Fun Hollywood story from "Pictures at a Revolution" by Mark Harris…

Robert Redford wanted the role in The Graduate which would bring instant stardom to Dustin Hoffman, and the director of the film was initially enthusiastic. Redford had seen a few ups and downs:

Now his movie career seemed to be on the upswing again: He had just finished the movie version of Barefoot in the Park opposite Jane Fonda, and he had tested with Bergen for the role of Benjamin Braddock, which he wanted badly.

Nichols, who had championed the idea, surprised himself by turning the actor down. “We were friends, we had done Barefoot, I was playing pool with him, and I said, ‘I’m really sad, but you can’t do it. You can't play a loser,’” says Nichols. “He said, ‘Of course I can play a loser!’ I said, ‘You can’t! Look at you! How many times have you ever struck out with a woman?’ And he said, I swear to you, ‘What do you mean?’ He didn’t even understand the concept. To him, it was like saying, ‘How many times have you been to a restaurant and not had a meal?’”

Another anecdote concerns the speed with which the tastes of the young defy satisfaction by those who would pander. [Democrats, and Republicans, pay attention to this part.]

After a career with many profitable films, the middle-aged Stanley Kramer produced and directed Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a comedy about an unremarkable white girl (Houghton) bringing her black fiancé (Poitier, playing a brilliant *doctor*) home to meet her folks. It was as trite a story as you'd imagine, deploying Sidney Poitier at the peak of his popularity to become the top film in the country. But it was perhaps the last time American moviegoers would tolerate the depiction of an an uncomplicated-but-faultless black figure, the kind of role which had made Poitier, for a time, the most bankable star in Hollywood.

In the year when the tastes of youth were tantalized by The Graduate, Bonnie & Clyde and Poitier's own In the Heat of the Night, Kramer craved some of the respect those films were getting. So he gave screenings to undergrads at nine colleges to encourage their engagement with the movie. It did not go well:

Kramer returned home, bitter and hurt. He wrote a piece about the tour for the Directors Guild of America newsletter in which he complained that students didn’t have respect for George Stevens or William Wyler or John Ford any more - they all wanted to be Godard. Kids had told him, he wrote, “that I made a film about a problem which the university student maintains does not exist.” He seethed over the emerging dominance of a filmmaking approach that valued “emotional essence” over “content and form.” He complained that all students wanted to see on screen was a “put-on” and that they didn’t understand why Poitier’s character had to be so “pure and simple.” After he had heard enough kids belittling Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner as sentimental -“oh, sentiment, the whipping boy of the film buff, 1968 version,” he sneered back at them- he tossed in the towel, insisting that he felt “no great defeat” and lambasting “bogus intellectual critics” who would rather praise work by “creative cowards” than his own. Kramer held his head high, but by the end of his tour, he was reduced to defending his own movie as “an adventure into the ludicrous.” He later admitted that after his cross-country journey, he was “in torment. I agreed with the college students in some of what they were demanding… but I didn’t understand why some of them were attacking me. I had been assaulting the establishment for forty years and now was being smeared with the same brush.”

“It wasn’t a movie for people my age,” says Katharine Houghton. “I don’t think he realized it on the set. The real event of the film was the relationship between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy-that was what was going on for audiences. The love affair between the white girl and the black man? That was never given any reality. It was a fable.”

“Everything was happening fast in the ’60s,” Kramer wrote later. “Too fast for me.”

And those sources will NOT be held accountable, financially or otherwise, for their editorial postures.

• Here's Thursday's "2020, man"… There will be two or three more before that one, um, "applies."

(Let's all make it a point to get laid on Wednesday night.)

• And here's one of those ironic things that's not actually ironic if you've given it more than a few seconds of consideration.

On twitter, Carlton Hinds @methuselaschild spotted something fascinating, as noted in this passage from USA Today:

WASHINGTON – Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, days before her death Friday, shared her last wish: that her replacement to the highest court in the land be picked by a president other than Donald Trump.

"My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed," Ginsburg said in a statement dictated to her granddaughter, Clara Spera, according to NPR.

Also…

Yeah okay RBG whatever. Let's pay our respects.

But she was a Supreme Court Justice, and we have a lot of those, with many more to follow. These aren't each a darling little treasure delivered to America from Heaven… At least no more so than are the winos who pass from our world in tragic loneliness on the street. Scotusi Americanus are mere public servants, and they're *extremely* well-compensated.

If you liked one of them in particular, you will want to see her honored by flags flying at half-mast, as was inconsistently practiced in my new midwestern neighborhood this afternoon. But a person who disagreed with that judge's decisions could, I affirm, think it was an inappropriate tribute and still be a righteous American. And because we're talking quite literally about legalities, such an appraisal ought not be automatically regarded as a slur on her work.

A few weeks ago I did some very short research about it, and couldn't get a clear understanding…

Is it my imagination, or are seeing this gesture a lot more often than we used to? It seems that way, but maybe it's just me being old and cranky.

This is starting to seem like that national anthem for sports thing… Do we ever stand up for it, or honor our veterans that way, in any other context? If not, isn't it something of a contrivance, whether observed or corrupted?

Because I suspect that there are people this week getting angry that some flags are still flying high, but who nonetheless believe that flags are jingoist and chauvinistic…

That is, they think the ONLY good purpose for flagpoles is for sanctimonious clucking at the middle of the staff, as a demand for piety from the vast majority of passersby who DGAF.

I'm not sure these Debbie Downers should be allowed that satisfaction.

So from now on, NO FLAGS AT HALF-MAST. For anybody, ever.

Agreed? Everyone? All of us? Good.

As Hinds put it, installed is "An interesting word choice." ~ Crid at September 21, 2020 1:08 AM

Her word choice? Or her grand=daughters? The one to whom RBG allegedly expressed this wish.

Now, the big question is, will RBG's memorial be even more of a political circus than that of John Lewis? Or George Floyd?

Silly rabbit. Just as Trix are for kids, political memorials are for furthering the cause, and not for honoring the dead.

As for the appropriateness of appointing her replacement days before an election? I guess that all depends on your political viewpoint. Democrats had no problem appointing a justice in an election year when it was their president doing the appointing. Even Joe Biden said there was no such thing as "the Biden Rule." But orange man bad, so election years are now sacrosanct, until they aren't.

Folks, the fight over Merrick Garland and the fight over replacing RBG were about power politics, not tradition. And Mitch McConnell is holding forth on the subject in a way that should make even Nancy Pelosi take notes.

As for the alleged hypocrisy, we have hypocrites accusing hypocrites of hypocrisy. And, to top that sundae off with a cherry, we have Bill Clinton lecturing us on morality. It's a goat rodeo.

While we're on the subject, let's not forget that the sanctity of an election year did not dissuade the Democrats from impeaching a president and trying to get him thrown out of office with less than a year to go in his term.

Nor did the solemnity of the the occasion restrain them from making a mockery of the judicial confirmation process with wild and unsubstantiated charges of high school gang rapes more than thirty years ago. We now have two SCOTUS justices whose alleged sexual dalliances have been fair game for political opponents - while senators like Kennedy, Dodd, Biden, and Johnson, were allowed to frolic like satyrs through a sea of fresh-faced pages unchecked.

You can say it was a different time, but it was Kennedy and Biden who brought us the salacious accusations of pubic hairs on a Coke can and made private porn viewing fair game in Senate confirmation hearings. It's been a downhill race to the gutter from there.

Donald Trump has a lot to answer for, in the coarsening of our political arena, but he does not bear the blame alone. He trod a road already paved.

Well, we don't have to worry about Trump replacing RBG anymore. Biden will just pack the court. Glad we had a handy solution to that problem.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-faces-growing-democratic-calls-to-expand-supreme-court-11600641858?mod=hp_lead_pos3

Of course when a significant portion of the US doesn't consider the supreme court legitimate and feels no need to follow any rulings it makes, well that is a problem for another day.

Oh, wait until Nancy and The Squad draw up articles of impeachment on Trump. That should play well in Peoria.

Oh, wait until Nancy and The Squad draw up articles of impeachment on Trump. That should play well in Peoria. ~ IRA Darth Aggie at September 21, 2020 7:33 AM

That will fire up the base, but probably alienate the middle. And the long-lasting effects another impeachment will have on our politics will not be good. Same for packing the Court.

On the bright side, she didn't went around blaming others like some do:

https://old.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/ivxh4i/my_bil_committed_suicide_and_im_having_trouble/

R.I.P. Robert Newton Peck, 92, in June, author of "A Day No Pigs Would Die."

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-ne-robert-newton-peck-longwood-obit-20200704-qigceq7r7bfdncug53ub2dxxni-story.html

Excerpt:

...“I believe the part about losing the farm was true,” said Sam (his widow). “I believe a lot of what he wrote about [in terms of animal slaughter], he really saw, the brutality he witnessed.”

Some of the brutality in “A Day No Pigs Would Die” made it a regular target for banning from schools and libraries. The American Library Association listed it as No. 16 out of the 100 most challenged books in the 1990s, just ahead of “The Color Purple” by Alice Walker.

But Peck prided himself on writing books that were appropriate for children. “He used to say over and over that his books were clean,” said Sam...
______________________________

I can't believe the 18-book "Soup" series is out of print, when it's been compared to the works of Mark Twain...

His college friend and best man at his first wedding was Fred Rogers. (Yes, THAT Mr. Rogers!)

Quotations from Peck:

"Fred and I don't see eye-to-eye on anything. You name it,
we differ on it. Yet we've always been able to disagree without
becoming disagreeable. Pals forever. That is America."

"If I possess any wisdom at all, most of it was given me by a mother, father, an aunt, and a grandmother...none of whom could read or write."

"I hope (my two kids) both grow up to have a tough gut and a gentle heart. Because I don't want to sire a world of macho men or feminist women, but rather a less strident society of ladies and gentlemen.'"

"Never buy anything, including religion, from someone who telephones you. Whenever one of these pesky people call, politely ask him, or her, to hang on because there's someone knocking at your door. Five minutes later, hang up the phone."

"One tiny birth-control pill, properly used, accomplishes more to preserve our beautiful planet than ten social workers or twenty environmentalists."

"For some reason, even though I'm a jingo patriot, I just can't abide The Star Spangled Banner. 'Rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air' isn't what our Republic is all about. Besides, at ball games, hardly anyone sings it, and worse, we all stand there thoroughly bored, until it's over."

"The high point of my life would be for me to visit a high school and meet a principal who is not a former football coach."

"Not long ago, upon hearing of his death, I wept. And then sat at my piano and played all of the 'S Wonderful songs he had written..."Lady Be Good" and "Embraceable You" and "My Love Is Here to Stay." Wherever you are, Ira Gershwin, I pray there's a piano and angels to sing you the kind of delightful music you gave to us."

"Women, please learn that men are interested only in one thing. But, after you feed us, our interests may be augmented into other areas."

"My favorite conversational ploy at a stand-up cocktail party is to corner a liberal and torture it."

"As world population rises, and it is doing just that at a frightening rate, ask yourself these pivotal questions: Is the air cleaner? Fresh water more pure? Oceans more free of contaminates? Land displaying less litter? Fewer traffic jams Less road rage? Will there be fewer crimes? Will we hear less noise pollution? More habitat room for animals? Will there be fewer wars? The common solution is merely common sense. As we reduce the number of human beings, all of the above problems (plus numerous others, such as our future's twenty-digit telephone dialing) will gradually abate."

"Sometimes it discourages an author when the novel he's attempting to write isn't quite ripening for harvest. But it almost always eventually does. However, if I puff up too uppity, I just fumble into a desk drawer to retrieve a rumpled letter, written on a shabby sheet of blue-lined notebook paper. The three tiny holes are no longer round but ripped. It was mailed to me a few years ago, from a boy named Charlie.
'Hi Rob, I like your books better than literature.' "

Canadian journalist Michele Landsberg (born in 1939) wrote the book "Reading for the Love of It: Best Books for Young Readers" in 1986. In it, she gleefully panned the books of Judy Blume and Roald Dahl (for their middle-class shallowness, selfishness, cruel humor and violence). However, she made it clear she's willing to tolerate some chaff for the sake of good wheat, as she demonstrates here:

(About a Russell Hoban book) "...like it or not, this is how young males, at some point and with some aprts of their psyche, see the women who bear, raise, and teach them. The innate misogyny is well within acceptable limits...The same is generally true of another classic boy's story, the strongly written 'Soup' by Robert Newton Peck. The mother, the aunt, the school nurse, and the teacher are all the kind of narrow, sex-hating, repressed, prudish, religion-prating, dominatrixes made into a national American stereotype by Philip Wylie in the 1950s. Woman is the implacable Other in Peck's work; though the female reader may find this disturbing, the writing is good enough to convince us that this is an honest account of reality as perceived by at least one small-town boy. 'The wind was as ripe as apples, so full of fall that you could almost bite every breath,' Peck writes, and the atmosphere of tough, small-town boyhood, with its poverty and exhilaration, its cruelties and bigotries, has moments of high farce and moral insight that are relished by generation after generation of schoolchildren."

And later:

"The prose is crisp and vivid, the humor racy, unsentimental. It is, in other words, a superior book."

Nobody ever considers the sonic implications of her cavernous & resonant cleavage.

And GenXers thought their 1980s hairdo and makeups were an embarrassment:

https://twitter.com/GregoryEck/status/1307794537960611840

And GenXers thought their 1980s hairdo and makeups were an embarrassment

Six, those are the shock troops.

This is fantastic.

If only the charities were even remotely appealing.

There may be no finer first twenty seconds in rock 'n roll.

(Of course, first seven seconds is a different category, as is first 33, 45, 60 and 90, etc.)

Of course now I'm wondering if there is a place in Colorado which does smoke pork in pot smoke? And if anyone would believe it's is my medical pulled pork sandwich.

> Her word choice? Or her grand-
> daughters? The one to whom RBG
> allegedly expressed this wish.

I'd thought about that in terms of the illiteracy, procedural and otherwise, of modern big-D Democratic politics, and decided it probably didn't matter. Lefty heroes (FDR, JFK) have had their words & reputations contorted for tawdry purposes across my whole life: And now, for more than half of it, so has Reagan.

Anyway, Cosh concurs with Coney:

My instincts, and indeed my regard for Ginsburg, suggest that her testament may be the invention of a grieving relative. History is full of these, and they usually do have the nature of pious exemplars.

This is yet another opportunity for Trump to look at the Democrats and say:

"I drink your milkshake".

No wonder the careerists despise him. He's just following the rules.