MOTHER EARTH

Imagine engaging an artist and inquiring, as he painted, “Wait, wait, why are you putting that brushstroke there?” or “How will that patch of pigment increase the thing’s salability?” Now you have an insight into the Producer’s mind.

The afflicted painter wants to buy a ball-peen hammer and whack himself in the head till the handle breaks, but the Producer perhaps feels he is doing his job. Why? He is doing his job, which, after putting the project together (if indeed he’s done that), is to fuck everything up.

When the lights go down you’ve GOT their attention. Lists of producers’ logos on the screen is annoying, stupid, AND COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE. It is a vanity operation, alright, but, as the aim of the corporations should be to make money, the display of their logos, watering down the audience’s attention, weakens the strength of the product. As does the endless display of the names of producers, who, in their multitude, would seem to indicate that the sole requirement for getting your name on the screen is being born.

At least back in the Studio Days they were doing whatever they did for personal gain.

Today’s Executives, it seems, are ushering in an unbridled reign of Virtue. But of old, we demanded virtue only of the clergy, who, on investigation, usually proved to be as randy and sick as the rest of us.

A student of history must assume that the hegemony of the Talentless is a result, rather than a cause, of decomposition. One generation rises and another generation passes away, but the earth endures forever.^I And Mother Earth is the great scavenger.

Just as, during my lifetime, SoHo (and then Tribeca) evolved from an abandoned factory district into artist squatter housing, then into gentrification; and, catering to the gentry, into the city’s eventual prime luxury shopping district; so, after the riots, begins the decay back into slums, squatter housing, and, with the death of the city, desolation.

Thus Hollywood or, more particularly, my life form, having succeeded in Hollywood and then aged out, scavenges some benefit from tell-alls, cartoons, and captions. That is my version of the faded film idol taken to shoplifting as the sole remaining possibility of maintaining public notice.

1. I. The Bible, a ripping good yarn.