Recently I saw a couple of plays that returned me to this train of thought:

While there may never be a definitive answer why bad things happen to good people, I believe there’s a good theory why bad plays are written by good people: They want people to get along in life. And unfortunately, that’s what they have happen in their plays, too.

Think back to the last play you saw written by someone thoroughly nice. Chances are, it was well-meaning and dull. If you’re going to be nice, I’m all for it — just don’t do it in your play. I’d rather see the latest play by an utter bastard, or at least someone who can summon that up. Like Neil LaBute.

That doesn’t mean that the collected poems of Donald Rumsfeld should win the Nobel. Odiousness is allowed, but talent is essential.

Click here. You’ll want to check out all 15.

If you aren’t already alarmed by the monarchical overreach of the Bush/Cheney White House, visit this site and watch the video. It’s from Friday night’s episode of “Bill Moyers’ Journal” and features a conservative Republican and a liberal (and Democrat, I guess) jointly making a very strong case for impeaching Bush and Cheney. Their main thrust is not the malfeasance of the Bush Administration — evidence of which seems, well, unimpeachable. No, their main thrust is that we need to pursue impeachment now before this Pandora’s Box of limitless presidential power is passed on to someone else on January 20, 2009 and the idea of the unfettered executive becomes forever inculcated in our fragile democracy.

Watergate? The Gulf of Tonkin resolution? Errant fellatio and subsequent perjury? These were mere warmup acts. Watch the video and see if you don’t think the nation is threatened as never before.

And who, surprisingly, is newly culpable? Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who has said impeachment is “off the table.” As one of the guests says, Nancy Pelosi is wrong and doesn’t understand her job.

We need to start by agitating her into action. Today.

As related here, I’ve been having a delightful time recently with oral surgery. But just now I had two new frights at the surgeon’s office.

1. I just ran into Phil Spector there. When I signed in, I saw that the name ahead of mine on the sign-in sheet was “Phil Spector” in childlike blocky letters. Assuming it was a joke, I turned around and was about to say something along the lines of, “Which one of you has the gun?” But because my usual fun-loving character evaporates upon exposure to the oral surgeon’s office, I decided something along the lines of “fuck it” and glumly sat down with my magazine. (Appropriately, The New Yorker, with more dire reportage on Iraq and presidential malfeasance. In other words, mood lifters.) Then when one of the assistants announced that “he” was ready and up jumped the 40-something tired-looking blonde in garb designed for a culture 20 years younger than she (plush sweatsuit with jacket, oversized baseball cap, flashing Bluetooth accoutrement in ear, chunky white sneakers — think, “costume by Sean John, worn by Carmela Soprano”), I noticed that her jacket was emblazoned with “Team Spector” on the back and the ass of her garb with the mere “Spector.” (I can think of worse things at the moment to have to do to draw a paycheck, but when it comes to wearing clothes at this particular point in time that say “Spector” on the ass, it takes a lot of thinking. And being part of “the team” must be even worse.) Then a Very Large Black Man in another sweatsuit got up; in L.A. iconography, this would be “the bodyguard.” So now I was sure that Phil was in the building and, that if someone present felt instantaneously suicidal (as has been said to happen in his presence at least once), trouble would ensue. I got the restroom key and went to splash cold water on my face, arriving in the hallway just in time to see said music legend — who has filled my ears with so much joy over the years and, the accusation is, has filled someone else with holes — exit via the private doorway into the elevator area. He look dazed and wan, clutching a cold pack to his jaw line, and for a moment, given my recent travails, I truly understood how it feels to be Phil Spector.
2. As scary as that was, here’s a line I will never forget, uttered by my oral surgeon (a professional I share with Mr. Spector) after he examined my ongoing misery:  “Hm. I see what’s bothering you. It’s that bit of bone sticking up through the gum. I’m just going to make an incision and flick it out of there.” And yes, “flick” was the precise word he chose. Never in my life have I anticipated either having a bone protrude out of its natural location or having someone offer to “flick” it out of there. He made it sound so carefree:  “I’ll flick it out of there.” Of course. Like a ladybug from one’s shoulder. He offered to do it on the spot and assured me that it would hurt for only a little while. Given past history and my newfound lack of trust, I told  him no, I would have to schedule that for later. Which, given that there is indeed a bone sticking up in my mouth, I believe I will have to do.

The other directors who interest me, by the way, are:

• Fritz Lang, as anyone who followed the Mabuse thread (here and here) could see
• Buster Keaton

and the only living and working director on the list other than Werner Herzog:

• Paul Schrader (“American Gigolo,” “The Comfort of Strangers,” “Affliction” and “Auto Focus” put Schrader at the pinnacle of American dramatic film. Scorsese who?)

You may note that each of them is the writer of their films as well.

Last week the LA Times had a good piece on my favorite working film director, Werner Herzog. Click here to read it.

I’m not sure precisely what compels me to go back over and over again to Herzog’s films, as I do. They’re simultaneously spellbinding and somewhat inept: While he continually dwells too long in scenes that don’t matter, or elides important parts of the narrative flow, or provides you with what seems like exactly the wrong shot, his films nevertheless have a raw immediacy — a power — that is almost entirely lacking elsewhere. Most movies just don’t interest me; all of Herzog’s do. Including especially:

• “Aguirre, Wrath of God,” which I keep returning to even as I’m “improving” its storytelling with my own director’s cut in my mind;
• “Fitzcarraldo,” also starring his frequent co-conspirator, the maniacal Klaus Kinski; in some ways this is the prototypical Herzog drama, about a fantastical and impractical pursuit (in this case, dragging a steamboat up and over a mountain in the Amazon to get it to another river);
• The documentary “My Best Fiend,” about Kinski, who was either seriously disturbed or flat-out the most convincing portrayer ever of mania — on-screen and in real life;
• The documentary “Little Dieter Needs to Fly” (imminently to be released in a fictionalized version called “Rescue Dawn” and starring Christian Bale). The ending has an unexpected majesty that I still don’t understand;
• And finally, “Grizzly Man,” which while Herzog says reminds him that life is about chaos, renews my faith in order because the nice naive man who views grizzly bears as his friends finally gets eaten by one.

All of these films are in some way a mess. But that chaos is what gives them life, and what makes every scene flawed and astonishing.

I just got back from another installment of Moving Arts’ “The Car Plays,” at the Steve Allen Theatre. (The show continues the first Sunday of every month through October; tickets go on sale two weeks beforehand and sell out within about 9 seconds, so if you want to attend, keep watching this space.)

On the way over, I found myself wondering if the event was already over. You see this sometimes in the theatre: the sensation that isn’t so sensational any more. We did “The Car Plays” last September, and the clamor for tickets was deafening. Those of us who were lucky enough to be involved (and get tickets) were glad to be there. I wondered if this was going to be a case of been there, done that.

Luckily, I was joined by five guests who are not regular theatregoers. They loved it. Each one of them remarked how different this event was — what a great idea — what an event. That just reminded me — again — of what I love about having expedient access to strange cultural events utterly unavailable where I grew up.

It was interesting to see my play “All Undressed with Nowhere to Go” revived — and, again, performed in a car, exactly as it was written to be done — but with a different director and with one new actor. The returning actor was Laura Buckles, whose work I’ve grown to appreciate more and more; I told Laura some time ago that from now on she has to be in all my plays. She was terrific in Nancy Weiner’s “The Invalid James” (in this production, directed by my good friend Trey Nichols), she was great Friday night in a reading from my workshop, and she was great last year (and this year) in this play, in a role I wrote somewhat with her in mind. Last year James Smith played “Jerry”; James has been in my plays “The Size of Pike,” “Happy Fun Family,” “Animals,” “Safehouse,” and probably others that elude me at the moment — to me, he really gets the rhythm of my lines and the subtext of my characters. Either that, or I keep subconsciously writing for him. Or, another choice, he’s just really good in them and elevates the material. Or all of those options. He wasn’t available for this revival, and neither was the original director (Trey), so I recommended Tony, who was in my play “Visiting Ours,” as the seemingly nice young man who reads porn to the old lady in the nursing home. I’ve also worked with Tony on several other plays not my own, and have always admired his odd comic delivery. He can be amazing in a role. The new director, Paul Nicolai Stein, changed the action around a bit for this 9-minute play about adulterers who can’t find a good spot to consummate their deceit high in the parking areas of the San Gabriel mountains. For one thing, the play now started with Jerry off in the “mountains” (the parking lot of the Steve Allen) “urinating” off the edge. For another, the button — the comedic summing-up of the play — that worked so well with James’ interpretation wouldn’t work with Tony’s interpretation. I’ve seen many of my plays remounted and reinterpreted, but never before within such a short period of time and inside a car, so this was oddly illuminating about how interpretative a performance can be. (And I say this after three decades of doing theatre of some sort.) And, as Tony later pointed out, the one I saw was only the first performance:  They still had 14 additional performances that night.

(Yes, each 9-minute “Car Play” is performed 15 times.)

I saw many of the writers and theatre enthusiasts I’ve known over the years from Backstage West, Entertainment Today, ReviewPlays.com, and the LA Times, so I’m sure some ink is going to follow on this. And, as I said, “The Car Plays” will continue into the fall (albeit with a shifting slate of plays). I saw 10 of the 15 plays tonight. As I was saying to the dean of our program at USC, this is a difficult little form to write in — as with haiku (good haiku), the rules are rigid and the form demanding. Each play has to be 9 minutes, each has to have an inciting incident, it must take place inside a car, and it must have a “button” that ends the action.

So much care has gone into writing, directing, acting and producing them, that I believe I can spot a problem looming with this production in nearby Santa Barbara (seemingly inspired by our success last September, which was Pick of the Week in the LA Weekly). “Pick your own” sounds like an owner’s manual for chaos.

By putting the Clintons into it.

A reader of this site (and, I admit it, friend and mentor) emailed me to bemoan the changes at the beloved Ritz cinemas in Voorhees, NJ (somewhat over the water from Philadelphia).

Hello Lee,
Now I know how you felt when your beloved ‘silents only’ movie house closed.  I just checked the listings for the Ritz 16 and they were gone.  Further searching revealled that a huge chain bought the theater and is making it over into a hit distributor.  Someone else bought the Philly branches and it appears that they are still doing the right thing, but ‘our’ Ritz is gone, despite claims by the new owners that they will devote two out of sixteen screens to art films.
I found a blog that had many posts from equally shocked and disheartened folks.  Some of them had attended the ‘new’ Ritz and were sadly disappointed.  There were reps from the new masters in the lobby telling people that indy films are very slow in the summer, which is why they got replaced by Shrek.  One blog poster responded with a list of 25 art flicks he saw last summer at the Ritz.  So much for that argument.
I posted, answering one question people kept raising.  They wanted to know why the new lords didn’t keep the old policy.  I suggested that, if you already buy the same eight hit movies for all your other outlets, it’s easier to add one more multiplex to that list, rather than deal with some small distributor to rent films that don’t even get advertised on prime time TV.
Anyway, I’m in shock.  I mean, the old Ritz was going to get the new Guy Maddin film.  I was looking forward to seeing it on a big screen.  I ask for justice… DENIED!

Sorry for the rant, but I feel like I’ve been kicked in the stomach.  In protest I’m going to go and re-watch my copy of Donny and Marie Osmond in “Goin’ Coconuts.”  Vive le Cinema.  Or Viva la Cinema.  Whatever.

Inconsolably,         Sad Rich

Dear Sad Rich:  All too often it’s about selling the popcorn rather than the art. Here’s another case. Here’s what I learned from my years working for Twentieth Century Fox:  on first-run films in initial weeks, the distributor gets 70, or 80, or 90, or sometimes even 100% of the ticket (the percentage goes down as the weeks roll by). The theatre gets what’s left (if anything) and the concessions.  So, how much have you spent on popcorn and Coke at the Ritz, and how does that compare against the popcorn-and-Coke sales for the new “Die Hard” movie? I thought so. Same here.

That doesn’t tell the entirety of the tale, though, because I’m sure there’s a good business model for upscale art houses, like the Arclight here in LA.  The Arclight shows both art flicks and major releases, but here are the differences:  it costs more, but in return you get reserve seating and a true and enforced “be quiet” policy. Once upon a time I used to go to art houses — like the delightful Little Art Theatre, in the middle of the woods in Egg Harbor Township, NJ, where my wife and I had our first date (“Rocky Horror Picture Show”) and where later we saw great movies like “Jean de Florette.” But now that I’ve got a Netflix account — 70,000 films and counting, including the complete Werner Herzog (!) — and I’ve got a large cinema-quality screen at home, why hassle with text-messaging and other cellphone interruptions at the movie theatre? There’s only one good reason:  the audience experience. So if it’s a comedy, like “Borat,” you want to see it with an audience. But anything else? I’d rather see it with an audience of 1 to 5 — myself, and maybe assorted family members.

If you don’t have one, it’s time for a Netflix account. And I just checked and yes, they have Guy Maddin’s films in stock.

The host of “What’s My Line? Live on Stage” is the funny, personable — and stylish! — J. Keith van Straaten. Before resurrecting “WML?” he hosted this live talk show in L.A. Watch and enjoy.