Favorite Media of 2020!

There was a large swathe of this year during which I was unable to concentrate on reading (as there probably was for a lot of other typically-frequent readers), so, as a result, I ended up listening to way more podcasts and watching way more TV shows. Not a bad thing, but boy did I read way less books than usual. 

However, for the first time in a while, the amount of fiction I read was about equal with the amount of nonfiction I read. Last year’s reading resolution was to read more fiction, so...success??

I did read a lot of phenomenal fiction when I had the energy to do so this year.

Books - Fiction

The Martian - Andy Weir

This book is the hardest of the hard sci fi I think I’ve ever read. Every single aspect of it is minutely researched and calculated. The author literally wrote equations to write this book. The science is insanely impressive and yet...it never loses its sense of humor or humanity in the mix. In fact, they’re the thing that drives the entire story.

Warlock Holmes - G. S. Denning

Way early in the year I was strolling down the fantasy aisle at the library, when this cover caught my eye. I took one look at it, went “oh, this looks silly” and...proceeded to devour the entire series in a matter of weeks. 

It is very silly. Especially when it’s pointing out something that was silly in the original. There’s something so satisfying about Watson immediately answering Holmes with the correct number of steps in their flat when he’s trying to make his point about how most people don’t pay attention to things like that.

World War Z - Max Brooks

Every single scenario in here could easily support an entire book. A park ranger whose job it is to contain the yearly zombie spring thaw? HECK YES. I’d read tens of thousands of words about that. A Chinese admiral who defaults, steals the government’s premier submarine, loads it up with the families of his underlings and takes to the sea for years to live in the maritime economy that has sprung up in a world where everyone is trying to escape the shore? That could be an entire movie on its own. 

Every chapter was more creative than the last and as a huge worldbuilding fan, this book was so, so fun.

An Unkindness of Ghosts - Rivers Solomon

In which a queer, neurodivergent protagonist solves a mystery on a spaceship which is a microcosm of antebellum era politics! This had a beautiful, mysterious, wonder-inducing writing style and it was a joy to peer into the wildly differing minds of every single character.

Books - Nonfiction

Underland - Robert MacFarlane

In every chapter, the author visits a different hole. Basically.

It’s an exploration of caves, catacombs, mines, nuclear waste facilities and the hidden underbelly of every forest. It was fascinating. And fundamentally changed how I look at time.

Rejected Princesses - Jason Porath

After years of having enjoyed the web entries, I finally got my hands on the first book and was not disappointed. 

There are the more entertaining entries, of course and the art is as charming as always, but what struck me the most were the more difficult stories. The deeper you go into this book, the more horrific it gets. The author does not hold back on the indignities suffered by the historical figures he writes about. It’s terrible...but also very, very illuminating.

The Gift of Fear - Gavin De Becker

This book - while maintaining all the essential information in it - could be pared down to one sentence in a sea of blank pages and that sentence would be: trust your instincts. End of story.

But in a world where instincts are either customarily suppressed or going haywire, it’s not quite that easy, which is why I’m glad there is more to the book.

I picked it up thinking “ha ha, betcha can’t help a person with anxiety who fears all the time already” and...what it actually ended up doing was giving me the tools to differentiate between real fear and unfounded fear. And did help with the anxiety quite a bit.

Fanfiction

Watch Over Me - cakeisatruth

A Bioshock fic from the point of view of a little sister who is learning how to trust and be an ordinary child again. Dark and sweet. An excellent combo.

All That is Visible - Ultima_Thule

An exploration of a minor character in a well researched historical context? That’s my jam! How did they know?? A Tron fic about what it’s like to be a female programmer in the 70s.

Graphic Novels

The Adventure Zone - McElroys + Carey Pietsch

Yesssssssss! It was a running-to-the-library type event whenever my library got a new volume in. The jokes are so good, the art is so lively and the ways in which they added the details that the podcast couldn’t necessarily get across is *mwah*

Trail of Blood - Shuuzou Oshimi

Hoooooooly shit, the art style of this one!! It’s beautifully detailed and expressive, sure, but the real draw for me was how it changes with the emotional state of the main character. There’s this sequence in which he’s consumed with anxiety at school and all of his classmates become blurry and unfocused, until they can’t be recognized as humans at all, that particularly sticks with me.

It’s a horror story about a kid who witnesses his loving mother push his cousin off a cliff for seemingly no reason and is then obligated by her to keep the secret, which is eating him from the inside out. It’s so good, guys, please read it.

Level Up - Gene Lien Yang/Thien Pham

A story about a kid who is haunted by his late father’s desire for him to become a gastroenterologist. It’s funny and touching and the ending gave me what I can only describe as a feeling of exhilaration. Y’know that feeling when something unexpected but not out of left field, perfectly in tune with the narrative arc and gut bustingly funny happens, all in the same panel? That one.

Film

Searching

This is a fairly standard thriller about a dad trying to find out what happened to his missing daughter. It’s also found footage...but not in the usual way, which was what made it so compelling to me. It’s told through the dad’s phone calls, google searches, social media interactions, news footage, security cameras and webcams. It was such a cool way to tell a story.

Train to Busan

There’s a lot that’s already been said about this movie and I don’t think there’s much more I can meaningfully add to that. Suffice to say that ya gotta take care of each other if you’re going to survive a zombie apocalypse!!

TV Series

My Brother’s Husband

As close to a perfect adaptation as a person can get (barring the entire conversation in English which was...oof). I was so happy when they took it a step further and showed Kana and Yaichi actually getting to meet Mike’s family.

Zumbo’s Just Desserts

I watched a lot of baking shows this year. Like...a lot. They were my much-needed comfort viewing for the year and this one was my favorite, even over The Great British Baking Show (which I LOVE). Why? Because the pastry chef for whom it’s named makes such bizarre and wonderful desserts and fosters an environment in which the competitors do the same. I’ve never seen anything like a lot of the desserts that make an appearance on this show. Every single episode was an awesome surprise and so help me, this show had better get a third season.

She-ra and the Princesses of Power

There’s also a lot that’s been said about this one, so I won’t say much more. Suffice to say: DAMN. That’s how you do an 80s toy tie-in cartoon remake.

Infinity Train

This show’s premise is probably the most unique I’ve seen in recent years. Its balance of comedy, horror and existential dread is also *mwah* I also love how much it trusts the viewer to figure things out on their own.

Primal

A late entry sliding in before the year ends! I finally got to watch the second half of the first season last weekend and it was EXCELLENT. The pacing, the brutal fight scenes, the adorable dinosaur antics, the animation, the quiet moments - *mwah-mwah-mwah-mwah-mwah*

The most emotional moment for me was the part in which the protagonists watch, with sorrow, as the rabid dinosaur who’s been trying to kill them all night dies an excruciating death.

Also it sets up a fascinating new plotline right before ending in a cliffhanger!! Another one for the ‘had better get a next season’ list.

Games

Night in the Woods

This is one that’s been on my to play list for a few years and I was so glad I finally got my hands on it. It’s like...The Millennial Experience (TM), the game. I felt so seen, playing it. The character writing was fantastic.

Prey

I don’t know why I put off finishing this for so long. I guess I wasn’t in the right alien killing headspace for a while?? Anyway, the setting is gorgeous, the alien biology is weird and cool, the ethics are delightfully murky and the interconnectedness of the station was really cool, especially in the OH SHIT moments at the end. 

Podcasts

The Adventure Zone

I tried to narrow this down to one favorite arc, but found that I couldn’t do it. I love Balance for its comedy and creative energy. I love Amnesty for its drama and acting. I am loving Graduation for the depth of its world and the way in which the real story behind everything that’s happened is slowly unfurling. It’s a good podcast all around.  

The Magnus Archives

Who obsessively listened to every single season while playing Minecraft in about a month? Surely not me, nooooo. Of course not.

There’s also been a lot said on this one, so I’ll keep it brief. I’ve seen things in here that I haven’t really seen elsewhere in horror. My particular favorites were the creepy psychiatric hospital in which the horror comes not from the patients, but from the denial of the doctor to believe them about their mental illnesses and every single thing related to the Anthropocene. The one with the Amazonian village made out of trash - CHILLS.

NYT Article about Joel Hodgson’s Riffing Class, 2012

Don’t Like the Movie? Let’s Talk About It

Joel Hodgson on ‘Mystery Science Theater’ and Riffs

By Paul Brownfield June 1, 2012

IT takes a certain kind of fan to recognize Joel Hodgson, creator of the cult 1990s Comedy Central series “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” and Shawn Queeney is that kind of fan. In his media and society class at Bucks County Community College north of Philadelphia, Mr. Queeney, an associate professor of communications, discusses the place of the “Mystery Science Theater” in the underbelly of cinema, and he and his wife spent a December evening watching Mr. Hodgson and friends perform their idiosyncratic comedy as part of the live B-movie heckling tour “Cinematic Titanic.”

So when Mr. Queeney spotted Mr. Hodgson at a restaurant not long after, he asked Mr. Hodgson to speak at his college. Mr. Hodgson agreed but later came back with a suggestion more befitting his sensibilities. And so was hatched one of the odder master classes ever offered in formal higher education: a workshop on the art and science of “movie riffing.”

On “Mystery Science Theater,” which began in 1988 and was integral to the early growth of Comedy Central, Mr. Hodgson played a janitor at a byzantine research lab who is sent into space, where he is forced to watch B and C genre movies with two robot companions named Tom Servo and Crow. But that setup, laid out in the theme song, was only the bones of the show. The meat each week was in the riffing, as Joel and his bot-pals, silhouetted at the bottom of the screen, commented on everything from killer lizard films like The Giant Gila Monster to cheesy instructional shorts like “Hired!”

“Hey, isn’t that the John Belushi biography?” Mr. Hodgson’s character says when the title appears. (Riff spoiler alert: It’s a reference to the book “Wired.”)

If “Mystery Science Theater” was part insult comedy aimed at movies, there was also something congenial in the show’s tone. (Perhaps it was the puppet robots, or that it was all being produced in Minneapolis.)

Six writers had to deliver a 90-minute episode every week, Mr. Hodgson said, with 600 to 800 riffs per movie, “when all the pistons were firing.” In devising the lines, no reference (Bella Abzug, Roy Lichtenstein) was too outré or rejected initially, Mr. Hodgson said. As he tried to convey to the students at Bucks, it’s best to brainstorm nonjudgmentally first and figure out what’s funny later.

Mr. Hodgson, now 52, left “Mystery Science Theater” in 1993 after, he said, a dispute with the executive producer Jim Mallon over the direction of a feature film based on the series.

Moving to Los Angeles, Mr. Hodgson landed a series of movie and TV deals while also keeping creative in more inimical ways. One of them was an event called the Super Ball, an annual “one-night World’s Fair” that Mr. Hodgson dreamed up with his brother, Jim, combining their interest in comedy, science and art happenings.

Mr. Hodgson, in this way, has long approached comedy as a chemist in a lab does, noodling with a drug protocol to make it more effective. In Minneapolis in the late 1980s he briefly taught a workshop called Creative Stand-Up and Smartology that was based on communication paradigms he’d read about in college. This was after he had earned appearances on “Late Night With David Letterman” and “Saturday Night Live.”

Years later he tried to rejigger the sketch comedy series format at HBO, where he made a pilot called “The TV Wheel.” Mr. Hodgson’s idea was to shoot the show live, with a camera that was locked down in the middle of a set that rotated like a record on a turntable. “Your TV doesn’t move, so why should the camera?” Mr. Hodgson said, explaining the philosophy.

Finally, in 2007, Mr. Hodgson, still regretful about leaving “Mystery Science Theater,” returned to movie riffing, forming the tour “Cinematic Titanic” with the writer-performers Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein, Frank Conniff and Mary Jo Pehl.

In class Mr. Hodgson kept things loose but wasn’t just fooling around either. In his travels with “Cinematic Titanic,” Mr. Hodgson said, he often meets people movie riffing à la “Mystery Science Theater” but live. “I was always curious what it would be like to participate with these people who wanted to get into it.”

The class was made up mostly of theater, film and video majors, and a number of them were involved in improv comedy, including Kyle Reichert, 21. “Every class he would talk about something new,” Mr. Reichert recalled, “what he would go through on a daily basis making the show.”

Mr. Hodgson’s first lesson was simple: When riffing don’t be a jerk. (He used a different word.) The 25 students in Riff Camp 2012 were divided into groups. They had two and a half months to complete a film’s worth of riffs before performing at the college’s spring arts festival. They also had to dream up a back story and set it to a theme song. One group, the all-female New Valkyries of Valhalla are Valkyries by day, collecting Viking souls, and students in a women’s studies course at Valhalla Community College by night.

That explains why they would be watching “Consuming Women,” an oddly spooky short billed as a portrait of the female consumer circa 1967. The other films Mr. Hodgson assigned for other groups — from the public domain Web site archive.org, which houses the Prelinger Archives— included “Pennsylvania Fish Commission,” a riveting 1950s tour of trout farming narrated by the commission’s decidedly un-emotive executive director, and the delicious University of California romp “Health: Your Posture,” about a girl ostracized by her peers because of bad posture.

“It had nothing to do with posture,” said Stephanie Drejerwski, 20, one of the riffers.

Mr. Hodgson instructed students not to riff more than once every three seconds, so that the audience could absorb each joke. As on “Mystery Science Theater,” scripts were time- and color-coded to indicate when the film’s narrator was speaking (“You need a thorough checkup by your family doctor to discover the cause of your posture defects”) and when the riff was interjected (“Sir? We don’t have insurance?”).

Though the practical application of a course on movie riffing seems negligible, Mr. Hodgson has perhaps hit upon something in the age of social media. Facebook and Twitter, among others, are portals not dissimilar to the sad, empty cinema where Joel, Servo and Crow watched bad movies, their riffs providing a sense of community.

Maybe that’s why “Mystery Science Theater” keeps enjoying afterlives. Michael J. Nelson, who replaced Mr. Hodgson on the TV series until it ended in 1999, offers RiffTrax, audio riffs to play alongside DVD releases of current and older films. The comedian Doug Benson, host of the popular podcast “Doug Loves Movies,” organized a live screening series in Los Angeles, “The Doug Benson Movie Interruption,” in which he and friends (like Zach Galifianakis, Sarah Silverman and Ed Helms) riff on a movie for the audience. And Kevin Smith, the filmmaker and inveterate podcaster, is starting a show on Hulu this week called “Spoilers.”

Mr. Smith was quick to note that this was riffing not like “Mystery Science Theater” but in the tradition of his first film, “Clerks,” in which the characters spitball about a movie everyone’s already seen, “Star Wars.” In “Spoilers” Mr. Smith plans to screen a current release at Universal City Walk in Los Angeles then take the audience to a nearby studio for what he sees as a live version of a movie chat room.

“I don’t think a movie discussion ever dies anymore,” he said.

Meanwhile, as alumni from Riff Camp 2012 prepared to perform this weekend at the Colonial Theater in nearby Phoenixville (the same theater where scenes from the original “ Blob” were filmed), Mr. Hodgson and his fellow “Mystery Science Theater” alums were busy putting together a “Cinematic Titanic” show set for July in Ann Arbor, Mich. They will be riffing on two 1970s films — “Rattlers” (rattlesnakes and nerve gas!) and “The Doll Squad,” which, Mr. Hodgson said, is about “a seven-woman army that was supposedly the prototype for ‘Charlie’s Angels.’” Set riffing engines to full throttle.

The Circle of Live (Action).

“The effort here was to keep the filmmaking tradition. I think there’s a balance between innovation and tradition.” —The Lion King director Jon Favreau and cast chat with us about the visually stunning new Disney film.

Disney’s recent proclivity for making live-action films based on its animated classics reaches its technical zenith with Jon Favreau’s The Lion King (whose animated predecessor holds an impressive 4.3 out of 5 stars). Building on methods he first explored in the 2016 live-action version of The Jungle Book, Favreau has constructed a digital world comprised of the most photo-realistic animals ever rendered.

The irony is, of course, that although it’s often referred to as such, the new Lion King isn’t live action at all. Save for one individual shot, it was created entirely inside a computer. But you probably wouldn’t know that if the animals didn’t talk.

That talking is provided by a new voice cast that now better reflects the story’s setting by featuring many actors from across the African diaspora.

JD McCrary (Little) and Donald Glover (a.k.a. Childish Gambino) voice the youthful and adult versions of Simba the lion, respectively, opposite Shahadi Wright Joseph (the daughter from Us) and Beyoncé as Simba’s best friend Nala. Joseph played the same role in the long-running Broadway adaptation of The Lion King, from which the new film takes some musical and aesthetic cues.

Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor (Doctor Strange) replaces Jeremy Irons in the role of Scar, and James Earl Jones (Darth Vader himself) returns to the role of Mufasa.

Ugandan-born, German-raised actor Florence Kasumba (Black Panther)—who also appeared in the stage version of The Lion King—plays head hyena Shenzi, alongside Keegan-Michael Key (The Predator) and Eric André (Rough Night) as bickering hyena minons Kamari and Azizi.

Key and André are pretty great, but the comedic pairing in the film that is getting talked about a lot is Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner as warthog Pumba and meerkat Timon. Both are utterly hilarious.

Favreau recently got together with most of the cast (no Beyoncé, sadly) and some select press in Beverly Hills to discuss the making of the film.

On how working on The Jungle Book flowed into The Lion King: Jon Favreau (director/producer): I’ve been working on both these movies back to back for about six years. All the new technology that was available, I had finally learned how to use it by the end of Jungle Book. And at that point, with the team that we had assembled for it, all the artists. Because a lot of attention is paid to the technology, but really, these are handmade films. There are animators working on every shot, every environment that you see in the film—actually, there’s one shot that’s a real photographic shot—but everything else is built from scratch by artists. And we had a great team assembled. And then the idea of using what we learned on that and the new technologies that were available to make a story like Lion King with its great music, great characters, and great story, it seemed like a wonderful, logical conclusion. And so that was something we set out to do.

On how digital production evolved in the new film: JF: In Jungle Book, we were essentially using the same motion-capture technology for performers and cameras as had been developed ten years prior for Avatar. But towards the end of that, there was a whole slew of consumer-facing VR products that were hitting the scene. We started experimenting with it at the end of Jungle Book and realized that we could build this really cool system of filmmaking using game-engine technology. That way I could bring in people who don’t have any background in visual effects. We would design the entire environments. We took all the recordings that we had from the actors. We would animate within the game engine, in this case, it was Unity. And the crew would be able to put on the headsets, go in, scout, and actually set cameras within VR.

The effort here was to keep not just the tradition of the film and stage production that came before us, but the filmmaking tradition. Oftentimes when new technology comes online, it disrupts an industry. But with just a little bit of effort, we were able to build around the way filmmakers and film crews work. So a guy like Caleb Deschanel, a fantastic cinematographer who I’ve always wanted to work with, inviting him to do a very technically advanced film without any prior background in visual effects and just saying: hey, we’ll make it so that you could just make a movie as you would have made The Black Stallion. We would actually have cameras driven in VR space by a film crew with dollies and cranes and assistant directors, script supervisors, set dressers. So we kept the same film culture and planted it using this technology into the VR realm.

Although the film was completely animated as far as performances went, it allowed a live-action film crew to go in and use the tools they were used to. Part of what’s so beautiful about the lighting, the camera work, the shots of the film, was that we were able to inherit a whole career of experience and artistry from our fantastic team. I think that it’s nice to look at technology as an invitation for things to progress and not always something that’s going to change the way everything came before it. I think there’s a balance between innovation and tradition.

The cast of the new ‘The Lion King’.

On what excited him about the story: Donald Glover (adult Simba): Jon was really good about the circle of life having a major hand in it. I really feel that it’s good to make movies that are global and metropolitan in the sense [that we are] the citizens of the world. Like, making sure that we talk about how connected we are right now. Because it’s the first time we’ve really been able to talk to everybody at the same time. It was just, like, a necessary thing.

On getting into Scar’s head: Chiwetel Ejiofor (Scar): I felt that it was just really interesting to go into that psychology, to really try and uncover that and to look at it. I’m a huge fan of what was done before, obviously, like everybody else—Jeremy Irons—and just going back in and exploring that character again from a slightly different perspective and seeing what was there.

It’s such an incredible part to play; so complex and all of that. Having empathy—not sympathy—but empathizing with the character and trying to understand them and trying to get underneath that. And such a rich, villainous character to play. In a way as much as I—absolutely with everybody else—loved the original, you kind of make it your own and you create the sort of individuality to it in that way.

On finding a loose comedic rhythm in a digital context: Seth Rogen (Pumba): It was a lot of improvisation with Billy. We were actually together every time we recorded, which is a very rare gift to have as someone who is trying to be funny in an animated film, of which I’ve done a lot, and you’re often just alone in there. I think you can really tell that we’re playing off of each other. It’s an incredibly naturalistic feeling. They really captured Billy. That is what is amazing, I would say. He essentially played himself on a TV show for years, and this character is more Billy than that character somehow. It’s remarkable to me how his character specifically makes me laugh so hard.

Billy Eichner (Timon): I wish I was as cute in real life as I am in the movie. The Timon they designed is so adorable, and I think the juxtaposition of my personality in that little Timon body really works. And yeah. I agree with everything that Seth was saying. I can’t imagine now, looking back, not being in the room together. Being able to riff off each other and really discover our chemistry together in the same moment. You can feel it when you’re watching the movie. I had not seen the finished movie until last night and I was shocked by how much of the riffing actually ended up in the movie. I think it works. I think it feels very unique to other movies in this genre, which can often feel a bit canned.

SR: The fact that it has a looseness applied to probably the most technologically incredible movie ever made is an amazing contrast. It feels like people in a room just talking, and then it’s refined to a degree that is inconceivable in a lot of ways. That mixture is what I think is so incredible and that’s what Jon really captured in an amazing way.

On how Favreau guided their tone: Eric André (Kamari): He’s incredibly talented and really, really easy to work off of. And he is a selfless altruistic talent, which is rare. So I was in great hands with Jon. It was just a very nurturing environment and made it very easy, because I’m very, very sensitive. So the slightest wind of anything will make me tear up.

Keegan-Michael Key (Azizi): I think Jon is a great student, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of all different types of comedy. One of those pieces of knowledge is about comedic duos and the dynamic that exists between them. We had a very similar experience to Billy and Seth where we were allowed to walk around the room. It was as if we were being directed in a scene in the play. And as you said, we were all mic’d, and so everything was captured.

It was the subsequent rounds that I thought [were] interesting. Jon would get a little more technical, when I would be actually by myself. The refinement is also very fun, because we would sit there and I would have the headphones on. I would say to Jon, “We’re looking for Fibber McGee and Molly here or Abbott and Costello. What are you looking for?” He goes, “I’m actually looking for a little bit of Laurel and Hardy with an explosion at the end, but then back it up into little Apatowian for me.”

EA: With a sprinkle of Beavis and Butthead.

On the experience of going from the stage version to the film version: Florence Kasumba (Shenzi): I was lucky that I got to play the part already in Germany for more than a year. We played like eight shows a week. So Shenzi is like muscle memory, because I got to play her every day. But this Shenzi is so different. I remember in the musical, we had sometimes shows where I was embarrassed because the hyenas are so dumb and funny. They are entertaining, but this is so different, this experience, because when I listen to the dialogue, when I read them, I realized that this is way more dangerous and more serious.

I was lucky [on] my first day that I was in a black box and I was working with Eric André, and with JD. We were very physical, because the guys were so strong, it was easy for me to just be big. Because everybody is very confident, we could just really try out things. We could walk around each other. We could scare each other. We could scream, be loud, be big, be small. It’s like working in the theater, which I love. Having that freedom just made me… I was allowed to do whatever I wanted to.

‘The Lion King’ is in theaters now. Comments have been edited for clarity and length.

Watchmen, Anchors & This Extraordinary Being

As anchor episodes go, what makes Watchmen’s This Extraordinary Being so… Extraordinary? Beside the rest, it’s a masterclass of meta. 

© HBO

In its entirety, HBO’s Watchmen is deserving of tremendous praise: “woke” without patronising, intellectual without pomposity, indulgent without narcissism, complex without confusing. Its best trick is to make the fanciful believable, laying on just enough familiarity and pseudo-science to imagine we really could be watching a parallel version of our own reality. Many of the ideas originated from its source material — Alan Moore’s seminal 1980s graphic novel of the same name. But successfully adapting, updating and elaborating on those ideas is no simple task, notwithstanding the presence of showrunner Damien Lindelof, and his history of intricate storytelling (Lost, The Leftovers, Prometheus, Tomorrowland).

The series follows Vietnam-born Angela Abar (Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk) as Sister Night — a highly-skilled police officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Masked vigilantes are outlawed, but several are now openly integrated into the police force. Ironically, all Tulsan police officers now wear masks to hide their identities — a reaction to a white supremacist terrorist attack on officers in their homes, several years earlier. The KKK-like “7th Cavalry” responsible for the attack were forced underground, but have re-emerged, threatening to re-boot their police-killing operation. Dr Manhattan, a blue, atomic, god-like super-human has long-since disappeared to reside on Mars, and (oh yeah) the world appears to be in occasional overlap with a portal to another, squid-filled dimension.

© HBO 

If you are familiar with previous iterations of Watchmen (either from the novel or Zack Snyder’s 2009 movie), you’ll recognise some of these elements and be unacquainted with others. Set 34 years after the novel, the surviving characters have evolved in tandem with their invented surroundings. Given George Floyd’s recent death and the recent focus on Tulsa (via Trump’s floppy rally and heightened awareness of Juneteenth), the intersection of the setting, white supremacy and policing makes this version unavoidably topical. Beyond that, the original thematic similarities are maintained — what if superheroes (with the notable, dick-swinging exception of Dr Manhattan) were just exceptional people, without supernatural powers, but with typical human flaws? What if there had been a different chain of presidents and major events in the latter 20th century? What if we better understood quantum physics and could put it to use?

Does Your Anchor Hold?

Every season of novelistic, modern TV has that episode, anchoring the entire show. In a typical 8–12-episode affair, it tends to appear around two-thirds of the way through. In a good show, it allows the other episodes to tread lightly on otherwise clunky exposition and foreshadowing, resolving unanswered questions from the first two acts, while constructing intrigue for the third. In a great show, it will go further, offering up an ambitious concept with cinematic exposition and efficient storytelling. It can virtually stand alone — a piece of poetry amidst a wealth of narrative, specifically memorable beyond the whole. 

Often it is played out in a context outside the conventional environment or characters of the show. At its best, it can even make the finale seem underwhelming (which, despite our natural (perhaps biological) craving for a climax to signal a conclusion, is no bad thing). On the other hand, it can just as easily go underrated, without the major twists or revelations offered elsewhere.

© HBO

It’s the cradle into which the show’s fundamental ideas are birthed. For everything to work, it’s the point the show needs to reach. The list is increasingly extensive, but a few examples, recent and historic, are listed at the end of this article.

Joining the anchor pantheon is Watchmen’s Episode 6 — This Extraordinary Being; a significant reason for the show’s recent 26 Emmy nominations. The episode itself is up for 8 categories: direction, writing, cinematography, original music, picture editing, sound editing, sound mixing AND supporting actor (Jovan Adepo; Fences, When They See Us). Wowzers.

WARNING: DEPENDING ON YOUR TOLLERANCE LEVELS, WHAT FOLLOWS POTENTIALLY CONTAINS (LIGHT) SPOILERS. YOU COULD PROBABLY READ IT ALL BEFORE WATCHING THE EPISODE WITHOUT ANY MAJOR HOO-HA, BUT IF YOU LIKE TO GO INTO EPISODES COMPLETELY BLIND — I FEEL YOU. JUST SKIP TO THE LAST PARAGRAGH, NO HARD FEELINGS. WHEN YOU’VE WATCHED THE SHOW, COME BACK AND GET FILLED IN.

This Extraordinary Episode

As anchors go, what makes This Extraordinary Being so… Extraordinary? Well, in addition to drawing the story threads together and answering a wealth of pent-up questions, it’s a masterclass of meta. A meta Beretta. A meta Matryoshka. A full meta jacket.

© HBO

It opens with a big storyline reveal on “An American Hero” — a fake, popular TV show within Watchmen, which portrays a fictionalised (and inaccurate) version of the (also) fictional story we ourselves are watching unveil. Phew. Maybe read that again. 

[Incidentally, this is just the self-referential rollercoaster making its initial ascent. Keep your hands and legs inside the episode at all times.]

It quickly progresses to depict one character’s experience of another’s memories; including memories within those memories; and the occasional reversion to the show’s reality. If that weren’t enough, among the fiction, chunks of your and my actual, human reality continue to land, in the form of real-life people, events and societal norms. Cleverly, the effect is to blur what is true versus what Angela, the other characters and we, the audience, perceive to be true. This not easily achieved (nor easily explained), but simply put, in This Extraordinary Being, it is seamless, sumptuous, and sensational.

© HBO

The audacious concept of “Nostalgia” — a pill that contains a person’s harvested memories — drives the episode. Tremendously cinematic, it’s filmed in rich, crisp black and white noir, with flashes of colour emphasising critical moments to pertinently fuel the story. Constantly on the move, the camera switches between first and third person, accentuating the feeling of simultaneously experiencing several perspectives. There are very few gimmicks or effects — it’s traditional film-making, reliant on great camera work, acting, direction and editing. Hard cuts and smooth transitions are cleverly blended, with flashbacks quietly interspersed, allowing the story to move at pace. Beautiful pacing is one of the episode’s most impressive achievements.

Back to the action, which is precisely detailed. Playful, symbolic flourishes compliment heftier motifs, often subtly relating to previous episodes or our own cultural reference points. Note the lettuce in the grocery store, the (real-life) Bass Reeves, Will painting his eyes white (compared to Angela’s black), the piano playing in the (again traumatic) cinema, the comic book reader on the sidewalk, the Alt-Right “OK” gesture, the destructive and restorative functions of fire. All these pieces efficiently collude to inform the present story, as well as crafting Will’s personality and guiding his behaviour.

© HBO

Adhering to it all is deeply affecting music. Its simplest impact is to aptly recall the early 20th century era in which the memory is set. But the romantic, haunting, crooning over both tender and violent moments consummately mirror the emotional state of the protagonist. In particular, I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire, by the Ink Spots (1941) — with lyrics variably ironic and literal — will infiltrate your dreams for some time afterwards. Between the ballads is the show’s thematic, dramatic, western movie piano music — a tormenting echo in Will’s psyche, recalling both his mother and his hero. Reminiscent of Birdman (dir. Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014), chaotic, thrilling solo jazz drums play whenever he escalates the power of his own agency.

With these ingredients blended, the scenes all underscore the internal and external conflicts of the characters: between blacks and whites; rage and serenity; integrity and corruption. The underlying messages of racism, history, and technology essential to this version of Watchmen are wonderfully extolled.

© HBO

Notably, there are no plans for a second season of Watchmen. Rather than a question of HBO’s reticence to renew (I’m sure they’d love to), Lindelof himself has stated his intention for the show to end where it does — his exhaustive love-letter to the ever-extending Watchmen epic. As much as we have become accustomed to the fulfilment of our insatiable desire for sequels, we should be grateful that this symphonic limited series and Its Extraordinary Episode will exist in illustrious isolation. Like Nostalgia, some things are best consumed in small, perfectly measured doses.

Watchmen is available to stream on HBO Max (US), Amazon (UK, £11.49), HBO Go (elsewhere).

Other Anchor Episodes for Your Viewing Pleasure:

Sopranos Season 3, Episode 11 — Pine Barrens (HBO / Now TV) Mad Men Season 4, Episode 7 — The Suitcase (Netflix) Atlanta Season 2, Episode 6 — Teddy Perkins (Hulu / Amazon) Better Call Saul Season 2 Episode 7 — Inflatable (Netflix) The Wire Season 3, Episode 7 — Back Burners (HBO / Now TV) Bojack Horseman Season 5, Episode 11 — The Showstopper (Netflix)  Westworld Season 2, Episode 8 — Kiksuya (HBO / Amazon) Succession Season 2, Episode 8 — Dundee (HBO / Now TV) The Marvelous Mrs Meisel Season 2, Episode 7 — Look, She Made a Hat (Amazon Prime)

(3) Audience Involvement with Media Personae: The Four Processes

Do you have a favourite celebrity or TV character that you idolize? Have you ever been so, incredibly, attached to a show that mentally and emotionally the story consumes you? Is there a media personality that makes you feel like there is a relationship or bond between you two? Or maybe there are traits and characteristics you admire from this idol that you try to embody in order to become more like them and less like you?

There are four ways we, as audience members, get involved with media personas.

“Involved with media pers- WHAT?”, you may ask?

To start, let me define for you what media persona means. Persona is defined as a “real person or a fictional character encountered through any form of mediated interaction”. Therefore, it is whoever, and whatever, you encounter while engaging with media outlets such as news, your favourite movie, cartoon, television show, video game or even your favourite book.

There are four processes of audience involvement while engaging with media personas, these include, transportation, para-social interaction, identification, and worship.

Transportation is when an audience member is both mentally and emotionally involved in a story.

Lets Transport into this post a little more...

Transportation

So, I’ll ask you again...

Have you ever been so incredibly involved with a media persona that mentally and emotionally you are consumed by it?

I’ll answer for you, yes, because I know that you are enjoying this blog post so much that you are hooked and want to keep reading to see where I am going with all of this knowledge... I know, I am so entertaining, you are welcome.

On a serious note...

When I engage with the famous television series Game of Thrones (GOT) I genuinely get invested in the characters, the narrative, and the actual world of Westeros and Essos as if I am part of the show. When a character I am devoted to dies, it emotionally affects me whether I cry or get angry. In this way, without even realizing I have done so, I have transported myself mentally and emotionally into the Game of Thrones world. 

If you are wondering, yes, when I am there John Snow IS my husband and he IS cheating on me with the Dragon Queen, but I do not want to talk about that right now.

Hold up...

 I DO want to talk about that right now

Para-Social Relationships/Interactions (PSR/PSI)

This “relationship” I tell myself I have with the tall, manly, dark and handsome John Snow is a para-social interaction (PSI). 

PSI is an imaginary relationship between yourself and a media personality. It can create a feeling of intimacy during media consumption. This happens a lot, I have a boyfriend in almost every show or movie I watch. I believe it is the transportation process that makes these para-social interactions feel so incredibly strong. 

Have you ever been to a concert and genuinely felt in your heart that you have a personal relationship with the artist on stage? Maybe this “relationship” was built through social media following, liking their posts, or viewing their live Instagram stories. These media interactions we have with our favourite celebrities or television characters make us feel closer to the star then we really are. 

After I finish watching a show, I find that I will continue to love and idolize the actors who played my favourite characters. This is because I feel like I know them, but really, I only know their fictional character who I felt a false sense of intimacy with while watching the series. Once you are emotionally and mentally devoted to the media you are engaging with, it is hard to let go or see things differently. 

After watching 8 seasons of GOT, equivalent to 8 years for those fans who watched it on cable TV in real-time, it is hard to detach those feelings and para-social relationships that have been in the works for 8 seasons. 

This sort of para-social interaction does not always have to be as dramatic as my Game of Thrones relationship with John Snow. While watching game shows, for example, I find myself playing along as if the host of Family Feud was asking me the questions. Of course, I win the game every time...!

Identification

“OKURR”

“BIBLE”

Have you ever met someone new and caught yourself using their “lingo”? For example, if you hang around the same friends or have a significant other, you may naturally start saying phrases that they say or start watching similar shows that they watch. 

Charles Cooley suggests that as humans, we naturally pick up on the traits and characteristics surrounding us or in the media that we consume. This is the identification process of audience involvement. Just how we form to our friends’ characteristics, humans may also form to media persona personalities that they consume. 

Some may say Keeping Up with The Kardashians is their “guilty pleasure”, it is honestly, truly just one of my favourite television shows. It is a show of famous sisters who are greatly admired in the world of social media. Kourtney, Kim, Khloe, Kendall and Kylie are all fashion and beauty icons. Although they may be an unrealistic image of perfect, their personalities on the show and their humour is why I love them as a family. It is their relationship with one another that keeps me coming back. In saying this, while watching the show I find myself admiring their characteristics such as Khloe’s humorous; straightforward personality, Kylie’s style, or Kourtney’s sass. In the show, the family always creates their own weird phrases or responses that I would then find myself, and my friends, using with one another. For example, Khloe Kardashian always says “OKURR” instead of “okay”. My friends and I quickly picked this up and jokingly used OKURR in place of “Okay”. I also identify my style choices being similar to the ones presented throughout the Kardashian family’s social media.

The Youtuber David Dobrik is a vlogger who has a friend group named the “vlog squad”. I admire David, he has a creative, hardworking, and positive nature about him. I admire his work ethic because he moved to California at 19 to pursue a social media career that was just emerging at the time. David did what every filmmaker or student wishes they had the courage to do. Now he is a millionaire and all he does is create funny content with his best friends. David recently bought FIJI disposable cameras and created an Instagram account to post the developed photos. Although I already had a film camera, I went out to Walmart and bought a disposable camera because I thought it was an extremely cool and affordable idea. In this way, I identified with David’s new hobby and made it my hobby too.

Worship

When you think of a God, who do you picture? Fans of Leonardo DiCaprio may say “LEO IS A GOD”. 

However, as I recall, Arianna Grande once said “God is a woman”, therefore, is Miley Cyrus a God to you? Jenny from the block? Madonna? Marilyn Monroe? 

If you ask me, I do have a hand full of celebrities who I would get seriously star-struck over. However, I have always loved, admired, and “worshipped” Rihanna. 

Remember those para-social relationships I discussed earlier? I believe this process of media engagement is what creates humans to “worship” and idolize other humans who are seen as higher in society.

I leave you with this...

Think about the content you consume and how you consume it. How have you been affected by these four stages?

Stay tuned for next weeks post!!

References

Sullivan, J. (2013 or 2020). Media Audiences: Effects, users, institutions and power (1st or 2nd ed.). Sage Publications Inc., New York, NY.

Brown, W. (2015). Examining four processes of audience involvement with media personae: Transportation, parasocial interaction, identification, and worship. Communication Theory, 25, 259-283.

Just a Taste (A CS AU) Part 1/10

AU where Emma and Killian are contestants on the Great American Baking Show and all twelve contestants hail from Storybrooke Maine. In this AU Emma is a book editor by day, while Killian is an architect who just moved to town a few months prior. Expect baked goods, flirtatious interactions, a little drama and a whole lot of fluff with a guaranteed HEA for Captain Swan. Rated M.

A/N: After some careful consideration I decided to make ‘Just a Taste’ my next story to republish. My main reason for this is that I need another baking fic in my life right now. So whether this is your first time reading, or you’re a long time fan of CS fluff meeting the ‘Great British Baking Show’ I hope you enjoy and thanks so much for reading!

If you had told Emma Swan a month ago, that her favorite TV show arguably ever was going to make an American version, that might not have surprised her. The Great British Baking Show was a hit, both back across the pond and now in America. What did surprise her was that the American version was making a twist, and that twist was to only use competitors from one hometown each season. The first season was to take place in Storybrooke, Maine, the small hamlet where Emma lived, and that… well that was crazy.

Up to this point, nothing of note had ever happened in Storybrooke, and local news never got more exciting than a passing family of moose, or the addition of a new baby to the town’s ranks. Easily the most exciting thing that had happened in the years Emma had lived here was when the factory that made hot cocoa mix a town over had a spill and all of Storybrooke smelled of chocolate for two whole weeks. No one had been hurt, the damage was minimal, and yet it was all anyone could speak of for months.  

Yet no longer could anyone claim that nothing ever happened here, because over the past few weeks, Storybrooke had become consumed with the rabid buzzing of TV crews and potential competition. The rules were clear, one had to live in Storybrooke Maine for at least six months prior to the shows taping. Other than that, anyone over the age of eighteen could compete for the title of… best baker in town? In retrospect, the title seemed kind of pointless, but Emma knew that people were taking this seriously. With twelve bakers in the race, the town was divided between who would win, and who deserved the crown, or in this case the dish. As one of those finalists, Emma was already feeling the pressure, and she’d only just set foot in the big white tent where she’d be baking.

“I really hope this doesn’t ruin the franchise for me,” she said out loud, not realizing that anyone was around until a deep, accented voice responded.

“My thoughts exactly, love.”

Emma turned to find Killian Jones, Storybrooke’s newest resident, who she’d only really seen in passing standing behind her. Despite barely knowing her new neighbor, her heart skipped a beat when her green eyes locked with his blue ones, and she wondered how someone could have this magnetic pull over her. Maybe it was the dark hair that she wanted to run her fingers through, or the way that his smile seemed to tick up to one side. Perhaps it was the accent, or the thoughtful sort of look he had any time they crossed paths. Emma watched as he extended his hand in greeting, and she met it gladly.

“I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced. Killian Jones, at your service.”

“Emma Swan,” She replied and he grinned at that.

“I know.”

Emma raised a brow and couldn’t help but smile, but just as she was about to ask him what he meant with his flirtatious tone, the ten others who were competing came barreling into the room, led by one of the shows production assistants.

“Were we not supposed to be here yet?” Emma whispered and Killian shook his head.

“Apparently not.”

As the others filed in, Emma saw two of her best friends, Mary Margaret Blanchard and Belle French who had also made it to the final twelve people.  While both women looked inclined to come near her, the PA’s wrangled them to their designated stations and then addressed the group. Filming would be commencing shortly, and the first step was introduction to the judges.

“Prepare yourself for a big difference between camera and off-camera personas. We ask that you respect the personal space of our panel, and our hosts.”

The small woman named Tink who spoke pushed the glasses she wore farther up her face as she carefully selected her words. She was the picture of efficiency, and Emma had seen her running around handling chaos at every turn in the auditions and now. It was very impressive, but Emma didn’t envy her. Tink had so much energy, that when she moved about, it was like watching a hummingbird fly, fascinating, but seemingly crazed with how much effort was required.

“So they’re bloody horrible, then?” Killian asked aloud and Emma bit her lip to keep from smiling outright. That was clearly what the young blonde PA was grappling with. Tink looked flustered and blushed as a tall man stepped into the room with his hands across his chest smirking at Killian. He dwarfed Tink in size, appearing well over six feet next to her modest frame.

“Enough of that, Killian. But as a matter of fact, some of them are. Heed Tink’s warning and save yourself the unpleasantness. Now –“

“And you would be?” Catherine Parker asked flirtatiously. Emma made eye contact with Mary Margaret across the room and mimicked a gagging motion that had her pixie-haired friend giggling and Catherine glaring at her, but Emma didn’t care. The woman was vile, and yet somehow was dating one of the town’s nicest men, David Nolan.

“Liam Jones, EP.”

This was surprising indeed, yet when Emma considered, she could see the similarities between Killian and this man calling the shots. Aside from the accents, both men were good looking, with dark hair and nice eyes. Though in all truth, Emma had to admit she liked Killian more. Just thinking as such had her tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. She felt like a girl again, all nervous and crushing on some guy she barely knew.

“You’re related to the Brit? How is that fair?!” This came from Leroy, the unofficial town crier and world’s most dedicated gossip. He loved to play the victim, build up the drama, and then cower and run in the face of actual confrontation. Emma thought it highly possible that he had been selected for the show based on those tendencies, because his trial bakes seemed questionable at best and grotesque at worst.

“Seeing as I have no control over the judge’s decisions, it’s completely fair, Leroy. Now, there isn’t a minute to waste. The sun in high enough and the set team has prepped, so let’s get going.” With that, Liam was off, with Tink just behind him and Emma looked over to Killian and smirked.

“So you’re the reason they chose us for this.”

Emma watched as a cute little blush spread across his cheeks, and it made no dent in how handsome he was. She allowed herself another moment to admire him, trying to convince herself that she could look now and steel herself against him once the cameras were there. His dark hair had gotten longer since he’d first moved to town, and now a lock of it had fallen to his forehead. Emma wanted to push it back into place, and ended up balling her hands into little fists to keep that inclination in check. Again she wondered how someone could endear her to them so quickly.

Before he could reply, the cameras were in motion and Emma felt the strangeness of the situation. Four different crews worked simultaneously, catching a whole host of angles in what seemed like barely organized chaos. Liam gave out his orders into a headset, and though they were whispered low enough that Emma couldn’t hear them, she thought they’d still have a bit of bark to them. The man practically exuded authority; there would be no silent entreaties from him, but his methods seemed to work. In the span of a few minutes they’d gotten some stock footage of each contestant, which was no easy feat.

Aside from Emma herself, Killian (who Emma knew from word around town was an architect), Leroy, Catherine, Mary Margaret, and Belle, the final twelve included a range of characters. There was Catherine’s boyfriend David, a real saint by all accounts for her dealt with her terrible temper and meaner qualities in stride. He was the town lawyer, and Emma’s guess was that in such a post, one ran into a whole host of personality types. Beside him was Tiana, a waitress at Granny’s who was both hard working and sincere and just before them was Lance, one of the deputies to the sheriff. Then there was Archie, who was a grief counselor, Robin who was a single Dad and the town’s only contractor, and Ella who was a stay at home Mom and very nice if still painfully shy.

All in all, it was a pretty good representation of the town, though there was one clear demographic missing, for not a one of the gaggle of gossips (a band of elderly women who frequented Granny’s) was there. That was because they were all running the betting ring that was consuming the town as they waited for intel on the show. Yup, this was Storybrooke, a place where the illegal betting rings were run by the AARP crowd. America was in for a real treat.

Into the tent at that moment strutted a tall brunette dressed to kill and donning four inch heels as if they were nothing more than slippers, and a man who stood another five or six inches above her with light brown hair and a handsome face. Emma recognized the former as her friend Ruby Lucas, and she nearly called out to see what the heck Ruby was doing here, but a worried Tink stomped down that inclination with a stern shake of her head to Emma. The man was still a stranger, but his face was familiar even if Emma couldn’t quite place him.

“Graham Huntsman is a judge on this show?!” Catherine’s grating voice sounded from the back of the tent, and though her instinct was to roll her eyes, Emma was glad that she hadn’t, because watching Tink’s reaction was so much better.

The small blonde looked near bursting, and was clearly unimpressed with Catherine. If Emma didn’t know her to be loyal to Liam, she’d have expected Tink to shame Catherine from here to Sunday, but as it was, she bit her tongue and moved her attention back to the iPad in front of her. His name had sparked her memory though, and Emma returned her gaze to Graham, a man who had been on another show to try and find love, only then deciding none of the girl’s were his perfect match.

“Yeah he is, Parker, so do us all a favor and shut that trap of yours before you embarrass the town further.” Ruby’s words were too much, and now Emma, Belle, and Mary Margaret were laughing so hard that they were shaking with it. They all three tried to keep quiet, but it was hard to do so, especially when looking back to Ruby and Graham, the latter of whom was blown over by the comment and looking at Ruby with newfound respect.

“If we’re quite done, let’s get the ball rolling shall we? Ruby, Graham you’re up.” He motioned to the camera beside him and Graham and Ruby both lit up with a happy smile.

“Hello and welcome to the Great Storybrooke Baking Show!” Ruby looked so excited as she said the words, while Graham feigned distress beside her.

“Um, no, Ruby, not quite. It’s actually the Great American Baking Show. We’ve just picked your town for the first season.” Ruby rolled her eyes.

“Ignore him, he’s new to this. As I was saying, we have got twelve competitors rearing to go, fighting to see who will be the next King or Queen of this small town in Maine.”

“Again, not what we’re doing here. Back me up on this guys,” there was general murmuring from the crew and a victorious smile from Graham. “And while you are right that we have twelve eager contestants ready to show us their skills in the kitchen, none of them will become royalty.”

“So what’s the take? Is it money? A new kitchen? A lifetime supply of cake?” Ruby asked and Graham shook his head, looking back at the camera.

“To be quite honest, it’s a dish and bragging rights. Oh, and if this show does well enough, hopefully the love of the American people.”

Emma placed a hand over her mouth as she watched the scene unfolding before her. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought that all of this was off the cuff, completely free styled, but it wasn’t. Whoever was writing this was doing a good job, it was funny and light and actually kind of true to the humor of the two women who hosted the show overseas.

Ruby and Graham went on and eventually made their way through the tent to a designated spot so that the camera crews could do a sweeping shot of all the contestants. Emma didn’t know whether to smile or stay neutral, and she nervously tucked another lock of hair behind her ear. Yet soon enough that take was over and they were moving on to the judges’ introduction. It was kind of exhausting to be honest, all of the setup. Maybe it was naïve of her, but Emma had kind of hoped to just come, bake, do some sort of ten minute testimonial style interview after for the editing room and get home, but this was an unaccounted for time suck.

When the judges were finally brought in, Emma was surprised again to see that one of the judges (there were three in this version of the show instead of the usual two) was another familiar face. Ruby’s Grandmother who everyone just called Granny, the owner of the local diner, was dressed fancier than Emma had ever seen her and was clearly just as excited as her granddaughter about her new position. That she was sandwiched between two people who Emma did recognize was too much to handle.

“Contestants, it’s time to meet the judges you’ll be working to impress over the next few weeks.” Graham said happily. “The first needs no introduction. Known to the culinary world simply as Mr. Gold, he owns nearly a dozen high scale restaurants, including Dark Side Snacks in New York, this year’s hottest spot. He’s written three books, worked with the world’s top bakers, and has ranked as CakeBake magazine’s Master of Cake’s three years running.”

Every contestant clapped for the man in question, who though clearly qualified to be here, could barely smile for the cameras. His long hair spoke of not caring, his suit was expensive but a bit too flashy, and he carried a cane for no noticeable limp. He looked so severe and so unimpressed, it left a bit of a sinking feeling in Emma’s stomach.

Something she’d liked so much about the original show was that the Brits kept it light and airy. Though they didn’t reward bad bakes, they also didn’t look like being there was torture. This all of a sudden felt more like an Americans singing competition. Yet, Ruby’s introduction helped lighten things a bit.

“And of course, ‘her majesty’ the lovely and talented Regina Mills. She is a co founder of the now nationally branded chain Wicked Bites, is a New York Times best selling author of the Royal Recipes series, and is the face of The Food Station with not one, not two, but three shows on the network. She’s agreed to join us through some sort of magic it seems, for really, who has the time to be so accomplished?”

Regina laughed at that, and though Emma could tell it was fake and for the cameras, it worked and would play better on the show than whatever Gold had done. Regina understood her image and her brand, and this poised almost calculating good humor, coupled with her ‘no-hair out of place’ appearance was a part of that.

“We also have this season’s ‘Regional Consultant.’ Known by the people of Storybrooke just as Granny, and determined to keep the moniker, she’s the owner of the town’s diner, and in many ways the glue that binds Storybrooke together. Show of hands, how many of you are regulars at Granny’s?” The cameras panned over the contestants, all of who were raising their hands and Granny smiled happily. “Full disclosure, she is also my grandmother, and the reason I couldn’t try out for this competition.” Ruby joked.

“No, my dear, the reason you couldn’t try out is you are a disaster in the kitchen,” Granny quipped.

“Also true. Now, without further ado, let’s get to today’s challenges.” Only despite Ruby’s words, they didn’t get straight to work. The camera’s needed readjusting, and as they worked, Granny said something to Regina who was receptive if a little cool in her answer.

“No I’ve never been to Maine. So far it seems… quaint, but pretty.” That was good enough for Granny, who always tried to sketch out a person’s character on their first meeting. So when she looked over to Gold and asked his thoughts, she was in for a far less favorable reading.

“Look lady, I’m going to be honest with you when I say that this job is entirely about a check and bit of PR polishing. Call one too many people a fuck-up on video, and you start to lose your public sparkle. So for the next ten weeks, I may bite back my nuggets of truth, but know that I find this entire show a fiasco of the highest caliber and a thorough waste of my valuable time. Now hopefully you can take a hint and will refrain from speaking to me for the rest of this.”

“Do you think he meant to use all those gold puns, or was that an accident?” Belle huffed under her breath, but Gold seemed to hear her. He sent a glare her way, but she merely smiled back, daring him to throw his salt and bitterness her way. It was an amazing sight to see, and Emma couldn’t have been prouder or more impressed with her friend.

“Well in order to get that check, we need an actual show, so if we’re quite ready, let’s move on.” Liam motioned the cameras once more, and they focused on Ruby and Graham who stood before the bakers with their instructions.

“Bakers, the task before you is simple: create a cake in ninety minutes with at least three layers and two filling variants. Your time begins… now.”

As a small bell chimed, the kitchen went from stagnant expectation to fully mobile, with everyone working towards the task at hand. For this signature challenge and the one to come tomorrow, they were allowed to prep in advance, so this should be easy. The hard part would be a few hours from now, when Emma had half a recipe to go off of to make something that she’d probably never heard of.

“It would be a bloody embarrassment to mess this one up, eh Swan?” Emma looked over to Killian and nodded without saying anything. She was surprised that he’d once again said exactly what she was thinking.

“Killian, it appears you’re making friends already.” Ruby remarked, as she came up with Graham beside her and one of the camera crews to ask him about his intended cake.

“Are we to assume you’re the town loner?” Graham asked skeptically and Killian shook his head before responding.

“Not intentionally, though being new to the area does have its drawbacks. Still, a competitive bakeoff seems as good a way as any to meet people.”

Killian looked back at Emma and their eyes caught. She smiled before turning back to her own work, though she listened as Killian outlined his wild berry circle cake that would incorporate blueberries, blackberries and raspberries in one confection with a basic white base. Emma liked the idea a lot, and hoped she’d get a chance to try it later. He’d been smart to choose fruit that were in season. The freshness would make for an excellent treat.

When they were done with Killian, Ruby and Graham made their way around the room, and Emma felt herself relax into her own course of action. She worked diligently to combine the flavors just so, and make sure she had everything timed out as she needed. She was making a mocha latte cake, based off a recipe she’d been working with through most of the winter. It was her favorite drink, aside from cocoa, and in cake form it was out of this world. Her design was split into three distinct segments – the white cake infused with a minimal amount of espresso, a layer of chocolate frosting, and a layer of coffee frosting, then covered in both frostings mixed together. It was always a hit wherever she brought it, but still, Emma was worried, she didn’t want to lose points for a stupid oversight, so needed to take her time.

“What you got there?” Ruby asked causing Emma to startle and nearly drop the cakes before they went in the oven, but she recovered and then threw a look up to Ruby. “Sorry, Ems. My bad.”

Emma just smiled and waved her friend off and explained the cake’s intention to the hosts as she set to making the frosting – She had three huge containers, one with each flavor variety, and while the cakes were on the cooling rack, she would set them to cool in the fridge, but for now, she mostly answered questions about her life and hobbies.

“So when did you start baking?” Emma didn’t even need to think, she knew instantly.

“In college. I didn’t ever have a place to try before that, but I always liked the idea. You know, every kid wants the smell of chocolate chip cookies when they walk through the door. I decided to make that for myself.”

“What, your Mom wasn’t the baking type?”

“I wouldn’t know. Never met her. But it doesn’t matter, because I am the baking type,” Emma said, “and if I’m still here the week we make cookies, everyone else is in serious trouble.”

Ruby had looked like she might pass out at Graham’s question, since she knew about Emma’s past as a foster kid, but the look of pride in her friend’s eyes now was true and sincere. Emma had handled the question with grace, not making herself a victim or coldly refusing to reply. She’d done a marvelous job, and to celebrate that, she allowed herself a taste of some of the mocha frosting.

“If your reaction is anything to go off of, love, we should all be very afraid for this challenge too.” Killian’s words pulled Emma from her internal reverie over the chocolate and she grinned playfully.

“Hey, you said it, not me.” Ruby and Graham lingered just a moment longer before returning to the others as Emma moved her frostings to the group fridge neatly labeled with her name. They’d sit for fifteen minutes, to give her enough time to have the cakes cool and the frosting to get to the desired consistency. She passed the time, checking in on Mary Margaret and Belle and seeing they were on their way to some good-looking cakes too.

The problem came when she returned to the fridge. Emma arrived at the same time as Catherine, and watched as the blonde saw her approach and then ‘accidentally’ knocked over one of Emma’s containers of frosting. The contents fell to the ground, spilling out and ruined in the blink of an eye. The room went silent, and Emma felt all of their eyes and the camera’s turned to her and Catherine who had a shit-eating grin on her face.

“Oops, sorry about that, Emma. But good thing you made extra right?”

Breathe, Emma. Ripping this woman’s hair out on national television will get you nowhere. Emma stepped forward and took her two remaining frostings and whispered low to Catherine.

“Bring it. Whatever insecure, asinine moves you’ve got, I can handle.”

Then Emma turned on her heel and proceeded to silently freak out. She most certainly did not have enough frosting for everything, and she didn’t have enough time to chill another batch, which was necessary. She paced back and forth, trying to come up with something. She felt her friend’s and Killian’s eyes tracking her but she continued to move about, needing an idea and fast. When she had it, she set to work immediately.

The clock was running down and time was precious, but in the end Emma created a satisfactory replacement for the frosting – a sweet cream glaze that covered the cake with a sprinkle of cocoa on top. While the appearance wasn’t as pristine as she’d hoped, the taste would still be stellar, of that Emma was sure. Just as she stepped away from her cake, the buzzer sounded and time was called.

“Bakers that does it for this round. Step away from your creations and take a breath, you’ve made it through the first challenge.” Everyone applauded politely, but Emma just wanted this judging cycle over. She had just gone from a top contender, to a wild card, and that was a stressful thing, even if they were essentially playing for nothing.

The judges were called, making their rounds through the tent to see what worked and what didn’t. The reviews were mixed. For some, like Tiana, who Emma was somewhat friendly with, they were glowing, while for others, like Leroy, they were bordering on insulting, yet most people stayed in the middle with both compliments and complaints. When they finally reached Emma, it was Regina who spoke first.

“Miss Swan, seems you’ve provided a less… traditional circle cake.” Emma nodded and tried to smile through her frustration.

“A mix up with some frosting, unfortunately, but when does a bake ever truly go perfectly?”

The other woman smiled at Emma’s joke, while Mr. Gold looked less than impressed with the façade of the cake and Granny looked down right murderous at Catherine. She no doubt had heard what happened. It wasn’t until they were cutting into the cake and each trying a bite that Emma felt any real anxiety though. After a moment of contemplation, Gold spoke first.

“Presentable or not, this is actually quite good.”

“You sound surprised.” Emma almost slapped a hand over her face in embarrassment but stood her ground as she heard both Granny and Belle smothering laughs for it. He meanwhile narrowed his eyes slightly as if she’d truly angered him.

“I actually like the design. It’s very DIY friendly, and I think you could find this on any magazine cover. People love deconstructed anything made into cake.” Such praise from Regina had Emma smiling again before turning to Granny.

“I don’t know what you were planning to do with the rest of this, but plans have changed.”

Emma watched as the older woman actually removed the cake from her table and began to walk away with it and shook her head stunned. There was a small break for people to do their testimonial responses, which Emma couldn’t even remember completing before they were on to the technical bake – Regina’s apple streusel cake.

While tensions were high, Emma stayed collected and moved through the ninety minutes with a sense of collectedness she hadn’t expected. In fact, the only thing she noticed beside herself and the recipe before her was Killian, who took great care to speak with her throughout the time.

“I’ve been meaning to ask if you know what the ribbons around town are for.” Killian’s words as they both waited for their cakes to bake pulled a smile to Emma’s lips.

“They’re everyone’s allegiances, for the competition. We’ve all been assigned a color, and the rest of our nosy neighbors can have up to three colors for the pool that the GG is organizing.” Killian looked confused.

“The GG?”

“Sorry, the Gossip Gaggle. You know, the white haired coalition of ladies with the permanent table at Granny’s?” Recognition set in for Killian and he laughed heartily.

“I rather like that. So what color are you?” Killian inquired.

“They gave me white, if you can believe it.” He chuckled again, and the sounds sent a hum of pleasure coursing through Emma.

“I can. And do you happen to know the rest of us?”

“Yes…” Emma purposely held back to see if he’d keep asking, and she was rewarded with a pleading look from him.

“What can I trade you for such information, love?” She pretended to consider.

“You can tell me what you’re making for the competition tomorrow.”

“Vanilla mouse with a lavender infusion and raspberry frosting.” Emma’s mouth watered a little at the idea and she was slightly envious of that flavor compilation. It would surely taste wonderful.

“Your band is black, because you’re the competition’s dark horse.” Killian grinned at that.

“So you’re the light to my darkness then, Swan?” She raised her hands in defeat.

“Hey, I didn’t make the color scheme.”

“Tell him about the other bet!” Mary Margaret called from her side of the room and Emma flushed slightly.

“Yes, Swan, do tell,” Killian implored.

“There’s a pool about you too.”

“About me?” he asked skeptically.

“Oh come on Jones. You’re a single guy who just moved to small-town Maine. Women take one look and wonder who you’ll end up with.” The comment from David was both unexpected and entirely spot-on, though now that Emma thought about it, she had noticed David and Killian speaking a few times before. Perhaps they were friends. Still, Killian’s jaw dropped and Emma stifled a laugh.

“Who’s the favorite?” he asked, his breath a bit gruffer than before.

“David.” Belle replied as she pulled her cake out of the oven. She was the first to do so, but still seemed pleased with herself.

“So everyone thinks Dave and I are gay?” He didn’t say it like it was a repulsive statement, just like it was a clearly incorrect assumption.

“No. The old ladies just like a little fantasy. Plus you haven’t asked anyone out and it’s been a few months, so…”

“My brother is a bit shy, Emma, you’ll have to forgive him.”

Emma raised a brow at Liam’s sudden comment where he’d broken the wall between producers and contestants and was about to ask why he would apologize to her in particular when her own buzzer went off and everyone began focusing on their cakes once more. Soon the time was up, and they were all being judged on a blind taste test. Things went very well for Emma, who actually came in second for the apple cake.

All in all, as the day was ending, Emma had to admit she’d done rather well, and that she was really looking forward to tomorrow, but she did have one tiny regret. She would have liked to talk to Killian once more, to see what Liam had meant, but her friends had other ideas. Ruby, Belle and Mary Margaret all decided that their first day deserved a wine night ending, and Emma couldn’t turn down the chance to relax and unwind. Her queries, it seemed, would have to wait until tomorrow.

…………

“Why didn’t I think to incorporate a book into my theme?” Belle asked the next day, as Emma was working to decorate her Peter Pan Petites in the allotted time they’d been given for their thirty-six cupcakes challenge. Emma shrugged in reply and Belle simply shook her head. “Let me guess, you’ll have a book theme every week?” Emma nodded.

“I need an inspiration. I can’t just come up with ideas on the fly, like you can.” This seemed to appease her friend, but it sparked Killian’s interest.

“Have a thing for reading, love?”

“It would be a problem if I didn’t, seeing as I am an editor by trade.” She didn’t have to look over to him to see his surprise.

“How did I miss that?” Emma looked up to see him genuinely wondering and she looked at him quizzically.

“Researching the competition, Jones?” she asked playfully.

“Only you, love.”

This caused a blush to creep across Emma’s cheeks and she bent her head back to the cupcakes before her. They were decorated meticulously, with a miniature Jolly Roger placed over a swirl of green. She’d also included a little Pan’s shadow and a fondant mermaid on each. Everyone brought their own stands on which to put their finished product, but Emma also had props to incorporate on the spread for her display. At one point, she noticed as the costume hook she’d brought was swiped away. Killian had taken it, in an attempt to get her to speak to him once more.

“Don’t you have some cupcakes to make yourself?” Emma asked with a hand on her hip, playing at being frustrated, when all she actually felt was excited. She loved the attention from him, and she wanted more of it, which surprised her as she was kind of a guarded person. Her past experience had taught her that putting yourself out there romantically never paid off, yet the gleam in Killian’s blue eyes made her wonder if she’d written love off too soon.

Pull it together, Emma, no one said anything about love, she thought to herself critically as he finally replied.

“Aye I do, Swan. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to do much until I can get one of those beautiful smiles out of you.” As if he’d willed it into happening, a full-blown grin broke out across her face.

“Has anyone ever told you that all the charm is a little suspect?” He looked affronted and waved the hook around as if it was a part of his being.

“Never, love. Usually women comment on my being devilishly handsome or my roughish appeal.”

“You sound like a pirate.”

“Captain Jones has a nice ring to it, actually,” Mary Margaret offered from the back of the tent.

“How does she hear me from all the way over there?” Killian asked aloud and Mary Margaret herself responded.

“It’s a teacher thing. My superpower is almost as cool as Emma’s.” Killian returned the hook to Emma’s display and then finally retuned to his station, but he wasn’t done with his questions.

“A superpower, Emma? You hold so much back about yourself.” She laughed at that. He had no idea.

“She can tell when anyone is lying, always. She’s never wrong.” Belle sounded so proud of Emma as she said it that Emma had to turn to smile at her friend.

“That’s a load of bull.”

And just like that, the silence from Catherine was broken and Emma was once again set on edge by the rude woman. Still, Emma ignored her and went on with her cupcakes like no one had spoken. Emma did hear David asking Catherine to pull back some, but that only made Catherine more hostile.

“I just don’t know why everyone thinks they’re so great. Between her, the bookworm, and Sister Mary Margaret it’s ridiculous. I mean look at her,” Catherine aimed her gesture at Mary Margaret in particular, “she goes about her life like birds dress her in the morning, but it’s all a front.”

David looked like he was truly angry at this point, and kept glancing to Mary Margaret to see if she had heard (which she had) and to see if she was okay (which she was). Still, it was interesting. Perhaps David wasn’t so fully under Catherine’s spell as they all thought.

“Just a friendly reminder that there are cameras around and the bitter words usually make the cut for television.” Tink’s intervention was controlled, but barely. Her dislike for Catherine was just as apparent today as it had been the day before and Emma was growing to like her more and more. In another life they likely would have been friends. As it was, she smiled at her thankfully and the petite blonde smiled back in kind.

Time went by quickly after that, and though they’d all had a bit of distraction, most of the contestants had nice looking end results. Only one was truly lacking and it was Leroy’s. His frosting looked like it had been scratched on with a fork of all things, and the judges really couldn’t seem to find anything kind to say at all. When it was revealed soon after that he would be the one going home this week, no one was surprised, including Leroy. What was surprising though was that Emma was the person chosen for star baker of the week.

“There was no way around it. Miss Swan provided three wonderful bakes for consideration, despite a bit of sabotage in the first round. She has a good understanding of flavor and presentation.” Emma heard Regina’s words and felt a lot of pride at all she’d accomplished this weekend. Gold’s words were less uplifting.

“While no bake was perfect, she seemed to have a bit more control over her vision than the others.”

“So verbose,” Belle said as she rolled her eyes. Emma was starting to wonder what it was about this man that bothered her friend so much, still she couldn’t deny the outbursts were funny and made her feel better.

“Emma’s a good girl,” Granny said.  “And clearly I wasn’t the only one who thought so. That Killian certainly paid her a lot of attention, even when it put his own treats at risk.”

Emma looked to Killian who smiled at her and shrugged as if to say ‘she has a point.’ Emma couldn’t help but laugh. When the cameras were finally finished getting what they needed from the judges, the producers came towards the contestants once more.

“As all of you know, we’re working on a sped up model for the show, but it turns out it’ll be far faster than we’d realized. Thanks to a few early cancelations from this season’s scripted dramas, the network needs content fast. All of this footage will be cut down edited, and sent into the networks by midweek. We expect a Thursday or Friday time slot.” Liam said all of this calmly but it caused a flurry of questions and comments.

“Wait, like Thursday or Friday of this week?” Ella asked looking pale at the thought.

“Yes, this week.”

“I thought this wasn’t going to air until the holidays.” Belle continued.

“That was the plan originally, but this is television, and they follow the money.”

“How realistic is it that this is where the money is?” Archie asked.

“No idea. But for the sake of the dozens of people who are counting on this as a job, hopefully long term, lets hope the chances are high.” Emma hadn’t thought about that, though she’d met some lovely people over the past few days who did everything from hair and make up to lighting to security.

“Do we still need to keep who got kicked off a secret?” Tink and Liam nodded vigorously.

“Of course, that was in the agreement you all signed.”

“Do you have any idea what else the network is canceling? I don’t want to risk getting to attached to anything.” Killian’s comment had most of the contestants laughing (save for Catherine and Leroy) but it seemed to ease any lingering tension. With that they were dismissed, most to reconvene the next weekend.  

Something occurred to Emma as she left the tent for her life outside once more. She had never actually expected this to be fun. Sure, it would be an experience, a great story and a cool thing to have on her life resume, but it wasn’t what she’d thought of as entertaining. She was nervous about the cameras, shy of too much competition between her neighbors, and a bit scared she might not measure up skill wise, but this had been surprising. She’d had a great time, better than any weekend in a long while, and the person largely responsible for that had gorgeous dark hair, a sexy as sin accent and kind blue eyes.

“Emma!” Killian’s voice from behind had Emma turning to him, waving to her friends that she’d meet up with them in one minute. “I know we’ll be meeting again next weekend, but I was wondering if perhaps… you might be – well what I was hoping was that-,”

His stammering was adorable as he ran a hand through his hair clearly flustered, and Emma had an undeniable urge to kiss the shy smile that toyed at his lips. Somehow she knew that he wasn’t used to acting this way. Like his brother he probably teetered closer to the edge of control and collectedness than this scene before her indicated.

“Here’s my number.” Emma said, pulling out a pen from her purse and writing it down on his hand. She could have found some paper, or just put it in his phone, but inexplicably, she wanted an excuse to touch him.

When she’d written it clearly, she smiled at him and turned around to head back home. She could have sworn she heard him mumble ‘Bloody hell’ under his breath and it filled her with a rush of excitement. A moment later though, she spun around to see him once more. He was still standing there, staring at her as she walked away like he was in some sort of daze.

“I’ll be waiting for your call, Captain.” The fire in his eyes at her endearment was exactly the effect she wanted. Now all she had to do was wait.

Post-Note: So there we have it! Hopefully you guys liked it. Subsequent chapters will likely have one of the three challenges and the results featured and either a little bit of their normal lives, or recaps of it. There will be nine regular chapters in total (one per episode) and then an epilogue, HEA guaranteed. So thank you guys for reading, and hope you all have a great rest of your week!

Tank & Wife Zena Let Fans Inside Their Crazy, Quarantine Life For Their New Reality Series + Yara Shahidi, Ta-Nehisi Coates Land MAJOR Deals

Singer Tank and his family are starring in their brand-new reality series where they give fans an inside look at their crazy, quarantine life. See what the Babbs are are up to, plus get deets on Yara Shahidi’s new development deal with ABC inside….

Just days ago, R&B singer Tank and his wife Zena Foster-Babbs celebrated their two year wedding anniversary.

“2 years in the books!.. You made it..lol. Being married to you is everything i prayed it would be,” Tank captioned on Instagram. “I’ve known you for 20 years and i’m still learning more about you everyday. I’m still learning how to be more for you everyday and i’m loving the process. You truly make me happy and i’ve cleared my books to do this with you forever... Happy Anniversary my beautiful, sexy, bossy Queen!.. What i wouldn’t give for a corona free trip back to Paris with you right now.. I love you with all that i am..”

        View this post on Instagram

              ��   2 years in the books!.. You made it..lol. Being married to you is everything i prayed it would be. I’ve known you for 20 years and i’m still learning more about you everyday. I’m still learning how to be more for you everyday and i’m loving the process. You truly make me happy and i’ve cleared my books to do this with you forever... Happy Anniversary my beautiful, sexy, bossy Queen!.. What i wouldn’t give for a corona free trip back to Paris with you right now.. I love you with all that i am..

A post shared by Tank (@therealtank) on Jul 22, 2020 at 1:45pm PDT

  With a couple of years of marriage under their belts and two kids, Tank and Zena are lettings fans into their lives amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Tank (real name Durrell Babbs), his wife Zena Foster-Babbs, and their children - daughter Zoey Babbs (age 12) and son Zion Babbs (age 5) - are knocking down the velvet rope with the premiere of “Babbs to the Bone” airing weekly on YouTube.

The Babbs are opening their doors to all the fun and magic that happens daily. The show will highlight how they navigate the R&B singer’s sex symbol status, Black love, marriage, parenting, entrepreneurship, along with unexpected family shenanigans. Several of The Babbs’ celebrity friends also will make surprises appearances.

“I’m excited to show something different. Positive images of love and family. I feel like negative shock value has consumed the mainstream and these uplifting moments are needed," Tank shares. "We’re not perfect but we’re happy. That’s the way forever should be.”

Zena adds, "We’ve always been asked to do reality television, but were afraid how others would try to edit our lives. So we decided to take our own creative control." She continues "Plus if I’m going to be working I want to do it with the ones I love to create amazing memories. This way we always have something we can look back on and be proud of."

In the first episode, Tank and Zena talk about what they love about one another. The kids do as well. If you didn’t know, Tank is obsessed with comedy and is currently working on pursuing making a splash in the comedy world. Fans also learn how Tank and Zena first met, their initial thoughts about each other and more. Check it out below:

In the second episode, the Babbs play a game of “Whatchu Know ‘Bout Me?” Check it:

The new reality series airs every Tuesday with 12 episodes.

In other news...

Yara Shahidi has been killing it in front of the camera as she stars in two successful ABC sitcoms, "black-ish" and her own spin-off "Grown-ish." Now, she's gearing up to slay behind-the-scenes.

According to Deadline, Yara has inked a development deal with ABC to "develop and produce scripted and alternative television projects for cable" via her newly launched 7th Sun production company, which she runs with her mother, Keri Shahidi.

The 23-year-old actress/activist plans to focus on stories from underrepresented communities and "projects that touch upon themes of history, heritage, culture, and joy." And who better to serve up historical facts and events in an entertaining way other than Yara. The YBF starlet is uber talented and smart, so we predict some interesting and entertaining projects that will also have an educational component to them.

“I’m thrilled to be partnering with my home family, ABC Studios, in this exciting next chapter, alongside my family,” said Yara. “It’s exciting to add our production company to the roster of my peers and mentors who are also actively committed to sharing meaningful stories.”

Deadline reports:

The Shahidis have brought on veteran executive Lajoie St. George to lead development for 7th Sun. St. George brings over 10 years of experience from NBC International, and an equivalent passion to champion accurate and reflective media. “We can’t wait to extend and expand our relationship with the incredibly talented Yara Shahidi, who has been a member of the family since black-ish,” said ABC Studios President Jonnie Davis. “When she’s not studying at Harvard and starring in our series ‘grown-ish,’ she’s mentoring and inspiring other young people, which makes us all feel like underachievers but also very proud that she’s part of our Studio.”

Sweet!

The "black-ish" stars are definitely flourishing. Outside of landing roles in movies and other shows, Marsai Martin signed a production deal with Universal last year, becoming the youngest to ever do so. #BlackGirlMagic

  EXTRAS:

1. Hallmark Channel has found its next leader. Former TV One CEO Wonya Lucas will take over for Bill Abbott, who was pushed out in January, to serve as president and CEO of Crown Media Family Networks. STORY

2. HBO is adapting "Between the World and Me," Ta-Nehisi Coates' book and stage show about racism and white supremacy. https://variety.com/2019/film/news/black-ish-marsai-martin-universal-dea... ">STORY

Photo: StrongArmMedia/Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock.com

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/07/28/tank-wife-zena-lets-fans-inside-their-crazy-quarantine-life-for-their-new-reality-series-

by Paul Batters

Part Two continues with the wonderful, personal stories of how our featured writers came to discover and love classic film.

Maddy 

Blog: Maddy Loves Her Classic Films   Twitter: @TimeForAFilm

I grew up in the 1990’s and was brought up on the animated Disney films such as Bambi and The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. I was very into dance when I was little and my parents bought me the documentary That’s Dancing (1985). That introduced me to so many classic era actors and films. It especially got me interested in Fred and Ginger, The Nicholas Brothers, Gene Kelly and Eleanor Powell. I started to seek out many of their films as I grew up.

If I had to pick one film in particular that made me fall in love with this era of filmmaking, then it would have to be Top Hat. It was the first b&w film I saw and I loved everything about it – from the characters and the dancing, to the stunning sets and beautiful costumes. This girl was hooked! In my teens I discovered Alfred Hitchcock. His films made me a classic film fan for life. They were what first made me aware of the language of cinema and got me interested in how films were made. Rear Window was the first I saw and I remember eagerly returning to the Library every weekend to borrow more of his films.

Theresa Brown

Blog: CineMaven’s Essays From the Couch     Twitter: @CineMava

I would need to go into some type of hydro~therapy, deep dark hypnosis to pull the memory of what film led me into loving classic films; and also to get into my past life as Cleopatra. My parents told me I used to run into the living room and stand in front of the tv set during commercials. Commercials, for heaven’s sake!! Were they bite-sized movies for the tiny Baby Boomer I was? It’s hard for me to say just what film set me on this path of being a classic movie buff. My mom took us to practically ev’ry Disney movie back in the 1950’s. American TV of the 60’s and 70’s threw away a lot of “old movies” and I was up all hours of the night trying to get my fill. Maybe seeing these films was a way to connect to my father and aunt with movies they grew up seeing on the big screen. For my 16th birthday my father gave me my first movie book: on Bogart films. Cinemabilia was a NYC book store I got lost in for hours. Classic films are just in my DNA.

Aurora

Blog: Once Upon a Screen    Twitter: @CitizenScreen

I arrived in the United States from Cuba at the age of five and immediately fell in love with movies. We were given a secondhand television set where one day I happened upon Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage. The unique point of view sequence at the onset of the movie fascinated me even then. I longed to see the face that peered out at the dark, grim world. I have loved film noir ever since. The only other genre that competes is the musical; it is what truly made my imagination soar. I remember vividly seeing On the Town and marvelling at the notion that my father had brought me to a place where people danced on the street. We lived in a crowded New York City apartment. I remember too wishing that my family were just like the Smiths in Meet Me in St. Louis. Alas, there are too many of those moments to recount, too many ways the movies made me who I am. It is to those days, when I knew no one outside my family, when those characters were as real as any person I had ever met, that I owe my love of movies.

Robert Short – Writer

Having been a fan of classic films for over fifty years now, I find it difficult to ascribe any specific movie as the pivotal film that inspired my love of the golden era of filmdom.  During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the decades in which I chiefly grew up, the cinematic offerings from the 1930’s and 1940’s were the general fodder of movie viewing on television; I undoubtedly saw many from a very young age.  I can say with greater certainty that I had developed a conscious interest in “old movies”, a relative term, by the age of twelve or thirteen.  Perhaps the interest grew organically; perhaps it was a moment of epiphany.

Again, while I cannot pinpoint any definitive “watershed” title, there is possibly one film of note which served as a cornerstone in my movie-watching career.  “Juarez” marked my first “late show”, the late-night movies that I was finally permitted to watch after beginning high school in September 1969.  A typically lavish production from Warner Bros., and another quality contribution from 1939, the film was immensely entertaining, albeit often historically inaccurate.  Admittedly, the fact that “Juarez” was my introduction to the venerable institution of the late show, now gone by the wayside in the wake of our modern digital era, may seem very trivial and unimportant.  However, the late show itself was once the chief means to watch classic films; through it my access to many wonderful movies was greatly expanded.

Amanda Garrett

Blog: Old Hollywood Films  Twitter: @oldhollywood21

My lifelong love of affair with classic movies began when I stumbled across director John Ford’s Western Stagecoach (1939) on PBS when I was in grade school. It soon became my favourite movie mostly because I wanted to be BFFs with Doc Boone played by Thomas Mitchell (I didn’t understand that what I thought was very funny behaviour was caused by alcohol), and I secretly wanted to be Andy Devine mostly because I thought driving a stagecoach seemed like a cool job. I’ve watched Stagecoach dozens of times since then, and while I’ve given up my ambition of being a stagecoach driver, I still find the film a rewarding experience all these years later. There are several reasons for this including the masterful plot, which Ford unfolds with clockwork precision, and the roster of great character actors. Most of all, I return to Stagecoach because of Ford. The gruff director despised being called an artist or even worse an auteur, but the truth is he was both. Ford’s fluid camera work makes Stagecoach poetry in motion, and he would return to the theme of one man’s quest for justice throughout his career.

Name: Jay

Blog: Cinema Essentials   Twitter: @CineEssentials

Although I grew up watching classic films, most were colour films from the 1950s and 1960s. If there was one film that overcame my childhood resistance to black and white, then it was Green for Danger. It’s a brilliant comedy-thriller that plays with the conventions of the murder mystery genre.

Alastair Sim plays an eccentric detective sent to investigate a series of suspicious deaths at a hospital, where he finds a range of suspects. Sim is unquestionably the star of the show, but there are many good supporting performances, from Trevor Howard, Sally Gray, Leo Genn, Megs Jenkins and Rosamund John.

The film was made by Sidney Gilliat, who co-wrote The Lady Vanishes and its spiritual successor Night Train to Munich. That gives you an idea of the sort of humour and playful tone of the film, which are mixed with a bit of tension and an intriguing mystery.

I first saw Green for Danger when I was 7 or 8. I’ve seen it numerous times since, but I usually forget who the murderer is, because it’s the performances and characterisations that make it irresistible. And the film is so entertaining anyway, that it doesn’t really matter if you remember the solution or not.

Margot Shelby

Blog: Down These Mean Streets

It’s hard to say exactly when, how and why I became a classic film fan. Neither my parents nor my grandparents were interested so I discovered them myself. I was probably around five and I assume some classic film came on TV and I was hooked. I loved history (still do) and somehow old movies were like a history lesson, a window into another world. Something just clicked. I wish I could remember what the first movie was that really left an impression on me, but I really can’t.

I’m so jealous of the people who had friends and family who also like classic films.

Unfortunately I had nobody I could share my love of classic films with. My friends weren’t interested either, everybody was just shaking their heads about my obsession.

Well thankfully nowadays we have the internet and yes, there are other people like me out there. I’m not a freak! Good to know. 🙂

Carol

Blog: The Old Hollywood Garden

I created The Old Hollywood Garden because I wanted to express my love for the classics. I wanted to make people want to watch them, and I wanted to share my undying fascination with Hollywood’s Golden Age with the world.

I became a classic movie buff after viewing my very first classic movie which was Gilda (Charles Vidor, 1946). All the way back in 2007 when I was fifteen years old. I was flipping through the channels, and I stumbled upon it on an retrospective type of channel which shows old films and TV shows. Its black and white cinematography caught my attention straight-away and I put the remote down and watched it. I had no doubt in my mind this would be the start of something great for me and I couldn’t wait for it. I was barely half way through it and I already knew that I wanted to consume as many of these wonderful movies as possible. I was mesmerized by Rita Hayworth – who isn’t? – and I loved the love-hate relationship between Gilda and Johnny (Glenn Ford). It was hot. It was exciting. It was a masterclass in screen chemistry. Years later, I still think it’s the sexiest movie ever made.

I was drawn in by them mostly, but right from the start, I thought Gilda was so fascinating. Johnny’s voice-over narration in the beginning (‘To me, a dollar was a dollar in any language…’) was everything I’d imagined these things to be. Great lines, no non-sense attitude; straight-up cool. The plot was interesting enough – small-time gambler Johnny is hired by Ballin Mundson (George Macready) to work in his casino, not knowing Ballin’s wife is his ex-lover Gilda – and the performances were fantastic. Especially Rita Hayworth’s. Her most iconic role was also her greatest. A flawed character, multi-layered and yet mysterious. Confident and yet vulnerable. A sort of anti-heroine that no doubt paved the way for many female characters that followed it. It is still one of my favourite performances of all time and the reason I couldn’t take my eyes off Gilda the first time I saw it. A ‘femme fatale’, I later read. I was transfixed by this. Film noir was intriguing.

Years later, of course, I realised that Gilda isn’t quite a film noir (noir melodrama?) and Gilda isn’t really a femme fatale. Not in the traditional sense anyway. Looking back, Gilda was ahead of her time, in many ways. But back then, I just knew that this was endlessly fascinating. I had to watch more of these. So many more. I had to watch more stuff with Rita Hayworth in it. And Glenn Ford. I had to watch all of these films noirs. And the screwballs and the Pre-Codes. And the musicals! I had to watch all the Golden Age of Hollywood had to offer. Needless to say, I’ve been doing just that for twelve years and it has been absolutely blissful.

Editorial use only. No book cover usage. Mandatory Credit: Photo by Columbia/Kobal/Shutterstock (5886203bk) Rita Hayworth Gilda – 1946 Director: Charles Vidor Columbia Lobby Card/Poster

It’s been an absolute honour to share the memories and feelings that classic film fans have about the films that matter to them and the experience of discovering classic film. The beauty is that those feelings do not go away but grow and flourish, as the journey continues and as we all discover and re-discover the films we have come to love. But it is also a wonderful thing to connect with classic film fans from around the world and share those experiences.

It has been an honour to share these contributions and my personal thanks to all who have contributed.

The Films That Brought Us To Love Classic Film – Part Two by Paul Batters Part Two continues with the wonderful, personal stories of how our featured writers came to discover and love classic film.

Tv Shows Quotes

Official Website: Tv Shows Quotes

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• A great day for me is not getting out of bed. I like to see how many snacks I can eat..and how many really bad TV shows I can watch – Gwen Stefani • A TV show is constant work, which is the great thing about it. – Seth Rogen • An actor gives voice to the many multitudes that we all contain. That’s why we love the movies, why we love TV shows: we watch different people portray an aspect of ourselves, maybe even one we don’t like. – Kristen Stewart • And I don’t think that success can be measured by how many TV shows you’re on. – Clay Aiken • And so as a director, as a leader, and myself as a director and a leader, I kind of try to make sure that we hold onto the vision and kind of corral it, but by the time you finish whatever the project is, a TV show, a series, a movie, a stage show, it should be a product of what all those people can do, and therefore, it can never be what you imagined it would be in the beginning. – Brian Henson • And the consumer doesn’t care. They don’t watch networks, they watch TV shows. – Dick Wolf • As an actor, you very rarely have the experience of picking up a script and getting a few pages into it and realizing that what you’re holding in your hands is not just a role on a TV show, but it’s one of those special parts that comes along, once or twice in a career. If you’re lucky, you get an opportunity to do something really memorable and to be part of one of those rare shows that passes into that special category. – Holt McCallany • At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift. – Anthony Bourdain

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jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Show', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '32', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_show').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_show img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Basically, growing up, and being a teenage kid, I’ve always been interested in charity. And one of the benefits of being on a TV show and having a fan base, you kind of have the power to spread news around. – Gregg Sulkin • Before the TV show of Jessica Jones, the response to Miles [Morales] is so overwhelming, and so constant, and it’s been five years now. I can’t even express to you how powerful it is on my end. It’s overwhelming how much it was needed, that I didn’t know that’s what was needed. – Brian Michael Bendis • But long story short, I didn’t start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up. – Demetri Martin • Cancer is so much bigger than a TV show. – Laura Linney • Critics say it’s illegal for Donald Trump to run for president while hosting a TV show. It’s also illegal to run for president if your hair wasn’t born in this country. – Conan O’Brien • Doing films as an actor, you spend maybe 40 percent of the year doing your chosen profession. If you are on a successful TV show, you spend 80 percent of your year doing the thing you love. – Christina Ricci • Dont take Portlandia too personally – Its just a stupid TV show – Greg Graffin • Especially for people who are unknown, it’s easier to get a TV show because you don’t have to put a certain amount of people in movie theaters for a box office weekend. It’s really difficult to get a great lead role in some big film, if nobody knows you. – Eve Hewson • Especially with the video games and social media we have now, I think that turning point from kid to sort of adult has gotten earlier with TV shows that are on right now and video games. They all contribute to that. – Gage Munroe • Even if you go out there and try to make the most vanilla, non-offensive TV show possible, people are going to criticize you for doing that. It’s just part of the game. You can’t let it get to you. – Thomas Sadoski • Even when people are rich and successful on TV shows, there’s always some trouble – you have to poke holes in them, throw them out of a job, put a pie in the face. – Drew Carey • Every single job I do. It sounds goofy but I did a music video for Fergie. I was in full on tattoos, ponytail, but it’s like even things like that they help other people to see you in a different light. They give me opportunities. I try and change the image with every job that I can, it’s just hard when you work on a TV show and you work so many months and trying to get away from that. – Milo Ventimiglia • Every TV show I’ve ever made, every game I’ve ever built, and every book I’ve ever published has had the common thread of building the biggest, brightest spotlight imaginable and then flipping it around to shine on you. – Elan Lee • Everyone has days where they don’t get their way, where you have to go to bed early or you have too much homework to do or you can’t eat the candy that you want or you miss your favorite TV show and, in those moments, you just want to tear the whole world down. – Alex Hirsch • Film and television are very different. On the TV show, we do seven or eight scenes a day, so time and money are of the essence, and we have zero room for creativity because you’ve got to do each scene in only five takes. Whereas, on a film, you have an entire day to film one scene, so you have so much time to choose how you want to fill in a scene. – Shailene Woodley • Going out hanging out with the troops, and you know it’s kind of all summed up in the TV show, I don’t what else I can say about it. It’s a great thing to do, something I’m definitely proud of. – Kid Rock • Good comics stick around. There are people who have TV shows that might be successful, but comics can’t really fake it. If you say, ‘Hey, I love what you guys are doing – you’re funny,’ then you’re in. It’s legit. – Wanda Sykes • Government and politics isn’t like a reality TV show. It’s not about voting the bad guys out of the house. You know, it’s about what do we need to take our country or our state or our city forward? And people, frankly, would be well advised to really get back into understanding politics. – Campbell Newman • Growing up, I remember my parents feeling a little wary of ‘The Simpsons.’ This was the late eighties, and there was a wave of articles about TV shows that were bad for America. Then we all started watching it and loved it. – Mindy Kaling • Hailey [as a character] was born when I left the courtroom and moved to New York for Cochran and Grace, my TV show with Johnnie Cochran. I moved with two boxes of clothes, a curling iron, and $300; I didn’t know a soul in the city, so I would come home at night and I’d be all alone and just write. I missed the courtroom and [what led me to the courtroom] so much I wrote about it. After my fiancé Keith’s murder, I had never thought I would have children – I thought that it was not God’s plan for me to have a family. – Nancy Grace • Here’s my proposal, which is based on the TV show Survivor: We put the entire Congress on an island. All the food on this island is locked inside a vault, which can be opened only by an ordinary American taxpayer named Bob. Every day, the congresspersons are given a section of the Tax Code, which they must rewrite so that Bob can understand it. If he can, he lets them eat that day; if he can’t, he doesn’t. – Dave Barry • Honestly, after doing a TV show for eight years and a cartoon for more than a decade, you are, financially speaking, in a very lucky position where you don’t have to work for the sake of working. And I decided to take advantage of that. – Mila Kunis • Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending. – John Hodgman • I acted in millions of TV shows. – Sebastian Bach • I always did TV commercials and made great money to put myself through school. That became guest starring roles on TV shows. – Malin Akerman • I always looked at magazines. Ever since I was little I was obsessed with Elle magazine and the models. I would watch the model TV shows, like the specials on Milla Jovovich. – Katherine Bernhardt • I always wish the hotels were like they are in movies and TV shows, where if you’re in Paris, right outside your window is the Eiffel Tower. In Egypt, the pyramids are right there. In the movies, every hotel has a monument right outside your window. My hotel rooms overlook the garbage dumpster in the back alley. – Gilbert Gottfried • I am a little suspicious of industry paradigms. I feel like so many movies and TV shows feel so familiar because of over-reliance on these paradigms. – Alan Ball • I believe I’m just getting started. The TV show is just the foundation…. If you’re open to the possibilities, your life gets grander, bigger, bolder! – Oprah Winfrey • I believe that, not only in chess, but in life in general, people place too much stock in ratings – they pay attention to which TV shows have the highest ratings, how many friends they have on Facebook, and it’s funny. The best shows often have low ratings and it is impossible to have thousands of real friends. – Boris Gelfand • I came down to Orange because I sold the Smothers Brothers a song called ‘Chocolate,’ and that gave me enough money to move down here. I was washing windows down in Orange County when they called me up and said they wanted me to do their TV show. – Pat Paulsen • I came into the ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’ TV show with a level of confidence that I don’t think I would’ve had if I hadn’t been doing the podcast for three years already. I certainly had to figure out in those three years the sense of humor I wanted to do and the way to talk to celebrities without being incredibly intimidated by them. – Scott Aukerman • I can’t do anything I want to. I mean, I can’t have my own TV show. I can’t have my own movie. But within my little world, nobody tells me what to put on the albums. – Lou Reed • I definitely want to start my own production company at some point. I’m actually teaming up with Funny or Die to put together a TV show right now, that I can’t really talk about because it’s still in the very preliminary stages, but if it pans out this will be the first project under my production company, which I have yet to name. – Dave Franco • I did a lot of terrible TV shows and was really terrible in them, and I’ve done terrible films I was terrible in, but nobody really noticed. – George Clooney • I did this TV show, which was my first job ever. It wasn’t a real acting part. It was like this promo for this sitcom and the main actress was meeting three different real people and then she was going to decide who was going to be on the episode. – Sean William Scott • I do a TV show about a priest in London, and he is also slightly beleaguered and is subject to fate and misfortune and daily difficulty. – Tom Hollander • I do think a lot of sexual violence stems from experiences in childhood or at puberty. Some people become sadistic after suffering early abuse at the hands of parents, relatives or friends. But for others, the seed is planted in the formative years by the conflation of images of violence with those of sexual arousal. Magazines, TV shows and, especially, slasher movies are masters at doing this. – Park Dietz • I do think that people get really emotionally involved in the TV shows that they love and I think that is fantastic. Of course they are going to have opinions. The other thing is that people project onto their television shows. They see a character and layer on many traits that are actually their own or their idea of what that character is. – Lisa Edelstein • I don’t care if I never do another TV show in my life. – Bobby Darin • I don’t really like to arrange shows by best performances. That’s why Emmy season is kind of a chore for me. Unlike movies, where it’s easier to decide who was the best performance, a TV show goes up and down, including characters/portrayals. – Hank Stuever • I don’t want my dad to say, ‘My daughter is an actress on a TV show.’ I want him to say, ‘My daughter cares about people.’ I would love to know that I’m a role model in Hollywood. – AnnaLynne McCord • I don’t want to be a TV star for the sake of being on TV. I want to have a TV show that’s based around my comedy. – Jim Gaffigan • I download TV shows more and more, especially from the US. – Julian Ovenden • I find America falling in love with a TV show flattering and interesting, but at the same time a little sad. – David Schwimmer • I find the film world very romantic. I want to try to be in more movies. When you’re on a TV show and you do the same thing for years and years, it can get a little bit boring. – Jane Levy • I found myself in Zurich Airport. I’d done a TV show, oddly enough, with Mavis Staples. That’s the way they do it in Switzerland. And I’d had a bit of a late night with members of her band. And I was – my flight was delayed. And I was sitting in the airport, and I just came up with the idea. And by the time, we landed at Heathrow, I’d pretty much sort of got it. – Nick Lowe • I get bored easily, so I need to do a lot. I’ve started a record label, so I get to nurture new talent and talk about music, which is a passion of mine. I’ve written another book. And I get to come to work and do the TV show, which is always really fun. – Ellen DeGeneres • I got on the TV show at 40 and that is something very rare. So, I know that God gave me that role (on) One Life to Live – the role of Carlotta, the role of a mom. – Patricia Mauceri • I had a TV show called ‘The Apprentice’ and it’s one of the most successful reality shows in the history of television. And now I’m doing something else. – Donald Trump • I had started acting when I was 7, and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition], but I wasn’t a perfect package of one thing. I wasn’t a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn’t pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn’t mousy enough to be the mousy girl. Then there was a TV show that Toni Collette was starring in. And when a role to play a girl who was struggling with identity came, I thought: “Oh, this is what I was supposed to do. Everything’s leading up to this moment.” I was 18. I was like, “This is it.” I didn’t get it. And I was devastated. – Brie Larson • I had told my agents that I never wanted to do an hour-long TV show. I said, “I’m not that stupid.” Because it’s the worst lifestyle in Hollywood. – Geena Davis • I hate remakes of TV shows – I didn’t like the new Charlie’s Angels at all – and I just don’t see the point of going back and doing the same thing over again. Baywatch was fun and successful, probably because we didn’t know what the heck we were doing. – Pamela Anderson • I hate those TV shows where characters talk about one thing, such as their patient on the operation table (let’s say they’re a doctor), then you realize they’re actually talking about actually talking about themselves. The patient’s open-heart surgery is nothing compared to their own messed-up heart or whatever. It’s selfish. And means they’re not concentrating, which is medical negligence. – Jaclyn Moriarty • I have a hit TV show. – Kim Kardashian • I have no plans to get an iPad. I know it will do more things than my Kindle, but I don’t want more things. If I want other stuff – movies, TV shows, weather forecasts, the forthcoming Josh Ritter album – I have my Mac. – Stephen King • I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch. – Charles Stross • I have to be careful of what TV shows I choose, particularly ones that have commercials in them, because it’s going to be a different kind of television show. – John Hawkes • I just remember the early days of Tenacious D. There was no talk or thought about doing a TV show or a movie. – Jack Black • I just watch a lot of different films and different TV shows. Really for me, it’s just looking at how people react to different shows in different genres. For me, it’s more a study of people than a study of acting. – Sterling Beaumon • I keep it real normal, like I don’t try to act like a celebrity, or say that just because I’m on a TV show I can do other types of TV. I take it very seriously and I respect the art of acting. – Vinny Guadagnino • I know artists that have tried for a long time in the Christian industry and then they were on a TV show and all of the sudden the doors swing wide open. Christians want to connect with things that are mainstream.- Anthony Evans • I like doing both comedy and drama. I’m not really feeling more drawn to one over the other. I also like dramedies. I like movies and TV shows that are mixtures of the two. – Jane Levy • I like to know why a video has suddenly gone viral, why a song has broken, why a TV show is suddenly rating out of pattern… I’m pretty good at understanding why things are becoming popular. – Simon Cowell • I like working on the house, small carpentry stuff. I also like working on the van. That’s about as quiet as my mind gets, I think. I always loved working on the How’s Your News? TV show and at Camp Jabberwocky too. – Chad Urmston • I love Godzilla, but my favorite was on this TV Show, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. I used to love the idea of having a giant robot under my control. That was like a dream come true for a kid. – Ice Cube • I love going to work, doing acting. I love when I’m done with a movie or a TV show. I love hitting the road or being in the studio or going on tour. That’s what I get off on. I don’t need to have my business in the press and all that stuff. I’m pretty low key. It’s all about the work for me. – Bryan Greenberg • I love hanging out with friends and family, going to the beach or just being a couch potato and binge watching TV shows or watching a good movie. – Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer • I love ‘Homeland.’ I think it’s such a well-done, well-acted TV show. – Victoria Justice • I love TV. I love being behind the scenes on a TV show but there’s something about, I don’t know there’s something very special when you’ve signed an artist and that first record comes in and it’s a good record. It is an indescribable feeling. – Simon Cowell • I owe my whole acting career to the fact that I’m a singer. I went out to Los Angeles and auditioned for a TV show called ‘Fame L.A.’ The original role was for a comedian, but they said I wasn’t very funny, so they asked me, ‘What else can you do?’ So I played a singer. – Christian Kane • I played some shows, but I’m disappointed it didn’t do better. I wish all my shows sold out, I wish I had sold more copies, I wish that a song was picked up to be in a TV show – whatever these little benchmarks are. You always want something more. – Eleanor Friedberger • I practice yoga at home to a TV show called ‘Inhale,’ taught by Steve Ross. I figured that if the people on the show could stretch that deep then I could too. I ended up pulling my hip flexor. But that’s how I met my husband. Paul was the physical therapist my coach called to meet with me after hours. – Danica Patrick • I push to be in good films and good TV shows. I don’t really pick and choose. I pick and choose what I will read for, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m being offered stuff. – Darren Shahlavi • I rarely watch TV, and in the past two years, I’ve done three TV shows. It’s quite interesting. – Oliver Jackson-Cohen • I really like ‘Batman.’ Not the TV show, but the dark ‘Batman.’ – Denis Leary • I remember my first show was a live TV show in Ireland, and I was just petrified. It was horrific. – Caroline Corr • I sort of knew very early on that I wanted to be a writer. Even in high school, I was a big movie buff, very much into TV shows, and would critique them. – Lena Waithe • I spent my entire first pay cheque from Cracker, a TV show on ABC, on an Audi because my other car broke down and I needed to get to work. – Josh Hartnett • I started out dancing on a reality TV show, but always with the intention of making my way over to film. I transitioned into the film world by doing certain things that my fans had been used to seeing me do. My dancing and singing gave me the confidence to act. – Julianne Hough • I started using the Internet in 1999. That was pretty late. But as soon as I did I just stopped watching TV. The idea of sitting down and waiting for a TV show at a certain time, I couldn’t do this anymore. The Internet is a better form of entertainment to me. – Tom Anderson • I think comedians should focus on what makes them happy, what art form fulfills them the most. Don’t be calculated about it and say, ‘Okay, I’m gonna tweet, and I’m gonna podcast, and I’m gonna do standup, and one of those things is going to lead me to my own TV show.’ I don’t think that should be the goal. – Scott Aukerman • I think my biggest problem was, as a celebrity on a TV show, you get an inflated ego and you think you’re the center of the universe. – Kirk Cameron • I think that it’s just extremely rare to see any kind of TV show that’s completely written by one person, regardless of what any showrunner will tell you. – Judy Greer • I think TV shows have usurped films! – Edie Campbell • I want to do more comedy… I’ve done a couple TV shows that had some comedy going on. – Sunny Mabrey • I wanted people to see that I really am a real person. I’m not just some guy who was on a TV show, some guy engulfed in the Hollywood life. I’m just a normal guy when it comes down to it. – Scotty McCreery • I wanted to end it now, like a bad TV show turned off in the middle. – Tawni O’Dell • I was able to make the jump to theaters without having a TV show. My passion for getting a TV show just plummeted. It was like I had already achieved what I wanted to achieve. – Jim Gaffigan • I was on some TV shows with Lady Gaga the other week, and you could see the difference in reaction between her fans and my fans outside. She comes out, and she looks like a star, and the reaction is just tears, crying, people going, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God.’ My fans are like: ‘Alright, Ed.’ – Ed Sheeran • I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: “C-Students from Yale”. – Kurt Vonnegut • I’d always wanted to do a film than TV show because film is always where my heart has been. I like diving into the character for a few months, and then leaving it behind. I love the idea of that. – Shailene Woodley • I’d love to be on a TV series someday, but I believe you get the jobs that you’re meant to get. If the job that I’m meant to get is another musical or another play or film or TV show, I’m just happy to keep working. – Stark Sands • If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl. – John Green • If I did a TV show, it would have to be in North London because I’m a bit of a homebody, and my work takes me away from home enough. But yeah absolutely. Television has never been more exciting than it is now. – Simon Pegg • If I only did TV show, I’d probably not be the happiest girl. I love the show, but I’m an actor and I want to work on different things. TV lasts for so much of the year that you’re just aching to play a different part. And I love movies so much that I want to be a part of as many as I can. – Jane Levy • If you get on a TV show that’s successful, odds are that you’re playing the same character for as many years as the show is running, which can be its own blessing, but it can also be a curse because you’re playing the same thing and that can be tiresome. – Sarah Paulson • If you’re going to do a guest spot on television, they need bodies on those procedural TV shows. You’ve got to keep working, and that’s where a lot of the work is. – William Mapother • If you’re in a popular TV show, you can attract attention, and I like to help focus that on stories that deserve to be told – which is what politicians do. But I would lose my autonomy, and to get things done I would have to compromise and get into the weeds of policy. I don’t know if I’m smart enough. – Tony Goldwyn • I’m a character-driven director, and I tend to fall in love with the characters in my movies and TV shows. – Doug Liman • I’m a guy here to play football. I’m not here for photos or newspapers or TV shows or trophies or awards. I’m not into all that. – Randy Moss • I’m a huge fan of film primarily. But, you can get a great TV show and get attached to it. Making a great film is forever though; so I always want to be part of film. It’s my first love. – Aml Ameen • I’m actually really lazy. I tell myself, “Okay, you work six months out of the year and you have to get up at 4 a.m. …” I’ll relish the downtime by chilling on the couch and watching my favorite TV shows. – Liana Liberato • I’m always feeling like I don’t belong, no matter where I am. So I’m just searching for a family nonstop, and sometimes I find it in the mosh pit, sometimes I find it when I’m doing some French TV show with the president’s wife. – James Hetfield • I’m fortunate enough to act in a TV show that makes me a lot of money so I can pay for my own movies. I don’t have to wait for anybody and that’s more of what I like doing. But I still think that you don’t have to be connected in the industry to make your movie. You just have to write something that is meant to be made cheaply. – Mark Duplass • I’m in a play on Broadway, I have an animated TV show coming up, I have a few movies that just came out. – Neil Patrick Harris • I’m just saying stupid, funny things when I’m hanging out on the TV show. When I’m making music I’m in a completely different zone. – Chanel West Coast • I’m looking for a deal from one of you TV networks to give Snoop Dogg his own hood TV show where I can find America’s hottest hood artists. – Snoop Dogg • I’m not disciplined in terms of scheduling. I work best late at night, but I can’t do that when I’m on a TV show – our hours are roughly 10-6:30, so I have to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So I’ll sometimes write fiction for an hour or two in the evenings, or several hours on the weekend afternoons – unless I’m actively writing a script for the show I’m working on, in which case there’s no time to write fiction at all. – Nick Antosca • I’m not going to watch two TV shows with vaginas in them unless somebody tells me why they’re different! – Ilana Glazer • I’m obsessed with voices in film. I have this memory of how people say words, even on the most intensely stupid reality TV show. – Jenny Hval • I’m proud of everything I achieved with ‘Idol,’ and away from ‘Idol’ also. It’s just such a different show now to what it was when I was on it. I didn’t even know it was a TV show until the third audition. – Kelly Clarkson • I’m really excited about my TV show. I wrote it with my best friend. – Pell James • I’m scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can’t fall asleep. – Maurice Sendak • I’m so grateful to be living doing what I love. Whether it’s acting in Films or TV shows or writing and directing my own projects. – Kyle Cassie • I’m used to seeing it, but it’s weird having an Academy Award. You usually only see one of them on the TV show when they give them out, so it’s kind of surreal to have one in your house. – Steven Wright • I’m very grateful for work especially in film industry. It’s highly competitive and there are a lot of people standing behind me jumping at the opportunity to only do one thing, like one movie or one TV show or one episode. – Famke Janssen • In California, they don’t throw their garbage away – they make it into TV shows. – Woody Allen • In France, anyone can use your music on like a TV show or whatever – they don’t need to ask permission. It’s almost like a child when it has its own life. – Thomas Mars • In some ways, a novel isn’t as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel, you can more deeply illuminate a character’s interior and get away with digressions. – Howard Gordon • In the middle of Beaches there’s a scene from the “Laverne & Shirley” TV show so they see some history of my work in each film. – Garry Marshall • It is tough, every time. The ensemble is great. I would always ask Andrew, “Is this how Hollywood is? Is this how every TV show and movie is?” And he was like, “No, dude. This is not. Do not get used to this. Be thankful that this is how your first gig is.” – Steven Yeun • It was actually the production group that ended up producing the show for us…Every musician, especially in the hip-hop community, you always make these show recaps or vlogs, and essentially what “Touring’s Boring” was is, we tried to make our vlogs interesting and almost more like a TV show. That’s how we got discovered by TV. – Mike Stud • It was feminism that made it possible for women to go to the Ivy League and women to be astronauts and women to have their own TV shows. What happened, though, was that the generation after feminism, which is my generation, misunderstood what feminism was saying. – Debora Spar • It was such a bigger picture [ Westworld] than what I thought it was. It’s more of a revolution than a TV show. – Evan Rachel Wood • It’s a lot of hard work to do a weekly TV show. It’s certainly not fun. – Michael Moore • It’s a TV show. Only the emotional damage is real. – Steven Moffat • It’s actually much harder to develop a TV show than I had anticipated. – Diablo Cody • It’s also one thing to see a celebrity or some kind of character on a TV show being gay. It’s a totally different thing when you know your husband… not your husband, but your brother or your friend or the dude you hung out in high school was gay. I mean, that is what changes people’s minds, what changes people’s minds. – Andrew Sullivan • It’s fun being on a TV show and not having to wear heels. – Trieste Kelly Dunn • It’s hard to find success and it’s hard to find hit movies or hit TV shows and to stay relevant. I think it’s a very difficult thing for actors, because a lot of us get lost, frankly. – Dylan McDermott • It’s impossible to overvalue the importance of television – both in its serious and less serious functions. It’s one of our most important ways of finding out the truth – and also of changing the world, and finding out what in the world needs changing. It’s also an immense bringer of joy – I learnt how to laugh through television, and now my children and I, every day of every week, share the joy and stupidity of TV shows – they actually make us HAPPY – Richard Curtis • It’s often the case with successful TV shows that they kind of inadvertently live on past their prime. It’s best to leave the audience wanting more. – Vince Gilligan • It’s weird how with a TV show, you don’t have just the one ending – you have the many. – Vince Gilligan • I’ve always been fascinated, obsessed even, with books and TV shows about unsolved murders, cold cases, forensic science, mysteries, and so on. Many times when I get inspiration for my work, it’s from something in one of these books or TV shows, or perhaps some newspaper article about a specific case. – Scott Heim • I’ve always got five or six things that would either make a good feature or TV show. And you just never know. You go and you pitch and it may be exactly what they’re looking for, or they may stop you after two sentences and say, “Oh, we’ve already done something just like that.” – John Sayles • I’ve been careful to keep my life separate because it’s important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. I’m worth more than that. – Lisa Kudrow • I’ve had lots of things that didn’t work out, like TV shows. You learn a lot through mistakes – I learned that you have to be the captain of your ship. Actually, I own my ship. – Pamela Anderson • I’ve never been on a TV show for more than a season and you have to continually keep it interesting and you have to keep it connected, even as you change. – Ian Somerhalder • I’ve only done two other TV shows [instead of Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll], one was Rescue Me and the other was a show called The Job, which was at ABC and only on for two seasons. – Denis Leary • I’ve seen [Donald Trump] appear in a film or a TV show cameo or the tabloids, and he’s a grotesquely distasteful human being and always has been, always made me want to take a shower. But other people fell in love with him as a reality star. So does that mean that the entertainment industry is doing something wrong? I think reality TV answered that question a long time ago: Yes, it’s doing something terribly wrong. But there’s some great reality TV, and I’m not bagging on it completely. – Joss Whedon • I’ve seen [Trump] appear in a film or a TV show cameo or the tabloids, and he’s a grotesquely distasteful human being and always has been, always made me want to take a shower. – Joss Whedon • Josh [Friedman] and I have been friends for years, and he said, “Hey, if you ever want to do a TV show, I can take it over and run it,” and I was like, “Yes!” He’s always been so busy that I never dared to ask that, but it just worked out, time wise, that this was the season where we could probably do it, so I jumped at it. So, even though I’m busy with other stuff, I’m excited to be writing this. – John August • Just concentrate on the performers. Make sure you get the performers, and that’s it. That’s all we need to do.” And I was thinking, “Well what if you do both? Of course the performance is important, the writing is really important. But what if you could have the perfect marriage of making it look really slick as well?” I think that’s kind of what I tried to develop as a style, and Spaced was the first TV show I did where all the elements came together. – Edgar Wright • Knowing the right questions is better than knowing all the right answers” Caleb from Pretty Little Liars (TV Show) – Sara Shepard • L.A. ispolluted. It’s overpopulated. But it is very much home. It was inevitable for me, the moving back. I was living in San Francisco, and Joan broke it off with me, and I needed a place to live. I’d been divorced. And I needed to write movies and TV shows to earn a living. Alimony. All that. So I figured what the hell, I’ll go back to L.A. – James Ellroy • Launching a new TV show is probably one of the most difficult things that a writer can do. – George Meyer • Like we were saying, the fact that the relationships on the show are love-based, and in the sense that I wasn’t aware of how special it was in contrast to a lot of the other TV shows that are on right now. It was our audience members that pointed out the love that you see in the show is special. – Steve Zissis • More American young people can tell you where an island that the ‘Survivor’ TV series came from is located than can identify Afghanistan or Iraq. Ironically a TV show seems more real or at least more meaningful interesting or relevant than reality. – John Fahey • Most people get their politics, obviously, from TV shows about senators or movies about them or… all the day-to-day press and the talk shows. – Judd Gregg • Most TV shows don’t reward you for paying attention. – Matt Groening • Movies, novels, TV shows – these are the water fountains of today. We thirst for stories which speak to us by representing us, but we go to the water fountains in the centre of town looking for that, and we’re turned away, sent to the ghetto. – Hal Duncan • My approach to ‘Star Trek’ was, ‘I know science fiction, and I know screen writing.’ That was very arrogant of me, but you really need to be a little bit arrogant to think that what you have to say is good enough to justify the expense of hundreds of thousands – now millions of dollars – to make an episode of the TV show. – David Gerrold • My boy, that was a TV show. I used a stunt double. I always use a stunt double. Except in love scenes. I insist on doing those myself. – William Shatner • My favorite TV show is probably ‘Glee.’ I’m a Gleek, like everyone – else!Victoria Justice • My tastes in all things lean towards the arty and boring. I like sports documentaries about Scrabble players, bands that play quiet, unassuming music, and TV shows that win awards. In that way, I am an elitist snob. And proud of it. – Michael Ian Black • My TV show had been cancelled; nothing else had gone anywhere; some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn’t ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn’t know if I would be able to keep my house. – Tom Hanks • My wife is like, You finally get your own TV show, you can have any kind of car you want and you get a darned truck. But my brother and I have the same kind of truck now. – Jeff Foxworthy • My wife says I’m much happier when I’m not a regular on a TV show. – Alan Dale • Nasty is the new normal in Florida. Politics here is very gutterlike. It’s like a very bad reality TV show that still gets very high ratings. – Dan Gelber • Nira Park, who is my longtime producer and friend – I’ve know her since we did Spaced, the TV show – she gave me this script the last day of filming The World’s End. She said, “Take a look at this. It’s filming in London next year, and you might like to look at Jack.” I trust Nira implicitly. – Simon Pegg • Nobody’s talking about movies the way they’re talking about their favorite TV shows. – Steven Soderbergh • Obviously, in this day and age, with the TV shows, there are some really interesting ones. I’m not that interested in going and doing a network show, but like everybody else, trying to find something good. – Scott Speedman • Ok so there’s no TV shows, no movies going on fine, but I love going on stage and performing stand up so my situation is a little better than someone who’s strictly just an actor or actress. – Wanda Sykes • On Michael Moore TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block… pretty funny. – P. J. O’Rourke • One day it was that I wanted to go make a movie with my kid and then another day it was that I wanted to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and another day it was that I wanted to sit in the studio and figure something out. All those things manifested themselves into what the TV show was. – Casey Neistat • Parodies of commercials are by no means new and have been popular going back to black-and-white TV shows of the ’50s. – Dan Aykroyd • People always ask about the transition from TV show to a movie, but it felt like just going to a different school. You don’t really notice the transition, when you’re in the moment. – Shailene Woodley • People are recognizing that I am an entrepreneur and do more than be on a reality TV show. -Kim Kardashian • People on both sides of any conflict believe they are right, whether it’s on a TV show or in the real world. – Mandy Patinkin • People say that you want to be varied in your career, and I’ve done so many things and am very appreciative. But, the one thing I’ve never done and wanted to do was to be a regular on a TV show, where you get 22 weeks of the year to develop and play a character. I’ve done arcs of five or eight episodes on shows, but I’d like to have a character that’s rich enough and deep enough to want to explore and live with for a few years. Playing the same character, but doing different scenes seems very exciting to me. – Jim Piddock • Phil Harris and Pat Boone were once paired as guests on an episode of Andy Williams’ TV show. During a rehearsal break, Harris suggested the three of them go out for a drink. When Boone declined, explaining he did not drink, Harris asked Williams, “Andy, can you imagine getting up in the morning knowing that’s the best you’re going to feel all day?” – Andy Williams • So I do have to work, you know, and I find as many movies and TV shows that I can, because otherwise I wouldn’t have an income. – Tippi Hedren • Some people may contend that there is no image more charming that a child holding a puppy or kitten. But for me that’s a distant second. When I see a child clutching a book… to his or her tiny bosom, I’m moved. Children can possess a book in a way they can never possess a video game, a TV show, or a Darth Vader doll. A book comes alive when they read it. They give it life themselves by understanding it. – Chris Van Allsburg • Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn’t do, you know enough about the characters to say, “No, that’s not what she would do there. That’s wrong.” You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can’t do as much with movie – you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel. – Nicholson Baker • Something economically changed. It used to be that you needed 20 million people to watch a TV show for it to be a hit. Now, with just a few million people watching, you’re considered very successful, for a lot of these streaming services, or cable channels. Now, that allows people to do much more creatively ambitious work, because it’s not lowest common denominator. – Judd Apatow • Sometimes directors get hired into TV shows, and it’s so formulaic and they’re a slave to whatever everybody wants them to do. But everyone came in with their own style, and it blended together with the Helix style that was set, and at the same time, they’re bringing their own ideas and their own input. It was really fun working with all of them. – Kyra Zagorsky • Sometimes you see auteur TV shows and movies, and those are great. – Akiva Goldsman • Sony and Nickelodeon knew they wanted to create a TV show that was a platform for a band they would have for Sony. They knew what they wanted, and it took two years of auditions and screen tests and countless people coming in and out the door until they finally settled on the four of us. – James Maslow • Television is competitive now, and the great stories live on television right now. I’m finding that I’m enjoying television more than film, these days. That was my motivation to take a TV show. – Jaimie Alexander • Thanks to NBC News and thanks to the NBC primetime TV network, Donald Trump has been in living rooms for 11 years being who he is. The Donald Trump running for president is not an unknown quantity. The Donald Trump running for president is the Donald Trump everybody’s gotten to know, and quite a lot of people watch those Donald Trump TV shows, The Apprentice and whatever else on there. – Rush Limbaugh • The Baha’i celebrity, or the Belebrity, is a character actor with a big head playing an annoying creep on a TV show. – Rainn Wilson • The bigger budget films only shoot about a page or two a day, so there’s very specific amount of time spent on detail and getting each tidbit exactly how they want it. In a movie or TV show, you shoot eight or ten pages and you aren’t afforded as much time to do each scene. – Dan Payne • The consumer mentality – we like something, what other flavor does it come in? We like that TV show, does it come in a book form? Does it come in a capsule? How about a soup? – Paul Reiser • The headmistress was a very well-respected theater teacher. She taught me what stage left and stage right were, what a director was, and what all these things meant, which was something I had no concept of. She sent me off to drama school, at age 18, and I stayed there for three years. Before I knew it, I was working on a TV show. – Robert Kazinsky • The Netflix brand for TV shows is really all about binge viewing. The ability to get hooked and watch episode after episode. – Reed Hastings • The only thing worse than a crappy TV show which Paddy Chayevsky couldn’t have conceived in his worst nightmare is two megacorps fighting over who thought of the crappy show first. – Judd Apatow • The really great thing about having two TV shows going on at the same time is that I can go to one and say that I have to go and visit the other and then I can just go home and they don’t know. – Matt Groening • The scheduling thing is really weird with TV shows. Certain projects haven’t been able to work out because of the schedule, so some of it is out of your control. You don’t have very many opportunities. There isn’t much time, so you want to make sure you’re going to be doing something that you really feel good about or that you’re going to have a good creative experience doing. You’re taking up vacation time from your job, so you want it to be meaningful. – Ty Burrell • ‘The Simpsons’ from the very beginning was based on our memories of brash ’60s sitcoms – you had a main title theme that was bombastic and grabbed your attention – and when you look at TV shows of the 1970s and ’80s, things got very mild and toned down and… obsequious. – Matt Groening • The thing about working on a TV show is that it becomes, very quickly, all consuming. – Jonathan Nolan • The truth is that we have to, as American citizens, stop thinking that this life that we’re living, the things that we’re dealing with, is some reality TV show. This is real life, real children, real situations. – Stevie Wonder • The wonderful thing about a TV show is if you get picked up for another season, there’s no happily ever after. – Guy Branum • There are many films and TV shows I make where people find themselves in fantastical situations; as often as possible their reactions to it are very normal. – Joss Whedon • There were a lot of lessons of production to be learned. On the page, the biggest thing you learn on any TV show is how to write to your cast. You write the show at the beginning with certain voices in your head and you have a way that you think the characters will be, and then you have an actor go out there, and you start watching dailies and episodes. Then, you start realizing what they can do and what they can’t do, what they’re good at and what they’re not so good at, how they say things and what fits in their mouth, and you start tailoring the voice of the show to your cast. – Ronald D. Moore • There’s a huge demand for my entertainment, and I can’t meet the need. So I decided to try a TV show to reach as many of my fans as possible. – Tyler Perry • There’s two kinds of press that you get when you put out a TV show: The reviews, and the people that just decide what the reviews say. – Louis C. K. • This election ain’t no stinkin’ TV show. – Bradley Whitford • This is the contradiction we have in the media. We love vigilantes: Batman, Tarzan, Green Arrow – the comic books and the TV shows are filled with vigilantes. We love to promote it. Jesus Christ was a vigilante. We admire these people, but we don’t want to be associated with them. – Paul Watson • This whole thing about reality television to me is really indicative of America saying we’re not satisfied just watching television, we want to star in our own TV shows. We want you to discover us and put us in your own TV show, and we want television to be about us, finally. – Steven Spielberg • Those rosy memories we all share are actually memories from our favorite TV shows. We’ve confused our own childhoods with episodes of “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Father Knows Best,” and “The Brady Bunch.” In real life, Ozzie had a very visible mistress for years, Bud and Kitten on “Father Knows Best” grew up to become major druggies, and Mom on “The Brady Bunch” dated her fifteen-year-old fictional son. – Cynthia Heimel • To a certain degree, with a TV show, people are looking for a certain amount of familiarity. You don’t want to pull the rug out, but you also want to keep things fresh and keep changing it up. – Jonathan Nolan • To me, the greatest thing in the world is downloading TV shows on iTunes because there are no commercials, and yet if I were a working stiff, I could never afford to do this. But I don’t even think about money. – Stephen King • Trying to negotiate getting a couple of kids to watch the same TV show requires serious diplomacy. – Dee Dee Myers • TV and film are very different media with different requirements. In a TV show, you have actors and fellow writers and directors, who are interpreting your work. With a novel, you only have ink, words and your reader. – Howard Gordon • TV is such a success nowadays because it gives back in a way that features can’t. If you go to a film, you only get two hours of great storytellers and performers, and you pay top dollar for that. If you’re subscribing to premium channels and you’re getting all of these amazing TV shows, and you’re watching them as you want, where you want, when you want, on what you want, I think that is the “the golden era of TV” in what television shows are offering to audiences. We’re giving them a lot more. It’s quality. – Milo Ventimiglia • TV series, there’s a lot of everybody talking to you and giving you input for the first couple episodes, and then they’re on such a crazy schedule that you get another episode on a Monday, you have to have it done by Friday and it becomes very solitary work usually, TV shows. – Mark Mothersbaugh • Veep is the best and most realistic political TV show out there. – Christopher Michael Cillizza • Way back in 1979, as a guest on a local TV show in Arkansas, then Hillary Rodham was quizzed about not taking her husband’s last name when they got married and keeping her job as a lawyer while being first lady of the state. – Tamara Keith • We did ‘The Simpsons Movie,’ which took almost four years; it was the same people that do the TV show, and it just killed us. So that’s why there hasn’t been a second movie. But I imagine if the show ever does go off the air, they’ll start doing movies. – Matt Groening • We may not have a sample size larger than one, or we may not have unlimited resources – it’s a TV show, and we generally turn these things around in about a week or so. – Jamie Hyneman • We now have a generation of people who in many cases feel that if they become chefs, they’ll get a TV show. They have a signature haircut, a year into the business, or a branding arrangement with a shoe company. I don’t really relate to that. I guess this is the world we live in now. – Anthony Bourdain • What if it was cats who invented technology, would they have TV shows starring rubber sqeaky toys? – Douglas Coupland • What was bizarre, when I was younger, I never watched TV. I would rather watch a movie 100 times than to watch a TV show, just to find another nuance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched ‘On the Waterfront’, just to find a flaw so that I can learn and try to improve my thing. – Vin Diesel • When I did TV shows and my other movies, I never try to do it for anybody. I just do what I think is good no matter what the genre is. – Will Gluck • When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn’t exist, and we didn’t need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online. – Al Franken • When I open many books, or most leading women’s magazines, or see almost all TV shows, I don’t find myself at all. I am completely anonymous. My value system is not there. – Bela Karolyi • When I planned my wedding the first time, my ex-husband and I, we were both struggling comics. I had a TV show that had gotten cancelled. Basically, I rented a wedding gown; the reception hall smelled like feet. – Sherri Shepherd • When I’m writing a theme song for a TV show I always think, “What would be Pavlovian where a kid would be in the kitchen, or an adult would be in the kitchen, and they hear the theme song come on and it would draw them back to the other room so that they would watch the show?” – Mark Mothersbaugh • When my TV show, ‘Sports Jobs with Junior Seau,’ assigned me to be a ‘Sports Illustrated’ reporter for a weekend, I didn’t realize I’d have to squeeze it in around another sports job. I had planned to retire from the NFL to enjoy the cushy lifestyle of a full-time reality TV star, but I wound up getting run over by a bull. – Junior Seau • When you do a TV show, the cumulative intimacy you develop with the audience through your characters is pretty profound. It may be the most profound storytelling there is, because the character gets to live and roll around in the audience’s mind week after week. – Howard Gordon • When you do a TV show, there’s always the fear that it will become tired and you’ll know exactly what’s going to happen.- Mads Mikkelsen • When you say, ‘I spent my summers at the Jersey Shore,’ people always say, ‘Oh, really?’ They think of the TV show. So I just say, ‘A cute little harbor town in New Jersey.’ – Taylor Swift • When you take on a TV show, you give trust to people that you really just met. – Katee Sackhoff • When you’re a regular on a TV show, they give you more of a backstory, so with these recurring gigs, you have to make up your own backstory. – Alan Dale • When you’re recording a TV show, you really feel like you’re in a bubble. – Judy Greer • When you’re writing for a TV show, what’s great is that you always know what actor you’re writing to. – Michael Brandt • Whether it’s being a leading man, making TV shows, being with my family, I’ve learned a lot. – Ashton Kutcher • Whoever calls and asks me to do stuff and obviously, with having your own TV show, people want you to get involved. They know you’re a stand-up comedian so they’re always looking for somebody funny to host an event. – Chelsea Handler • Writing for television is a great job. And it’s a job. Most people watch TV and have a comment about one or two moments of an episode – whether they love it or hate it or something in between. To come up with every moment of an entire season of a TV shows is heavy lifting. – Steven C. Harper • Writing pilots is such a specific thing. It’s not even really writing TV shows. A pilot is its own beast. – June Diane Raphael • You [Bill Maher] seem to have done alright with your TV show… I mean, I don’t get a sense… to the extent that they’re boycotting you, it’s because of your other wacky views rather than your particular views on religion. – Barack Obama • You and your scars. Please! You don’t kill youself like this!” I gesture, holding a wrist turned up to the ceiling, then pretending to cut across it with my other hand. “That’s just a cry for help. That’s just attention. Everbody knows that. Cutting across just gets you to the hospital. That’s just from movies and TV shows and stuff like that. You didn’t really try to kill yourself. you just wanted attention, but you screwed up. Try harder next time. – Barry Lyga • You can say “ass,” but you can’t say “asshole.” That’s why I always cringe when a character in a TV show refers to someone as an “ass.” Unless you’re British, calling someone an ass really doesn’t work. But those are the rules of television. You can be a dirtbag, but not a scumbag. – Gilbert Gottfried • You come to America, and, if you do a big TV show, then you can be overexposed, or old, before you’re new. – Chris Hemsworth • You get a kind of familiarity on a set when you’re on a TV show. – Alia Shawkat • You know, a TV show is a slow build. – Ray Romano • You want to put out a TV show? If you have the money to do it on your own, by yourself, and you have a TV network, you can do it by yourself. But the nature of the beast is, art needs finance. That’s how this industry works. So until the Internet becomes our source of entertainment – and watch it, I believe it will – this is how things go. – Nathan Fillion • You were doing a TV show – you don’t realise that you’re also making social commentary at the same time. – Amber Benson • You’ve got to do something to fill up your day. And I can only play so much guitar and watch so many TV shows. It fulfills me. There are two things about it I like: It makes me happy, and it makes other people happy. – Stephen King [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

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Tv Shows Quotes

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• A great day for me is not getting out of bed. I like to see how many snacks I can eat..and how many really bad TV shows I can watch – Gwen Stefani • A TV show is constant work, which is the great thing about it. – Seth Rogen • An actor gives voice to the many multitudes that we all contain. That’s why we love the movies, why we love TV shows: we watch different people portray an aspect of ourselves, maybe even one we don’t like. – Kristen Stewart • And I don’t think that success can be measured by how many TV shows you’re on. – Clay Aiken • And so as a director, as a leader, and myself as a director and a leader, I kind of try to make sure that we hold onto the vision and kind of corral it, but by the time you finish whatever the project is, a TV show, a series, a movie, a stage show, it should be a product of what all those people can do, and therefore, it can never be what you imagined it would be in the beginning. – Brian Henson • And the consumer doesn’t care. They don’t watch networks, they watch TV shows. – Dick Wolf • As an actor, you very rarely have the experience of picking up a script and getting a few pages into it and realizing that what you’re holding in your hands is not just a role on a TV show, but it’s one of those special parts that comes along, once or twice in a career. If you’re lucky, you get an opportunity to do something really memorable and to be part of one of those rare shows that passes into that special category. – Holt McCallany • At the end of the day, the TV show is the best job in the world. I get to go anywhere I want, eat and drink whatever I want. As long as I just babble at the camera, other people will pay for it. It’s a gift. – Anthony Bourdain

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jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Show', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '32', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_show').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_show img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Basically, growing up, and being a teenage kid, I’ve always been interested in charity. And one of the benefits of being on a TV show and having a fan base, you kind of have the power to spread news around. – Gregg Sulkin • Before the TV show of Jessica Jones, the response to Miles [Morales] is so overwhelming, and so constant, and it’s been five years now. I can’t even express to you how powerful it is on my end. It’s overwhelming how much it was needed, that I didn’t know that’s what was needed. – Brian Michael Bendis • But long story short, I didn’t start doing stand-up because I wanted to have a TV show or be an actor or even wanted to write sketch comedy. I got into stand-up because I love stand-up. – Demetri Martin • Cancer is so much bigger than a TV show. – Laura Linney • Critics say it’s illegal for Donald Trump to run for president while hosting a TV show. It’s also illegal to run for president if your hair wasn’t born in this country. – Conan O’Brien • Doing films as an actor, you spend maybe 40 percent of the year doing your chosen profession. If you are on a successful TV show, you spend 80 percent of your year doing the thing you love. – Christina Ricci • Dont take Portlandia too personally – Its just a stupid TV show – Greg Graffin • Especially for people who are unknown, it’s easier to get a TV show because you don’t have to put a certain amount of people in movie theaters for a box office weekend. It’s really difficult to get a great lead role in some big film, if nobody knows you. – Eve Hewson • Especially with the video games and social media we have now, I think that turning point from kid to sort of adult has gotten earlier with TV shows that are on right now and video games. They all contribute to that. – Gage Munroe • Even if you go out there and try to make the most vanilla, non-offensive TV show possible, people are going to criticize you for doing that. It’s just part of the game. You can’t let it get to you. – Thomas Sadoski • Even when people are rich and successful on TV shows, there’s always some trouble – you have to poke holes in them, throw them out of a job, put a pie in the face. – Drew Carey • Every single job I do. It sounds goofy but I did a music video for Fergie. I was in full on tattoos, ponytail, but it’s like even things like that they help other people to see you in a different light. They give me opportunities. I try and change the image with every job that I can, it’s just hard when you work on a TV show and you work so many months and trying to get away from that. – Milo Ventimiglia • Every TV show I’ve ever made, every game I’ve ever built, and every book I’ve ever published has had the common thread of building the biggest, brightest spotlight imaginable and then flipping it around to shine on you. – Elan Lee • Everyone has days where they don’t get their way, where you have to go to bed early or you have too much homework to do or you can’t eat the candy that you want or you miss your favorite TV show and, in those moments, you just want to tear the whole world down. – Alex Hirsch • Film and television are very different. On the TV show, we do seven or eight scenes a day, so time and money are of the essence, and we have zero room for creativity because you’ve got to do each scene in only five takes. Whereas, on a film, you have an entire day to film one scene, so you have so much time to choose how you want to fill in a scene. – Shailene Woodley • Going out hanging out with the troops, and you know it’s kind of all summed up in the TV show, I don’t what else I can say about it. It’s a great thing to do, something I’m definitely proud of. – Kid Rock • Good comics stick around. There are people who have TV shows that might be successful, but comics can’t really fake it. If you say, ‘Hey, I love what you guys are doing – you’re funny,’ then you’re in. It’s legit. – Wanda Sykes • Government and politics isn’t like a reality TV show. It’s not about voting the bad guys out of the house. You know, it’s about what do we need to take our country or our state or our city forward? And people, frankly, would be well advised to really get back into understanding politics. – Campbell Newman • Growing up, I remember my parents feeling a little wary of ‘The Simpsons.’ This was the late eighties, and there was a wave of articles about TV shows that were bad for America. Then we all started watching it and loved it. – Mindy Kaling • Hailey [as a character] was born when I left the courtroom and moved to New York for Cochran and Grace, my TV show with Johnnie Cochran. I moved with two boxes of clothes, a curling iron, and $300; I didn’t know a soul in the city, so I would come home at night and I’d be all alone and just write. I missed the courtroom and [what led me to the courtroom] so much I wrote about it. After my fiancé Keith’s murder, I had never thought I would have children – I thought that it was not God’s plan for me to have a family. – Nancy Grace • Here’s my proposal, which is based on the TV show Survivor: We put the entire Congress on an island. All the food on this island is locked inside a vault, which can be opened only by an ordinary American taxpayer named Bob. Every day, the congresspersons are given a section of the Tax Code, which they must rewrite so that Bob can understand it. If he can, he lets them eat that day; if he can’t, he doesn’t. – Dave Barry • Honestly, after doing a TV show for eight years and a cartoon for more than a decade, you are, financially speaking, in a very lucky position where you don’t have to work for the sake of working. And I decided to take advantage of that. – Mila Kunis • Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending. – John Hodgman • I acted in millions of TV shows. – Sebastian Bach • I always did TV commercials and made great money to put myself through school. That became guest starring roles on TV shows. – Malin Akerman • I always looked at magazines. Ever since I was little I was obsessed with Elle magazine and the models. I would watch the model TV shows, like the specials on Milla Jovovich. – Katherine Bernhardt • I always wish the hotels were like they are in movies and TV shows, where if you’re in Paris, right outside your window is the Eiffel Tower. In Egypt, the pyramids are right there. In the movies, every hotel has a monument right outside your window. My hotel rooms overlook the garbage dumpster in the back alley. – Gilbert Gottfried • I am a little suspicious of industry paradigms. I feel like so many movies and TV shows feel so familiar because of over-reliance on these paradigms. – Alan Ball • I believe I’m just getting started. The TV show is just the foundation…. If you’re open to the possibilities, your life gets grander, bigger, bolder! – Oprah Winfrey • I believe that, not only in chess, but in life in general, people place too much stock in ratings – they pay attention to which TV shows have the highest ratings, how many friends they have on Facebook, and it’s funny. The best shows often have low ratings and it is impossible to have thousands of real friends. – Boris Gelfand • I came down to Orange because I sold the Smothers Brothers a song called ‘Chocolate,’ and that gave me enough money to move down here. I was washing windows down in Orange County when they called me up and said they wanted me to do their TV show. – Pat Paulsen • I came into the ‘Comedy Bang! Bang!’ TV show with a level of confidence that I don’t think I would’ve had if I hadn’t been doing the podcast for three years already. I certainly had to figure out in those three years the sense of humor I wanted to do and the way to talk to celebrities without being incredibly intimidated by them. – Scott Aukerman • I can’t do anything I want to. I mean, I can’t have my own TV show. I can’t have my own movie. But within my little world, nobody tells me what to put on the albums. – Lou Reed • I definitely want to start my own production company at some point. I’m actually teaming up with Funny or Die to put together a TV show right now, that I can’t really talk about because it’s still in the very preliminary stages, but if it pans out this will be the first project under my production company, which I have yet to name. – Dave Franco • I did a lot of terrible TV shows and was really terrible in them, and I’ve done terrible films I was terrible in, but nobody really noticed. – George Clooney • I did this TV show, which was my first job ever. It wasn’t a real acting part. It was like this promo for this sitcom and the main actress was meeting three different real people and then she was going to decide who was going to be on the episode. – Sean William Scott • I do a TV show about a priest in London, and he is also slightly beleaguered and is subject to fate and misfortune and daily difficulty. – Tom Hollander • I do think a lot of sexual violence stems from experiences in childhood or at puberty. Some people become sadistic after suffering early abuse at the hands of parents, relatives or friends. But for others, the seed is planted in the formative years by the conflation of images of violence with those of sexual arousal. Magazines, TV shows and, especially, slasher movies are masters at doing this. – Park Dietz • I do think that people get really emotionally involved in the TV shows that they love and I think that is fantastic. Of course they are going to have opinions. The other thing is that people project onto their television shows. They see a character and layer on many traits that are actually their own or their idea of what that character is. – Lisa Edelstein • I don’t care if I never do another TV show in my life. – Bobby Darin • I don’t really like to arrange shows by best performances. That’s why Emmy season is kind of a chore for me. Unlike movies, where it’s easier to decide who was the best performance, a TV show goes up and down, including characters/portrayals. – Hank Stuever • I don’t want my dad to say, ‘My daughter is an actress on a TV show.’ I want him to say, ‘My daughter cares about people.’ I would love to know that I’m a role model in Hollywood. – AnnaLynne McCord • I don’t want to be a TV star for the sake of being on TV. I want to have a TV show that’s based around my comedy. – Jim Gaffigan • I download TV shows more and more, especially from the US. – Julian Ovenden • I find America falling in love with a TV show flattering and interesting, but at the same time a little sad. – David Schwimmer • I find the film world very romantic. I want to try to be in more movies. When you’re on a TV show and you do the same thing for years and years, it can get a little bit boring. – Jane Levy • I found myself in Zurich Airport. I’d done a TV show, oddly enough, with Mavis Staples. That’s the way they do it in Switzerland. And I’d had a bit of a late night with members of her band. And I was – my flight was delayed. And I was sitting in the airport, and I just came up with the idea. And by the time, we landed at Heathrow, I’d pretty much sort of got it. – Nick Lowe • I get bored easily, so I need to do a lot. I’ve started a record label, so I get to nurture new talent and talk about music, which is a passion of mine. I’ve written another book. And I get to come to work and do the TV show, which is always really fun. – Ellen DeGeneres • I got on the TV show at 40 and that is something very rare. So, I know that God gave me that role (on) One Life to Live – the role of Carlotta, the role of a mom. – Patricia Mauceri • I had a TV show called ‘The Apprentice’ and it’s one of the most successful reality shows in the history of television. And now I’m doing something else. – Donald Trump • I had started acting when I was 7, and I was always wrong. I would always get to the very end [of the audition], but I wasn’t a perfect package of one thing. I wasn’t a cliche, and it always worked against me. I wasn’t pretty enough to play the popular girl, I wasn’t mousy enough to be the mousy girl. Then there was a TV show that Toni Collette was starring in. And when a role to play a girl who was struggling with identity came, I thought: “Oh, this is what I was supposed to do. Everything’s leading up to this moment.” I was 18. I was like, “This is it.” I didn’t get it. And I was devastated. – Brie Larson • I had told my agents that I never wanted to do an hour-long TV show. I said, “I’m not that stupid.” Because it’s the worst lifestyle in Hollywood. – Geena Davis • I hate remakes of TV shows – I didn’t like the new Charlie’s Angels at all – and I just don’t see the point of going back and doing the same thing over again. Baywatch was fun and successful, probably because we didn’t know what the heck we were doing. – Pamela Anderson • I hate those TV shows where characters talk about one thing, such as their patient on the operation table (let’s say they’re a doctor), then you realize they’re actually talking about actually talking about themselves. The patient’s open-heart surgery is nothing compared to their own messed-up heart or whatever. It’s selfish. And means they’re not concentrating, which is medical negligence. – Jaclyn Moriarty • I have a hit TV show. – Kim Kardashian • I have no plans to get an iPad. I know it will do more things than my Kindle, but I don’t want more things. If I want other stuff – movies, TV shows, weather forecasts, the forthcoming Josh Ritter album – I have my Mac. – Stephen King • I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch. – Charles Stross • I have to be careful of what TV shows I choose, particularly ones that have commercials in them, because it’s going to be a different kind of television show. – John Hawkes • I just remember the early days of Tenacious D. There was no talk or thought about doing a TV show or a movie. – Jack Black • I just watch a lot of different films and different TV shows. Really for me, it’s just looking at how people react to different shows in different genres. For me, it’s more a study of people than a study of acting. – Sterling Beaumon • I keep it real normal, like I don’t try to act like a celebrity, or say that just because I’m on a TV show I can do other types of TV. I take it very seriously and I respect the art of acting. – Vinny Guadagnino • I know artists that have tried for a long time in the Christian industry and then they were on a TV show and all of the sudden the doors swing wide open. Christians want to connect with things that are mainstream.- Anthony Evans • I like doing both comedy and drama. I’m not really feeling more drawn to one over the other. I also like dramedies. I like movies and TV shows that are mixtures of the two. – Jane Levy • I like to know why a video has suddenly gone viral, why a song has broken, why a TV show is suddenly rating out of pattern… I’m pretty good at understanding why things are becoming popular. – Simon Cowell • I like working on the house, small carpentry stuff. I also like working on the van. That’s about as quiet as my mind gets, I think. I always loved working on the How’s Your News? TV show and at Camp Jabberwocky too. – Chad Urmston • I love Godzilla, but my favorite was on this TV Show, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. I used to love the idea of having a giant robot under my control. That was like a dream come true for a kid. – Ice Cube • I love going to work, doing acting. I love when I’m done with a movie or a TV show. I love hitting the road or being in the studio or going on tour. That’s what I get off on. I don’t need to have my business in the press and all that stuff. I’m pretty low key. It’s all about the work for me. – Bryan Greenberg • I love hanging out with friends and family, going to the beach or just being a couch potato and binge watching TV shows or watching a good movie. – Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer • I love ‘Homeland.’ I think it’s such a well-done, well-acted TV show. – Victoria Justice • I love TV. I love being behind the scenes on a TV show but there’s something about, I don’t know there’s something very special when you’ve signed an artist and that first record comes in and it’s a good record. It is an indescribable feeling. – Simon Cowell • I owe my whole acting career to the fact that I’m a singer. I went out to Los Angeles and auditioned for a TV show called ‘Fame L.A.’ The original role was for a comedian, but they said I wasn’t very funny, so they asked me, ‘What else can you do?’ So I played a singer. – Christian Kane • I played some shows, but I’m disappointed it didn’t do better. I wish all my shows sold out, I wish I had sold more copies, I wish that a song was picked up to be in a TV show – whatever these little benchmarks are. You always want something more. – Eleanor Friedberger • I practice yoga at home to a TV show called ‘Inhale,’ taught by Steve Ross. I figured that if the people on the show could stretch that deep then I could too. I ended up pulling my hip flexor. But that’s how I met my husband. Paul was the physical therapist my coach called to meet with me after hours. – Danica Patrick • I push to be in good films and good TV shows. I don’t really pick and choose. I pick and choose what I will read for, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m being offered stuff. – Darren Shahlavi • I rarely watch TV, and in the past two years, I’ve done three TV shows. It’s quite interesting. – Oliver Jackson-Cohen • I really like ‘Batman.’ Not the TV show, but the dark ‘Batman.’ – Denis Leary • I remember my first show was a live TV show in Ireland, and I was just petrified. It was horrific. – Caroline Corr • I sort of knew very early on that I wanted to be a writer. Even in high school, I was a big movie buff, very much into TV shows, and would critique them. – Lena Waithe • I spent my entire first pay cheque from Cracker, a TV show on ABC, on an Audi because my other car broke down and I needed to get to work. – Josh Hartnett • I started out dancing on a reality TV show, but always with the intention of making my way over to film. I transitioned into the film world by doing certain things that my fans had been used to seeing me do. My dancing and singing gave me the confidence to act. – Julianne Hough • I started using the Internet in 1999. That was pretty late. But as soon as I did I just stopped watching TV. The idea of sitting down and waiting for a TV show at a certain time, I couldn’t do this anymore. The Internet is a better form of entertainment to me. – Tom Anderson • I think comedians should focus on what makes them happy, what art form fulfills them the most. Don’t be calculated about it and say, ‘Okay, I’m gonna tweet, and I’m gonna podcast, and I’m gonna do standup, and one of those things is going to lead me to my own TV show.’ I don’t think that should be the goal. – Scott Aukerman • I think my biggest problem was, as a celebrity on a TV show, you get an inflated ego and you think you’re the center of the universe. – Kirk Cameron • I think that it’s just extremely rare to see any kind of TV show that’s completely written by one person, regardless of what any showrunner will tell you. – Judy Greer • I think TV shows have usurped films! – Edie Campbell • I want to do more comedy… I’ve done a couple TV shows that had some comedy going on. – Sunny Mabrey • I wanted people to see that I really am a real person. I’m not just some guy who was on a TV show, some guy engulfed in the Hollywood life. I’m just a normal guy when it comes down to it. – Scotty McCreery • I wanted to end it now, like a bad TV show turned off in the middle. – Tawni O’Dell • I was able to make the jump to theaters without having a TV show. My passion for getting a TV show just plummeted. It was like I had already achieved what I wanted to achieve. – Jim Gaffigan • I was on some TV shows with Lady Gaga the other week, and you could see the difference in reaction between her fans and my fans outside. She comes out, and she looks like a star, and the reaction is just tears, crying, people going, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God.’ My fans are like: ‘Alright, Ed.’ – Ed Sheeran • I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: “C-Students from Yale”. – Kurt Vonnegut • I’d always wanted to do a film than TV show because film is always where my heart has been. I like diving into the character for a few months, and then leaving it behind. I love the idea of that. – Shailene Woodley • I’d love to be on a TV series someday, but I believe you get the jobs that you’re meant to get. If the job that I’m meant to get is another musical or another play or film or TV show, I’m just happy to keep working. – Stark Sands • If by that you mean that I dislike celebrity magazines, prefer food to anorexia, refuse to watch TV shows about models, and hate the color pink, then yes. I am proud to be not really a girl. – John Green • If I did a TV show, it would have to be in North London because I’m a bit of a homebody, and my work takes me away from home enough. But yeah absolutely. Television has never been more exciting than it is now. – Simon Pegg • If I only did TV show, I’d probably not be the happiest girl. I love the show, but I’m an actor and I want to work on different things. TV lasts for so much of the year that you’re just aching to play a different part. And I love movies so much that I want to be a part of as many as I can. – Jane Levy • If you get on a TV show that’s successful, odds are that you’re playing the same character for as many years as the show is running, which can be its own blessing, but it can also be a curse because you’re playing the same thing and that can be tiresome. – Sarah Paulson • If you’re going to do a guest spot on television, they need bodies on those procedural TV shows. You’ve got to keep working, and that’s where a lot of the work is. – William Mapother • If you’re in a popular TV show, you can attract attention, and I like to help focus that on stories that deserve to be told – which is what politicians do. But I would lose my autonomy, and to get things done I would have to compromise and get into the weeds of policy. I don’t know if I’m smart enough. – Tony Goldwyn • I’m a character-driven director, and I tend to fall in love with the characters in my movies and TV shows. – Doug Liman • I’m a guy here to play football. I’m not here for photos or newspapers or TV shows or trophies or awards. I’m not into all that. – Randy Moss • I’m a huge fan of film primarily. But, you can get a great TV show and get attached to it. Making a great film is forever though; so I always want to be part of film. It’s my first love. – Aml Ameen • I’m actually really lazy. I tell myself, “Okay, you work six months out of the year and you have to get up at 4 a.m. …” I’ll relish the downtime by chilling on the couch and watching my favorite TV shows. – Liana Liberato • I’m always feeling like I don’t belong, no matter where I am. So I’m just searching for a family nonstop, and sometimes I find it in the mosh pit, sometimes I find it when I’m doing some French TV show with the president’s wife. – James Hetfield • I’m fortunate enough to act in a TV show that makes me a lot of money so I can pay for my own movies. I don’t have to wait for anybody and that’s more of what I like doing. But I still think that you don’t have to be connected in the industry to make your movie. You just have to write something that is meant to be made cheaply. – Mark Duplass • I’m in a play on Broadway, I have an animated TV show coming up, I have a few movies that just came out. – Neil Patrick Harris • I’m just saying stupid, funny things when I’m hanging out on the TV show. When I’m making music I’m in a completely different zone. – Chanel West Coast • I’m looking for a deal from one of you TV networks to give Snoop Dogg his own hood TV show where I can find America’s hottest hood artists. – Snoop Dogg • I’m not disciplined in terms of scheduling. I work best late at night, but I can’t do that when I’m on a TV show – our hours are roughly 10-6:30, so I have to go to sleep at a reasonable hour. So I’ll sometimes write fiction for an hour or two in the evenings, or several hours on the weekend afternoons – unless I’m actively writing a script for the show I’m working on, in which case there’s no time to write fiction at all. – Nick Antosca • I’m not going to watch two TV shows with vaginas in them unless somebody tells me why they’re different! – Ilana Glazer • I’m obsessed with voices in film. I have this memory of how people say words, even on the most intensely stupid reality TV show. – Jenny Hval • I’m proud of everything I achieved with ‘Idol,’ and away from ‘Idol’ also. It’s just such a different show now to what it was when I was on it. I didn’t even know it was a TV show until the third audition. – Kelly Clarkson • I’m really excited about my TV show. I wrote it with my best friend. – Pell James • I’m scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can’t fall asleep. – Maurice Sendak • I’m so grateful to be living doing what I love. Whether it’s acting in Films or TV shows or writing and directing my own projects. – Kyle Cassie • I’m used to seeing it, but it’s weird having an Academy Award. You usually only see one of them on the TV show when they give them out, so it’s kind of surreal to have one in your house. – Steven Wright • I’m very grateful for work especially in film industry. It’s highly competitive and there are a lot of people standing behind me jumping at the opportunity to only do one thing, like one movie or one TV show or one episode. – Famke Janssen • In California, they don’t throw their garbage away – they make it into TV shows. – Woody Allen • In France, anyone can use your music on like a TV show or whatever – they don’t need to ask permission. It’s almost like a child when it has its own life. – Thomas Mars • In some ways, a novel isn’t as structurally rigorous as a screenplay or a TV show, which have finite real estate. In a novel, you can more deeply illuminate a character’s interior and get away with digressions. – Howard Gordon • In the middle of Beaches there’s a scene from the “Laverne & Shirley” TV show so they see some history of my work in each film. – Garry Marshall • It is tough, every time. The ensemble is great. I would always ask Andrew, “Is this how Hollywood is? Is this how every TV show and movie is?” And he was like, “No, dude. This is not. Do not get used to this. Be thankful that this is how your first gig is.” – Steven Yeun • It was actually the production group that ended up producing the show for us…Every musician, especially in the hip-hop community, you always make these show recaps or vlogs, and essentially what “Touring’s Boring” was is, we tried to make our vlogs interesting and almost more like a TV show. That’s how we got discovered by TV. – Mike Stud • It was feminism that made it possible for women to go to the Ivy League and women to be astronauts and women to have their own TV shows. What happened, though, was that the generation after feminism, which is my generation, misunderstood what feminism was saying. – Debora Spar • It was such a bigger picture [ Westworld] than what I thought it was. It’s more of a revolution than a TV show. – Evan Rachel Wood • It’s a lot of hard work to do a weekly TV show. It’s certainly not fun. – Michael Moore • It’s a TV show. Only the emotional damage is real. – Steven Moffat • It’s actually much harder to develop a TV show than I had anticipated. – Diablo Cody • It’s also one thing to see a celebrity or some kind of character on a TV show being gay. It’s a totally different thing when you know your husband… not your husband, but your brother or your friend or the dude you hung out in high school was gay. I mean, that is what changes people’s minds, what changes people’s minds. – Andrew Sullivan • It’s fun being on a TV show and not having to wear heels. – Trieste Kelly Dunn • It’s hard to find success and it’s hard to find hit movies or hit TV shows and to stay relevant. I think it’s a very difficult thing for actors, because a lot of us get lost, frankly. – Dylan McDermott • It’s impossible to overvalue the importance of television – both in its serious and less serious functions. It’s one of our most important ways of finding out the truth – and also of changing the world, and finding out what in the world needs changing. It’s also an immense bringer of joy – I learnt how to laugh through television, and now my children and I, every day of every week, share the joy and stupidity of TV shows – they actually make us HAPPY – Richard Curtis • It’s often the case with successful TV shows that they kind of inadvertently live on past their prime. It’s best to leave the audience wanting more. – Vince Gilligan • It’s weird how with a TV show, you don’t have just the one ending – you have the many. – Vince Gilligan • I’ve always been fascinated, obsessed even, with books and TV shows about unsolved murders, cold cases, forensic science, mysteries, and so on. Many times when I get inspiration for my work, it’s from something in one of these books or TV shows, or perhaps some newspaper article about a specific case. – Scott Heim • I’ve always got five or six things that would either make a good feature or TV show. And you just never know. You go and you pitch and it may be exactly what they’re looking for, or they may stop you after two sentences and say, “Oh, we’ve already done something just like that.” – John Sayles • I’ve been careful to keep my life separate because it’s important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. I’m worth more than that. – Lisa Kudrow • I’ve had lots of things that didn’t work out, like TV shows. You learn a lot through mistakes – I learned that you have to be the captain of your ship. Actually, I own my ship. – Pamela Anderson • I’ve never been on a TV show for more than a season and you have to continually keep it interesting and you have to keep it connected, even as you change. – Ian Somerhalder • I’ve only done two other TV shows [instead of Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll], one was Rescue Me and the other was a show called The Job, which was at ABC and only on for two seasons. – Denis Leary • I’ve seen [Donald Trump] appear in a film or a TV show cameo or the tabloids, and he’s a grotesquely distasteful human being and always has been, always made me want to take a shower. But other people fell in love with him as a reality star. So does that mean that the entertainment industry is doing something wrong? I think reality TV answered that question a long time ago: Yes, it’s doing something terribly wrong. But there’s some great reality TV, and I’m not bagging on it completely. – Joss Whedon • I’ve seen [Trump] appear in a film or a TV show cameo or the tabloids, and he’s a grotesquely distasteful human being and always has been, always made me want to take a shower. – Joss Whedon • Josh [Friedman] and I have been friends for years, and he said, “Hey, if you ever want to do a TV show, I can take it over and run it,” and I was like, “Yes!” He’s always been so busy that I never dared to ask that, but it just worked out, time wise, that this was the season where we could probably do it, so I jumped at it. So, even though I’m busy with other stuff, I’m excited to be writing this. – John August • Just concentrate on the performers. Make sure you get the performers, and that’s it. That’s all we need to do.” And I was thinking, “Well what if you do both? Of course the performance is important, the writing is really important. But what if you could have the perfect marriage of making it look really slick as well?” I think that’s kind of what I tried to develop as a style, and Spaced was the first TV show I did where all the elements came together. – Edgar Wright • Knowing the right questions is better than knowing all the right answers” Caleb from Pretty Little Liars (TV Show) – Sara Shepard • L.A. ispolluted. It’s overpopulated. But it is very much home. It was inevitable for me, the moving back. I was living in San Francisco, and Joan broke it off with me, and I needed a place to live. I’d been divorced. And I needed to write movies and TV shows to earn a living. Alimony. All that. So I figured what the hell, I’ll go back to L.A. – James Ellroy • Launching a new TV show is probably one of the most difficult things that a writer can do. – George Meyer • Like we were saying, the fact that the relationships on the show are love-based, and in the sense that I wasn’t aware of how special it was in contrast to a lot of the other TV shows that are on right now. It was our audience members that pointed out the love that you see in the show is special. – Steve Zissis • More American young people can tell you where an island that the ‘Survivor’ TV series came from is located than can identify Afghanistan or Iraq. Ironically a TV show seems more real or at least more meaningful interesting or relevant than reality. – John Fahey • Most people get their politics, obviously, from TV shows about senators or movies about them or… all the day-to-day press and the talk shows. – Judd Gregg • Most TV shows don’t reward you for paying attention. – Matt Groening • Movies, novels, TV shows – these are the water fountains of today. We thirst for stories which speak to us by representing us, but we go to the water fountains in the centre of town looking for that, and we’re turned away, sent to the ghetto. – Hal Duncan • My approach to ‘Star Trek’ was, ‘I know science fiction, and I know screen writing.’ That was very arrogant of me, but you really need to be a little bit arrogant to think that what you have to say is good enough to justify the expense of hundreds of thousands – now millions of dollars – to make an episode of the TV show. – David Gerrold • My boy, that was a TV show. I used a stunt double. I always use a stunt double. Except in love scenes. I insist on doing those myself. – William Shatner • My favorite TV show is probably ‘Glee.’ I’m a Gleek, like everyone – else!Victoria Justice • My tastes in all things lean towards the arty and boring. I like sports documentaries about Scrabble players, bands that play quiet, unassuming music, and TV shows that win awards. In that way, I am an elitist snob. And proud of it. – Michael Ian Black • My TV show had been cancelled; nothing else had gone anywhere; some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn’t ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn’t know if I would be able to keep my house. – Tom Hanks • My wife is like, You finally get your own TV show, you can have any kind of car you want and you get a darned truck. But my brother and I have the same kind of truck now. – Jeff Foxworthy • My wife says I’m much happier when I’m not a regular on a TV show. – Alan Dale • Nasty is the new normal in Florida. Politics here is very gutterlike. It’s like a very bad reality TV show that still gets very high ratings. – Dan Gelber • Nira Park, who is my longtime producer and friend – I’ve know her since we did Spaced, the TV show – she gave me this script the last day of filming The World’s End. She said, “Take a look at this. It’s filming in London next year, and you might like to look at Jack.” I trust Nira implicitly. – Simon Pegg • Nobody’s talking about movies the way they’re talking about their favorite TV shows. – Steven Soderbergh • Obviously, in this day and age, with the TV shows, there are some really interesting ones. I’m not that interested in going and doing a network show, but like everybody else, trying to find something good. – Scott Speedman • Ok so there’s no TV shows, no movies going on fine, but I love going on stage and performing stand up so my situation is a little better than someone who’s strictly just an actor or actress. – Wanda Sykes • On Michael Moore TV show, when he went to the home of the guy who invented the car alarm and set off all the car alarms on the block… pretty funny. – P. J. O’Rourke • One day it was that I wanted to go make a movie with my kid and then another day it was that I wanted to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and another day it was that I wanted to sit in the studio and figure something out. All those things manifested themselves into what the TV show was. – Casey Neistat • Parodies of commercials are by no means new and have been popular going back to black-and-white TV shows of the ’50s. – Dan Aykroyd • People always ask about the transition from TV show to a movie, but it felt like just going to a different school. You don’t really notice the transition, when you’re in the moment. – Shailene Woodley • People are recognizing that I am an entrepreneur and do more than be on a reality TV show. -Kim Kardashian • People on both sides of any conflict believe they are right, whether it’s on a TV show or in the real world. – Mandy Patinkin • People say that you want to be varied in your career, and I’ve done so many things and am very appreciative. But, the one thing I’ve never done and wanted to do was to be a regular on a TV show, where you get 22 weeks of the year to develop and play a character. I’ve done arcs of five or eight episodes on shows, but I’d like to have a character that’s rich enough and deep enough to want to explore and live with for a few years. Playing the same character, but doing different scenes seems very exciting to me. – Jim Piddock • Phil Harris and Pat Boone were once paired as guests on an episode of Andy Williams’ TV show. During a rehearsal break, Harris suggested the three of them go out for a drink. When Boone declined, explaining he did not drink, Harris asked Williams, “Andy, can you imagine getting up in the morning knowing that’s the best you’re going to feel all day?” – Andy Williams • So I do have to work, you know, and I find as many movies and TV shows that I can, because otherwise I wouldn’t have an income. – Tippi Hedren • Some people may contend that there is no image more charming that a child holding a puppy or kitten. But for me that’s a distant second. When I see a child clutching a book… to his or her tiny bosom, I’m moved. Children can possess a book in a way they can never possess a video game, a TV show, or a Darth Vader doll. A book comes alive when they read it. They give it life themselves by understanding it. – Chris Van Allsburg • Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn’t do, you know enough about the characters to say, “No, that’s not what she would do there. That’s wrong.” You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can’t do as much with movie – you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel. – Nicholson Baker • Something economically changed. It used to be that you needed 20 million people to watch a TV show for it to be a hit. Now, with just a few million people watching, you’re considered very successful, for a lot of these streaming services, or cable channels. Now, that allows people to do much more creatively ambitious work, because it’s not lowest common denominator. – Judd Apatow • Sometimes directors get hired into TV shows, and it’s so formulaic and they’re a slave to whatever everybody wants them to do. But everyone came in with their own style, and it blended together with the Helix style that was set, and at the same time, they’re bringing their own ideas and their own input. It was really fun working with all of them. – Kyra Zagorsky • Sometimes you see auteur TV shows and movies, and those are great. – Akiva Goldsman • Sony and Nickelodeon knew they wanted to create a TV show that was a platform for a band they would have for Sony. They knew what they wanted, and it took two years of auditions and screen tests and countless people coming in and out the door until they finally settled on the four of us. – James Maslow • Television is competitive now, and the great stories live on television right now. I’m finding that I’m enjoying television more than film, these days. That was my motivation to take a TV show. – Jaimie Alexander • Thanks to NBC News and thanks to the NBC primetime TV network, Donald Trump has been in living rooms for 11 years being who he is. The Donald Trump running for president is not an unknown quantity. The Donald Trump running for president is the Donald Trump everybody’s gotten to know, and quite a lot of people watch those Donald Trump TV shows, The Apprentice and whatever else on there. – Rush Limbaugh • The Baha’i celebrity, or the Belebrity, is a character actor with a big head playing an annoying creep on a TV show. – Rainn Wilson • The bigger budget films only shoot about a page or two a day, so there’s very specific amount of time spent on detail and getting each tidbit exactly how they want it. In a movie or TV show, you shoot eight or ten pages and you aren’t afforded as much time to do each scene. – Dan Payne • The consumer mentality – we like something, what other flavor does it come in? We like that TV show, does it come in a book form? Does it come in a capsule? How about a soup? – Paul Reiser • The headmistress was a very well-respected theater teacher. She taught me what stage left and stage right were, what a director was, and what all these things meant, which was something I had no concept of. She sent me off to drama school, at age 18, and I stayed there for three years. Before I knew it, I was working on a TV show. – Robert Kazinsky • The Netflix brand for TV shows is really all about binge viewing. The ability to get hooked and watch episode after episode. – Reed Hastings • The only thing worse than a crappy TV show which Paddy Chayevsky couldn’t have conceived in his worst nightmare is two megacorps fighting over who thought of the crappy show first. – Judd Apatow • The really great thing about having two TV shows going on at the same time is that I can go to one and say that I have to go and visit the other and then I can just go home and they don’t know. – Matt Groening • The scheduling thing is really weird with TV shows. Certain projects haven’t been able to work out because of the schedule, so some of it is out of your control. You don’t have very many opportunities. There isn’t much time, so you want to make sure you’re going to be doing something that you really feel good about or that you’re going to have a good creative experience doing. You’re taking up vacation time from your job, so you want it to be meaningful. – Ty Burrell • ‘The Simpsons’ from the very beginning was based on our memories of brash ’60s sitcoms – you had a main title theme that was bombastic and grabbed your attention – and when you look at TV shows of the 1970s and ’80s, things got very mild and toned down and… obsequious. – Matt Groening • The thing about working on a TV show is that it becomes, very quickly, all consuming. – Jonathan Nolan • The truth is that we have to, as American citizens, stop thinking that this life that we’re living, the things that we’re dealing with, is some reality TV show. This is real life, real children, real situations. – Stevie Wonder • The wonderful thing about a TV show is if you get picked up for another season, there’s no happily ever after. – Guy Branum • There are many films and TV shows I make where people find themselves in fantastical situations; as often as possible their reactions to it are very normal. – Joss Whedon • There were a lot of lessons of production to be learned. On the page, the biggest thing you learn on any TV show is how to write to your cast. You write the show at the beginning with certain voices in your head and you have a way that you think the characters will be, and then you have an actor go out there, and you start watching dailies and episodes. Then, you start realizing what they can do and what they can’t do, what they’re good at and what they’re not so good at, how they say things and what fits in their mouth, and you start tailoring the voice of the show to your cast. – Ronald D. Moore • There’s a huge demand for my entertainment, and I can’t meet the need. So I decided to try a TV show to reach as many of my fans as possible. – Tyler Perry • There’s two kinds of press that you get when you put out a TV show: The reviews, and the people that just decide what the reviews say. – Louis C. K. • This election ain’t no stinkin’ TV show. – Bradley Whitford • This is the contradiction we have in the media. We love vigilantes: Batman, Tarzan, Green Arrow – the comic books and the TV shows are filled with vigilantes. We love to promote it. Jesus Christ was a vigilante. We admire these people, but we don’t want to be associated with them. – Paul Watson • This whole thing about reality television to me is really indicative of America saying we’re not satisfied just watching television, we want to star in our own TV shows. We want you to discover us and put us in your own TV show, and we want television to be about us, finally. – Steven Spielberg • Those rosy memories we all share are actually memories from our favorite TV shows. We’ve confused our own childhoods with episodes of “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Father Knows Best,” and “The Brady Bunch.” In real life, Ozzie had a very visible mistress for years, Bud and Kitten on “Father Knows Best” grew up to become major druggies, and Mom on “The Brady Bunch” dated her fifteen-year-old fictional son. – Cynthia Heimel • To a certain degree, with a TV show, people are looking for a certain amount of familiarity. You don’t want to pull the rug out, but you also want to keep things fresh and keep changing it up. – Jonathan Nolan • To me, the greatest thing in the world is downloading TV shows on iTunes because there are no commercials, and yet if I were a working stiff, I could never afford to do this. But I don’t even think about money. – Stephen King • Trying to negotiate getting a couple of kids to watch the same TV show requires serious diplomacy. – Dee Dee Myers • TV and film are very different media with different requirements. In a TV show, you have actors and fellow writers and directors, who are interpreting your work. With a novel, you only have ink, words and your reader. – Howard Gordon • TV is such a success nowadays because it gives back in a way that features can’t. If you go to a film, you only get two hours of great storytellers and performers, and you pay top dollar for that. If you’re subscribing to premium channels and you’re getting all of these amazing TV shows, and you’re watching them as you want, where you want, when you want, on what you want, I think that is the “the golden era of TV” in what television shows are offering to audiences. We’re giving them a lot more. It’s quality. – Milo Ventimiglia • TV series, there’s a lot of everybody talking to you and giving you input for the first couple episodes, and then they’re on such a crazy schedule that you get another episode on a Monday, you have to have it done by Friday and it becomes very solitary work usually, TV shows. – Mark Mothersbaugh • Veep is the best and most realistic political TV show out there. – Christopher Michael Cillizza • Way back in 1979, as a guest on a local TV show in Arkansas, then Hillary Rodham was quizzed about not taking her husband’s last name when they got married and keeping her job as a lawyer while being first lady of the state. – Tamara Keith • We did ‘The Simpsons Movie,’ which took almost four years; it was the same people that do the TV show, and it just killed us. So that’s why there hasn’t been a second movie. But I imagine if the show ever does go off the air, they’ll start doing movies. – Matt Groening • We may not have a sample size larger than one, or we may not have unlimited resources – it’s a TV show, and we generally turn these things around in about a week or so. – Jamie Hyneman • We now have a generation of people who in many cases feel that if they become chefs, they’ll get a TV show. They have a signature haircut, a year into the business, or a branding arrangement with a shoe company. I don’t really relate to that. I guess this is the world we live in now. – Anthony Bourdain • What if it was cats who invented technology, would they have TV shows starring rubber sqeaky toys? – Douglas Coupland • What was bizarre, when I was younger, I never watched TV. I would rather watch a movie 100 times than to watch a TV show, just to find another nuance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched ‘On the Waterfront’, just to find a flaw so that I can learn and try to improve my thing. – Vin Diesel • When I did TV shows and my other movies, I never try to do it for anybody. I just do what I think is good no matter what the genre is. – Will Gluck • When I first started writing for television in the seventies and eighties, the Internet didn’t exist, and we didn’t need to worry about foreign websites illegally distributing the latest TV shows and blockbuster movies online. – Al Franken • When I open many books, or most leading women’s magazines, or see almost all TV shows, I don’t find myself at all. I am completely anonymous. My value system is not there. – Bela Karolyi • When I planned my wedding the first time, my ex-husband and I, we were both struggling comics. I had a TV show that had gotten cancelled. Basically, I rented a wedding gown; the reception hall smelled like feet. – Sherri Shepherd • When I’m writing a theme song for a TV show I always think, “What would be Pavlovian where a kid would be in the kitchen, or an adult would be in the kitchen, and they hear the theme song come on and it would draw them back to the other room so that they would watch the show?” – Mark Mothersbaugh • When my TV show, ‘Sports Jobs with Junior Seau,’ assigned me to be a ‘Sports Illustrated’ reporter for a weekend, I didn’t realize I’d have to squeeze it in around another sports job. I had planned to retire from the NFL to enjoy the cushy lifestyle of a full-time reality TV star, but I wound up getting run over by a bull. – Junior Seau • When you do a TV show, the cumulative intimacy you develop with the audience through your characters is pretty profound. It may be the most profound storytelling there is, because the character gets to live and roll around in the audience’s mind week after week. – Howard Gordon • When you do a TV show, there’s always the fear that it will become tired and you’ll know exactly what’s going to happen.- Mads Mikkelsen • When you say, ‘I spent my summers at the Jersey Shore,’ people always say, ‘Oh, really?’ They think of the TV show. So I just say, ‘A cute little harbor town in New Jersey.’ – Taylor Swift • When you take on a TV show, you give trust to people that you really just met. – Katee Sackhoff • When you’re a regular on a TV show, they give you more of a backstory, so with these recurring gigs, you have to make up your own backstory. – Alan Dale • When you’re recording a TV show, you really feel like you’re in a bubble. – Judy Greer • When you’re writing for a TV show, what’s great is that you always know what actor you’re writing to. – Michael Brandt • Whether it’s being a leading man, making TV shows, being with my family, I’ve learned a lot. – Ashton Kutcher • Whoever calls and asks me to do stuff and obviously, with having your own TV show, people want you to get involved. They know you’re a stand-up comedian so they’re always looking for somebody funny to host an event. – Chelsea Handler • Writing for television is a great job. And it’s a job. Most people watch TV and have a comment about one or two moments of an episode – whether they love it or hate it or something in between. To come up with every moment of an entire season of a TV shows is heavy lifting. – Steven C. Harper • Writing pilots is such a specific thing. It’s not even really writing TV shows. A pilot is its own beast. – June Diane Raphael • You [Bill Maher] seem to have done alright with your TV show… I mean, I don’t get a sense… to the extent that they’re boycotting you, it’s because of your other wacky views rather than your particular views on religion. – Barack Obama • You and your scars. Please! You don’t kill youself like this!” I gesture, holding a wrist turned up to the ceiling, then pretending to cut across it with my other hand. “That’s just a cry for help. That’s just attention. Everbody knows that. Cutting across just gets you to the hospital. That’s just from movies and TV shows and stuff like that. You didn’t really try to kill yourself. you just wanted attention, but you screwed up. Try harder next time. – Barry Lyga • You can say “ass,” but you can’t say “asshole.” That’s why I always cringe when a character in a TV show refers to someone as an “ass.” Unless you’re British, calling someone an ass really doesn’t work. But those are the rules of television. You can be a dirtbag, but not a scumbag. – Gilbert Gottfried • You come to America, and, if you do a big TV show, then you can be overexposed, or old, before you’re new. – Chris Hemsworth • You get a kind of familiarity on a set when you’re on a TV show. – Alia Shawkat • You know, a TV show is a slow build. – Ray Romano • You want to put out a TV show? If you have the money to do it on your own, by yourself, and you have a TV network, you can do it by yourself. But the nature of the beast is, art needs finance. That’s how this industry works. So until the Internet becomes our source of entertainment – and watch it, I believe it will – this is how things go. – Nathan Fillion • You were doing a TV show – you don’t realise that you’re also making social commentary at the same time. – Amber Benson • You’ve got to do something to fill up your day. And I can only play so much guitar and watch so many TV shows. It fulfills me. There are two things about it I like: It makes me happy, and it makes other people happy. – Stephen King [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

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Thursday, 24th of november

Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day. I went into the office after lunch. I encountered something interesting that evening while I made my way from the office to the Hibiya Line. A little girl held her camera in front of a huge billboard. She appeared about six or seven years old. She was probably in the lower grades of elementary school.

She paced back and forth, side to side, struggling to find the best frame for her photograph. Her hands held a small, pink camera. A woman who looked like the girl's mother paid more attention to the people passing by than to her daughter.

"What is she trying to shoot?"

I was curious, so I walked in front to see the billboard that she had tried to capture on film. The billboard in front of me glowed with a representation of the Hills' Christmas lights.

"Ah! So this is what she wants to preserve."

The Hills features three different lighting schemes within its Christmas decorations. Keyaki-zaka has Snow-&-Blue. 66 Plaza has Dramatic Crystal. And Mouri Teien has Garden-H. Each decorative scheme has a different sponsor. Collectively, though, we call this year's Hills Christmas display Artelligent Christmas 2005.

The little girl had seen the scenery as soon as she had stepped off the train and passed through the turnstile. The billboard only showed a second-hand image of the lights display, but it was still quite beautiful. She must have been very happy. The lighting really touched her, so she wanted to photograph the billboard's scenery.

She finally framed her shot and clicked the shutter. The camera's flash briefly lit the hall white. The girl nodded, satisfied, and then left for the Hills while holding her mother's hand.

To feel the scenery's beauty... to want to keep it near... her camera had served its duty. Children sense the world so clearly.

They enjoy the world even to the point that scenery depicted on a billboard has beauty. Would anyone my age have tried to preserve the image found on the billboard? No -- they would think that the billboard is reserved for advertisements. Adults reason that the real scenery sits just a little farther away, so they conclude that the billboard isn't fit for a photograph.

Even a commercial billboard can serve as photographic material if the picture-taker senses its beauty. Reality or facsimile... the distinction is irrelevant. Beauty found is beauty, nothing less.

A child's purity... that's the root of the girl's hunger for beautiful things.

We spent the morning in a long internal meeting. It lasted through the end of lunch. Kenichiro had thought of me, and he brought me food from the fifth floor while I was still in the meeting. Because of him I could check my mail while I ate katsu bento from the Hills' own Katsura.

For some reason I felt uncomfortable. I was nonetheless thankful.

I ate hurriedly since I had an afternoon visitor scheduled. I always eat fast, so it was an easy trick.

I took care of one piece of mail for every bite that I ate. By the time that I had polished off the bento, I had gone through all the mail that had gathered while I had attended the meeting.

I once ate quite slowly, unlike now. I ate the slowest in my family. I would sometimes even chew a piece of hard meat from my school lunch until the first class started after lunch. I chewed like a cow does its cud.

I had so many preferences, so many likes and dislikes. Eating became a difficult task in itself. I would always dream, "Can we go on living somehow without eating, through some kind of photosynthesis?" Could people live on like The End?

Everything changed when I got into junior high. All the students scrambled for the school playground at lunchtime. The ones who got there first were the daily winners -- first come, first serve. Students from the other classes would claim the playground if any one of us dawdled too long.

We couldn't use any particular custom as an excuse to eat earlier, so we had to fill up our stomachs as quickly as possible at the beginning of lunch. I developed a way to eat my bento quickly: to swallow without chewing, and to eat by swallowing. I became a quick eater after eating like that day by day. My family gets nervous because I eat so hastily, but it's really convenient when I have to eat and run.

In the afternoon I had a secret meeting with a certain Mr. X. The commercialization for a certain project (that I won't name here) has progressed smoothly.

Later I returned to organize the MGS4 project. We continued settling our arrangements for the big event in honor of Subsistence's release. I worked on mail, papers, or my blog whenever I had a spare moment.

Meetings and engagements overran my schedule today. What a miserable Thursday.

In the evening I went to the Virgin Cinemas and saw the film Always: San-cho-me-no-yuuhi. The film depicts "the good old days of Showa." It's based on one of my favorite mangas, San-cho-me-no-yuuhi.

The movie sets its narrative in Showa 33 -- the thirty-third year of the Showa Emperor's enthronement. That was 1958, the year when we completed the Tokyo Tower.

I was born in Showa 38 (1963), so I'm sensitive to movies like this. I cried when I saw the 2001 Crayon Shin-chan movie that was set at the World Expo Osaka. I can't restrain my sobs when something touches me that way. Sometimes I even wail. I prepared for the movie and brought my beloved camouflage handkerchief.

Tears fell over the curves of my cheeks many times during the movie. I would have allowed myself to cry more freely, had I been alone. I haven't cried at a movie like that since I saw Big Fish.

I heard that audience members older than fifty tend to cry from beginning to end. I didn't react that way though. My memories of those times start in the Showa 40s, and they set the movie in the Showa 30s. Ten years make a huge difference.

For example, I've never seen an icebox. I also never saw the former sumo wrestler (who later turned pro wrestler) Rikidozan live. He lived from 1924 to 1963... Rikidozan died the year before I was born. On top of all that, I was born in Tokyo and then raised in Kansai. That created another gap in my experience.

Some people say that the sight of the unfinished Tokyo Tower alone moves older Tokyo citizens to tears. The scenery certainly inspires much nostalgia.

The ad gimmicks were really well executed in the film. The sign boards and posters looked like authentic Showa artifacts, with such names as Torys Bar, Mitsubishi Enpitsy, Glico, National, Tsubame Gomu, and so on. You could see all the people selling goldfish and bamboo poles, along with the tobacconists and mom-and-pop candy stores. Everything hearkened to that time... the refrigerators, the TVs, the fans, the choo-choo trains, and the automatic tricycles.

The images inspire a melancholy nostalgia. Just seeing them on the screen brought such pleasure. I immediately decided to buy the DVD.

I didn't cry because of the setting alone though. It's a genuinely good film.

The screenplay exaggerates some things at times, but even that coheres with the Showa Era. The exaggeration reminded me of a television show that I used to watch as a boy, Kanmi Fujiyama Shochiku Shin Kigeki.

The national populace really should see this movie. They'll laugh and cry with longing, but we ought to remember that complaining won't do any good. Adults shouldn't say, "Those really were the best days." We're no longer in the Showa Era. We're in the Heisei Era now. We should bear in mind that it's the twenty-first century.

We ought to remember the past, yes -- but we shouldn't allow it to consume us. We live in the present moment, and some people are too tied to the ideals of that period to fully move forward. We'll never work through the future unless we accept the present. We must fill the twenty-first century with dreams.

I love the manga San-cho-me-no-yuuhi, as well as its author Mr. Ryohei Saigan.

I first discovered Ryohei Saigan over twenty years ago. Back then the manga had been titled Yuuyake-no-uta. I became acquainted with the manga when I borrowed it from my older brother. Ryohei Saigan had such a unique touch. His romantic stories stirred nostalgia within us. No other manga compared with him. I became his fan immediately.

After that, I read the collection of science fiction stories that he had written early in his career. I liked him more and more. They might be scarce (and in some cases impossible) to find, but I recommend these books to everyone.

1: Chikyu saigo no hi (The Last Day of the Earth)

2: Time Scooter

3: Mysterian

4: Hipparukosu no umi (The Sea of Hipparcos)

5: Akai Kumo (Red Cloud)

I was pretty worried when I learned that they would adapt San-cho-me-no-yuuhi into film. Mr. Yamazaki directed it, and he also directed the films Juvenile and Returner. He is a director from the gaming generation, and his films lean heavily on visual effects.

My friend had recommended the film to me, but I didn't have the courage to watch. Very few films can ever surpass their original source materials. I'm glad that I saw it though. It's different from the original, but it also captured the emotional gamut of the Showa Era.

The sunset doesn't look beautiful in the twenty-first century, but that's not due to pollution or smog. We can't see a beautiful sunset because our people and society are sick. We could have regarded a sunset as beautiful when we were children, because the people and the times had been purer back then.

The movie Always reminds us of these things. The film simultaneously becomes nostalgic and reminiscent.

I ate dinner at Azabu Juban with one of my close friends. We hadn't seen each other in a month, so we spoke of many things. My friend sometimes slipped into the Kansai dialect along with me.

Kansai seems to be contagious!

I saw my friend off and started back toward the office. I noticed that the sunset's chrome had lit the Tokyo Tower.

The Tower has guarded Tokyo's sky for fifty years, but the environment has changed... and the times have changed too. I returned to my office in the Hills Tower, a landmark of the twenty-first century. The Hills doesn't bear any of the Era's scents.

I had received so much mail in my absence.

I suddenly felt so melancholy that I decided just to go home. The day's last train jostled me from side to side for about an hour, until I arrived at my home station at last. I climbed the slope that leads to my house.

I stopped when I arrived at a certain area near San-cho-me. I didn't see a sunset of course... it was already midnight.

The streets were already asleep. The house windows wouldn't emit any light because the families within had gone to sleep. The world's slumbering hours had come.

I steadily walked through the nighttime suburb alone. We don't have decorations like the lights at the Hills here. Our street-lamps shine feebly. This isn't a town from the Era.

I felt somewhat cold, and the waning moon seemed languid. Everything converged to make me feel lonely.

I try to walk along the curbs at times like this. I walked farther inside the white line that designated the pedestrian path. Then the sensors installed in the houses detected my presence. The sensors' lights will blink on around the garage whenever anyone set them off. They're installed for security. At one particular spot, a line of consecutive houses has light sensors installed.

The dark street lit up when I walked close to those houses. The lights popped on, one after another. They seemed to whiten the night just for me -- my private beacons.

A beautiful sunset means that we live in a beautiful era. I'd like to see a sunset during our times like the one I saw in the movie.

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/john-waters-takes-us-on-a-funny-filthy-tour-of-his-fine-art/

John Waters Takes Us on a Funny, Filthy Tour of His Fine Art

Walking behind John Waters last week while he talked to a small gang of critics, reporters, and art world insiders about his pieces included in John Waters: Indecent Exposure at the Baltimore Museum of Art, I got everything I wanted: the tailored, outlandish clothes (black and gray suit printed with a geometric repeat, splashy red slip-ons), the big smile, the giant eyes, the pencil-thin mustache, the head shaped like a light bulb, and the candor and brilliance keen enough to cut glass.

The aphorisms flowed: “The only obscenity left in the art world is celebrity.” And his timing was perfect: “I hate celebrity, too.”

But this material—the photographs made to look like film stills from imaginary movies, interactive pieces, a G-rated version of Pink Flamingos acted entirely by children, some weighty installation pieces, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson puppets, sculptures, ephemera—this was all new to me.

Even with Waters as a guide, there was more to his work than I could grasp, because a lot of it references (often obscurely) the work of other artists and sensibilities I’m unfamiliar with—outsider art, if you will. And this despite the fact that I’m a longtime consumer of his films, books, and stage appearances.

Waters’ art is defined and liberated by his influences, his hometown of Baltimore, gay culture, DIY punk ethos, and a society obsessed with celebrity. Most of this work would have been lost on me were it not for his enthusiastic answers to the one question I had at every stop along his tour—Why?

The upside is, he wants to talk, to explain. He wants you to get it. But he doesn’t give everything away. Some stuff requires the viewer to put in the same years of research and thought that Waters went through to make this stuff. Who has that kind of time?

John Waters means different things to different people. Musical theater nerds might love the remake of Hairspray adapted from the Broadway musical that was adapted from a subversive film John Waters made in 1988. A film buff might consider only his early cult films that were played as midnight movies: Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), and Pink Flamingos, while clamouring for his rarely seen earlier movies, some of which are included in an installation at the BMA (the show runs through January 6, 2019).

At first glance, much of it seems pointless or contrived. Without packing the show’s catalog/coffee table book and reading along the way, even a seasoned collector of contemporary art might well stand staring for a long time in a losing struggle to comprehend. More research, thought, and archiving went into each work than I would have imagined. The more you know, the better it gets.

Waters prefaces his tour of the show by saying, “I am always trying to imagine the worst that can go wrong in the art business and the movie business. I am a fan of both. I always just make fun of things I love. That’s the point.” Every few steps, he reminded us, like a mantra, “I’m always trying to think of the worst thing that could happen in show business and celebrate it.”

“It’s about images,” he said. “I believe that people remember film stills. They don’t remember film plots. Everybody remembers From Here to Eternity and making out in the water. Who knows what the movie was about? That thing with Divine with the red dress in Pink Flamingos is more famous than anything that happened in the movie.”

There is an urgency to his photographic art—maybe to everything he does—implied in the phrase that continued to crop up: “I had to…”

His output as a fine art photographer began out of necessity. In 1992, he needed, but didn’t have a still for Multiple Maniacs. “So I just put the VHS on and took a picture in the dark on the TV screen. And that’s what started it, because it had a different quality. It doesn’t work digitally. I still have to take it with real film with a camera. This was the first one,” he said, pointing to a photograph entitled “Divine in Ecstasy.” “So I finally had a still. This is kind of how it started.”

Waters curates frames from others’ movies or photographs into assemblages all his own. “I’m going into other people’s movies, taking images, and putting them in a new narrative.” So curator as creator, he filched Ingmar Bergman’s Grim Reaper from The Seventh Seal and spun it into “this famous shot of [the Kennedys] getting off the plane. But I had Bergman’s Death following them, which was true, though.” The import of the original photograph is tragic: the president and first lady deplaning in Texas on November 22, 1963. Now add Death with the sickle shadowing them, and you have “Grim Reaper.” Why is it okay to laugh? “Camelot” and the superficiality of stylish Jackie pushes JFK’s horrific death into the background. Years of cinematic depictions dull the shock. Waters turns up the volume on the iconography and lowers it on the gruesome head wound, while commenting on his obsession with Bergman’s films of the ’50s and ’60s.

“And Ingmar Bergman, I saw his films at the same time [as the Kennedy assassination]. That was it. I loved him from then on.” Fine, but I was getting lost. Here and elsewhere in the show, Waters references movies (not to mention other cultural totems and taboos) so obscurely that only someone who has watched every film ever made will get what’s going on. Luckily that someone and I have been friends for 30 years.

So when I got home, I called my friend for help. As soon as I showed him “Grim Reaper” and mentioned another Bergman-influenced sequence, “Puking in Cinema,” the floodgates opened.

“I bet if you showed me the stills from “Puking in Cinema,” I’d know what films they were all from,” said my friend. And he did, rattling off the titles while doing push ups: “Bergman’s Cries and Whispers, Persona, and The Silence all have puking. So, now there’s puking in Waters’ movies, and I guess his art, too.”

I don’t know if this is the correct interpretation or not, but aesthetics before investigation. If it’s just puking, who cares? I’d hate “Puking in Cinema” if I hadn’t had my friend. But now I don’t, because I realize it’s reverential through the cinephile lens. It certainly contextualized Waters’s quote about his love for Bergman, and maybe why he’s called the Prince and not the King of puke (that would have to be Bergman himself).

I was on my own to interpret and figure out most of Waters’ work for myself. About “Lana Backwards,” Waters said, “Lana Turner. I always noticed they kept her one beat longer when she left a room. The director never cut. I was fascinated at that. I realized women wanted to see the back of her outfits, and the men wanted to see her ass.” Eight stills of Lana’s backside prove his point. Collectively, unconsciously, moviegoers agreed implicitly that they needed a longer look at Lana’s ass in the days before pressing pause. But only John Waters noticed.

His habit of “going into things no one else notices in a movie” sharpened his democratic eye, such that, as far as he’s concerned, “there is no such thing as a bad movie. You can find one frame in there that’s great. When you don’t like the movie, stop watching it as a moviegoer. Watch it like you’re at an art show. Just concentrate on the furniture or the color blue, and then all movies are good.”

I sat starstruck during my private Q&A with Waters. I contemplated his mustache, and saw a few greys mixed in the black line. I wondered if it’s tattooed, then remembered it’s not, because he once let Justin Bieber pencil it in. I forgot every question I had. Instead of kicking me out of my chair and shouting, “Next!” he graciously moved the conversation for me. Intuitively, he understood the question at the heart of my blathering: What’s up with the marriage of true crime, celebrity, and the play on tabloid who-wore-it-best in his “Manson Copies…” photo juxtapositions? Who but John Waters noticed Charles Manson’s evolving fashion?

“Manson Copies” is a series of paired photos. Each set puts a photo of Manson beside a photo of a celebrity, and in each set, Manson and the celebrity are somehow sartorially similar. “The first one—I saw this picture of Manson I had never seen with his hair cut like Divine’s in Pink Flamingos. [“Manson Copies Divine’s Hairdo.”] So I did that. Then, I had to wait for every parole hearing that Manson had, so I could see what his new look was. I just photographed it off the TV screen like I did for everything. Then, I had to go and find news stories of celebrities that were facing the same way in the same outfit. I had to look through everything to find a picture to match Manson’s parole hearing look, so I could say [Manson] copies this one and copies this one. I’d have to look through everything. I have Richard Gere with the same sunglasses on. Brad Pitt with the beard like [Manson] had.”

Waters gets a pass for things other people would be called weird or creepy for acknowledging. Why? His wink and nod give us permission to glimpse into stuff that was pulpy—like true crime—but has becomes mainstream, because he’s been our guide into our depraved world for 50 years. He’s not condoning it. He’s pointing it out. He’s removed from it. His art doesn’t show corpses. Instead, Charles Manson is depicted as the celebrity he became—a failed musician and cult leader, safely imprisoned, which is turning up the volume on high camp. But, lower the volume and Manson is a murderer, responsible for taking lives from victims and perpetrators.

There’s a lot of Dorothy Malone in Waters’ work, not only in “Manson copies…” but again in an eight-image sequence devoted to her popped collar, “Dorothy Malone’s Collar,” and in “Divine Copies Dorothy Malone’s Collar,” and in “Peyton Place…The Movie.” I asked my friend about this. Again, he rattled off the facts.

“Probably because she won Best Supporting Actress for Written on the Wind and she slowjacked the Oscar during her acceptance speech, and played a serial killer in Basic Instinct. Then, there’s Peyton Place, which was a banned book, and bestseller, and a nighttime soap with her.” He actually said much more, but I forgot everything but the highlights—just the very worst thing to do to the statue when winning Best Supporting Actress.

Celebrity rarely, if ever, accompanies talent. With that in mind, Waters pays homage to people who are known for nothing more substantial than the most vapid kind of fame. “Melissa” is a photograph of white clouds against a blue sky with the words: Starring Melissa Rivers. That’s it. That’s the photograph, and it’s a lot of things—all of them bad, so again I stood wondering, why? Once I found out, I wanted to own it.

“I’m always trying to celebrate the things that don’t work in show business,” Waters said, by way of introducing “Melissa,” which purports to be the opening credit in a movie, but a movie that never happened and never will. It may not be the stand-out piece in the show, but it made me laugh, because it’s a fantasy piece. Joan Rivers’ daughter would be hard to place on a seating chart at a dinner party. The irony to Melissa Rivers is that there is no irony.

“There is no credit,” Waters explained. “This is a completely made up credit. That ‘Starring’ above your name means you’re first billing, and Melissa, God bless her, she never was first billing in any movie that I know of. So, in a way, it’s a sad piece. If any piece is a little mean, it might be this one. But she did star in a movie where she reenacted the death-suicide of her father. She acted finding the body. So, I feel, in bad taste, we’re sister and brother.”

For Waters, unwatchable is “the worst thing you can say about a movie. It’s the worst review you can get. It’s literally unwatchable. So, I want to think, what movie can be in that category? It’s an extreme one. I had a friend who said, ‘That’s the most irresponsible movie I ever saw.’ I said, “It’s not that good.’ That would be something that is really important.” “Melissa” might fall into this category.

The simplest pieces are the most acute. One work, baldly entitled “9/11,” pairs movie title shots from Dr. Dolittle 2 and A Knight’s Tale. “This is, I think, the scariest, saddest one in the whole thing,” Waters says. “You look at these two titles and you think, Why? They’re the most forgettable movies that no one talks about. They aren’t good or bad. Why did he put these together? Well, It took me awhile to research and find out, but these were the two movies that were playing on the 9/11 planes that day.” How did he research this? Who did he call? Weighing the banality of the in-flight entertainment against the awareness of imminent death and tragedy felt heavy and trivial at the same time. A few seconds were needed to work through that. “But, they never put them in. They never even got that far. So, if there’s any optimism—it would have been worse.”

The childhood puppeteer in Waters shines forth in a few pieces, although we’re way beyond Punch and Judy territory here. One disturbing piece in particular, “Control,” could seem, if taken at face value, to condone domestic violence, although anybody familiar with Waters knows that would never happen. Still, what in the world is a Barbie-sized Tina Turner doing strung up as a marionette manipulated by Ike Turner who looks like he just slid across the stage on his knees Chuck-Berry style? Again, why?

“I liked her best when she was with him. I saw them in Baltimore in 1964, she had a mustache and a ratty mink coat, and them in a broken down school bus. That was the best show I ever saw in my life. I agree, she left, and she should have. She’s in Switzerland, about as far away as she could ever get from Ike Turner. But still, I went to the Tina Turner museum and there is no mention of Ike in it at all, so I just want to remember how great they were no matter how horrible their personal life was. I always stick up for the bad guy. I visit friends in jail. When someone gets a bad review, I call them the next morning. I’m always the one that will call you if something goes bad, so I’m trying to remember something that did go very very very bad. Kind of put it in a way that puts a good spin on it and remember maybe the one second that was great.”

He stopped next at a long red-velvet theater curtain extending almost the length of one wall, and pulled the curtain to reveal: “Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot,” only this time “I had to search porn to find pictures of assholes that had no hands, mouths, arms, penises—anything invading its moment in the sun. You can never find them them alone. They’re really rare.” The curtain is there, he explained, “in case your parents are coming over, or the IRS is auditing you.” Somebody asked him which was his favorite. He laughed and walked over to the last photo. “Here’s the dirty foot,” he said triumphantly. Again, he “had to…” Why the dirty foot? “A dirty foot, first of all, is up when you’re having sex, right? But a dirty foot is the one thing you will never find in porn, because they always wipe it off whenever it’s shown. There is someone there whose job is to wipe off the bottom. So, it was really hard to find. It was like Rosebud!”

While poring over the exhibition catalog of the 160 pieces in the BMA show, I consulted my 21-year-old daughter, who knew that “he made movies with his freak friends.” And added, “He doesn’t seem like a Taurus.” Weird somehow that my daughter knows Waters, but my parents, who are his age, 72, do not.

Could Waters have imagined “Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot” hanging permanently at the BMA? He said, ”The Baltimore Museum, I could have, because [former BMA curator] Brenda Richardson was the first person here that gave me a full film retrospective before I made Hairspray, before I was safe. People were outraged that city money was being spent. The censor board lady went crazy and everything. So the Baltimore museum was the first artistic institution that ever embraced me. So, yes, if anywhere was going to do it, I could have imagined it here.”

“‘Gay is Not Enough.’ It isn’t. It’s a good start. It helps but I am not a separatist. I think that heterosexuals can be great artists. They can’t be good florists, but they can be great artists. It has some sensibility about being an outsider or being other, no matter what—gay or straight or minority or anything that’s not fitting in with everybody.”

When I look at “Gay is Not Enough,” all I see are the words “Gay Is Not Enough” against a blurry background sending an at best ambiguous message. Again, with my Knowledgeable Friend:

“I don’t know,” he said. “ You have to show it to me.”

As soon as I turned my phone toward the image, he came back with, “It’s the typeface for the title sequence of the film of Jacqueline Susann’s novel Once Is not Enough (terrible, out of control, still got nominated for an Oscar), The blurry background is the water on the frosted glass door where Kirk Douglas is showering.”

I told him what Waters said about gay sensibility not being enough.

“Like he said, it’s not enough. You have to be the most extreme version of whatever you want to be. If you’re fat, you have to be Divine eating a meatball sub. If you’re skinny, you have to be anorexic.”

“What’s John Waters superlative?”

“His delivery. He’s the best person to say it.”

I was very happy walking around living in John Waters’ world for awhile, and I was sad when we reached the final exhibit in John Waters: Indecent Exposure, a room lined with a row of booths, each with a courtesy box of Kleenex. “The very last room are peepshows, which I always liked, but in them are my very first movies I ever made: Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, and Eat Your Makeup. They shouldn’t really be in movie theaters or anything. It’s much better in a peepshow on a loop. They are really ephemera. They were movies I made when I was a kid.”

The tour ends where all of his career began, so for those without much insight into John Waters, understanding where Indecent Exposure is heading really is the beginning. This show reaches back to the filming of 1964’s Hag in a Black Leather Jacket. Intentionally, or not, showing the early films on a loop juxtaposed to explicit peepshow content is as sweetly charming as nickelodeons of the past—almost. His work in the ’60s seeded the visual art he created beginning in the early ’90s. Divine’s eternal return on the screens in the booths pays tender homage to their friendship, and continues as a thread throughout not only Waters’ films, but in his visual art, books, and live appearances.

During our one-on-one conversation, I asked Waters about his kindness and his lifelong friendships, particularly with the actors he dubbed the “Dreamlanders,” the cast of his earliest films. “I’m still friends with the ones that are alive,” he said. “I still see Mink [Stole] and Mary Vivian Pierce. We’re still friends, and to me, that’s the success of living. That you do have friends. That’s what keeps you sane. That’s the only thing that really matters, that you have friends that have lasted for awhile. I don’t trust people who have no long-time friends. I mean, ‘Why?’ That’s the only comfort that you’re going to have, because your parents are going to die, usually before. So basically, I’m saying my friends are very important to have for me, and that’s another reason I live in Baltimore. I have people here. I’m showing movies I made fifty years ago out there, and the sad part is, many of them aren’t here with me. Divine, he’d be much happier if he wasn’t dead. He’d rather be here.”

Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/john-waters-takes-us-on-a-funny-filthy-tour-of-his-fine-art

The first 30 seconds of the trailer for Insatiable, a new comedy series coming to Netflix on August 10, introduces the story of a chubby high schooler grappling with bullies, unrequited crushes, and the FOMO that comes from nights spent on the couch eating ice cream.

It’s all a fairly standard setup for what looks to be a show about modern teens — perhaps even one that, like Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, is benefitted by the fact that its lead looks more like an average high schooler than the glamorous 20-something stars of shows like Riverdale.

But then the trailer takes a turn. Patty, our main character, gets punched in the face, has her jaw wired shut for months, and thereby loses so much weight that by the time she goes back to school in the fall, she’s a bonafide (thin) hottie. It’s with this newfound power that she can apparently get her revenge on the kids who’d excluded her in the past.

[embedded content]

Because no one has officially reviewed the show yet, the trailer is all that we have to determine what the rest of Insatiable will look like and what themes it will deal with. But based on that one minute and 30 seconds, the reaction has been … not great.

Critics on Twitter and elsewhere have called the premise of the show fatphobic, triggering to people with eating disorders, and a regressive lens through which to view fat people’s stories. The Good Place star Jameela Jamil, who has advocated for body autonomy in the past, tweeted about how there’s a problem with implying that the only way to “win” in life is to diet:

Kids who bully are just miserable, badly raised arseholes. It is not, and should not ever be YOUR problem that they have a problem with you. You don’t have to conform. You don’t have to placate. Revenge isn’t a good use of your time and energy. And starving yourself is

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) July 20, 2018

Writer Roxane Gay also noted the trailer’s flawed logic that fat women can’t stand up for themselves and must undergo physical trauma to become their best, skinny selves:

Ahhh yes, a fat girl could never stand up for herself while fat and of course she has to be assaulted and have her mouth wired shut before she becomes her best self, her skinny self. Good to know!

— roxane gay (@rgay) July 22, 2018

There’s now even a Change.org petition that, as of publication, has garnered more than 145,000 signatures to stop Netflix from airing the show, on the grounds that releasing it will be damaging to young girls’ self-esteem and cause or trigger eating disorders.

One day after the trailer premiered, on July 20, Insatiable’s writer and producer Lauren Gussis defended the show against critics, writing that the inspiration was based on her own experience with an eating disorder as a teenager, and that comedy is a means of dealing with our vulnerabilities.

Star Debby Ryan, a former Disney Channel actress, took to Instagram to defend the show, writing that it was a satirical look at “how difficult and scary it can be to go to move through the world in a body,” and assured viewers that the humor is “not in the fat-shaming.” Alyssa Milano, who also appears in the trailer, said in a 30-minute Twitter video that she “totally gets” the backlash to the trailer, but hopes people will wait to see the full show before judging it.

This, above all, is what the creators and stars are attempting to communicate. But for people who are so accustomed to seeing their stories told onscreen via the same harmful tropes, the Insatiable trailer could be seen as just another exhausting example of the negative ways TV and movies portray fat people.

To understand why the Insatiable trailer hit such a nerve, you have to look at pop culture’s terrible track record of telling fat people’s stories.

On July 23, artist and writer Kiva Bay asked his Twitter followers to name the fat-hating moment in media that has stuck with them, starting with the scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when Aunt Marge inflates to such great proportions that she literally floats away.

Responses ranged from Bridget Jones being consistently described as fat (in the books, she weighs 130 pounds) to pretty much the entire premise of Pixar’s Wall-E, which depicts a futuristic dystopia in which everyone isn’t just overweight, but share the negative characteristics associated with being overweight: that they are lazy and stupid, and that all they care about is passively consuming whatever’s in front of them.

The problem persists even in media that’s often held up as progressive — many people in the thread called out Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks & Recreation’s recurring fat jokes, while others brought up the inherent fatphobia of shows like Gilmore Girls and 30 Rock in which objectively thin main characters have an obsession with unhealthy food.

A 2009 Jezebel piece described the “skinny glutton” phenomenon as “a sure indicator to the audience that these women are Single, Quirky and, (because they’re thin, only gently) Sad” because casting an actually fat actor in the role would, the thinking goes, be too pathetic.

The Insatiable trailer also reprises an especially troubling Hollywood practice: the fat suit. When a character actually is meant to be fat, instead of casting a bigger actor in the role, often a thin actor will wear a fat suit.

We tend to see them used in flashbacks to a time when a now-thin character was fat, like Monica in Friends, Schmidt in New Girl, or Ryan Reynolds in Just Friends. The “humor” comes not only from seeing actors wearing a silly costume, like Eddie Murphy in Norbit or The Nutty Professor, but also from the ability to crack jokes at a past character’s fatness with the knowledge that the present character is laughing now, too.

Few uses of fat suits, however, are more controversial than the 2001 film Shallow Hal, in which Jack Black plays a man who has to be hypnotized to find Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit sexy enough to be his girlfriend. Not only is the entire premise pretty gross, but, as a Telegraph piece noted after comparisons were drawn to the recent Amy Schumer film I Feel Pretty, the movie consistently uses fat bodies as punchlines:

“The camera linger[s] over every dimple and crease on the physical form of Ivy Snitzer, Paltrow’s body double, and contrasting the sight of Paltrow in revealing booty-shorts with a large woman spilling out of her clothes. Jokes are endlessly made about her appetite, while every chair Rosemary sits on appears perilously close to collapsing (it’s a sight-gag that is repeated twice on-screen, along with a deleted scene involving a caved-in bed).”

That contrast — the visual of the character wearing a fat suit versus the character without it — can have the effect of implying that fatness, when constantly compared to the superior thinness, is grotesque and deserves to be laughed at.

That’s the history Insatiable is drawing on when it puts Debby Ryan in a fat suit, regardless of intention.

And there is yet another pattern that Insatiable seems to fall into: the idea that weight loss is the road to happiness. Friends’ Monica and New Girl’s Schmidt are both characters who don’t accomplish their goals until they lose weight. The entire wellness industry is based around this false promise — that losing weight is the key to getting whatever you’ve always wanted, whether that’s love, money, or revenge. (See: Khloe Kardashian’s extremely on-the-nose reality series, Revenge Body.)

In an essay for Medium titled “To the writers of Insatiable,” fat activist and writer Your Fat Friend wrote about the problem with this narrative, pointing out that not only do 97 percent of dieters gain back what little weight they lose (or more), but that weight loss is often the only narrative that fat people get to have.

She continues:

I have never seen a fat life like mine on screen. I have not seen fat people recklessly, happily in love, as I have been. I have not seen thin partners struggle to accept their own attraction to fat people. I have not seen fat people getting promoted, getting fired, working hard, succeeding. I have only seen fat people fail. Anything else, I have learned, is reserved for the penitent thin.

In short, fat characters are defined entirely by their fatness, and only get to become multi-dimensional once they lose the weight. It’s a trope that the Insatiable trailer even touches on in a meta way: When Patty returns to school, newly thin, she muses, “Now I could be the former fatty who turned into a brain, or an athlete, or a princess,” as if these character traits can’t apply to fat people because their main identifier is already “fat.” Until we see the show, it isn’t clear where this strain of self-awareness’s endpoint lies, or how far the series will take its meta-understanding of fat tropes, but it could be a promising sign.

So yes, the Insatiable trailer, as of right now, is still just a trailer; there’s still a whole show to come and be watched and discussed, starting on August 10. But many viewers are worried that the groundwork seems to be laid for a series about the same stories of fat people we’ve seen thousands of times over.

And though its stars and creators promise the show is an empathetic look at the pressures modern teenagers face surrounding body image, well, don’t we already sort of … know them? Above all, what’s necessary is an empathetic look at fat people in general: one that ideally doesn’t involve weight loss — and certainly no fat suit.

Original Source -> Why 150,000 people are calling for Netflix to cancel the teen comedy Insatiable before it debuts

via The Conservative Brief

Actor Brings Community Model to Content Creation

Don’t be fooled by his moniker on HITRECORD, the collaborative production company he founded with his brother in 2004. Actor, director, writer, and producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt is anything but a regular Joe.

His acting career already spans three decades and includes a long list of popular and acclaimed TV shows and movies: 3rd Rock from the Sun, The Dark Knight Rises, Lincoln, Looper, Inception, Snowden, 500 Days of Summer …

Having graduated from child actor to blockbuster star, it’s hard to imagine that Gordon-Levitt ever struggled to find work. Yet an actor’s life is never certain, and dry spells are not uncommon.

At Content Marketing World 2017, Gordon-Levitt talked about how just such a career dry spell led him to seize control of his creative destiny and to build something few startups and brands ever achieve: a thriving online community that not only pays for itself but also shares the wealth with its contributors.

CCO: How did the idea for HITRECORD come about? Were there moments in your life that formed the seeds for this project?

Gordon-Levitt: I’ve been an actor since I was 6 years old. At 19, I quit to go to college. When I wanted back in, I couldn’t get any acting roles. That was painful.

When you’re an actor, you depend on someone else to give you a role. That couldn’t be how it went in my life. I had to be creative and express myself on my own terms. HITRECORD became a symbol for me taking responsibility for my own creative outlet – for being the one to push that record button on the video camera. It’s also a pun. In the past, media was an object you would consume, like a hit record. Now media is more and more something you do, an action you take, something that you’re a part of.

.@hitRECord became a symbol for me taking responsibility for my own creative outlet, says @hitRECordJoe. Click To Tweet

HITRECORD evolved organically as the (online) community grew over the last 10 years. I think that’s a huge strength. You can feel the homegrown origins in the nature of HITRECORD when you go there. It’s not just a startup that was conceived as a business model. I think people feel that. It’s a big part of why creative people – who are notoriously difficult – really do trust HITRECORD. They come. They contribute. They participate. It’s not just a scheme to make money or to collect your data.

CCO: HITRECORD feels like a community for creative brainstorming and ideation. But the platform also generates finished/monetized projects. Do those projects produce enough revenue to support the community or will there be other ways to monetize?

Gordon-Levitt: For a while, it was purely a hobby I worked on with my brother. We didn’t spend money or make money. And then, starting in 2010, we launched as a production company with our co-founders.

We wanted to do ambitious things: create things good enough to become feature films, make records, write books. A TV show was our pie-in-the-sky goal.

To accomplish those things, we had to figure out the legal, intellectual property side. How would it pay for itself? How would artists get paid?

I’m a big believer that if someone works on a project and the project earns money, that person deserves some of the money. It’s great that artists are putting their stuff out there for free if that’s what they want. What I don’t like is when companies make money from contributors without sharing the money. That happens a lot on the internet.

If someone works on a project that earns money, that person deserves some of the money, says @HitRecordJoe. Click To Tweet

So we figured out how to launch HITRECORD as a product. For the first three years, I was bankrolling it. For the last four years, it’s been profitable. It’s paid for itself and grown.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Grow Your Audience From Zero to Millions in Less Than 5 Years

CCO: What’s the role of non-media brands that produce content on HITRECORD?

Gordon-Levitt: We make money from two categories: branded content and licensed content. Licensed content is like our TV show. We make it and license it to cable companies or Netflix to distribute.

The far more lucrative revenue stream for us is branded content. We have partnerships with lots of different brands. We’ve just wrapped our third year with LG, so we’ve now made three wide-playing TV spots for them. The centerpiece of one campaign was a 30-second commercial during the World Series that performed really well. We also make 60-second versions to go online.

We’ve also done stuff with Samsung, Sony, Levi’s, and National Park Foundation.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: The Only 10 Ways to Make Money From Content Marketing

CCO: What’s different about the way HITRECORD operates?

Gordon-Levitt: There are a few things that feel counterintuitive at first. That’s often the case when something’s new. One thing that’s counterintuitive is how we all work together.

Most creativity online is an individual posting something of their own: “Hey, world, look what I did.” On HITRECORD, we’re more about what we can do together when we collaborate. Even very successful sites that crowdsource creativity aren’t really collaborative. They’ll put out a brief and say, “Whoever fulfills this brief the best will win the prize.”

What we do is different. When we issue creative challenges, it’s about people working together to fulfill the challenge in the best way possible. It’s very rare that a single writer will fill the challenge themselves. Other writers will jump in and remix what the first writer did. The result isn’t limited by what the best contest entry is. It can be better than your best entry to the contest. In that way, working together is more effective than just a bunch of isolated individuals working on their own.

CCO: I was inspired by the HITRECORD-produced video of “You’re Not the Only One” as it sums up how a massive group of creatives across multiple disciplines can come together to produce amazing television. How does HITRECORD inspire you personally as an actor and director?

Gordon-Levitt: That song is about not being alone. The internet can be a lonely place even though it brings people together from all over the world. A lot of the platforms on the internet don’t actually encourage togetherness. They don’t encourage people working together to achieve something they wouldn’t be able to achieve on their own.

The result of what online culture has become is everyone trying to be loudest to get the most attention for themselves. There’s something really uplifting about seeing people on HITRECORD come together and prop each other up, working together towards a common goal. The internet’s potential is in collaboration. In the past, it wouldn’t have been possible to have all these people putting their heads together on one thing.

The inherent challenge is how to organize so it doesn’t devolve into chaos. That’s what we work on. We haven’t perfected it yet, but over time we keep getting better at it.

The internet’s potential is in collaboration, putting all these heads together on one thing. @hitRECordJoe‏ Click To Tweet

Collaboration in motion: First Stars I See Tonight

This moving short film was created from a member-submitted story about how she came to see the stars for the first time at age 16.

Gordon-Levitt adapted the “record” into a script and issued challenges to the visual artists in the community to illustrate the story around actors Elle Fanning and James Patrick Stuart. Another member contributed the score, from which member musicians in many countries performed their contributions and submitted the recordings.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: User-Generated Content: Where Does It Fit in Your Content Marketing Strategy?

A version of this article originally appeared in the May issue of  Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our print magazine every quarter.

Experience the 2018 keynote from Tina Fey at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today for best rates and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Actor Brings Community Model to Content Creation appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/05/community-content-creation/

Actor Brings Community Model to Content Creation

Don’t be fooled by his moniker on HITRECORD, the collaborative production company he founded with his brother in 2004. Actor, director, writer, and producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt is anything but a regular Joe.

His acting career already spans three decades and includes a long list of popular and acclaimed TV shows and movies: 3rd Rock from the Sun, The Dark Knight Rises, Lincoln, Looper, Inception, Snowden, 500 Days of Summer …

Having graduated from child actor to blockbuster star, it’s hard to imagine that Gordon-Levitt ever struggled to find work. Yet an actor’s life is never certain, and dry spells are not uncommon.

At Content Marketing World 2017, Gordon-Levitt talked about how just such a career dry spell led him to seize control of his creative destiny and to build something few startups and brands ever achieve: a thriving online community that not only pays for itself but also shares the wealth with its contributors.

CCO: How did the idea for HITRECORD come about? Were there moments in your life that formed the seeds for this project?

Gordon-Levitt: I’ve been an actor since I was 6 years old. At 19, I quit to go to college. When I wanted back in, I couldn’t get any acting roles. That was painful.

When you’re an actor, you depend on someone else to give you a role. That couldn’t be how it went in my life. I had to be creative and express myself on my own terms. HITRECORD became a symbol for me taking responsibility for my own creative outlet – for being the one to push that record button on the video camera. It’s also a pun. In the past, media was an object you would consume, like a hit record. Now media is more and more something you do, an action you take, something that you’re a part of.

.@hitRECord became a symbol for me taking responsibility for my own creative outlet, says @hitRECordJoe. Click To Tweet

HITRECORD evolved organically as the (online) community grew over the last 10 years. I think that’s a huge strength. You can feel the homegrown origins in the nature of HITRECORD when you go there. It’s not just a startup that was conceived as a business model. I think people feel that. It’s a big part of why creative people – who are notoriously difficult – really do trust HITRECORD. They come. They contribute. They participate. It’s not just a scheme to make money or to collect your data.

CCO: HITRECORD feels like a community for creative brainstorming and ideation. But the platform also generates finished/monetized projects. Do those projects produce enough revenue to support the community or will there be other ways to monetize?

Gordon-Levitt: For a while, it was purely a hobby I worked on with my brother. We didn’t spend money or make money. And then, starting in 2010, we launched as a production company with our co-founders.

We wanted to do ambitious things: create things good enough to become feature films, make records, write books. A TV show was our pie-in-the-sky goal.

To accomplish those things, we had to figure out the legal, intellectual property side. How would it pay for itself? How would artists get paid?

I’m a big believer that if someone works on a project and the project earns money, that person deserves some of the money. It’s great that artists are putting their stuff out there for free if that’s what they want. What I don’t like is when companies make money from contributors without sharing the money. That happens a lot on the internet.

If someone works on a project that earns money, that person deserves some of the money, says @HitRecordJoe. Click To Tweet

So we figured out how to launch HITRECORD as a product. For the first three years, I was bankrolling it. For the last four years, it’s been profitable. It’s paid for itself and grown.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Grow Your Audience From Zero to Millions in Less Than 5 Years

CCO: What’s the role of non-media brands that produce content on HITRECORD?

Gordon-Levitt: We make money from two categories: branded content and licensed content. Licensed content is like our TV show. We make it and license it to cable companies or Netflix to distribute.

The far more lucrative revenue stream for us is branded content. We have partnerships with lots of different brands. We’ve just wrapped our third year with LG, so we’ve now made three wide-playing TV spots for them. The centerpiece of one campaign was a 30-second commercial during the World Series that performed really well. We also make 60-second versions to go online.

We’ve also done stuff with Samsung, Sony, Levi’s, and National Park Foundation.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: The Only 10 Ways to Make Money From Content Marketing

CCO: What’s different about the way HITRECORD operates?

Gordon-Levitt: There are a few things that feel counterintuitive at first. That’s often the case when something’s new. One thing that’s counterintuitive is how we all work together.

Most creativity online is an individual posting something of their own: “Hey, world, look what I did.” On HITRECORD, we’re more about what we can do together when we collaborate. Even very successful sites that crowdsource creativity aren’t really collaborative. They’ll put out a brief and say, “Whoever fulfills this brief the best will win the prize.”

What we do is different. When we issue creative challenges, it’s about people working together to fulfill the challenge in the best way possible. It’s very rare that a single writer will fill the challenge themselves. Other writers will jump in and remix what the first writer did. The result isn’t limited by what the best contest entry is. It can be better than your best entry to the contest. In that way, working together is more effective than just a bunch of isolated individuals working on their own.

CCO: I was inspired by the HITRECORD-produced video of “You’re Not the Only One” as it sums up how a massive group of creatives across multiple disciplines can come together to produce amazing television. How does HITRECORD inspire you personally as an actor and director?

Gordon-Levitt: That song is about not being alone. The internet can be a lonely place even though it brings people together from all over the world. A lot of the platforms on the internet don’t actually encourage togetherness. They don’t encourage people working together to achieve something they wouldn’t be able to achieve on their own.

The result of what online culture has become is everyone trying to be loudest to get the most attention for themselves. There’s something really uplifting about seeing people on HITRECORD come together and prop each other up, working together towards a common goal. The internet’s potential is in collaboration. In the past, it wouldn’t have been possible to have all these people putting their heads together on one thing.

The inherent challenge is how to organize so it doesn’t devolve into chaos. That’s what we work on. We haven’t perfected it yet, but over time we keep getting better at it.

The internet’s potential is in collaboration, putting all these heads together on one thing. @hitRECordJoe‏ Click To Tweet

Collaboration in motion: First Stars I See Tonight

This moving short film was created from a member-submitted story about how she came to see the stars for the first time at age 16.

Gordon-Levitt adapted the “record” into a script and issued challenges to the visual artists in the community to illustrate the story around actors Elle Fanning and James Patrick Stuart. Another member contributed the score, from which member musicians in many countries performed their contributions and submitted the recordings.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: User-Generated Content: Where Does It Fit in Your Content Marketing Strategy?

A version of this article originally appeared in the May issue of  Chief Content Officer. Sign up to receive your free subscription to our print magazine every quarter.

Experience the 2018 keynote from Tina Fey at Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Register today for best rates and use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

from http://bit.ly/2xb7z0K