BuzzMachine

It was bound to happen; I’m just surprised the odds didn’t hit first in one of the many American reality shows or double-dare-you movies. First, the crocodile hunter is hunted. Now a BBC presenter suffers serious brain injuries in the crash of a jet-powered car he was driving for a show.

Jesus has a MySpace account. He lists his hobbies as “beard care, extreme waterskiing” and his favorite film as “The Life of Brian.” Last I looked, poor bloke has zero friends. In fact, He needs to advertise for them. But does He pirate videos?

I was puzzled, even amazed, and truthfully disappointed when I saw an ad on a page of NYTimes.com touting Bill Clinton speaking at something called The Power Within. Is Clinton turning into a motivational speaker? In a manner of speaking, yes. President Bill meets Dr. Phil.

I was even more amazed when I saw the cost and the cast of players at the Power Within site, with all kinds of well-known names ready to stand up on a stage and tell you how to run your lives. A New York event includes Clinton (who can teach you — what? — how to redefine nothing less than the verb ‘to be’?), Michael Eisner (how to piss off an entire industry and lose your job), Mark Burnett (how to make the tackiest entertainment in decades and redefine reality), plus Lance Armstrong (insert your punchlines here), Jonathan Tisch, and Peter Guber. At least Donald Trump tells you how to get rich.

Sorry to be cynical. But I am. I can’t stand this crap. I spent too many years in San Francisco covering the likes of Werner Erhard’s est and the self-centered babble fad of the moment. I wonder whether these guys are doing this for the ego or the money.

Well, pap pays. The New York event at Javits — a damned big hall — costs up to $1,078.33 (don’t forget the .33) for “VIP executive,” down to $644.83 for the merely desperate to have has-beens tell you the secrets to their former success. I have no idea how many will buy tickets, but Trump says his last event at Javits lured 20,000 people. Figure an average $750 per ticket. That’s $15 million. Split — unevenly — among six speakers; it would seem that they’ll each get $1-3 million for a day’s “work.”

Hey, more power to them: Make a buck anyway you can. But make this much from the poor shlubs who are spending this fortune only because they can’t figure out what to do with their lives? The only thing more pathetic is exploiting the same void in people’s lives with the same sort of motivational speakers hauled out during PBS pledge weeks, in Yanni breaks.

I’m a big an of Clinton’s. But can he be this desperate for money and/or attention?

Oh, but he’s hardly alone. The list of people who want to tell you how to live is stunning. It includes:
* Cherie Booth, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife.
* Gooshy book writer Mitch Albom (no surprise).
* Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benezir Bhutto (surprise).
* Gooshy goosh seller Deepak Chopra (no surprise).
* Singer Naomi Judd.
* Celebrity something-or-other Bianca Jagger.
* Sir Richard Branson (is he not rich enough yet?).
* Les Brown, “one of the nation’s leading authorities in understanding and stimulating human potential” (huh?);
* The Freakonomics boys (big surprise; so much for their hard-edged analyses).
* John Edwards (who speaks on, what, how to lose?).
* Gloria Estefan (no surprise whatsoever, if you’ve ever heard her low-oxygen monologues).
* Tim Sanders, author of “Love is the Killer App” (doesn’t title make you want to puke?).
* John Gray, author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, and He’s from Pluto.
* Suzanne Somers (thinner thighs and fatter souls in 30 days, I suppose).
* Jack Welch (miss that expense account, fella?).
* Irshad Manji (a very disappointing personal surprise).
* Dr. Phil McGraw (of course!).

Mind you, I’m all for people making money speaking. Believe it or not, I very occasionally make a buck (not much more) that way. That’s not my issue. What amazes me is the company they all keep. These leaders of industry, government, entertainment, and publishing selling their — what? spiels? souls? — right next to:
* Rosemary Altea “an internationally renowned spiritual medium” who “gives the world a new ’soul system’ for understanding our relationships, our successes and failures, and ultimately our most fundamental selves.” She has even been on Oprah (no surprise).
* Crystal Andrus “a leader in the field of self-discovery and personal power.” (Who are the runners-up?)
* Sylvia Browne, “a world-renowned psychic.”
* Debbie Ford, “internationally recognized expert in the field of personal transformation.”
* Carolyn Myss who says she can “see” illnesses in patients’ bodies. Uh-huh.

If these people are internationally recognized, world-renowned leaders, why have I never heard of them? Guess I hang out with the wrong crowd. Thank goodness.

Toby Young, best known as Graydon Carter’s best-known firee, writes about being interviewed by Lynn Barber for the Observer at the same time that the Observer piece comes out. He says it was an interview from hell, though that seems rather like covering his ass just in case he was slapped around. But he wasn’t.

As if people with shopping carts aren’t dangerous enough, now they’ll be watching TVs instead of the road. That’s just another excuse for me to stay away from the supermarket.

Ever since the days of Fatty Arbuckle, Hollywood studios have worried about how the personal affairs of their stars would affect their business. The first impulse was always to cover up. But when you couldn’t do that, you ran away.

The canning of Tom Cruise is unusually and perhaps refreshingly public. Paramount mogul Sumner Redstone told the Journal that he was firing Cruise for acting crazy and stumping for Scientology.

This morning on Howard Stern, Elijah Blue Allman talked about Scientology since his mom, Cher, dated the young Mr. Cruise and since Sonny Bono was also a Scientologist. Allman said it started as an effort to have a Hollywood version of the Masons: a club with a secret handshake. But clearly, it is more than that. I wonder, though, whether stars will start tiptoeing away if the realize that their “religion” could cost them at the box office.

I would like to think that we have reached the end of our cultural rope with stars acting crazy and all their entourages being afraid to tell them they’re nuts. Tom Cruise. Michael Jackson. Mel Gibson. I’d like to think that, but I doubt it.

: LATER: Nikki Finke gets mad a Paramount for urging the dogs on. I disagree. It’s time for Hollywood to start expecting sanity.

: LATER STILL: The HuffingtonPost continues its surprisingly rousing defense of Scientology.

And just what are the scornable consequences that Scientology has fostered?

That car bomb planted by Sunni insurgents in Iraq against innocent Shia?
The Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust?
The atrocities committed against Christians and animists in the Sudan?
The wars between Hindu and Buddhist in Sri Lanka?
The several decades of religious wars in Northern Ireland?
The mutual bloodshed in Lebanon?

Oh, and was it Scientologists who flew planes into the World Trade Center?

Oy.

Last night on network news and today on the morning shows, I heard the laziest, most misleading and sensationalistic “reporting” about music and sex. You probably heard it, too: Rand study in Pediatrics says that raunchy lyrics lead to sex.

Lock up the kids! Elvis is in the house!

I was wishing for the guys from Freakonomics to take them on and, by golly, they did. Repeat after me: This is about correlation not causality. There is no way to provide that lyrics cause sex.

But these TV reports didn’t even acknowledge that. They didn’t go to anyone who would point that out. No, that would ruin a good tease. And they call this journalism?

Ain’t this just a loverly turn:

This year’s Emmy Awards, to be held on August 27 in Los Angeles, prove that British television executives have become astonishingly good at selling Americans the shamelessly downmarket fare that we once imported from the US.

In the reality competitions category, three of the five nominations are of British origin: American Idol, the creation of Simon Fuller, with Simon Cowell on the panel of judges; Dancing With The Stars, an overhauled version of the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing; and Survivor, the brainchild of British expat Mark Burnett.

In contrast, the highbrow categories are full of American shows popular in Britain, such as The Sopranos, 24 and The West Wing. . . .

We’ve outclassed the cousins.

Parents are paying to airbrush their kids’ yearbook pictures.

So I took my unsuspecting teenage son to see Woody Allen’s Scoop and here’s the funniest part:

The entire audience was geriatric. There wasn’t a person in the theater — in a decent crowd, by the way — who was under 50 and most won’t see 60 again. Not one hair follicle — those left — carried its natural color of youth. My son personally lowered the mean age in the place by 30 years.

I tell you, Woody Allen is the newspaper of film directors: His audience is dying off.

: The movie was cute if twitchy because Allen’s in it. Scarlet Johannson is not as sultry as she was in their last movie; she’s a reporter — a journalism student — and so she has to act awkward and twitchy herself, since reporters are like that, aren’t they? Yes, they are.

But she had her moments as the hardened reporter dame. And in the right light, her hair shone red and she looked like an imitation of none other than Ana Marie Cox. Separated at the casting couch:

A.O. Scott writes what is — until the last paragraph — a good column today on the critics vs. the box office (aka, the audience). He points to the RottenTomatoes and Metacritic ratings for the latest Pirates of the Caribbean — 54 and 52 out of 100. “Even in an era of rampant grade inflation, that’s a solid F.” But at the box office, of course, the movie is setting records: “Its $136 million first-weekend take was the highest three-day tally in history, building on a best-ever $55 million on that Friday, and it is cruising into blockbuster territory at a furious clip.” So…

For the second time this summer, then, my colleagues and I must face a frequently — and not always politely — asked question: What is wrong with you people? I will, for now, suppress the impulse to turn the question on the moviegoing public, which persists in paying good money to see bad movies that I see free. . . .

I don’t for a minute believe that financial success contradicts negative critical judgment; $500 million from now, “Dead Man’s Chest” will still be, in my estimation, occasionally amusing, frequently tedious and entirely too long. But the discrepancy between what critics think and how the public behaves is of perennial interest because it throws into relief some basic questions about taste, economics and the nature of popular entertainment, as well as the more vexing issue of what, exactly, critics are for.

Are we out of touch with the audience? Why do we go sniffing after art where everyone else is looking for fun, and spoiling everybody’s fun when it doesn’t live up to our notion or art? What gives us the right to yell “bomb” outside a crowded theater?

Scott is quite right that critical opinion and box office do not need to agree. A critic, after all, is just one among millions in the audience — the one who gets to see the movie earlier (well, not as often, these days) and who is paid to have and explain an opinion. But it’s wrong to think that critics should be predictors of commercial results. I remember years ago appearing on a TV news interview with an ad agency guy going over the fall schedule and he said I was “wrong” about some shows because some of those I liked would fail or vice versa. I said I wasn’t trying to predict their success — that’s his job. I was just trying to give my opinion. He didn’t get that.

Later, when I started Entertainment Weekly, I got into a huge fight — the last big one — over Pretty Woman. The magazine’s critic didn’t like it (neither did I). The top editors at Time Inc. all fussed and fumed and said that well, obviously, he was wrong and the box office proved it. Even they didn’t get it. Sadly.

Here’s where Scott ends his column. Get ready for a 200-pound lead weight dropping in that last sentence:

So why review them? Why not let the market do its work, let the audience have its fun and occupy ourselves with the arcana — the art — we critics ostensibly prefer? The obvious answer is that art, or at least the kind of pleasure, wonder and surprise we associate with art, often pops out of commerce, and we want to be around to celebrate when it does and to complain when it doesn’t. But the deeper answer is that our love of movies is sometimes expressed as a mistrust of the people who make and sell them, and even of the people who see them. We take entertainment very seriously, which is to say that we don’t go to the movies for fun. Or for money. We do it for you.

Oh, come now. That’s a bit too self-lionizing when the tongue appears to be nowhere near the cheek. You do do it for money. And you should do it for fun. And I don’t think criticism is like covering government; it is not and should not be informed by constant skepticism and distrust of artists and audience. At EW, I had one stopper criterion for potential critics: They had to love the area they criticized. I hate TV critics who hate TV; why bother? Now a critic who loves TV can be more righteously upset seeing bad TV but his or her attitude sitting down to watch something should be joyful anticipation.

The kicker notwithstanding, I think this is the first third of what could be a very interesting column. The last two-thirds are missing. I’ll reprise my questions from this post: What is the role of the “professional” critic in an age when everybody is a critic (well, everybody always was, it’s just that we can hear them now)? What is the role of the critic in the age of the — pardon me — long tail, when no critic can possibly pretend anymore to watch everything or cover every interest? What is the role of the former audience in art when it can become fluid? There is an opportunity — a need — to redefine criticism in a new media age. I wish Scott would tackle that.

Nevermind copyright for the moment. I want to look instead at creators’ rights.

A federal judge just ruled against CleanFlicks’ sanitizing of movies, editing out the allegedly naughty bits and then selling cleansed copies. The judge said this was a violation of copyright. The Salt Lake Tribune’s coverage adds: “The ruling does not affect another Utah company, ClearPlay, which has developed technology in DVD players that edits movies on the fly as they play.” So this ruling does come down to copyright — the right to copy — yet it also raises other issues.

Out of this news comes to opposing views from two web authors. (I love it when that happens. The web should be a neverending Oxford debate; may the best argument win.) Nick Gillespie, editor of Reason, takes CleanFlicks’ side, arguing that it’s our right to remix. Infotainment rules, on the other hand, argues that in this case copyright is a good thing for it is keeping bad things from happening to creative work.

I’m not entirely sure where I come down (yes, mark this day in your history books). On the one hand, I’m encouraging media people to submit their creations to the great remix out there: If you’re remixed, you’re part of the conversation, I say, and the conversation is the new distribution. But on the other hand, I would hate it if something I created under my name were mangled: I hate editors; that’s why I blog.

So get past the rights of ownership to the rights of authorship. When you create something, what rights should you have — ethically and legally — to maintain your creation in its full form, to protect your ideas and thoughts from bastardization?

When I wrote for People magazine, way back when, I wrote a favorable review of Concealed Enemies, a PBS miniseries. As I told the story here, the then editor-in-chief of Time Inc. took it upon himself to change not just the words but the opinions in my review (to make it favorable to his friend and mentor, Whitaker Chambers). He tried to put opinions that were not mine under my name. I said I would resign rather than let that happen. I saw it as a journalistic and ethical right to protect my views and my reputation with them. I won, by the way.

So what if someone took something I wrote here and changed my opinions utterly? What if the so-called Parents Television Council took a post of mine and made me an enemy of the First Amendment and Howard Stern? What if Dell made me into a satisfied customer?

Steven Spielberg wouldn’t allow so much as one “fuck” to be taken out of his Saving Private Ryan and that’s why some stations refused to be caught in a vice between him and the threat of an FCC fine and so they didn’t air the movie. Was that Spielberg’s right? I’d say so. He would rather that his movie not be seen than mangled by someone else.

So in one sense, the CleanFlicks decision is just a copyright fight: You can’t copy and sell a movie. But it raises these issues of authors’ rights. And so does that other technology that takes out the dirty bits for you.

But on the other hand, if you bought a DVD of Private Ryan, don’t you have some rights of use and ownership? Couldn’t you hit a dump button every time the F bomb is dropped if your kids are in the room? How do your rights of ownership clash with Spielberg’s rights of authorship and ownership?

And what if you’re a TV station reporting on the controversy over Ryan and you go into the movie and compile all the scenes with no-no words but show it on the air with bleeps. You do this to avoid FCC fines. Or what if you’re a comedy news show and you take all the bleep words and turned them into jokes: “Motherflower… Goddogged…” You do this to make fair comment on something in the news.

All this is timely around here as I talk about the need to reinvent the book, not to mention the rest of media; the need to get into a conversation; the need to be collaborative, the benefit of the remix; the value of the direct link. And the question often is raised: What is the role of the author in this new world? In journalism, I say that the author becomes more of a moderator, and when you’re seeking facts and information, that makes sense.

But in art, the author is the creator and has rights surrounding that creation. But that may change, too, as art itself becomes more collaborative. So what are the rights of the author? Do copyright and Creative Commons protect those rights? And what are the ethics of the remix? Is linking to the original sufficient? Is permission required? Is fair use a license to quote and thus to comment? Aren’t selection and alteration forms of comment? What rights does the audience have to change? In an age of the permalink and the deep link and the ability to track and compile consumption, in an age when consumption becomes an act of creation, isn’t that ability to just get to the good bits the audience likes a form of editing?

Here’s what Gillespie says:

As a viewer, I am already acting as a “third-party editor” to Apted’s—and every other directors’—films. As a writer, I can sympathize with Apted’s sense of creative ownership and his fear of losing control of his work. . . .

But here’s the rub. There is only unauthorized editing whenever a piece of culture is put in front of an audience. The individuals watching in the darkened theater, the family room, or on a computer screen are constantly making choices, skipping over stuff, misinterpreting things, and more. The audience, alas, has a mind of its own, and that mind doesn’t care about the creator’s intentions. . . .

But the old model, in which a producer produces and an audience passively consumes culture, is over. To be completely honest, that old model was never the way culture worked anyway, but even the pretense of full artistic control is finished in today’s environment, in which individuals have an ever-increasing ability to produce and consume culture on their own terms.

And here is Infotainment’s argument:

In the conversation about the coming digital revolution in books, I argued that many authors will want to keep their books whole—not to cling to copyright for its own sake but rather because sometimes it is the integrity of the work that makes a particular book exceptional: it is of a piece, and every word is essential to making it what it is, so altering it takes something away from the work. Books like that exist. Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Others will have their own examples.

So too with films. Whether you’re colorizing them to get eyeballs not used to black-and-white or chopping them up to make them Palatable for the Pious, you’re destroying their integrity.

It’s a valid argument, and an argument we need to be clear on—and one we will need to stand up for—as the digital revolution continues apace and the Moral Marauders start to take advantage of it

What’s yours?