I’ve never liked Blockbuster, starting with their placing a ban on “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which caused me to place a ban on giving them any of my business for years. But then a few years ago I desperately wanted to see any one of three films — “Das Boot,” “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” or “Fitzcarraldo.” I called every Blockbuster around and not only did none of them stock any of these films, none of the clerks had heard of them. This was in Los Angeles, the movie capital of the world. So that night I signed up for Netflix. Netflix, and Red Box, and online streaming, and iTunes and piracy have all been killing Blockbuster and I have to admit to feeling a little frisson of schadenfreude about it.

But the advent of better technology (immediate delivery at a lower price) isn’t the only reason that Blockbuster is going out of business.

The other night I wanted to introduce my kids to the joys of “Alien,” that wonderful science fiction horror movie. This being a last-minute decision, and discovering that it wasn’t available as a “Watch It Now” via Netflix streaming, I impulsively swung into Blockbuster while driving by. Sure enough, they had the movie. Although there was absolutely no easy way to find it on the shelf (it seemed to be stocked between microwave popcorn and spiderwebs, and by the way, who would buy their microwave popcorn at Blockbuster, anyway?), the clerk located it and led me to the checkout. Whereupon I was staggered to learn that this rental was $5.49.

“$5.49?” I asked. It seemed to me that I could probably buy it for about $5.49. Did they think this was still 1990? I told him that it seemed pricey.

“Yeah,” he answered. “But it’s not due back until Thursday.” This was on Saturday night.

“Why would I need it until Thursday? I want to watch it, not worship it. Do you have one I can just buy?” Because now I thought, kids being kids, they’ll probably watch it over and over for years to come. And my wife, being similarly disposed, has repeatedly watched four movies, and only those four movies, in the past twenty years (and two of them were “Dune”). So it would get lots of viewing.

No, they didn’t have a sale copy. Just the rental. I figured what the heck, and rented it.

Half an hour later, my two kids and I were ready to watch it. Emma had her blanket all ready to cover her eyes during the scary parts, while Dietrich was  ready with his mask of grim defiance. (”It’s not going to scare me.”)  An hour into the movie — precisely when the little extraterrestrial bugger is bursting out of John Hurt’s chest — the movie froze. No matter what I tried — including slow fast forward, slow rewind, playing the director’s cut version, even blowing on the disk — it wouldn’t play. We were stuck with the turgid image of a bloody sharp-toothed alien phallus directed straight at our living room.

I called Blockbuster to ask if they had another copy. “No,” said the same guy who’d rented this one, “that’s our only copy.” Now I took a closer look at the case. It was so old and worn it looked like Abe Vigoda.

The next day I took the disk and the receipt back to Blockbuster. I told this clerk, a different one than the previous night, what had happened, including the salient fact that “we were an hour into the movie — right in the middle of the chest-bursting scene — and it froze. Which ruined the experience of watching the movie.” To which he replied:

“It’s an old disk. It happens.”

I know: I’m sentimental. I’m a relic of a bygone era, an era of the milkman and the 15-cent comic book and “I’d like to teach the world to sing.” Because here’s what I honestly thought I was going to get, at some point:  “Sorry.” Any variation of that would have sufficed. I didn’t want anything additional — not a special offer or a make-good or anything. Just a simple “sorry.” But he didn’t seem sorry. In fact, he barely seemed cognizant, like he’d spent too much time scoffing their supply of Milk Duds in the back room when no one was watching and was now weighed down physically and emotionally by all the plasticky chocolate he’d consumed.

He asked if I wanted store credit — guess what my response was — and then gave me back my money. Usually when a cashier hands me change, I say thank you. This time I waited to see if at any point this person was going to say “sorry” or “thank you” or anything at all that sounded customer-service-like. But no. Nothing.

So here’s the Blockbuster experience:

• high prices
• limited selection
• bad service
• products that don’t work

Wonder why they’re failing.

And by the way? We drove over to Best Buy and bought the “Alien” trilogy. All three disks, brand-spanking-new, for $19.99, or $6.66 each. The price may have been demonic, but the disk works and we get to own it for $1.17 more than Blockbuster wanted.

What I’m looking forward to when I’m on the east coast briefly next month:  Poker. Clams. Shooting. Cigars. Pinochle.

I have written to my brother-in-law to this effect so that he can plan accordingly.

My plan for this weekend:  write (my new play), play (Oblivion on the xBox, and poker in real life), shop (household things).

It’s not Eat, Pray, Love, but it’s less nauseating.

Who’s funding the “populist” Tea Party? Billionaires.

My good friend Rich Roesberg turned me onto this story in May and I’m only now getting around to posting it. It’s still a good story. It seems that during a recent rehearsal for Waiting for Godot in Melbourne, one of the stars, Sir Ian McKellen, took a break outside on a bench. Whereupon one of the passersby, thinking him homeless, tossed him a dollar coin.

McKellen is holding onto the coin as a good luck charm but offers his benefactor something for his money, “If that man would like to identify himself, we would like to invite him to come and see Waiting For Godot. And if he insists on paying, we’ll knock a dollar off the ticket price.”

I have three further thoughts about this:

1. I have no doubt that this theatre’s publicist leapt on the opportunity to put this story out. A tip of the hat to that theatre professional for a job well-done. The story got reported widely — even down to southern New Jersey, where said good friend Roesberg lives. A good theatre publicist is always worth his keep.
2. My favorite comment to the story on this newspaper’s site:  “Round in Yarraville and Seddon we have got heaps of these types. I never give them money, just a kick in the pants and yell get a job you bum.” So the confusion that Sir Ian was a bum continues even onto the news coverage.
3. In theatre circles, Sir Ian is known as a real gentleman and a bit of a cut-up. When he did his show “A Knight out” at the Los Angeles Theatre Center in 1997, he was prone to taking over the box office and answering the phone himself in ways such as this:  “Oh, so you’d like to come see my show would you? And where would you like to sit? Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit further down where you can see me better? Now, it will cost you a little more, but I’m sure you’ll agree it will be worth it.” And so forth. He charmed everyone who called and everyone who worked there.

Last week, I was mentioned (briefly) in the Burbank Leader’s coverage of a forum that I agreed to moderate about developments within our fair city’s police department. Click here if you’d like to read it. Public response so far, on some blogs, is that no doubt I was paid to intentionally get some people’s names wrong. Good theory — and I wish I’d thought of that.

Also in the Burbank Leader comes news that Gun World is closing.  For those of you who’ve seen my play “About the Deep Woods Killer,” this may strike a chord. Here’s Scene Three, in which Jack, the son of the Deep Woods Killer, struggles to stay on a good path:

 

 

                                                (Scene Three: Testimony.)

           

(Spotlight on Jack. He stands alone, addressing us as though we were a group. He holds his baseball cap in his hands and fidgets with it, at times twisting and turning it.)

 

                        JACK

My name is Jack. I’m an alcoholic. But you know that. I had a tough week. Well, a tough day. The same thing happened at work, again, the thing that happens every time I think it’s okay. They hired this new girl, woman, Alice, and somebody told her. About me. Well, about my father. I know you all already know, so what’s the point. It’s about honesty in here. So at work, nobody said anything to me but I could tell. Monday morning Alice was filling out paperwork while I was in the breakroom and she smiled and said hello. I didn’t want to talk to her, I wasn’t trying to talk to her, I wasn’t even trying to look at her, but I did like her hair, it was red, pulled up behind. She talked to me and I looked up and looked up at her hair, that was when I saw it, and she smiled again. And after lunch she wouldn’t look at me. She came into the breakroom and I was there again and she acted like she didn’t mean to come in there and turned and left, and I knew what that was. I was… I was really down after that. The whole day that feeling was back, it felt like there was something on me, something heavy I couldn’t get off and the drive home took me past the Dew Drop Inn, and the Rustic Inn, and the Pitney Tavern, and the Stop and Go Liquor – I don’t know why we have so many of these places, it’s like they build ‘em right where I’m going to drive by, that’s what I was thinking – then I stopped at the light at Leeds Road and there was Gun World. And I looked at myself in the rearview and I just looked tired, real tired. The light changed… and after a bit I drove home and I got inside and I –

(He starts to choke up.)

–  I called Tony. I got through it all, I got home, but I might not’ve gotten further ‘cept for Tony. He saved me. So I thank him and I praise God for him. I am a strong person, a strong man, but sometimes everybody needs a little help, and I had Tony. Thank you.

 

This play was performed in the Moving Arts one-act festival two years ago here in Los Angeles. One of the actors was walking down Magnolia Boulevard and did a double-take. He called our producer, Steve, to say, “You’re not going to believe this… but I’m standing in front of Gun World.” He later told me how very strange it felt to one moment be leading his normal life, and the next moment to feel that he’d entered the world of the play. For this reason alone, I’m sad that Gun World is closing.

Finally,  the current issue of Inc. magazine has a profile of my company, Counterintuity. Counterintuity is the place where I write those other things that blur the lines between reality and fantasy (we call that marketing copy). Click here if you’d like to read it and use my image for target practice.

I’m fascinated with Danielle Sacks’ profile of former ad man Alex Bogusky in the current issue of Fast Company. I think you should click here and read it.

While at Crispin Porter Bogusky, Bogusky was the creative director behind relaunching Burger King’s King (and the viral hit “Subservient Chicken”) as well as the terrific campaign against teen drinking and drugs,  and the very gimmicky magazine inserts for Mini. One of the magazines I get had a punch-out-and-assemble cardboard Mini on one page, and little punch-out traffic cones on the opposite page. Yes, I popped out both and played with them. During his tenure, CP+B became the hot, hip agency, and for good reason:  their work was clever, and they delivered a lot of sales for clients. In 2009, Ad Agency named it the agency of the decade.

In this profile, Bogusky now makes himself out to be a man transformed. He’s left advertising and discovered soul-searching. With about $45 million now in hand, he’s hanging out all day writing or playing or doing finger paints in a cottage he calls FearLess, and handing out keycards to the cottage to other cool people he thinks can help change the world. I read all this and thought about Alfred Nobel, who suffered the accidental indignity of reading his own obituary, which condemned him for inventing dynamite; Nobel set out to redeem himself by creating the Nobel Prizes. Bogusky devoted a lot of his life to getting people to consume more from Burger King, Coke, Domino’s, Jose Cuervo, and Kraft, and now he regrets it. Because — and please don’t think I’m cynical — he can now afford it. Easily. Stylishly. It doesn’t seem that these self-doubts plagued him while he was devising those campaigns.

Evidently, I wasn’t the only one starting to wonder a thing or two about Bogusky’s transformation, because  Sacks then goes and talks to a lot of Bogusky’s former employees. A far different picture emerges. What Sacks thinks she finds isn’t interesting (news alert:  creative types can be narcissistic). What’s more interesting is the theory that Bogusky had manipulated Sacks into getting exactly the kind of profile he wanted — until she figured that out and turned on him for the back half of the piece. This is the biggest such reversal I’ve ever seen in a profile. It’s like the last few minutes of “The Sixth Sense,” which has you revisiting everything you just saw, but now from a completely different angle.

Days later, I’m still trying to figure out why this is newsworthy:  Martin Short’s wife has died.

I mean no ill intent to her surviving family members, including Mr. Short, whom I had a very pleasant half-hour press interview with once.  But why was this newsworthy enough to be covered by  CNN, Entertainment Weekly, the Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, and by my Google count at least 500 other news sources?

If I’m reading her biography correctly, her last and most noteworthy acting appearance, as a supporting player on the sitcom “Soap,” was in 1981, the year that Ronald Reagan became president. The year “Raiders of the Lost Ark” opened. The year Britney Spears was born. Since then, she’s been a housewife and mother. These are good and important things. But housewives die all the time, with little notice by the media.

The greatest clue we get is the headline from the LA Times: ” ‘Three Amigos’ and ‘Father of the Bride’ funnyman Martin Short’s wife dies.” So what we have is an obit in which the subject of the obit is mentioned after the names of two films in which she didn’t appear, and after her husband, an obit in which she is mentioned in the next-to-last word, and not by name, but by title:  “wife.”

This has me asking:

When Phil Silvers’ wife died, whoever she was, was it reported?

Who is Jason Alexander’s wife? Wikipedia tells me they’ve been married almost 30 years, like the Shorts. If she dies, of natural causes, will there be an obit?

How is the health of Billy Crystal’s wife? Would she get an obit?

Small-town papers run obits of all the locals. (Or, at least, they used to. Now unless the local is notable, they run a death notice — which is a paid service offered to the family.) But with mainstream media, obits are restricted to notable people. The late Mrs. Short is notable solely for having been married to Mr. Short. While understandably, her demise is newsworthy to him and to their children, and perhaps to people in the entertainment industry who knew the couple, why is this important to outside mainstream media? I honestly can’t figure this out. She died of natural causes. What is the news angle? The fact that this is being reported at all makes me wonder if there’s some aspect that is not being reported (yet?). As it is, it seems to be a dog bites man story:  a not-well-known person died after a lengthy illness.

I am sorry for the Short family’s loss.

Few people are more miserable than closet cases. My gay friends told me this years ago, and it seems truer and truer. Case in point:  Bush campaign chief Ken Mehlman who has now announced that he’s gay. Evidently, he’s only recently come to this conclusion, and now must bear the agony of helping Karl Rove fan the flames of homophobia for fun and profit. In previous off-the-record interviews, it’s revealed that Mehlman “often wondered why gay voters never formed common cause with Republican opponents of Islamic jihad, which he called ‘the greatest anti-gay force in the world right now.’” Theory for you Ken:  Maybe it was all the hatred you and your pals were stirring up against, well, your own kind.

Not sure how to spot closeted gays? I understand. I have poor gaydar. I’m someone who’s still unsure that all the guys on “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” were gay. Sure, they were knowledgeable about hair products and where the couch should go, but that doesn’t always translate into “gay.” But now I’ve locked into one surefire tell-tale clue. You should just assume that any Republican opposed to gays and gay marriage is himself a self-loathing closeted gay person. That would explain Congressman Mark Foley, Ken Mehlman, Senator Larry Craig, Pastor Ted Haggard, Congressman Bob Allen, California State Senator Roy Ashburn and so many others. Now I understand whom they hate, and why.

The other night my daughter and I watched the movie “Unbreakable.” This is one of my favorite movies. I respond to its central message — that if you don’t express who you really are, you will be lost — and to its driving metaphor:  that comic books reflect inner truths about us as a species. I was thrilled at her interest in watching his movie. When it was over, I asked her if she liked it. She said, “No. It was boring.”

A night or two later, I invited her to watch an episode of “Wonders of the Solar System” with me. When it was over she insisted that we never watch that together again, because it was boring.

Then on Sunday we were in my car when she suddenly perked up to a song playing on my stereo. “What is this?” she asked. “Raygun Suitcase,” I said, “by Pere Ubu.” “I don’t like the way he sings this,” she announced, adding, “I don’t like the way he sings ‘Kathleen’ or ‘Oh, Catherine, in fact, I just don’t like the way he sings.” In this way, she overturned 15 years of universal agreement in our household that these are wonderful songs, brilliantly delivered.

Did I mention that she just turned 12?