It’s Labor Day weekend — and unfortunately, I’m here at my office laboring. It’s not what I planned on, but in the cosmic scheme of things (or at least the scheme of my life for probably the next year), it’s important. So my plan of “write, play, shop” is temporarily on hold.

Oh, I did shop, though. I just bought an online registration to traffic school to void a ticket I got in central California when I was pulled over because my car didn’t have a front license plate on it. Why didn’t I have a front license plate? Because BMWs don’t come with front license plate brackets or holes. You have to take the car to the dealer to get them drilled in.  Which seems like an oversight. Now I have a mounted front license plate — and eight hours of online traffic school.

And tonight I am doing some playing — of poker. My wife and I are having a group of what she calls “marks” over to play Texas Hold ‘Em.

Tomorrow I hope to actually be writing my play. And playing “Oblivion” on the xBox; my character has sat idle for nine months and I’m starting to worry that the little towns and villages are getting overrun by demons unleashed from the other side.

Two last quick notes:

On Thursday night my friends Mark and Richard and I saw a movie that I thoroughly enjoyed, “The Last Exorcism.” It’s done in that cinema verite / documentary style that we’d all better become more accustomed to (because in the age of User Generated Content, and interactive content, that’s the look and feel that Millennials will  come to expect because everything must, somehow, adopt features of Facebook and/or YouTube). It’s cleverly written, acted, and directed; the lead reminded me very much of my good friend and favored actor Keith Sellon-Wright ten or 15 years ago, who, like this actor, is somehow able to be sincere and phony simultaneously; and the deceptively simple plot reveals itself, in retrospect, to be devilishly well contrived. And, somehow, it’s both scary and funny. I highly recommend it.

Coming out soon:  a movie somebody gave his right arm to see.

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.

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.

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?

Back here I noted that I had taken a two-week break from this blog and hoped to finally explain why that night. That was on August 9th, and I still haven’t done it. Why not? Because I have struggled for a month to figure out what to say about this, with no resolution. So now I’m just going to say it.

Someone I know killed himself.

On July 26th, the day after I came back from Comic-Con, during the middle of a day with many other delights and joys in it, I got an email that this colleague had died suddenly. It didn’t take long for me to piece together what had happened from a couple of calls and  some investigation on the Internet. I knew, as many of us did, that he had risen to a position of local prominence, then suffered a major career setback. After struggling with the aftermath of that for many months, months during which many of us still saw him on a regular basis, he one day parked his car at the end of a bridge, walked to the middle, and jumped to his death, a fall of 255 feet, farther than from the Golden Gate Bridge, in a descent that must have seemed an hour long to the man taking it. Pedestrians and bicyclists are protected from falls on that bridge by a 54-inch-tall concrete and metal safety rail.  An accidental slip off the side would be impossible.

I have a lot more to add to this story, but I don’t think I can add it here (at least not now). That’s what I was struggling with for weeks. This incident was foremost in my thoughts, and I did discuss it with my family and close friends, but I didn’t think it seemed appropriate to go on the Internet right now with my feelings about this.

I wasn’t close to this man, but we did serve on a board and on a committee together, and I saw him at many other civic and private functions. Over the course of the past year, I probably saw him three dozen times. That’s more often than I saw some of the people I consider my closest friends (especially those on the east coast). I had a lunch with him that left me very impressed with his intelligence and his ideas and his passion for his field, and I told him after that how glad I was that I’d gotten to know him better. We exchanged several emails following up on our discussion. I’m glad I got that opportunity.

Seven years ago, another man I knew killed himself. This man was a  close friend. He was one of the founders of my theatre company, and a regular guest to my house for holiday celebrations and parties. He was enormously talented and funny and strange, and generous with his time and his skills, but one day he just got tired of battling the mental illness he was always on guard against, and so he drank an entire bottle of whiskey while talking all his prescription pills. We did a lot of things together over the course of almost 15 years, and I have many, many fond memories, but here’s my last memory of that friend:  that one night four of us went to see a show together at La Mirada Theatre, two of us to a car, him riding with someone else, and before the show and after the show I don’t think I took much notice of him or said much to him, not willfully, but in a sort of blind ignorance because I was wrapped up in my own thoughts, and that was the last time I saw him. I doubt I could’ve changed anything (although I know I would have tried). But I do wish I could go back in time and pay a little more attention on that last night I was ever going to see him alive.