6/20/22
Newsletter17
At 4:22 it’s still dark.
All actors say on their resumes that they can ride horses, but they’re lying. I had a scene in a SyFy Network movie I directed, “Stan Lee’s Harpies,” where the script called for all of the six lead actors to all be on horses in the same scene, including good old Steven Baldwin. All they had to do was ride slowly across the frame. I called, “Action,” and I shit you not, all six actors fell off their horses, and the horses ran away.
When Teddy Roosevelt was twenty-five years old both his mother and his wife died on the same day in the same house.
The four Warner brothers: Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack (real name Wonskolaser), were Polish Jews. The eldest, Harry, was president and ran the company from New York. The youngest, Jack, ran the studio in Hollywood. Harry was an Orthodox Jew. In the 1920s Warner’s distributor was Lewis Selznick (father of David Selznick who would later produce “Gone With the Wind”). When Selznick wouldn’t pay Harry Warner the money he was owed, Harry, the Orthodox Jew, walked over to Lewis Selznick’s office and beat the shit of him. Warners found a new distributor.
Robert Benchley, grandfather of Peter Benchley who wrote “Jaws, was one of the biggest film critics in New York. At some terrible play about Native Americans, the actress said, “Me Tondeleo, me stay.” Benchley stood up and announced, “Me Benchley, me go.”
In the course of time I worked for Universal Pictures, 1993 to 2001, the studio was owned by: Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg; the Japanese company, Matsushita; the Canadian liquor company, Seagrams; the French company, Vivendi; then General Electric bought it and made it NBC Universal.
Suspicious lyrics: In Hank Williams the elder’s song, “Lovesick Blues” it goes: I got a feeling called the blues/ Oh Lord, since my baby said goodbye/ Lord, I don’t know what to do/ All I do is set and sigh/ That last long day she said goodbye/ Well Lord I thought I would cry/ She’ll do me, she’ll do you, she’s got that kind of loving/ Lord I love to hear her when she calls me sweet daddy.
During the “Danish Cartoon Crisis” of 2005, when a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Islamic Prophet Muhammed, which is forbidden in Islam, riots broke out around the word and people were killed – over cartoons. Wanting to join the fray, I drew my own cartoon. It was entitled, “The Three Hamids,” and beneath my childish drawings of three faces, I named them: Moe Hamid, Larry Hamid, and Curly Hamid. I never had the guts to publish it.
I worked as a production assistant (PA) for seventeen years, first in Detroit, then in L.A. I worked on Mariah Carey’s very first music video in 1991, so she was twenty-one. We shot on the New York street set on the Paramount lot. All of the manhole covers at Paramount say, “Brunton.” The studio was built in 1917. In 1918 it became Robert Brunton Studios. This was where Mary Pickford had her office. It was sold to Paramount Pictures, which was called Famous Players-Lasky at the time, in 1926. Famous Players-Lasky took the name and mountain logo from their distribution division and became Paramount Pictures.
There are more Mormons (about 16.5 million) in the world than Jews (about 15.5 million).
And finally, one of my favorite Broadway songs from “My Fair Lady,” was meant to be politically incorrect, and still is. It has the wonderful title, “A Hymn to Him,” and it goes like this (I write from memory): “Women are irrational, that’s all there is to that/ There heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags/ They’re nothing but exasperating, irritating, calculating, agitating, and infuriating hags.”
The sky is just starting to become an orangey-purple hue. Morning has broken.