It’s holy writ among playwrights that a bad production can screw up even a masterpiece. (Don’t believe it? Imagine William Shatner doing Shakespeare — or just singing “Rocket Man.”) But some plays hold up better than others under all circumstances, and after seeing a production of it this past Friday in a tenement theatre in San Francisco I’m thinking that Neil LaBute’s “The Shape of Things” is one of them.

The basic premise is just so much fun:  An average college nerd given a chance with an unconventional and attractive young artiste is remade in the process and left wondering, in the end, who he is and what just happened. This particular production was the directing debut of a recent college grad, and the casting reminded me of many a production I have myself featured in somehow as director or producer or (worst) playwright:  This actor’s great, this one’s good, this one’ll do, and this one… we’ll make work somehow. One actor telegraphed the play’s finale — if you didn’t know the final twist, you could certainly guess it from every actorly indication starting with Moment One. (Note to young actors (or bad actors, or all actors):  Please don’t play the end, and please don’t play the intention; and please don’t play subtext; just be. Please.) Another was physically wrong in almost every way but brought such bonhommie to the role that I grew to appreciate him and his oddly accidental comic moments. The lead was a sensation. And despite whatever faults — including the introduction of an intermission that the playwright expressly doesn’t want — the production worked well, got laughs, and held the attention of the audience. LaBute’s play asks smart questions about the essence of identity and the nature of art and the authenticity of sexual attraction; its success stems from its ability to entertain while being provocative.

What undoubtedly added to the enjoyment for me was that my son was seeing it with me. We went to San Francisco very last minute for three days on some personal business and decided to see a play on Friday night. My heart is usually found in a smaller theatre, so that’s where we went. Thirty years in, it’s hard for me to look at these things without a critical eye (but boy, when I love it, it is a joy to behold); but for Lex, this sort of thing is still new and young. His enjoyment of the play, which he’d already read, rubbed off on me. Whatever relatively minor faults of the production, I left feeling that I wanted to see another play in another small theatre right away.

The next night, after a day full of errands and obligations all over San Francisco, we went to the movies. We both wanted to see “Taken,” but it wasn’t playing near our hotel, so we wound up seeing “Fast & Furious.” Throwing us, in one night, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Let me just say that if ever in my life I’m having the stuffing beaten out of me, if someone is to grab me, throw me against a hard wood table so hard that it breaks in half, pick me up and hit me eight times hard to the craniofacial area, I hope it’s Vin Diesel, because judging from the recovery of Paul Walker it must be like getting pummeled with soft pillows. Walker sits up, wipes an invisible dripping from his nose, and talks down Vin Diesel with soothing words:  It’s the classic misunderstanding, but it’s all for the good, and no hard feelings. You or I would be on life support, but Walker is made of movie stuff. Earlier in the picture, Diesel’s posse of roadway hoodlums south of the border power their muscle cars down twisting mountaintop expanses of secluded roadway at top speeds in reverse, dropping trailer hitches onto gasoline tankers so they can haul off the precious fuel. (I’m assuming this was conceived when oil was at $150 a barrel, not the $50 it’s hovering at now. In 2009 if you want to make off with that much money, you just get a federal bailout.) The fuel swipe goes awry and Vin Diesel and his car find themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place:  hurtling toward one truck on a dead-end mountain pass while another tractor trailer endlessly flipping and bouncing from midair to hard ground is tumbling precisely their way. His solution:  Expertly timing when the tractor trailer is in midair and driving beneath it, getting out from under by the skin of his paint job. This trick is so neat that, of course, the movie repeats it again later. In big-budget action-adventure movies, if once is good, twice (or more) must be better.

For me, the movie dies 10 minutes in with Michelle Rodriguez’s character. No, I don’t know why I care about Michelle Rodriguez. I just know I can’t take my eyes off her. It isn’t purely heat; she’s got that indecipherable screen charisma that some people have and some people don’t. In a season of “Lost” that I don’t remember much about and didn’t care much about at the time, she was magnetic. (As was Michael Emerson.) Even surrounded by nitro-fueled steroid cars and whatever has been injected into Vin Diesel’s muscles and head, she stands out. But then she dies. In retrospect. We don’t even get to see it (except later). My son, who knew of my interest in seeing this movie because of Michelle Rodriguez, whispered “Uh oh” when we learned she wasn’t going to be reappearing in this movie. Not that her disappearance was a surprise, either:  Once your action-adventure hero somewhat unwillingly parts with his leading lady but leaves her a note (or, in this case, a big whopping bundle of cash; nothing says farewell my lovely so well as stacks of dead presidents), you know she’s doomed. But then, nothing, absolutely nothing, is a surprise in this movie, up to and including the identity of the mysterious drug lord everyone is hunting, and who turns out to be precisely who everyone (except our hero) thinks it is in the first place.

Finally — and I really can’t leave this subject without a word about this — let’s discuss Vin Diesel. I know that we shouldn’t discuss anyone with the name Vin Diesel, and I realize that each of us has only a limited time on Earth and I’m now spending some of mine on Vin Diesel,  and you’re spending some of  yours reading about Vin Diesel, but I can’t resist. Somehow I didn’t mind him in “The Chronicles of Riddick.” Maybe that’s because Judi Dench was in it. Maybe it’s because it was a science fiction movie with enough distractions, including Thandie Newton. (No Michelle Rodriguez, but she’ll do.) But “Fast & Furious” had me asking myself if Vin Diesel isn’t the flattest “actor” since Charles Bronson. An actor who was in a couple of my plays in the 1990’s did a movie with Charles Bronson in that period. I asked him what Charles Bronson was like. His reply:  “Like cement.” Just an inert slab that happened to be there for you to bounce lines off. I recently watched “Death Wish” again — and no, I don’t know why — and it’s true:  the “distraught” Charles Bronson upset over his wife’s murder and daughter’s rape is indistinguishable from the “workaday” Charles Bronson doing business out in the desert is indistinguishable from the vigilante Charles Bronson shooting would-be muggers in the park is indistinguishable from the murderous Charles Bronson evading police pursuing him from the subway station. Each has the emotional consistency of drywall. I couldn’t think when I’d seen that since in a major name film actor — but then seeing Vin Diesel in his latest solved that riddle for me. Say what you will about Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who can’t deliver a comic line to save his schwarzenegger, but at least he can crack his face into a smile.

Oddly, though, for all its obvious problems, “Fast & Furious” is every bit as unwreckable as “The Shape of Things” — probably moreso. The latter is clever enough to withstand the uneven application of artistic ability. The former is so witless, so amped up on steroids and meth, that no amount of artistic ability is needed, or even germane. “What I learned from you is to have a code,” Paul Walker’s character tells Vin Diesel; from all evidence, that character’s code is to do whatever he wants whenever he wants wherever he wants, no matter the impact on anyone else. (We call that hedonism. No, Virginia, it is not a basis for heroism.) The movie’s code is similarly easy to grasp:  maximum impact, but no repercussions. Repeat. Faster. Repeat.

Yes, this site was down for a bit. And yes, if you emailed me through this site, your email bounced. Why? In order to provide better service to its clients, the company that hosts this site transferred all its client sites and domains to even faster servers. Only one site didn’t make the transfer seamlessly:  this one. Who owns the company? Me. Ironies abound. As my partner said (I’m paraphrasing), “If it had to happen to one site, at least it was yours.” (A sentiment I share.)

I’ve said it here before:  Don’t blame technology for the demise of newspapers, blame newspaper companies. As Daniel Gross reminds us to.

Note especially this graf about my current hometown paper (or what’s left of it):

In 2007, legendary real estate investor Sam Zell decided that a talent for good timing in flipping office buildings made him an expert on the ailing newspaper industry. In December 2007, he closed on the $8.2 billion purchase of the Tribune Co., which owned the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Cubs. Zell put down just 4 percent of the purchase price—$315 million—and borrowed much of the rest, leaving the company with a $13 billion debt burden. This deal was the purest expression of the “dumb money” mentality. The only hope Zell had of making a dent in the debt load and keeping current on the $800-million-plus annual interest tab was to sell off trophy properties like the Cubs, office buildings, and big-city newspapers—assets that themselves don’t throw off lots of income but whose purchase requires tons of cheap credit. Tribune Co. filed for bankruptcy Dec. 8, 2008.

Uh huh. And this was after a decade of mismanagement by the Tribune people, and Times Mirror before them.

I’m not the only one upset about the end of Battlestar Galactica. Turns out Barack Obama is too.

Just a reminder that today is Blank Screen day.  Won’t you join me in pledging to participate?

As part of the global effort to conserve the Internet, which researchers at MIT have shown to be reaching capacity, people all over the world have agreed to switch off for one hour today. I will be observing Internet silence from 2 to 3 PM. You or your organization can participate at any time during normal business hours.

Just one reason why this is important:  Americans comprise less than 5% of the world’s population, yet use more than 25% of the world’s internet capacity. People in the developing nations will never be able to get online while some others are sucking up all available bandwidth  playing online poker and checking out amateur sex sites. Think about it:  your internet silence could help a shoeless child in a remote village get through to Zappos.com.

Please consider joining me and everyone else concerned about shrinking online accessibility today in this crusade.

In Tombstone there’s a new Wyatt Earp in town. Unfortunately, there’s still an old Wyatt Earp too. Now there’s a showdown brewing, with the sheriff saying the town ain’t big enough for the both of them.

I’ve been talking here about my friends losing their newspaper jobs, and all of us losing newspapers. It now occurs to me that I should also note the theatres we’re losing and, more importantly, the theatre people:  the people who really are the theatre (not, to paraphrase Mike Daisey, the buildings in which they work). Because we just lost one of the best. Having been laid off by his theatre, he’s now leaving “the theatre.” When we had him here in L.A., the impact was immeasurable. This isn’t just Portland Center Stage’s loss, this is a loss for everyone who cares about new plays.

“I’m not a journalist,” says the weepy Fox News host Glenn Beck in this video. “I’m just a guy that loves his country.”

I agree he’s not a journalist. No self-respecting journalist would cry these cued-up crocodile tears.

In this clip, you’ll see Tina Brown call Beck someone who is “in the mode of the great charlatan evangelists.” I think that’s about right. Many of those folks were taken as prophets of God — just as many of these entertainers are misunderstood as journalists.

Before the last newspaper folds, will any of them be able to make a profitable transition to the web? Because as bad as print reporting has been the past decade, with an overbearing curiosity about Britneys and Lindsays and little interest in corporate and government malfeasance and illegal wars, I shudder to consider how much worse we will be relying on the sort of boosterish hucksterism seen below.

Please watch.

In honor of the mistreated guy at A.I.G., today’s music video is “March of Greed” by Pere Ubu, animated by the Brothers Quay.

(And why does the band Pere Ubu sing about “Pere Ubu”? Because the band is named after the character, and this video is taken from “Bring Me The Head Of Ubu Roi,” an adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi.” Which had better come to L.A., or I warn you, someone will pay the price.)

By the way, if you like the song — and who wouldn’t? — you can download it free here.