RKO No He Didn’t.

For reasons that are none of your business I was just now reading about the movie RKO 281 which was made about 700 years ago and/or in 1999, which is basically the same thing.

I have both seen and enjoyed this movie. It is about the making of Citizen Kane. The movie is basically about Orson Welles (played by a dynamite and youthful Liev Shreiber) as he is lured from the NYC theatre and radio scene by Hollywood and how he then proceeds to (due to a petty personal gripe) decide to make a movie excoriating William Randolph Hearst whose nickname at the time was “Literally the Only Dude You Don’t Want to Piss Off”.

I have not watched RKO 281 in more than a decade, but it made a big impression on me when I did watch it. I have a distinct memory of Liev Shreiber shouting - about the art and industry of making movies - “It is the most powerful storytelling medium in the history of mankind and it is controlled by bankers!”

I can find no place on the internet willing to confirm the existence of this dialogue, so I guess I should go watch the movie again.

The point is salient though, right?

My BFF Mike The Director is constantly annoyed by the fact that I like to play at both writer and producer and so I will write things like, “And then the moon EXPLODED and melted all the buildings on Earth, but then EVERYONE REALIZED that buildings were not important and so over the next 300 YEARS they developed an agrarian society based on simple trade and which focused on meeting the emotional needs of human beings rather than on the erstwhile construct of “personal successes” or EXISTENTIAL VALIDATION” and then MTD is all like, “How the fuck am I supposed to make a movie out of that?” and then I am all like, “I don’t know, but we seriously do not have the budget for an exploding moon.”

RKO 281 is a fantastic movie because the actors in it are good (did I mention John Malkovich plays the writer?), the script is great (written by a dude named John Logan, based on a documentary by Richard Ben Cramer and Thomas Lennon), the subject matter is fascinating, and because it traffics in the creative process itself which we all experience in our lives, be it in the form of writing shit down the way I do, visualizing it the way my friend Mike does, or simply settling into bed at the end of the day and plotting out a series of events for the next day. We tend to mitigate the importance of creativity in our lives, but without it we would be worse off. Without it we would be in the weeds.

At one point in the movie RKO 281 - if I recall correctly - a cinematographer shows up and says something along the lines of, “Hey, I wanta work with you” and when Welles asks after the guy’s credentials he removes from his duffel an Oscar for cinematography. That is the dream for all of us auteurs. Talent and skill all coming together in the service of something good.

There is always a struggle between the effort of making and the product of that making. As a simple, lowly writer I rely only on the reader to be my partner, but even that is more complicated than I am acknowledging.

If I have to sum all of this up, I would say that there is a difference between the initial creative impulse (think: an exploding moon) and the exercise of the creative muscle (think: a short film about exploding moons). And, I guess, I think that you should get on Hulu right now and actually watch Citizen Kane 70 times and actually watch RKO 281 35 times and then let me know how transformed you are by this experience I advised you to have. Though I suppose it is possible I’m just bored and trying to Rick-Roll you into watching better movies than you normally do because, let’s be honest here, your Netflix history is pretty embarrassing.

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All Your Badger News.

It is very easy for us to get caught up in our own busy lives and to miss out on the important things and to forget that there is a wider world out there that needs our attention. Sometimes even when we want to keep abreast of the affairs of the world it is difficult to know where to even start; the world is a daunting place right now: Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, the Ebola outbreak, ISIS. There’s the independence vote in Scotland, the upcoming midterm elections here at home, the economy is still in a slog, the wealth gap is as large as it has ever been and the western US is basically out of water. Like I said: daunting.

In light of all that, the editors here at Standardkink want to do our part and keep you up-to-date on one of the important issues you have probably not paid any attention to, that’s right: badger murdering.

For those of you who grew up in urban environments, this is a badger:  

This is an angry badger:

This is a skeptical badger who has lost his optimism and sense of purpose because he just read some Camus or something:

This is a still from the upcoming Quentin Tarantino children’s movie “Furry Friends Who Grow Up and Try to Eat Each Other”:

This is a badger who just wants you to rub his tummy:

This is a story about how the Brits are near a complete social collapse of the sort not seen since the War of the Roses on account of a government-sanctioned experiment to murder a bunch of badgers. It has something to do with stopping the spread of bovine tuberculosis. Well Britain has unwashed badger-loving hippies too and - god love them - they are threatening to hide in the bushes and throw themselves between the hunters and the badgers when the shooting starts. I imagine it will be something like the end of “In the Line of Fire” when Clint Eastwood throws himself between John Malkovich and the guy playing the President.

Some of them are, apparently, also infiltrating the groups of hunters, to what end I’m really not sure.

You can read about it all right here.

Also of interest: there is a surprisingly wide array of pictures of badgers on the internet. For instance, here is a badger in a helmet:

 This is a badger who is too close to the camera:

This is a badger who is alone. So alone:

This is a baby badger who wants to know why you let them murder his mother:

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No Country for Kevin Bacon.

The other night I was totally exhausted and I was sitting on the couch clicking back and forth between two different movies. This post gets more interesting, I promise.

I was watching “No Country for Old Men” and “In the Line of Fire”.

I started to think about how, with so many good and/or popular actors were in these two movies that it would be really easy to connect the two somehow Kevin Bacon Style.

Well then I started to think about it and think about it and think about it . . . and it was really hard for me! Now maybe this will be easy for you, maybe I just missed some HUGE connection, but I didn’t think so, which is fascinating because here you have Clint Eastwood, John Malkovich, Rene Russo and then Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Woody Harelson, Tommy Lee Jones!

This should be easy, right!

Clint Eastwood has worked with Morgan Freeman who has worked with everybody! John Malkovich has worked with John Cusack and Cameron Diaz! Rene Russo has worked with Mel Gibson! Josh Brolin has worked with Richard Dreyfuss!

But I could not make it work. I was so frustrated.

And then, like a vision, like an angel, who should walk into that meeting room in the Old Executive Office Building and shake hands with Clint Eastwood? Who?



That’s right, Bill Lumbergh himself, Gary Cole.

And like a flash of jagged lightning sent on high from Kevin Bacon I had it!

Gary Cole is in “In the Line of Fire” and also in “Pinapple Express” with James Franco who was in “Milk” with Josh Brolin who was in “No Country for Old Men”.

Success! I was very proud of myself because it was a job well done. It was not pretty and it was not clean and it was not fancy, but god-as-my-witness I stuck the landing.

But something about it still didn’t sit right with me and for days now it has been slowly gnawing at my brain like some sort of water-borne Amazonian disease. And then just now I came up with it! I figured it out! It has the kind of simple elegance that physicists used to look for when contemplating the Grand Unified Theory.

Do you know what it is? Can you connect them?

You probably can, you probably already have, but if you have not then scroll down. But if you want to stew on it for a little while, then don’t scroll down. It is an exercise in freedom.

TTFN.

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“Space Cowboys” staring Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones.

Oh, and because it is (almost) tangentially related, here is a picture of Scarlett Johansson (who was in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” with Javier Bardem, and who is also in love with me).