Knowledge Is Good
Hope you’re staying warm and that your pipes haven’t frozen. To celebrate, or to commiserate as the case may be, here once again is my favorite rendition of “A Visit From Saint Nicholas”, as performed by cartoon and voice actors:
As noted before, I’ve been posting this for over a decade, I watch it every year, and it remains one of my favorite things. Happy Christmas Eve to all who celebrate.
In May 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed into law SB8, also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act. It’s the latest, and most contested, challenge to the 1973 Supreme Court decision made in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States. Since Abbott’s adoption of the law, which allows any private citizen to sue someone who performs or aids and abets an abortion once “cardiac activity” can be detected, the current Supreme Court has denied a motion to block the act from going into effect; the White House is reportedly preparing to sue Texas; Abbott has signed a Senate bill that requires physicians providing abortion-inducing drugs up to seven weeks into a pregnancy to report such doings at the risk of possible jail time; and everyone from HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver to The Satanic Temple has argued against the law.
But Hollywood has been relatively quiet on the matter. While the Texas law inspired some outcry from names like The Wire’s David Simon, Boyhood’s Patricia Arquette, and her sister, Ratched’s Rosanna Arquette, as well as scattered refusals to film in the state, the response hasn’t been nearly as urgent as it was in 2019, when Georgia had its own “fetal heartbeat” bill.
Back then, Disney CEO Bob Iger told Reuters that if that bill became law, it would be “very difficult” to produce films and TV series there. “I rather doubt we will,” he added. When asked about it during that summer’s Television Critics Association press tour, Mark Pedowitz—president of the CW, a channel that’s a subsidiary of WarnerMedia and CBS Entertainment Group and that has a history of airing shows filmed in Georgia—was similarly responsive. “Anybody who interferes with people’s right to make medical choices, I am solely against,” he said. “If the law is passed, I am certain we’ll have discussions with both studios about what to do and what not to do in terms of where Georgia sits.”
Why, then, has the Texas bill not catalyzed the same level of fervor? Simple: “Texas is not a production hub on par with Georgia,” television producer and writer Amy Berg says via email.
Berg, who was interviewed by Vanity Fair in 2019 about her decision to call for a boycott then—and, judging from her Twitter feed, is no fan of the Texas law either—continues that “even Louisiana and New Mexico have traditionally been more film-friendly. Perhaps that’s why boycotting Texas isn’t something that comes to mind immediately as a vehicle for expressing outrage or inducing meaningful change.”
There’s more to it than that, and as with Stacey Abrams’ plea for businesses to not boycott Georgia following the passage of its recent voter suppression law, there are concerns that any such action would just hurt small businesses and people without power, while being welcomed by the state’s Republican leaders who’d be happy to be in opposition to Hollywood types. You can feel however you want to about this, but I think we can all agree that this is a complex question and that people can approach it in good faith from different angles.
Everything old really is new again.
In the midst of ongoing concerns and restrictions over the Covid-19 pandemic, Houston is going back to the future with a new drive-in movie theater. The Drive-In at Sawyer Yards, a pop-up operated by the Los Angeles-based Rooftop Cinema Club chain, is set to open May 12 with a line-up of classic films for an audience that doesn’t have to leave the car.
Located at 2301 Summer St., right near Buffalo Bayou Brewing Co., The Drive-In at Sawyer Yards will offer two screenings seven days a week. This is the company’s second drive-in venture as it already operates one in London, England.
“Bringing back the nostalgia of the drive-in theater as well as the return of a great American institution, the kings of outdoor cinema want to provide relief through the power of film to Houstonians during this difficult time. Guests of the new drive-in theater can have an away-from-home cinema experience from the security of their own vehicle,” the company said in a statement Wednesday.
The opening films are “Grease” and “Drive” and they will be followed by “Night at the Museum” (May 13), “Silence of the Lambs” (May 13), “The Princess Bride” (May 14), “Romeo + Juliet” (May 14), “The Greatest Showman” (May 15), “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (May 15), “Grease” (May 16), “Moulin Rouge” (May 16), and “The Sandlot” (May 17) and “Brown Sugar” (May 17).
Tickets — at $28 per vehicle regardless of occupancy — can be purchased online beginning today at noon at www.rooftopcinemaclub.com/houston/venue/the-drive-in-sawyer-yards. Moviegoers can bring their own snacks or order concessions from Rooftop Cinema or food and drinks from Buffalo Brewing Co. All orders are made online and guests will be notified for pick-up to avoid unnecessary time spent away from their vehicles.
I just showed this to my 13-year-old, and she was excited by the idea. (She also reminded me that I have not seen “The Greatest Showman”, which she considers a travesty on my part.) So yeah, I think we have a movie night in our future. Anyone know what Joe Bob Briggs is up to these days?
I’ve posted a few times about how sports leagues like MLB are making plans to return to action from coronavirus shutdowns. The larger entertainment industry, including TV and movie making, are in a similar position as the sports leagues, and they too are starting to game out how they can (safely) return to doing what they do. This story gives a good outline of where that stands.
We are still months away from cameras rolling — studios’ most optimistic projections are for July-August production restarts, and the more realistic ones are aiming to be up and running by September. California is still under a stay-at-home order, which currently expires on May 15.
There are many different issues we will cover, starting today with the resumption of location and soundstage shoots.
Getting up and running again in this brave new world is going to be very difficult to navigate. For one thing, insurers are unlikely to cover productions for COVID-19 cases when business resumes, according to multiple sources in the know. Producers all over filed multimillion-dollar claims triggered when civil authorities — governments — prevented filming from continuing and forcing production shutdowns. When the business starts up, that will now be considered an identified risk, and insurers will not cover it, sources said, just as CDC is warning of a second coronavirus wave.
What does that mean? Most likely, everyone on a film or TV production will be required to sign a rider, similar to ones they sign covering behavior codes in areas like sexual harassment, to indemnify the productions. “You acknowledge you are going into a high-density area, and while we will do our best effort to protect you, nothing is failsafe and if you contract COVID-19, we are not liable,” said a source involved drawing up these guidelines. “There is no other way we can think of to address this. If you don’t want to sign, don’t take the job.”
Conversations about how to return to production began ramping up late last week amid stabilizing levels of new COVID-19 cases and deaths in Los Angeles County, boosted by an encouraging drop in new infections over the weekend. Unfortunately, the optimism was short lived — Tuesday and Wednesday brought record spikes in deaths– but discussions continue because the business cannot begin to recover until an industry goes back to work.
So far, there are no protocols on which studios have settled, but active discussions continue, including with the film commissions in New York and Los Angeles, we hear. AMPTP and IATSE are leaning in hardest here to map lists of safety concerns and solutions, and every major studio in Hollywood has top people trying to figure out every scenario that needs to be addressed before shows can get up and running. The same conversations are taking place in other areas that touch the business, from the offices where people work and congregate, to hotspot eateries and movie theaters.
A lot of this starts with the state of California’s plan to gradually ease up on restrictions. Studios will still need to contend with any remaining local restrictions. There’s a lot in here, from catering to heavier use of green screens to avoid filming crowds to extra special handling of topline stars, and some of the items listed will likely be similar to the steps other businesses will have to take to reopen their own offices. Check it out.
Click play on the grainy, black-and-white image titled simply “Houston Time Service” on the website of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image and you’re treated to a 110-second Houston love story.
The film, from the 1940s, is about a phone number Houstonians could call to get the correct time. Ruth McClain Graham owned the service, according to an Oct. 24, 1947, Houston Chronicle story. Two years earlier she had married Shadrack E. “Shad” Graham, an itinerant filmmaker, who, apparently taken with the proprietor, produced the film promoting the business.
But film, like love, can be short-lived, and that’s what has driven Caroline Frick’s race against time. The role of film preservationists like Frick, an associate professor of film at the University of Texas’ Moody College of Communication in Austin, becomes ever more crucial as moving images depicting life and history become unplayable.
As the years play on, the decay of aging motion picture film accelerates, as does the quality of magnetic tape on which video is recorded. Video projectors and old-format tape machines break, are not repaired and discarded. The race to get these recordings into a digital format – also unlikely to survive forever – becomes more crucial with each passing year.
“This is what we are trying to prevent,” says Frick, who founded and is executive director of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, or TAMI, in 2003, opening a plastic bag filled with what looks at first glance to be beef jerky. It’s actually decomposing celluloid, curled and blackened. The smell from the bag is a pungent, vinegary rot, and in TAMI’s crowded offices near downtown Austin, you can catch a whiff if you stand next to stacks of boxes filled with 8-, 16- and 35-millimeter film.
Another threat is in the shrinking universe of ways to watch these historic movies, a dwindling number of obsolete devices available for playback. Frick points to a Sony reel-to-reel videotape machine on the floor that once was the pride of a television station editing room. It was designed to work with a now-abandoned, 1-inch tape format.
“We were able to play something once on that after we got it, and then it broke,” she says, sighing. “We’re still looking for parts.”
A staff of five — all part-timers — are in the office on this chilly January day. Some work on physical restoration of film, others scan it into computers for digitization. Another crew catalogs and curates, putting context to the images that, ultimately, stream across the internet to computers, phones and tablets.
It is a daunting task, hampered by a lack of funding — TAMI’s annual budget is in the $300,000 range — and made overwhelming by the sheer amount of content that flows in. So far, TAMI has digitized about 58 terabytes of film and video, but only 10 percent of that is available for viewing at its website, texasarchive.org.
“The number one reason for the disconnect between what we have digitized vs. what is streaming is budget – the human labor of researching and contextualizing the content,” Frick says. “Everyone is excited about what AI will be able to do some day (for automated curation) but, as of yet, nothing is as reliable or useful as the human eye and brain.”
I’m old enough to remember calling a phone number to get the correct time. Crazy to think about now, but here we are. In any event, preserving old film is a much more challenging task than preserving old books because of the technological barriers. Look at it this way: Most of us have obsolete technology from recent years that has information on it that is now unreadable to us, like various forms of portable storage from computers. The TAMI folks have to deal with machines from decades ago, where there may literally be nothing else like them in existence. Once these old films are gone, that’s it, they’re completely lost to history. Whatever the value of any individual piece of celluloid may be, it sure is a shame to lose something like that. Read the rest of the story and check out the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. Maybe you have something that would interest them.
Of interest to me, and other middle-aged guys like me.
This past week Houston filmmaker and blogger Mike McGuff released a trailer for his upcoming film about the late, great radio station, Rock 101 KLOL-FM, and it’s getting Houstonians of a certain vintage very excited for the finished product.
The story of the raunchy Houston radio phenomenon will be told in McGuff’s first documentary, with appearances from the likes of Outlaw Dave (one of the Texican’s creative mentors), Lanny Griffith, Colonel St. James, Pat Fant, David Sadof and even the late Jim Pruett of morning duo Stevens and Pruett in footage shot before he passed away in 2016.
To help with this long-gestating rock doc, McGuff, a former newsman, has turned to crowdsourcing platform IndieGoGo to bankroll some final nips and tucks for the promotional side of things. He’s hoping for a wide release in 2020, just in time for the station’s 50th anniversary. KLOL, formerly KTRH-FM, was born in 1970 as a progressive-rock station, evolved into a more structured album-oriented-rock and then classic-rock station before owner Clear Channel flipped it to Spanish-language in 2004.
As McGuff says, it has been a long journey to get this film in the can. When it comes to labors of love, sometimes time is the best ingredient.
“This project was only supposed to take a couple of years, at least that is what I told my very patient wife back in 2010,” McGuff says. “The years kept piling on as I kept chasing people for interviews, conducted a bunch of research, and waited for people’s photos and video to be found.”
As their onetime promo went, I admit it, I listened to Stevens and Pruett back in the day, and not just them. My enthusiasm for Dayna Steele’s Congressional campaign came very honestly, I assure you. I was right in the sweet spot of their demographic. Anyway, you can see a trailer for this here, and if you want to contribute to the Indiegogo campaign, you can do that here. You know you want to.
I can see why she might intimidate him
Texas Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick is not too pleased that Oscar winning actress Sandra Bullock has agreed to star in a movie about former state Sen. Wendy Davis, whose 13-hour filibuster helped stall an anti-abortion bill in 2013.
“It saddens me that Sandra Bullock agreed to play Wendy Davis in a movie called ‘Let Her Speak,'” Patrick said in downtown Austin, just miles from where Bullock once owned a home.
When a member of the audience doubted it, Patrick assured the crowd it was true.
“Sandra Bullock,” he repeated. “I used to like her.”
But Patrick said he’s already taking steps to keep Bullock and film crews out of the Senate chamber to recreate the filibuster that raised Davis’s statewide profile. Davis ran for governor in 2014 and lost to Gov. Greg Abbott.
“And by the way, if I have anything to do with it, I’m not going to let them use the Senate chamber to shoot, because they’ve already disgraced it once,” Patrick said. “They’re not going to do it a second time.”
Patrick told the audience at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative public policy advocacy group, that he already has other issues with the movie. He said they sent him a script and asked, “Guess who the villain is?”
After a pause, Patrick raised his right hand and smiled: “Me.”
Can’t imagine why anyone might think of you that way, Danno. Now please go ahead and show me where that mean lady hurt you. You’re safe now. RG Ratcliffe has more.
Make your own Tom DeLay joke. Mine is in the embedded image.
Rick Perry’s spirit animal
Former Gov. Rick Perry is joining the new season of “Dancing With the Stars.”
Texas’ longest-serving governor will be a contestant in the 23rd season of the dance competition show, which premieres Sept. 12 on ABC. Perry will be paired with professional dancer Emma Slater, the network announced Tuesday morning.
Entertainment Tonight broke the news Monday, and in a round of media appearances shortly before the lineup announcement, Perry declined to comment on the rumors. But he did suggest that the show would help him with dancing at his daughter’s upcoming wedding and that it would be an “extraordinary platform” to draw attention to two issues he has long been passionate about: the military and veterans.
“I just hope I don’t forget my dance steps, were I to be on this program, after the third lesson,” Perry said on Fox Business News, riffing off his infamous failure to remember the third federal department he wanted to eliminate during his 2012 presidential campaign.
I will say that I think Perry is likely to be a better fit for this than Tom DeLay was, because DeLay never appeared to have any actual charm, while Perry, whatever else you may say about him (and Lord knows there’s plenty), does have some people skills as well as a discernable sense of humor. I’m just glad that my kids are into watching “American Ninja Warrior” and not DWTS, so I won’t have to watch any of it. Now if he were to become a contestant on “American Ninja Warrior”, that would impress me. Until that time, here are Perry’s competitors for this title.
Jolanda Jones
The Houston school board just got a little more star power.
Jolanda Jones, the former city councilwoman who joined the board last week, is starring in a new reality show called “Sisters In Law,” set to air in March. As the cable network WE puts it, the Houston-based program follows a “close-knit group of elite high-powered black female lawyers as they juggle their families, busy careers and even more demanding social calendars.”
“The ladies may differ in their fundamental beliefs when it comes to right and wrong,” the station says on its website, “but what they have in common is their ability to win cases in a traditionally white, male-dominated profession.”
Jones broke the news on Twitter and Instagram Friday.
You can see her announcement here. I trust that Tubular will add it to their roster of shows to recap for us. There’s never a dull moment in my line of preoccupation, that’s for sure.
A climactic scene from one of my favorite movies of all time:
That is of course the one true version of Miracle on 34th Street, the original 1947 version. I do not speak of the 1994 remake, but I will concede that this is a movie that really could be reimagined in a contemporary light. I mean, my kids have never written a letter to Santa Claus. I’d bet most kids from the last ten or twenty years have never written letters to Santa. You can’t have that scene without actual by-God on-paper delivered-by-the-USPS letters to Santa. How would you do a scene where the judge is finally convinced that this is the One True Santa? I don’t know that there’s a similar authority that could be invoked today like the USPS was in 1947. How would you do it?
Recently local video production company The Storyhive announced details of an upcoming documentary about Houston artist and sculptor David Adickes, the man behind many of the large-scale public art pieces dotting the Bayou City area.
The film, titled “Monumental,” will chronicle Adickes who at the age of 88 is still exercising his creative muscles daily. The film has been in production for three years now, according to the producers.
They shot footage with him in Huntsville at his old high school, which he turned into the Adickes Art Foundation Museum in 2012. They just recently spent a day with him at his house in the Montrose area as he created a mock-up for a statue of an astronaut for a project he’s currently an integral part of.
It could one day be the second-tallest statue in the United States, right behind the Statue of Liberty in New York City, if the project is completed as planned.
“He’s talking about his entire life in the film and the production will focus on his life in Houston after he returned from Europe mostly,” says The Storyhive’s Jena Moreno. The film only has a crew of three people.
Here’s the Facebook page for the project. If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know I’m a big fan of Adickes’. The film is aiming for a 2016 release, and I intend to be at a screening. I’m so glad someone is doing this.
It’s all money to them. Why wouldn’t they think the state should provide more funding for them?
A Warner Bros. executive told a panel of Texas lawmakers they would have to pony up more cash for film industry incentives if they wanted to be in the movie business.
“The Texas movie industry incentive program … is not as competitive as many other jurisdictions,” said Warner Bros. Entertainment Vice President Michael Walbrecht. “Increasing the overall budget provided each year would probably draw more large-budget feature films.”
During his remarks before the House Select Committee on Economic Development Incentives, Walbrecht told the panel’s 13 members Texas was doing “just enough” to get some filmmakers to come to the state.
Texas’ programs are far surpassed by much more enticing incentives in states like Louisiana, he added, saying the Lone Star State isn’t even on the list of states feature filmmakers go to as a default.
“Without the incentive, these productions would probably not be able to choose Texas,” Walbrecht said.
The panel is holding a series of meetings before the 2015 session and is charged with looking at the state’s myriad economic development incentive programs, from the “deal-closing” Texas Enterprise Fund to local tax rebates.
Earlier Wednesday, Texas Film Commission Director Heather Page said the amount of money available through the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program is a moving target, but currently sits around $32 million. The program’s return on investment to date stands at 658 percent, she added.
Boy, I’d love to see the accounting on that. We know how accurate Hollywood accounting can be. Speaking of which, the state of California is boosting its film credit program to $400 million per year, with fewer constraints. We can’t let ourselves get beaten by California, can we? My opinion on this hasn’t changed much in recent years. If we’re going to throw money at movie studios to try to “incentivize” them to do their filming here, we should at least be honest about it.
A shot-by-shot LEGO remake of the mall chase scene from The Blues Brothers:
How awesome, not to mention OCD, is that? Here’s the side-by-side comparison:
And the “making of” video:
All done by the folks at Bricktease. I am in awe. Via Consumerist.
I can’t wait to see what happens with this.
A lawsuit filed by Austin-based filmmaker Robert Rodriguez and the production company behind his film Machete accuses The Texas Film Commission of denying agreed-to financial incentives after the commission decided the film was “inappropriate.”
Machete Chop Shop Inc. says in a suit filed July 13 in Travis County that the Texas Film Commission backed out of partially reimbursing the cost of the film after coming under fire for the film’s violence and depiction of Texans.
Before the movie was released in September 2010, anti-immigration groups were upset over the film’s trailer, citing its violent imagery and Robert De Niro’s cartoonish role as a senator who kills illegal immigrants.
According to court documents, the Machete producers’ application for a grant under the Texas Moving Image Industry Program was approved in May 2009, one month after Gov. Rick Perry signed the program into law at Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios in Austin.
At the bill signing, Rodriguez announced that the bill would allow him to make films in Texas, including Machete.
The complaint states that former commission head Bob Hudgins verified that the script complied with content requirements and also claims that an attached email shows Hudgins’ approval of the incentive package.
Once filmmakers knew they had additional state funding they increased their budget, the complaint says, banking on a state contribution of nearly $8 million.
Had filmmakers not had this funding, they would have made the film elsewhere, said the complaint.
According to my archives, the Texas Film Commission denied granting the incentives for the film in December of 2010; Hudgins resigned from the Commission in November of 2010. The complaint states that no other film has been denied funds post-production. I have no information on that, but I do know that at least one other filmmaker was turned away for fear than his movie would not portray Texas in a positive light. I’m just going to add this to my list of reasons why the whole Texas Moving Image Industry Program idea is a bad one that should be scrapped.
Not these housewives
A reality television show developer has traveled from California to Texas in hopes of spinning the “Real Housewives” concept into an oil field drama.
Matt Stroud, a development producer for CrashHat Entertainment, recently released a casting call for women who can show “the real American pride that goes hand-in-hand with being an oil field wife.” He said he already has received applications from 400 wives eager to share their lives on the small screen.
Stroud, who works from Santa Monica, Calif., said he was unfamiliar with the unique lives of oil field families until he was introduced to the roughneck culture during a recent visit to Texas.
“It felt very marketable in terms of what would work” for TV, he said.
Oil field jobs often require two-week shifts, with workers cycling between 14 days in the field and 14 days at home. Some wives have created a vibrant online community, with websites devoted to their lifestyles, Pinterest boards pinned with pink hard hats, and Facebook community pages where tens of thousands of wives swap advice about surviving their husbands’ long stays away from home.
Stroud said wives from across the country have sent applications, from Alaska to Pennsylvania to California.
They don’t have a network yet, but I’m kind of rooting for them. There are certainly worse things on which to base a TV show. And who knows, it might actually be educational. All I know for sure is that if this does become a thing, I request – nay, I demand – that the Chron’s Therese Odell blog about it. I mean, this was meant to be.
Larry Hagman
J.R. Ewing was a business cheat, faithless husband and bottomless well of corruption. Yet with his sparkling grin, Larry Hagman masterfully created the charmingly loathsome oil baron — and coaxed forth a Texas-size gusher of ratings — on television’s long-running and hugely successful nighttime soap, “Dallas.”
Although he first gained fame as nice guy Major Tony Nelson on the fluffy 1965-70 NBC comedy “I Dream of Jeannie,” Hagman earned his greatest stardom with J.R. The CBS serial drama about the Ewing family and those in their orbit aired from April 1978 to May 1991, and broke viewing records with its “Who shot J.R.?” 1980 cliffhanger that left unclear if Hagman’s character was dead.
The actor, who returned as J.R. in a new edition of “Dallas” this year, had a long history of health problems and died Friday due to complications from his battle with cancer, his family said.
“Larry was back in his beloved hometown of Dallas, re-enacting the iconic role he loved the most. Larry’s family and closest friends had joined him in Dallas for the Thanksgiving holiday,” the family said in a statement that was provided to The Associated Press by Warner Bros., producer of the show.
The 81-year-old actor was surrounded by friends and family before he passed peacefully, “just as he’d wished for,” the statement said.
I was never into “Dallas” back in the day, though I admit that the “Who shot JR?” story line drew me in, and I watched the episode that revealed the answer like everyone else in America. It was hard to watch Larry Hagman do anything and not get the impression that he was just having more fun doing what he did than most of the rest of us. I’m sure there will be many great stories told about him in the next few days. Harold Cook, who didn’t know Hagman but knows people who did, has more, and you really owe it to yourself to read Mark Evanier’s Larry Hagman story. Rest in peace, Larry Hagman.
Congrats to Ernie Manouse for reaching this milestone:
Houston-(February 15, 2012) Over the past 10 seasons, the nationally syndicated award-winning series, InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse hasentertained and informed audiences with interesting, intimate, and revealing conversations with some of today’s most captivating notables. Now,InnerVIEWS, and Emmy winner Ernie Manouse, get ready to celebrate their 150th episode with multi-award winning journalist Bill Moyers.
The 150th episode featuring Bill Moyers will air in the Greater Houston Area on Thursday, February 23 at 10:30pm on Channel 8, HoustonPBS.
Other upcoming InnerVIEWS guests this season include: Publisher and First Amendment crusader Larry Flynt, Oscar winner Marsha Mason, author Charlaine Harris, actress & documentarian Alana Stewart, soap star Kim Zimmer and gospel great Yolanda Adams.
Since its debut in January 2004, the program has spawned a legion of fans across the county, airing on over 100 PBS stations. InnerVIEWS… guests have ranged in age from the youngest at 16 (Singer Angel Faith) to the oldest at 95 (TV Presenter Art Linkletter). Through the years the program has won four Dallas Press Club Regional KATIE Awards; three Videographer Awards; two Bronze Telly Awards; and the Communicator Awards Award of Distinction. InnerVIEWS was also nominated for the Emmy for Best Interview/Discussion Program/Series.
InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse airs on HoustonPBS every Thursday night at 10:30pm, with re-broadcasts Fridays at 11:00pm and Sundays at 3:30pm. For national airdates and times, check with your local PBS stations.
I’ve been a guest a couple of times on his Houston 8 show, and Ernie is a engaging and affable host. Here’s to the next 150 shows.
When you think about it, the strange thing is that they didn’t already have a reality TV show.
Joel Osteen announced Tuesday that he has partnered with Survivor producer Mark Burnett to create a reality TV show that would follow him and his wife, Victoria, and Lakewood Church members on mission trips across the country.
Osteen signed an agreement with Burnett to work on a series to be pitched for prime-time play as early as next year. The details of the program are still being worked out, so they’ve yet to secure a deal with a network. The news of their partnership was reported early by TMZ.
Osteen likened their program to Extreme Home Makeover, saying, “It’s another way to take our message of hope and inspiring others to another venue … We didn’t just want to do a reality show, we wanted to do something that inspires people and makes them better.”
As co-pastors of Lakewood Church, the largest church in America, the Osteens already have 10 million viewers watching their broadcasts each week. They’ve repeatedly turned down reality show pitches, but then Burnett – a fellow Christian who has visited Lakewood multiple times in the year that they’ve known him – came up with a concept that would focus more on Christian mission than their own lives.
Here’s the TMZ report. I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t happen and if it’s not a success. Hair Balls has more.
Some things were just meant to happen:
Be sure to watch the “behind the scenes” video as well:
Thanks to Popdose for the embeds.
The above is a preview for Miss Representation, which is showing this Thursday for one night only at the Alamo Drafthouse, West Oaks Mall, at 7 PM. I’ve got tickets for the screening, which is also a benefit for Annie’s List. There are similar screenings in Austin (Tuesday, 7 PM, The Drafthouse) and San Antonio (Wednesday, 6 PM, Alamo Drafthouse Park North), any of which is worth your time if you live in the vicinity. I figure I’ve got a lot of work to do to help make the world my daughters are growing up in suitable for them, and supporting efforts like this and organizations like Annie’s List are important parts of that. So please do your part, get some tickets, and I’ll see you there.
Bobby McFerrin sings “The Wizard of Oz” in seven and a half minutes. It’s even more awesome than it sounds.
There’s a more recent version of this performance, with somewhat better video (not having been ripped from someone’s VHS tape, one presumes) here, but I prefer the embedded one, both for the stronger audience participation (the audience in the latter version is mostly kids, and I’m not sure how well they know the material) and of course for the excellent 80s hair and fashion. And I just love the concept. Hope you liked it, too.
All movies should be like this:
Plot? Dialog? Those pesky laws of physics, not to mention logic? Pshaw. Who needs them when you have that much awesomeness? Via Gizmodo.
The other day I heard Olivia saying – trying to say, anyway – fourteen-syllable words are quite the mouthful – that fabled construction from “Mary Poppins”, “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, to Audrey. I sang her a verse of the song, and they were duly impressed. Then Olivia wanted me to spell it for her. I’m a pretty good speller, but I figured it would be easier just to show her the video instead:
That’s from the stage musical that’s been touring; Tiffany and I saw it a few months ago here. It’s different in some ways from the movie but like the movie is based on the books. We thought it was outstanding. And the girls liked the video. What more do you need?
