There’s a line in my bio which I’ve come to understand over the years is pure anecdote bait: “Peter once worked as an extra in a Michael Jackson music video.” Everybody envisions me all zombied up in the background of Thriller, but come on, people: those aren’t extras. Those are zombies.
The video was “Remember the Time,” and it was shot in 1992, directed by John Singleton. The story, such as it is, sends MJ back through time to a version of Ancient Egypt ruled over by African American luminaries: Eddie Murphy as the Pharoah, Imam as the Queen, Magic Johnson as… some kind of bare-chested announcer guy, I don’t know. Via a friend who worked as a casting director, I was hired to be an extra in the marketplace scene, in which Michael – I call him Michael – flees (whilst singing and dancing, of course) from the Pharoah’s guards. You can see the sequence starting at about 4:44, here. You won’t see me, though. I was on the set all day, in costume as the Snake Charmer, hanging around with the other extras, all of whom were – like me – actors/writers/directors/whatever, who had taken the job in order to meet Jackson, or Singleton, or just to be able to spend the rest of their lives telling a great story. However, the shoot went long, and they broke before shooting my “scene.” Read the rest of this entry »
Back in October, I put up a series of posts about the conspiracy theorizing going around over the Right, specifically, on the web- and paper-pages of the National Review, concerning Barack Obama. Namely, that he was a closeted radical Marxist who would upend/destroy/replace everything we ‘Muricans hold dear.
Like a lot of people who watch politics and political media, I wondered how the right-wing punditocracy would react after the election. Obviously, Obama is now the President, and might be due some small measure of respect, at least a similar measure to that which was demanded for President Bush; more importantly, his election showed that he was popular, and I thought there was a small chance that some folks might be cognizant of what happened to Father Coughlin after he turned against the equally popular Roosevelt, in wartime.
Well, some have, but some have not. Our friend Andy McCarthy, again of the National Review, put up a post this week in which he comes out blazing with the guns he’s sticking to, if you will. It is so remarkable a document of, shall we say, subjective vindication (YOU SEE? I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG) that it drew a rare, if brief and mild, rebuke, from the National Review’s editor, a rebuke to which McCarthy responded.
I really have no comment, other than to say that the hope that anybody, on either side of our increasingly wide chasm of opinion, will ever admit error, is (almost) ridiculous. Happy to read examples of that, if you know of them.
Ira, as he always does, accurately and skillfully condensed a much longer interview (we spoke for an hour) into a sharp few minutes of radio, so here are some additional notes:
The play about Holocaust denial which brought me to the attention of producer Lawrence Bender is called Denial, and was premiered by the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, CT under the direction of Arvin Brown in November of 1995. It’s published by Dramatic Publishing, and is also available as a radio play from LA Theater Works. Its most recent production (that I’m aware of) was in New York City in April of 2007 under the direction of my dear friend Alex Roe.
And: Ira kept trying to get me to admit that the experience of seeing my originally screenplay turned into “Dirty Dancing 2″ was heartbreaking, but as I say on the show, it really wasn’t. For one thing, this wasn’t some kind of deep powerful story torn from my soul; it was a professional writing assignment that I put a lot of effort into, and for which I was adequately (though not exorbitantly, by anyone’s standards) paid. And, to reiterate, that it got made, even though transfigured into something entirely different, is a better ending to my Hollywood story — so far — than the one I thought I had created: abject failure, a screenplay sitting on the shelf.
So I got to go to a big Hollywood premiere and meet Patrick Swayze; and now I’ve got a big movie poster with my name on it in my living room, a yearly check for a few thousand dollars from international royalties or some such, and a good story to tell. Thanks to Ira, and producer Jane Feltes, for letting me tell it on their superb radio show.
Some unknown person or persons dug this up from the ethereal past and posted it:
I taped the appearance in the fall of 1987, if I remember correctly. I had moved to LA just a few months before, to seek my fortune, and having met Chuck Forrest, a Jeopardy Tournament of Champions winner, the prior summer in Egypt, I had the idea of trying out for the show. I of course assumed that by the time they called me, if ever, I’d be too busy pursuing my lucrative writing career to bother, but why not try? Needless to say, I was available when I got the call
To answer some questions that have already come up: I DID know a lot of the answers, but I couldn’t figure out the timing of the buzzer system… watch my hand, and you’ll see me fruitlessly mashing the button. So I desperately started trying to answer questions I didn’t know; a poor strategy.
I did enjoy the various prizes, especially that Vaseline, but, twenty years later, all I have left is the chair. The TV lasted for a long time, though, travelling with me from LA to Minneapolis to New York to Chicago before I sold it 5 years ago for $100.
I got rid of the glasses shortly thereafter after a girl at a party said to me, “Are you a lawyer? You look like a lawyer.”
Alex seemed professional but utterly uninterested in any of us once the camera light was off. My main memory of his was him sitting around in his undershirt, during the lunch, complaining to his crew that he was the hardest working guy in daytime TV, while they nodded.
And no, that’s not Weird Al Yankovic.
UPDATE — sorry, I butchered the YouTube link while editing. Now fixed.
… which is a runner’s saying, meaning, if you’re working out a lot, you can eat whatever crap you want. This is not true, by the way, but as Hemingway said in another context, it’s pretty to think so.
It may also not be true of the political noise machine… the vast and profitable infrastructure that turns Outrage into money, donations, book sales, names on the mailing list, aided and abetted by media that needs two sides so they can broadcast a fight. Watching the conservative punditocracy go after Judge Sotomayor is a lesson in how they’ll take anyone and try to make, as my grandmother used to say, a Federal case out of it. I am reminded of a scene in a play a friend of mine wrote years ago, in which a salesman, as an exercise, tries to sell.. a seashell. In trying to paint this hard working, moderate, hell, judicious judge as some kind of combination of Andrea Dworkin and Rita Moreno, these guys are trying to sell a seashell.
I don’t know anything about her, and have no opinion on whether should be a good justice, but it really hacks me off the way some people are saying that she must have gotten into Princeton and Yale via some kind of affirmative action program, and therefore she’s not necessarily as accomplished as others with those distinctions, who “earned” them. Okay. (Pause for breath.) I also attended one of those Elite Institutions, and it is true that I probably had a harder time getting admitted as an upper-middle class Jewish kid from the burbs, than if I had been (say) poor and Latino from the Bronx, because the elite institutions have lots of me and not a lot of them, and want to spread the wealth. But of course it is also true that I had every advantage, and they had none, so maybe we should spot those guys a couple of points on their SATs.
And I knew some of them, and did projects some of them, and I saw a bit of that brusque behavior that people are now attributing to Sotomayor. “Ooh, she’s not nice.” If she’s anything like the people I met at Harvard in the ’80s, then what she is, is what we used to call a grind, somebody who got everything she has by working extremely hard, and was going to do the same today and the next day ad infinitum, and had very, very little patience for those of us — and I stress “us” — who walked around the Yahd as if being there was something we were owed.
Is she brusque? Is she dismissive? I have no idea, but I would believe it. She must look upon the aristocratic lawyers who stroll into her court, white and rich and Groton and Yale and summering on the Vineyard, the way farmers do at the people who think that food is something produced magically by waiters.
Last year, I wrote a post about Mr. Rogers which cited an amazing article about him by Tom Junod, printed in Esquire. Since Esquire didn’t post the article, I felt I couldn’t either, but have since discovered an “unofficial” copy online. Here it is. I read it again, and it made me cry again. I read once that Victor Hugo began “Les Miserables” with an urge to create in fiction a model of a living saint — it’s the Bishop in the early chapters, the one who catches Jean Valjean with a stolen candlestick and gives him the other one — and reading this article again, it occurs to me that this kid’s show host — who I thought was too boring for me, even at the age of 6 — may, in fact, be the only true saint to have walked among us.
“Heard Axelrod shameful comment about naming the Obama dog Miss California. What a terrible thing to say about a fine woman who spoke her belief about same-sex marriage in a manner that would not offend anyone. Of course, you libs can’t stand anyone disagreeing with you, so you attack her. Your audience just howled in delight at the slam on her. You and your ignorant audience may not realize it, but her position on same-sex marriage is exactly the same as President Obama who has expressed it in the same terms. What a bunch of shit-heads!!!!”
“Pathetic imbeciles.”
“I just listened to the audio of David Axelrod denigrating Carrie Prejean on your program. You people make me sick. So smart, so intellectual. Why would you all laugh at a remark like that? Maybe it is because Carrie is a Christian (and you are bigots)? Maybe it is because Carrie is anti-abortion? Wait, wait…..don’t tell me. I know, it is because you are smarter than her, you are better than her, you are simply superior. You all may think you are real smart right now, but I’m willing to bet those smirks are going to be wiped off your faces shortly. Can you spell d-e-f-u-n-d? You are going to meet the same fate as your soul mates Acorn.“
“Truly, you have become an extremist, radical left-wing arm of the polarizing liberal idiots that divide this country. I hope this is used to go after your corporate sponsors, and to prevent any government money from going your way.”
“It is sad when a public official whose salary is paid by the American Taxpayer, and who is a representative of the POTUS, sees fit to ridicule a private American citizen, and to do so on a publicly funded media outlet with no objection from its administrators who accept Taxpayer dollars to fund their enterprise. What is next for Americans who differ in thought and idea from those in the Obama administration? Prison? Disappearings? Pogroms?”
As many folks have pointed out to me, porn star Stormy Daniels, who I profile in my book, says she’s considering a run for the Senate as a Republican in Louisiana, challenging David Vitter for the GOP nomination. (All the links above are SFW, but I’d be careful Googling her.)
Many are wondering if she’s serious. I don’t know… she’s an savvy businesswoman, so I wouldn’t put it by her to come up with this as a way of making herself even more of a household name. But as I say in the book, she is extremely charming, and very smart. She chose a career in porn because she saw it — correctly, as it turns out — as a way of very rapidly escaping her upbringing and becoming wealthy and famous. And, in an industry that, to quote myself, chews up young people at the rate of a World War I French infantry platoon, she’s proved herself to be a survivor. I would say to anyone, especially Mr. Vitter: underestimate her at her your own peril. There’s nothing this woman enjoys more than confounding the people who don’t care for her.
There are a lot of jokes to be made — ones she would enjoy — about how her experience screwing the masses will help her in high office, but for now I will say she comes off better in that CNN interview than most professional pols, and certainly better than many candidates. Run, Stormy, Run!
