political candidates.  We'd like to see one of ours in the White House.  You can accept or refuse, Hartley, but pick one option now."

     Suddenly, Hartley Benton the Second felt like Nick Nolte when he falls into the pool in Down and Out in Beverly Hills.  Hartley Benton, an avid watcher of films, did not shun Birth of a Nation.

     In Griffith's BBDOA, or BTT, young Hartley Benton (Bradford Dillman) teaches history at a southern college.  He gets canceled over and over again.  His views on everything don't jibe with the values of tender-hearted souls learning about things they'll forget about.  

     They entrap him with one of his students, an attractive young Black woman (Vonetta McGee), videos go out to internet, somehow this scandal which cost him his job has no impact on his presidential run.  

     Oh, the people said, you're saying Benton likes to fuck young women?  What else yuh got?

     

     Griffith had an internet tech advisor teaching him about social media.  The advisor, Jeff F., was paid a salary of 250,000 dollars per month.  The shoot lasted three months, Jeff earned 750,000 dollars but didn't save it.  In two months he was broke.  

     Jeff F. destroyed Nevada and it was worth it.

     

     A documentary about the making of Griffith's epic was produced.  Alec Baldwin's pissed off outtakes are especially fun, but the film has parallels aplenty with Benton's life, including the making of the film within the film.

     Griffith did a little acting, too...

     

     President Benton calls in the legend.  Oval Office.  Scene 18.  Take One.

     Benton: I see you admiring the room.

 

     Griffith: You should have more battle flags, flags of divisions, sir!

     Benton: I have the Stars and Stripes, the flag that whooped your ass.

   

     Griffith: I understand you have seen my film.

  

     Benton: I admire how you can shift away from explosive argument.

 

     Griffith: Pointless argument.  What did you think?

 

     Benton: Honest?

     Griffith: Injun.

     Benton: I didn't understand why you had the present scenes be in black and white and the historical scenes be in color.

     Griffith: Subverting expectations, my good man!  Does it really matter?  What did you think of the story, of my portrayal of you and your ancestor?

     Benton: It's a bit heavy on the KKK stuff.  You know, I've backed racist bills in the past but I never wore a white sheet.  It's all a bit too secret society for me, I'm already in one of those.  But, it'll get talked about if it comes out.

  

     Griffith: If it comes out?

     Benton: I can shelve the project with a snap of my fingers, as long as I have my secretary Molly nearby to hear the snap.  She can then draft a memo using that shorthand writing ability she has--Molly.   Come in here, please.

     Molly: Yes, Mr. President?

     Benton: I was just telling Mr. Griffith I can have you write up an executive action memorandum--(low voice) D.W., that's the long version of the word memo.  An executive action memo, you can say it two ways, cancelling the film, Beautiful Bread Basket.

     (Together), Griffith: Bark Beautiful, Dogs of America.  

     (and) Molly: Building Togetherness, Together!

     Benton: Do you understand, Griffith!?  I can kill your film.  You're going to make cuts.  I'll send the White House Communications Shaper of Informative Matter and Chief Editor to work on it with you.  He's a wiz.  It'll get done in five to ten days, my prediction, but I'll give you thirty, and some extra taxpayer money, there's an endless supply of that.  The poor labor to just survive.  I labor to keep my mind interested because I bore easily.  Please, don't start speechifying at me.  My acceptance speech at the convention last summer was thirty-two seconds long.  They loved it, they think they heard certain words they enjoy hearing.  Anyway, get going Griffith, you're not about to go working on another picture just yet.  Follow what Nate says.

  

     Griffith: Nate?

     Benton: You'll recognize him.  White golfing cap on backwards, knee-length shorts, t-shirt with some logo on it, he's a sportsman, and a helluva good editor.  He makes me look good.  He'll do the same for BTT.

     Three days later.  Editing chamber, West Wing, Subterranean Level B-2, surveillance camera tiny, but there, and on:

     Griffith: Nathan, would you please sit down?!

     Nate: This is how I think, Granddad.

     Griffith: Hopping about the room as if you're on a tennis court?

 

     Nate: Racketball, you ignoramus.

     Griffith: Your manners match your insolent personality.

     Nate dodges onto his rolling chair: I got it!  We'll restore that part we just cut with Civil War Benton joining the KKK, but we'll make it a flashback when it's revealed to the audience he's a KKK man.

     Griffith: Well, that's not a bad idea.

     Nate: We'll get this, Dave.  We'll get this.

     Griffith: But it won't be my film anymore.

     The final film makes Civil War Benton a demonic drunken killer who also maintains a law practice.  The current Benton is made out to be lovable, his gaffes and poor job performance just funny shit to laugh about during down times.  Concentrating on personality quirks is always more important than illuminating the policy objectives of our leaders.

     Someone remarks that Alec Baldwin should have received two Academy statuettes, not just the one he got for his overall performance.  The two roles, wherein he plays himself playing the fictional cavalry officer, and the current Benton, who's the President.  Still, he thanks the Academy, his wife, family, his producer for putting up with his demands.

     He thanks the makers of guns everywhere, for without guns and jewelry, Hollywood wouldn't exist.

Vic Neptune