THE WEAK STUFF

What's wrong with this picture? Roy Disney's resignation from the board of the Walt Disney Company was big news yesterday. Today, Sharon Waxman, in a follow-up in The New York Times, reports: "Roy Disney's parting words to the company his uncle built were harsh, but few resonated more painfully than the charge that the Walt Disney Company has 'lost its focus, its creative energy and its heritage.' " Her lede ends: "A significant number of Hollywood executives would agree."

She's probably right. But she never really substantiates that assertion. How many is significant? A handful? Ten? Three dozen? Waxman doesn't say. She also fails to quote a single one of the "significant number" to support her point, unless you count publicity-hungry Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, who's had troubles with Disney. Waxman does say she spoke to an unnamed studio executive who "once kept a list of departing Disney executives, but stopped when the roster topped 100."

And how about this assertion? "Many in the [film] industry questioned the notion of basing movies, like 'Pirates of the Caribbean,' on theme park rides." Sounds like a dumb Disney idea to me, too. But who are the many she cites? Just one: Tim Doyle, co-founder of "a leading movie fan Web site." Maybe Doyle makes movies on the side.

This is reporting? From the Times, no less? It's under-reporting. Waxman, newly hired from The Washington Post, has been pretty weak before. I don't know how she got away with it at the Post. Maybe it's because Hollywood is not a Post priority?

December 2, 2003 12:22 PM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on December 2, 2003 12:22 PM.

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