Archives for 2003

I went to Lileks and what did I see? “Curse you, Terry Teachout!” In boldface, yet. And how had I given offense? By mentioning that I’d written a piece about Paul Whiteman without saying where it ran. I’m innocent, innocent! The piece hasn’t run yet, but it will–in next month’s Commentary–and when it does, I’ll post a link in the “Teachout in Commentary” module of the right-hand column.

I promise. Really. Anything to keep Gnat’s dad happy.

P.S. If you’re a Lileks reader who is new to this site, click here to find out what we’re all about.

Drudge (who has been way out front on this story) quotes an unnamed “top source,” presumably from CBS, as saying that network head Les Moonves made “a brave, decisive move” in personally choosing not to air The Reagans.

Now that’s what I call brave and decisive: having your boots licked by an anonymous source inside your own shop.

Here is CBS’s official statement about its decision not to telecast The Reagans:

CBS will not broadcast THE REAGANS on November 16 and 18. This decision is based solely on our reaction to seeing the final film, not the controversy that erupted around a draft of the script.

Although the mini-series features impressive production values and acting performances, and although the producers have sources to verify each scene in the script, we believe it does not present a balanced portrayal of the Reagans for CBS and its audience. Subsequent edits that we considered did not address those concerns.

A free broadcast network, available to all over the public airwaves, has different standards than media the public must pay to view. We do, however, recognize and respect the filmmakers’ right to have their voice heard and their film seen. As such, we have reached an agreement to license the exhibition rights for the film to Showtime, a subscriber-based, pay-cable network. We believe this is a solution that benefits everyone involved.

This was not an easy decision to make. CBS does tackle controversial subjects and provide tough assessments of prominent historical figures and events, as we did with films such as “Jesus,” “9-11” and “Hitler.” We will continue to do so in the future.

As a Media Person, I see a lot of press releases, and thus have learned to take most of them with a cellar of salt, but this one is striking for its comprehensive lack of candor. If you were born earlier than this morning, you don’t need me to tell you that CBS decided to pull The Reagans solely and only because of the “controversy.” They didn’t give a damn whether it was “balanced.” All they cared about was whether enough people would watch the series to make it worth broadcasting–and the firestorm of outrage among conservatives, whom one would assume to make up a large part of the target market for a network miniseries about Ronald and Nancy Reagan, left little doubt that such would not be the case.

I’m sure that everybody and his sister will be blogging about this one, and they’ll mostly be right. Of course it’s a new-media story, and of course it wouldn’t have happened five years ago. I’ve been following Big Media’s coverage of the flap over The Reagans, and just two days ago I noted with interest and amusement a wire story claiming that CBS would be pleased by the controversy, since it would inevitably increase the series’ ratings. That is soooooo last year. Those of us who blog, whatever our political persuasions, know better. Boycotts of Big Media have always been feasible in theory. (Newspapers, in case you didn’t know, take cancel-my-subscription-you-bastards letters very seriously–if they get enough of them.) In practice, though, they rarely worked, because it was too difficult to mobilize large-scale support quickly enough. No more. Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative-libertarian sector of the blogosphere have combined to create a giant megaphone through which disaffected right-wing consumers who have a bone to pick with Big Media can now make themselves heard.

All that, as I say, is pretty obvious, and need not be belabored further. Besides, this is an art-and-culture blog, not a political blog, so I want to turn to what I regard as the really interesting part of the story, which is that by relegating The Reagans to Showtime, CBS has publicly acknowledged, albeit implicitly, the growing weakness of Big Media. Now that the common culture is a thing of the past, lowest-common-denominator programming is harder and harder to pull off, as is lowest-common-denominator editing. To do it, you have to keep lowering the denominator further and further. When your overhead is as high as it is at CBS, you can’t afford to give offense, nor can you afford to be sophisticated. Above all, you don’t dare try to lead the culture anywhere it doesn’t care to go–not if your job is to keep your numbers in the black.

The new media impact on Big Media in two ways. The first is the megaphone effect I spoke about a moment ago. The second, which is of at least equal importance, is that they compete with Big Media. If you’re reading these words, you’re not watching CBS, or anybody else, nor are you sitting in a movie theater or reading a print magazine. If you’re using iTunes to download two tunes off Radiohead’s last CD, you’re not buying the CD–though you might do so at some point in the future.

Five years ago, opponents of The Reagans would have failed to sway CBS because of their inability to make enough noise. The network would have taken the “high road” and stared them down, and been praised for its courage by other Big Media outlets. And if it were only a matter of noise, CBS would have done the same thing today…but it isn’t. Today, CBS is fighting for its corporate life. So are NBC, ABC, Time, TV Guide, the Reader’s Digest, and all the film studios and record labels. They can’t afford to ignore the noise anymore, no matter which side of the political fence it comes from. And they won’t.

Eve Tushnet
has some brief but interesting remarks on Grosse Pointe Blank, a movie that she (and I) liked very much. (Don’t get Our Girl started on John Cusack!)

Ballet Alert has a nice thread on Edward Gorey’s legendary obsession with New York City Ballet. The last posting, signed “RG,” is by my colleague Robert Greskovic, dance critic of The Wall Street Journal and author of Ballet 101, the best introductory book about ballet ever written. He knew Gorey quite well–insofar as he was knowable.

My Stupid Dog reports on the Kennedy Center premiere of Stephen Sondheim’s Bounce. I can’t see the show until it opens on Broadway because I have to review it in its final form for the Journal, so I’m green with envy.

“Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.”

Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music

The New York Times had an interesting story on Sunday about The Producers, which is still turning a profit every week, but a much smaller one than when the show was new:

Its box office grosses, which set record highs–more than $1.2 million per week–in its first year, have fallen about 20 percent in the last 12 months. It now ranks below newer shows like “Hairspray” and “Mamma Mia!” as well as “The Lion King,” the 1997 Disney phenomenon whose success some believed “The Producers” might emulate. Worse, in a supremely status-conscious metropolis, the show is now an easy ticket. “The Producers” has not regularly sold out since the beginning of the year, despite a bout of new television advertising.

I’m not surprised, nor should you be. As I wrote here back in July, Mel Brooks’ Borscht-belt style of anything-for-a-laugh humor is the last gasp of a dying comic language:

To see The Producers is to be immersed one final time in that older style of pressure-cooker comedy, and for those of us who were born before 1960 or so, the experience is as sweetly nostalgic as a trip to the state fair, which I rather doubt is what Mel Brooks had in mind. My guess is that he still thinks it’s titillating, even shocking, to put swishy Nazis on stage. It’s no accident that he hasn’t made a movie for years and years: Broadway is the last place in America where he could possibly draw a crowd with that kind of humor, and it’s not an especially young crowd, either.

With six months’ worth of Wall Street Journal drama columns under my belt, I feel even more confident in saying that we won’t be seeing many more shows like The Producers. If you seek the future of musical comedy on Broadway, look to Avenue Q. It’s smaller, hipper, faster, snarkier. And–yes–better.

Damn you, OGIC, for being smarter than me. I wrote a print-media review of Mystic River (the piece hasn’t run yet, but will be posted in the right-hand column in the next week or so), and I didn’t say one thing about Laura Linney, whom I adore and admire without reserve and whose small but staggering bit at the end of the film deserved all the praise you gave it. What’s more, it does change the total effect of Mystic River…but did I mention it? Nooooooooo.

OGIC and I blogged compulsively on Friday and over the weekend, so if you were too busy dressing up as a sexy ketchup bottle (or recovering from a post-Halloween hangover) to visit us, keep on scrolling until your fingers go numb. Among other things, you’ll find postings on: