THE HOLLYWOOD RAGE PAGE

One year into his presidency,   I’ve suddenly realized that POTUS and FLOTUS are Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor in “Green Acres.”   Fittingly, Eva was also the voice of “”Duchess” in “The Aristocats.”   When she speaks she is also Andy Kaufman, lip-synching “here I come to save the day!” They are also the Capital Hillbillies. Best of all like those classic   Hee-Haw worthy American comedies, they will eventually be canceled. You can only allow the Russians to do whatever they want, whenever they want for so long. It’s moments like this when I think of the McCarthy years.   The lives that we allowed to be destroyed. And now here we are with a U.S. President who fondles the Soviets like women who are backed into the corner of a Trump Tower bathroom. You have to believe that the most honest guy in the world is Christopher Steele. Clips of recent programs in Russia that have been airing recently have featured hosts who not only mock Tr...

Recently O.A. Scott, in the New York Times, wrote a retrospective look at Woody Allen. For sport, he took the Freudian route in analyzing both Woody’s work and personal life and while that was intellectually clever it was emotionally empty. It was like reading the review of Hamlet without bothering to go beyond Hamlet’s obvious psychological hang ups.   I get that he was stylistically trying to look at Woody through Woody’s famous eyeglasses, but instead, I think it distanced him from the deeper levels that run like a rapid human river through the DNA of this story. A few things to get out of the way. I have been a professional TV/film/play writer for over thirty years and the two biggest influences of my life have been and remain Woody and Neil Simon.  That being said I was a huge Bill Cosby fan too and just like you, I’m disgusted by his past.  But God just took his second child, so at this point, between his blindness and his losses, I’m ready to mo...

We have had lots of them.   Darkest Hours I mean. And I’m not just talking about the ones that we have all lived through and man, we’ve lived through plenty. In order of what I think of first,  I have experienced The Kennedy Brothers and Martin Luther King Assassinations, The Challenger Explosion,  9/11,  Princess Diana, The Vietnam War, The Cold War confrontations, the day that Carol Schwartz broke up with me.   That last one is a day that will go down in infamy. Thanks to TV, radio and film we have “lived” through tons of other darkest hours: The Hindenburg,  World Wars One and Two, The Holocaust, The Kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby, The Titanic, The Civil War, The Revolutionary War, Civil Rights.  Tragedy is in fact a film genre wedged right in there, in between comedy and drama.  Shakespeare sure as hell knew how to wield a tragic pen.  We all have our, own personal darkest hours like when cancer and/or death co...

Law  is a system  of rules that are created and enforce through social or covermental institutions to regulate behavior.  Law is a system that regulates and ensures that individuals or a community adhere to the will of the state.   The formation of laws themselves may be influenced by a constitution , written or tacit, and the rights  encoded therein. The law shapes politics, economics, history and society   politics ,  economics ,  history , and  society  in various ways and serves as a mediator of relations between people. Nowhere in those definitions does it either say or imply that our country's laws were handed down in Ten commandment tablet form from high atop the mount. Being that none of our laws were originally cast in stone,  we have, more than a few times since 1776, found that because society has changed and so must certain laws. Our laws were written by men, many who were slave owners.  This was Pr...