6/19/22
Newsletter #16
The summer solstice will be here in two days; the longest day of the year. Even still, at 4:12 AM it’s completely dark.
When I was a little kid I went to a day camp in the summer. We all sang songs on the bus back and forth. We sang a song that I personally found inappropriate at the age of six. It was about the Titanic and went like this: It was sad, so sad/ It was sad, hallelujah/ It was sad when the day the great ship went down/ To the bottom of the . . ./Husbands and wives/ Little children lost their lives/ It was sad when the great ship went down.
We see the name Fox on TV all the time: Fox news, Fox sports, Fox Network, etc. Well, who was Fox? He was William Fox, formerly Wilhelm Fuchs, an Hungarian Jew who formed the Fox Film Corp. in 1915, and was one of the earliest film moguls. Fox was a major studio until the stock market crash of 1929 when Fox went bankrupt. Fox was acquired by the one-year-old studio, 20th Century Pictures, run by the wunderkind, Darryl F. Zanuck, in 1935. The merger became 20th Century-Fox.
Apparently the Washington Post melted down this week in an unbridled frenzy of wokeness. A reporter tweeted what I consider to be a pretty good, short joke, and I love short jokes: All women are bi, you just have to find out if it’s sexual or polar. A female reporter in her 20s went ballistic, sent out fifty incensed tweets, and got herself fired. But at least she got fired instead of the guy who innocently tweeted the joke.
I’ve pitched screenplays to every studio in Hollywood. It only took me about twenty years to figure out that if a studio executive will actually have a pitch meeting with me, they’re so low on the food chain that their entire job is to just say no to shmucks like me. They can’t say yes, and wouldn’t even if they could because then they’d have to stick their neck out, and it would certainly get chopped off. Therefore, these low-end execs are all bored, nasty and hate their jobs, so they’re going to make you suffer. I have many of these, but here’s one: I was pitching at Chartoff-Winkler, producers of “Rocky” and “Raging Bull.” The exec was a chubby, unattractive, and unpleasant fellow in his early thirties. As I launched into my ten minute pitch this putz took off one shoe and sock, put his bare foot up on his desk, then proceeded to trim his toenails the entire time I spoke. Toenails flew everywhere.
The Bible was written in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. In time nobody spoke those languages, so it was translated into Greek. Several hundred years later, when nobody spoke Greek (except Greeks), the Bible was translated into Latin. Several hundred years later, nobody spoke Latin (except Latin Americans, as per Dan Quayle). So in 1575 a motivated, exceptionally talented writer, poet and intellect, William Tyndale, took it upon himself to translate the Bible into English. The British religious authorities considered this blasphemy and had Tyndale burner at the stake. A few years later English King James said (something like this), “I don’t read Latin, have the Bible translated into English.” No doubt the bishops and cardinals coughed and blushed, then gave the king William Tyndale’s translation. King James said, “This is bloody marvelous. Publish it under my name.” And that’s how we got the 1611 King James version of the Bible.
The great director John Ford, a short man, was famous for punching his lead actors in the face. He punched Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne (who was a foot taller than Ford) every time they worked together. At a swanky party in Beverly Hills, John Ford was holding forth, and young Maureen O’Hara had the audacity to interject a comment. Ford turned around and decked her.
The blue gels have arrived.
In the movie, “White Mischief,” set in Africa, Sarah Miles opens the curtains in the morning and proclaims, “Not another fucking beautiful day.”