Hollywood: Let's party like it was 1999

It's always high-comedy time when Variety delivers one of its patented "state of the industry" thumbsuckers. The trade paper did not disappoint today, offering up an unintentionally hilarious piece claiming that Hollywood was undergoing an industrywide cutback of its premieres and holiday bashes. As always, Variety's team of reporters wrote an entire story without managing to quote a single industry executive by name, since apparently no one in Hollywood would be willing to acknowledge that--the horror!--they are cutting back on party expenses, for fear of ticking off the talent involved with the movie whose premiere was the one to suffer.

Still, what made the story especially strange was that most of the people quoted--anonymously, of course--didn't even support its premise. All Variety could deliver in the way of evidence of cutbacks was the vague news that "Disney and Viacom won't be getting festive this year" while Universal was letting "individual divisions decide how merry to get" during the holidays. The only actual quote in the whole piece supporting the industry-cutback premise was from an unnamed caterer who said one way to save money was to put the "shrimp in hors d'oeuvres instead of a buffet," adding "you cut back on things that take an inordinate amount of labor."

Yikes! The next thing you know they'll be buying the champagne from Costco. That's not exactly stop-the-presses material. In fact, the farther you read into the piece, the more questionable the whole assumption becomes, since according to Variety's own reporting, there are still plenty of big parties on tap and still plenty of films getting fancy premieres ("We still need to make a splash," as one studio event planner put it). Another unnamed executive was quoted as saying the parties would continue, since "we still have a business to run."

I called two big-shot PR executives to ask if it was true that studios were cutting back on premieres and parties and lavish Oscar spending. "Are you kidding?" was the answer. The sad truth is that if studios really want to save money, they'd much prefer to fire a bunch of low-level employees. The premieres, parties, limo rentals, Oscar ads and private jets are the last to go, since they are expenditures that can be written off against the film, buried far from view. The rest of America may be suffering, but the recession hasn't gotten bad enough for anyone in Hollywood to crack down on anything that involves coddling the talent. It's show business, where the party must always go on.   

Photo by Alastair Miller / Bloomberg News

Who knew that he had a highbrow fan club including the likes of Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Raymond Chandler and Anthony Burgess? Who knew that he was once described as looking like a "young Hoagy Carmichael?" Who knew that he wasn't even English, having a Scotsman as a father and a mother who was Swiss?

We're talking about James Bond, of course, the legendarily smooth-as-silk secret operative who's been a favorite big screen escapist fantasy for more than 40 years, and is arriving in theaters again this weekend via "Quantum of Solace," with Daniel Craig in his second turn as Bond. I thought I knew plenty about the whole Bond mystique and back story, but it turns out that I'd barely scratched the surface, as is evidenced by how much I learned from reading Allen Barra's delightful Bond essay in today's Wall Street Journal.

Also a consummate baseball fan -- his new book, due out in March, is called "Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee" -- Barra takes us along for a great ride through Bondland, tossing out arcane stats (there have been 20 previous films, not including a 1954 TV production of "Casino Royale"), nostalgia (in "Thunderball" Bond is envious of the CIA for "the excellence of their equipment") and juicy Bond quotes (from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," on his many amorous adventures: "I'm fed up with all these untidy, casual affairs that leave me with a bad conscience").

I mean, who knew JB even had a conscience? Even though the reviews of "Solace" have been lukewarm, Barra makes a persuasive case that Craig is the actor born to play Bond. You should read his whole piece, but here's the thrust of his point:

Forget the foppish Roger Moore or the bland Pierce Brosnan. Mr. Craig's Bond is the real thing, the "blunt instrument" described by Ian Fleming in an interview and repeated by Judi Dench's M in "Casino Royale." He isn't suave like Sean Connery or sensitive like Timothy Dalton; when a bartender asks Craig whether he wants his martini shaken or stirred, he snaps, in a line that drew chuckles from Bond fans everywhere: "Do I look like I give a damn?"

Photo of Daniel Craig in "Quantum of Solace" by Karen Ballard / Associated Press

Over the past few days, everyone has been offering words of wisdom about what Barack Obama's historic presidential victory means, especially in terms of it being a seismic political event. But after I got over the emotional experience of seeing America embrace an African American as its president, I found myself wondering: Did this election really represent a huge cultural triumph as well as a political mandate? That was a big reason why I spent Friday night with "Soul Men" producer David Friendly, watching him do what producers often do on their film's opening night, traveling around to local theaters to see whether their movie has any juice at the box office.

"Soul Men" isn't just any movie. It's a comedy starring two prominent African Americans, Sam Jackson and the late Bernie Mac, playing '70s-era backup singers who reluctantly reunite three decades later to play at a memorial concert for their old frontman. So it was an intriguing cultural test case: Would white audiences come out to watch an R-rated comedy with two black actors engaging in uproarious, but often barbed and profane insult humor? The box-office results provided a simple answer: No.

The problem wasn't playability--the movie earned an A-minus CinemaScore, meaning that audiences largely enjoyed the film. Its reviews were mixed, but it actually earned warm notices from top critics like Roger Ebert and the New York Times' A.O. Scott. Its tracking numbers were originally pretty solid, solid enough for the Weinstein Co, which made the film, to predict a decent weekend performance. When Friendly and I grabbed a bite in Century City, before ducking into the AMC complex there, he said he'd been told to expect "somewhere between $9 and $10 million" for the weekend, citing various Internet box-office tracking services.

But audiences simply didn't show. The movie ended up making a dismal $5.6 million (that's the Monday-morning estimate--the final numbers could be even lower Tuesday). Since Tyler Perry films regularly draw far bigger numbers without crossing over to white audiences, it means that neither black nor white moviegoers came out in droves to see the film. But as my travels on Friday night revealed, "Soul Men" is just another reminder that we still have a bifurcated pop culture. Will Smith and Denzel Washington are movie stars to all people, but when it comes to more specific film genres, notably black family dramas and raunchy black comedies--even in this age of Obama---there remains a huge gulf between African American and white audience tastes.

What's going on here? Did "Soul Men" play completely differently at the Magic Johnson Theaters than it did in Century City? Keep reading:   

As the enormity of Barack Obama's win last night begins to sink in around the country, I've been hearing from friends -- some of them giddy, some of them in awe, some of them simply amazed that after so many decades of racial strife, that this country has freely elected an African American president. It's hard to put it all in perspective, though I will try to give it a shot later today. However, my friend Howard Rodman, the screenwriter and USC film school guru, just passed along a wonderfully perceptive observation about America and how we symbolize the ideals of people all around the globe. It comes from the great filmmaker Sergio Leone, someone who admired America from afar, but who found a way to express many of our most potent myths and dreams in his movies. He says: 

"In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life -- in jeeps -- and upset all my dreams. I admired the Americans on the screen a lot -- their style, their way of speaking, and their way of wearing hats. But after a while I began to realize that America is really the property of the world. America was something dreamed by philosophers, vagabonds and the wretched of the earth long before it was discovered by Spanish ships and populated by colonies of the world. The Americans have only rented it -- temporarily. If their movies don't work, if the mythical level is lowered, if they don't behave well -- then the contract can always be withheld. We can evict them. Or discover another America...."

As Howard explains: "I always thought he was talking about tomorrow.  But perhaps, just perhaps, he was talking about yesterday, Nov. 4, 2008."

Obama poster by Shepard Fairey

It feels like nearly every journalist I've talked to this week has just been to a screening of "Milk," Gus Van Sant's lively biopic about San Francisco's pioneering gay activist Harvey Milk. The chatter about the film -- Is it an Oscar contender? Is it too admiring? Does Sean Penn sound exactly like your Aunt Sophie from the Bronx? -- has been nonstop, which is only pouring more salt on the wounds over at the Hollywood Reporter, which ran a piece Monday claiming that Focus, the film's distributor, was hiding the movie.

Even more embarrassing, the piece went on to contend that Focus needs to persuade senior citizens to see the movie in order for it to succeed, citing a recent Las Vegas screening where several seniors attempted to leave the movie during a brief gay love scene. Even though the seniors actually stayed -- they were trapped in a middle aisle -- the Reporter concluded that "these are the viewers Focus must woo." If Focus really needs to woo my Aunt Toots to make "Milk" a success, we're all in a heap of trouble, but I suspect that this anecdote tells us more about clueless trade reporting than an actual marketing challenge.

Focus chief James Schamus was so insulted that he fired off a cranky letter to the Reporter, slagging its story, boasting about his own marketing campaign and rattling off the names of all the California politicians who are on the film's benefit committee. He did manage to make one salient point--the "Milk" premiere arrives the week before a crucial election, "one which includes an anti-gay state proposition much like the one Harvey Milk vanquished 30 years ago."

Today the anti-gay measure is Proposition 8. Thirty years ago, it was Proposition 6, a ballot initiative masterminded by California state senator John Briggs, which would ban gays and lesbians - as well as any gay rights supporter -- from teaching in California public schools. To add insult to injury, Briggs publicly called gay-friendly San Francisco a "sexual garbage heap." Milk led the opposition to the incendiary initiative, traveling across the state engaging Briggs in a series of colorful debates. "Milk" re-creates one of their public encounters where Milk quipped: "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around." The proposition lost by more than a million votes. It was the high water mark of Milk's political career.

The parallels between the events of 30 years ago and today are striking. My colleague Rachel Abramowitz has talked to the "Milk" filmmakers about the film's connection with today's events. Here's her report:

Movie studios may still have enough dough to run full-page ads for a special tribute in Variety honoring the trade paper's venerable Peter Bart, but it's become pretty obvious that most of Hollywood is in the grip of a deep recession. When I showed up for lunch yesterday at the Peninsula Hotel, the hotel's swank Belvedere restaurant--normally buzzing with agents, producers and aging TV actors--was practically deserted. When I found my lunch date, producer Charlie Corwin, we had our pick of any booth in the place. (It's like this everywhere--a friend in New York says the restaurants and theaters there are empty as well.)

Corwin made his money from the Internet, but for the past few years he's quietly become an intriguing player in Hollywood. The company he co-founded, Original Media, has been involved with everything from hip indie films ("The Squid and the Whale" and "Half Nelson") to edgy reality TV shows like "LA Ink," "Miami Ink" and "Storm Chasers." He's now producing one of NBC's most ambitious new shows, "The Philanthropist," which is due early next year, starring James Purefoy as a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

Corwin doesn't need much help when it comes to clout and connections. One of his good pals is NBC's Ben Silverman, who greenlit "The Philanthropist" after hearing Corwin's pitch over drinks one night at the Chateau Marmont. Another good buddy is Sting, who was a producer on "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," another one of Corwin's indie pictures. The money man for "Saints" was yet another good pal, Bobby Sager, a former corporate raider from Boston who's now ... a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

In other words, Sager's the role model for "The Philanthropist." It's quite a nice little circle. When Silverman, who'd been Corwin's agent at William Morris, wanted to see a maverick billionaire in action, Corwin took him to Las Vegas to meet Sager and go to one of Sting's Police reunion shows. Corwin insists that Sager is the real deal. "He's devoted his life to changing the world," he told me. "He's a hands on, boots on the ground kind of guy. His beat is Palestine, Pakistan, Rwanda and Iraq."

To hear Corwin tell it, a TV show about Sager would be like going globe-trotting to every hot spot around the world with a swashbuckling do-gooder as your guide. "One week he's in the West Bank, then he's in Iraq, then he's in Tibet with the Dalai Lama," Corwin says. "Bobby also goes to Rwanda, where he created a business that makes scarves, made by the women whose husbands were murdered during the genocide there, working alongside the women whose husbands had been in jail for murdering them."

It could be totally cheesy, but it could also be guilty-pleasure-style Feel Good TV: following a guy who cuts through the red tape, writes the checks, can get the U.N. ambassador or CIA station chief on the phone in the middle of the night. So why has "The Philanthropist" had such a rocky start?

Keep reading:   

Bill Maher just won't go away. His documentary, "Religulous," grossed nearly $1 million over the weekend, putting it over the $10-million mark in its fourth week in theaters. Granted, that's still about $68 million less than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" has made, but it's a pretty impressive performance for a documentary. In fact, at $10.6 million, the movie is now in the all-time box office Top 10 for documentaries. Lionsgate execs say "Religulous" isn't just a hit among the nonbelieving, non-"true American" crowd. They say the doc has been putting fannies in the seats in every state in the country. Most of its top performing theaters have been in New York and L.A., but two of the film's Top 20 theaters were in Denver and one was the Broadway Center Six in (gasp!) Salt Lake City.

Since I'm still getting comments from my last Maher interview, I decided to check in with him again, just to see if success had softened his loathing for any and all religion. I think its fair to say the answer is--no, no way, not a chance. You might say Maher has a gift for the wicked jab. So far Maher has been getting mostly kudos for the film, so I thought I'd try to rattle him by raising some of the complaints registered by the Weekly Standard's critic John Podhoretz, who grouched that Maher repeatedly made fun of obese people in the film. The comic's response: "What did you expect? We did the film in America and it's a fat country. I think Podhoretz is fat and he's just especially sensitive to it."

OK. What about Podhoretz's claim that he's never seen anyone conduct himself as rudely on camera ("or in real life") as Maher. Podhoretz wrote that Maher's method in "Religulous'" is "to interview people who are far poorer, far less sophisticated and vastly better mannered than he, and as he does so, to laugh at them, tell them that their deepest beliefs are the sort of nonsense he gave up when he was 11 years old, and then press ahead with another question intended only to expose their idiocy."

Maher's response? "That's ridiculous. Even the people who didn't want to like this movie say how genteel I was. They were expecting me to be snotty and rude and I was nothing of the kind. I don't know what movie Podhoretz saw, but it clearly wasn't mine. To say that I only pick on the weak-minded is totally bogus. I interviewed a U.S. senator--is he poorer or more unsophisticated than me? What about the Vatican astronomer I interviewed? Is he less intellectual than me? Please!"

Podhoretz also complained that the only rabbi Maher interviewed was an anti-Zionist nut. Wasn't that unfair, I asked.

Maher's response: "We don't present him as representing the entire Jewish religion. It was actually difficult, ironically, to find a Jewish guy who was funny. Because it's not fear based, their religion is a harder target for ridicule. The Jews just don't believe a lot of the crazy things I find so dangerous in Christianity and Islam. They don't look forward to Armageddon, like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush and all the other end-timers do. It's one reason I find them so dangerous. It makes me nervous that people are convinced that Jesus is going to fix all of mankind's problems when he comes back. I mean, that can't have a positive effect on our ability to come up with practical solutions if our political leadership believes that everything is coming to an end soon anyway."

To be honest, Maher wasn't any easier on me when I volunteered my own criticism of the movie. Is it really possible that he doesn't find anything positive about religion at all? 

Just when you thought Dodger Stadium couldn't get more cluttered with ads and promotions and marketing hype, here comes the news that the William Morris Agency has been hired by Frank McCourt and Co. to exploit even more branding opportunities for the team. No stone will remain unturned--or more accurately, no public space will remain bare in the Dodgers constant search for new revenue streams. As Variety put it, the team "is exploring sponsors for everything from the bullpens, baselines and the team dugouts," along with sponsorship arrangements for the team's new retail outlet project that will be under construction for the next several years.

As Big Picture loyalists may have noticed, I'm a Cubs fan, so I'm especially sensitive to ballparks being turned into giant billboards. Wrigley Field has largely remained a holdout from the current mania for commercial exploitation, although you could argue that the Cubs' ballpark--built in 1914--was one of the first stadiums to endorse a commercial sponsor, since the park's very name touts its former owner's chewing gum brand. But do we really want to see a Dodger pitcher warming up in the "Shrek 4" bullpen? Or watch the home team take the field, scrambling out of a dugout emblazoned with a giant severed head logo for "Saw 5"? Where would it end? What would stop Disney from emblazoning "Bolt" on all the Dodgers bats? Or Fox from doing giveaways for every ball that bounces on "The Day the Earth Stood Still" warning track? Who knows--maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg will give away 50,000 3D glasses to fans on Opening Day so they can watch clips from "Monsters vs. Aliens" on the stadium's jumbo video screen during the seventh-inning stretch.

It's almost impossible to exaggerate what marketers will do if given "virtually limitless" possibilities, to quote Dodgers COO Dennis Mannion's breathless description of the team's master marketing plan. Baseball purists will remember that in 2004 Sony launched a "Spider-Man" promotion designed to put the movie's logo on all the bases at ballparks during inter-league play that year. The studio was forced to scale back the promotion after a storm of protest from outraged fans. With the Dodgers playoff hopes hanging by a thread right now, I don't want to do anything to jinx the team's chances. But I'd like to hear from baseball fans: Are ballparks already filled with too much advertising clutter and showbiz marketing? Or are you OK with owners using whatever means necessary to generate revenue to stock the team with the most highly paid stars imaginable?

"Shrek the Third" photo from DreamWorks Animation

When it rains, it pours. It's no secret that Hollywood isn't exactly a Republican stronghold, so the GOP values every conservative celebrity vote it has in its back pocket. On the other hand, Hollywood is, well, a town that loves front-runners, so when things aren't going good, you can expect celebrities to jump ship at the slightest provocation.

That just happened to Dennis Hopper. After having voted a straight GOP ticket for Bush (both father and son), not to mention costarring in "An American Carol," the current David Zucker right-wing comedy that mocks Michael Moore, Hopper has gone overboard, telling reporters in Paris that he's voting for Barack Obama this time around. Even though he voted for George W. Bush--twice--Hopper blasted his administration for its many "lies," saying "I pray God, Barack Obama is elected."

This is especially bad news, since Hopper is McCain's demographic peer--the legendary star of "Easy Rider" is actually three months older than McCain, having turned 72 in May. I guess if I were a die-hard conservative, I'd say, "It figures that Hopper would wait till he was in (ahem) France to deliver the bad news." Speaking of bad news, as we mentioned the other day, the McCain campaign has been running out of pop anthems to play at campaign rallies after a slew of performers--including the Foo Fighters, Van Halen and Jackson Browne--all complained that the McCain campaign had never gotten permission to use their music.

I asked readers for helpful suggestions for new songs the McCain campaign might play instead. And oh boy, did we get suggestions! I guess we have a lot of liberal readers, since most of the ideas were--shall we say--somewhat sarcastic. I've gone through the lengthy list to cull a few highlights. Which songs were my favorites? Keep reading:

There was a time, oh so long ago, when music videos were cool. Every Hollywood agent and movie studio executive had MTV playing in the background in their offices and were on the lookout for the hot new video wunderkind. Everyone seemed happily persuaded that every fresh-faced 23-year-old straight out of USC film school might turn out to be the next David Fincher, Tarsem Singh or Spike Jonze. Then it all started to fall apart, with MTV pretty much going down the drain and all too many of the alleged hot-shot directors turning out be one-hit wonders. 

Could music videos possibly make a comeback? Wired magazine argues that we could be in the dawn of a new golden age of music video, thanks largely to the digital reach of YouTube, which has replaced MTV as the popular proving ground for the best new videos. As Weezer's "Pork and Beans" director Mathew Cullen puts it: "MTV has become an afterthought." He should know. When "Pork and Beans" (which is filled with cameos from the latest and greatest Web celebs) was posted on YouTube earlier this year, it became an instant sensation, attracting 4 million views in its first week.

Wired spotlighted six videos, nearly all of 2008 vintage. "Pork and Beans" is the best known, but it's hardly the only one worth watching. My favorite was "Toe Jam," by Brighton Port Authority, actually a Fatboy Slim spinoff group featuring David Byrne. Directed by Keith Schofield, it's a comic delight, featuring a host of naked women cavorting on shag carpet, their breasts and bottoms all carefully obscured with black censor bars. Schofield choreographs their movements so the censor bars spell out words or form Busby Berkeley-style geometric patterns.

One of the other treats is an interactive video of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," which allows you to create all sorts of cool effects by clicking on the screen as the video plays. Another video worth watching is Bright Eyes' "At the Bottom of Everything," directed by Cat Solen, which features playful stop-motion animation and special guests Terence Stamp and Evan Rachel Wood getting to know each other in a plane that's spiraling earthward in the most ethereal fashion. I also liked the low-fi quality of Animal Collective's "Taste." The only real clinker in the bunch is Rik Cordero's draggy, eight-minute-long video of a Nas song, which is undercut by the solemn pretense of the video. It's surely the only music video that actually has a "key grip" credit.

Still, five out of six isn't bad. Maybe music video has a future after all.

Photo of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video from YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

The name is Bond, James Bond -- not Mr. Solace

Who knew that he had a highbrow fan club including the likes of Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Raymond Chandler and Anthony Burgess? Who knew that he was once described as looking like a "young Hoagy Carmichael?" Who knew that he wasn't even English, having a Scotsman as a father and a mother who was Swiss?

We're talking about James Bond, of course, the legendarily smooth-as-silk secret operative who's been a favorite big screen escapist fantasy for more than 40 years, and is arriving in theaters again this weekend via "Quantum of Solace," with Daniel Craig in his second turn as Bond. I thought I knew plenty about the whole Bond mystique and back story, but it turns out that I'd barely scratched the surface, as is evidenced by how much I learned from reading Allen Barra's delightful Bond essay in today's Wall Street Journal.

Also a consummate baseball fan -- his new book, due out in March, is called "Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee" -- Barra takes us along for a great ride through Bondland, tossing out arcane stats (there have been 20 previous films, not including a 1954 TV production of "Casino Royale"), nostalgia (in "Thunderball" Bond is envious of the CIA for "the excellence of their equipment") and juicy Bond quotes (from "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," on his many amorous adventures: "I'm fed up with all these untidy, casual affairs that leave me with a bad conscience").

I mean, who knew JB even had a conscience? Even though the reviews of "Solace" have been lukewarm, Barra makes a persuasive case that Craig is the actor born to play Bond. You should read his whole piece, but here's the thrust of his point:

Forget the foppish Roger Moore or the bland Pierce Brosnan. Mr. Craig's Bond is the real thing, the "blunt instrument" described by Ian Fleming in an interview and repeated by Judi Dench's M in "Casino Royale." He isn't suave like Sean Connery or sensitive like Timothy Dalton; when a bartender asks Craig whether he wants his martini shaken or stirred, he snaps, in a line that drew chuckles from Bond fans everywhere: "Do I look like I give a damn?"

Photo of Daniel Craig in "Quantum of Solace" by Karen Ballard / Associated Press

Over the past few days, everyone has been offering words of wisdom about what Barack Obama's historic presidential victory means, especially in terms of it being a seismic political event. But after I got over the emotional experience of seeing America embrace an African American as its president, I found myself wondering: Did this election really represent a huge cultural triumph as well as a political mandate? That was a big reason why I spent Friday night with "Soul Men" producer David Friendly, watching him do what producers often do on their film's opening night, traveling around to local theaters to see whether their movie has any juice at the box office.

"Soul Men" isn't just any movie. It's a comedy starring two prominent African Americans, Sam Jackson and the late Bernie Mac, playing '70s-era backup singers who reluctantly reunite three decades later to play at a memorial concert for their old frontman. So it was an intriguing cultural test case: Would white audiences come out to watch an R-rated comedy with two black actors engaging in uproarious, but often barbed and profane insult humor? The box-office results provided a simple answer: No.

The problem wasn't playability--the movie earned an A-minus CinemaScore, meaning that audiences largely enjoyed the film. Its reviews were mixed, but it actually earned warm notices from top critics like Roger Ebert and the New York Times' A.O. Scott. Its tracking numbers were originally pretty solid, solid enough for the Weinstein Co, which made the film, to predict a decent weekend performance. When Friendly and I grabbed a bite in Century City, before ducking into the AMC complex there, he said he'd been told to expect "somewhere between $9 and $10 million" for the weekend, citing various Internet box-office tracking services.

But audiences simply didn't show. The movie ended up making a dismal $5.6 million (that's the Monday-morning estimate--the final numbers could be even lower Tuesday). Since Tyler Perry films regularly draw far bigger numbers without crossing over to white audiences, it means that neither black nor white moviegoers came out in droves to see the film. But as my travels on Friday night revealed, "Soul Men" is just another reminder that we still have a bifurcated pop culture. Will Smith and Denzel Washington are movie stars to all people, but when it comes to more specific film genres, notably black family dramas and raunchy black comedies--even in this age of Obama---there remains a huge gulf between African American and white audience tastes.

What's going on here? Did "Soul Men" play completely differently at the Magic Johnson Theaters than it did in Century City? Keep reading:   

As the enormity of Barack Obama's win last night begins to sink in around the country, I've been hearing from friends -- some of them giddy, some of them in awe, some of them simply amazed that after so many decades of racial strife, that this country has freely elected an African American president. It's hard to put it all in perspective, though I will try to give it a shot later today. However, my friend Howard Rodman, the screenwriter and USC film school guru, just passed along a wonderfully perceptive observation about America and how we symbolize the ideals of people all around the globe. It comes from the great filmmaker Sergio Leone, someone who admired America from afar, but who found a way to express many of our most potent myths and dreams in his movies. He says: 

"In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life -- in jeeps -- and upset all my dreams. I admired the Americans on the screen a lot -- their style, their way of speaking, and their way of wearing hats. But after a while I began to realize that America is really the property of the world. America was something dreamed by philosophers, vagabonds and the wretched of the earth long before it was discovered by Spanish ships and populated by colonies of the world. The Americans have only rented it -- temporarily. If their movies don't work, if the mythical level is lowered, if they don't behave well -- then the contract can always be withheld. We can evict them. Or discover another America...."

As Howard explains: "I always thought he was talking about tomorrow.  But perhaps, just perhaps, he was talking about yesterday, Nov. 4, 2008."

Obama poster by Shepard Fairey

It feels like nearly every journalist I've talked to this week has just been to a screening of "Milk," Gus Van Sant's lively biopic about San Francisco's pioneering gay activist Harvey Milk. The chatter about the film -- Is it an Oscar contender? Is it too admiring? Does Sean Penn sound exactly like your Aunt Sophie from the Bronx? -- has been nonstop, which is only pouring more salt on the wounds over at the Hollywood Reporter, which ran a piece Monday claiming that Focus, the film's distributor, was hiding the movie.

Even more embarrassing, the piece went on to contend that Focus needs to persuade senior citizens to see the movie in order for it to succeed, citing a recent Las Vegas screening where several seniors attempted to leave the movie during a brief gay love scene. Even though the seniors actually stayed -- they were trapped in a middle aisle -- the Reporter concluded that "these are the viewers Focus must woo." If Focus really needs to woo my Aunt Toots to make "Milk" a success, we're all in a heap of trouble, but I suspect that this anecdote tells us more about clueless trade reporting than an actual marketing challenge.

Focus chief James Schamus was so insulted that he fired off a cranky letter to the Reporter, slagging its story, boasting about his own marketing campaign and rattling off the names of all the California politicians who are on the film's benefit committee. He did manage to make one salient point--the "Milk" premiere arrives the week before a crucial election, "one which includes an anti-gay state proposition much like the one Harvey Milk vanquished 30 years ago."

Today the anti-gay measure is Proposition 8. Thirty years ago, it was Proposition 6, a ballot initiative masterminded by California state senator John Briggs, which would ban gays and lesbians - as well as any gay rights supporter -- from teaching in California public schools. To add insult to injury, Briggs publicly called gay-friendly San Francisco a "sexual garbage heap." Milk led the opposition to the incendiary initiative, traveling across the state engaging Briggs in a series of colorful debates. "Milk" re-creates one of their public encounters where Milk quipped: "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around." The proposition lost by more than a million votes. It was the high water mark of Milk's political career.

The parallels between the events of 30 years ago and today are striking. My colleague Rachel Abramowitz has talked to the "Milk" filmmakers about the film's connection with today's events. Here's her report:

Movie studios may still have enough dough to run full-page ads for a special tribute in Variety honoring the trade paper's venerable Peter Bart, but it's become pretty obvious that most of Hollywood is in the grip of a deep recession. When I showed up for lunch yesterday at the Peninsula Hotel, the hotel's swank Belvedere restaurant--normally buzzing with agents, producers and aging TV actors--was practically deserted. When I found my lunch date, producer Charlie Corwin, we had our pick of any booth in the place. (It's like this everywhere--a friend in New York says the restaurants and theaters there are empty as well.)

Corwin made his money from the Internet, but for the past few years he's quietly become an intriguing player in Hollywood. The company he co-founded, Original Media, has been involved with everything from hip indie films ("The Squid and the Whale" and "Half Nelson") to edgy reality TV shows like "LA Ink," "Miami Ink" and "Storm Chasers." He's now producing one of NBC's most ambitious new shows, "The Philanthropist," which is due early next year, starring James Purefoy as a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

Corwin doesn't need much help when it comes to clout and connections. One of his good pals is NBC's Ben Silverman, who greenlit "The Philanthropist" after hearing Corwin's pitch over drinks one night at the Chateau Marmont. Another good buddy is Sting, who was a producer on "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," another one of Corwin's indie pictures. The money man for "Saints" was yet another good pal, Bobby Sager, a former corporate raider from Boston who's now ... a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

In other words, Sager's the role model for "The Philanthropist." It's quite a nice little circle. When Silverman, who'd been Corwin's agent at William Morris, wanted to see a maverick billionaire in action, Corwin took him to Las Vegas to meet Sager and go to one of Sting's Police reunion shows. Corwin insists that Sager is the real deal. "He's devoted his life to changing the world," he told me. "He's a hands on, boots on the ground kind of guy. His beat is Palestine, Pakistan, Rwanda and Iraq."

To hear Corwin tell it, a TV show about Sager would be like going globe-trotting to every hot spot around the world with a swashbuckling do-gooder as your guide. "One week he's in the West Bank, then he's in Iraq, then he's in Tibet with the Dalai Lama," Corwin says. "Bobby also goes to Rwanda, where he created a business that makes scarves, made by the women whose husbands were murdered during the genocide there, working alongside the women whose husbands had been in jail for murdering them."

It could be totally cheesy, but it could also be guilty-pleasure-style Feel Good TV: following a guy who cuts through the red tape, writes the checks, can get the U.N. ambassador or CIA station chief on the phone in the middle of the night. So why has "The Philanthropist" had such a rocky start?

Keep reading:   

Bill Maher just won't go away. His documentary, "Religulous," grossed nearly $1 million over the weekend, putting it over the $10-million mark in its fourth week in theaters. Granted, that's still about $68 million less than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" has made, but it's a pretty impressive performance for a documentary. In fact, at $10.6 million, the movie is now in the all-time box office Top 10 for documentaries. Lionsgate execs say "Religulous" isn't just a hit among the nonbelieving, non-"true American" crowd. They say the doc has been putting fannies in the seats in every state in the country. Most of its top performing theaters have been in New York and L.A., but two of the film's Top 20 theaters were in Denver and one was the Broadway Center Six in (gasp!) Salt Lake City.

Since I'm still getting comments from my last Maher interview, I decided to check in with him again, just to see if success had softened his loathing for any and all religion. I think its fair to say the answer is--no, no way, not a chance. You might say Maher has a gift for the wicked jab. So far Maher has been getting mostly kudos for the film, so I thought I'd try to rattle him by raising some of the complaints registered by the Weekly Standard's critic John Podhoretz, who grouched that Maher repeatedly made fun of obese people in the film. The comic's response: "What did you expect? We did the film in America and it's a fat country. I think Podhoretz is fat and he's just especially sensitive to it."

OK. What about Podhoretz's claim that he's never seen anyone conduct himself as rudely on camera ("or in real life") as Maher. Podhoretz wrote that Maher's method in "Religulous'" is "to interview people who are far poorer, far less sophisticated and vastly better mannered than he, and as he does so, to laugh at them, tell them that their deepest beliefs are the sort of nonsense he gave up when he was 11 years old, and then press ahead with another question intended only to expose their idiocy."

Maher's response? "That's ridiculous. Even the people who didn't want to like this movie say how genteel I was. They were expecting me to be snotty and rude and I was nothing of the kind. I don't know what movie Podhoretz saw, but it clearly wasn't mine. To say that I only pick on the weak-minded is totally bogus. I interviewed a U.S. senator--is he poorer or more unsophisticated than me? What about the Vatican astronomer I interviewed? Is he less intellectual than me? Please!"

Podhoretz also complained that the only rabbi Maher interviewed was an anti-Zionist nut. Wasn't that unfair, I asked.

Maher's response: "We don't present him as representing the entire Jewish religion. It was actually difficult, ironically, to find a Jewish guy who was funny. Because it's not fear based, their religion is a harder target for ridicule. The Jews just don't believe a lot of the crazy things I find so dangerous in Christianity and Islam. They don't look forward to Armageddon, like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush and all the other end-timers do. It's one reason I find them so dangerous. It makes me nervous that people are convinced that Jesus is going to fix all of mankind's problems when he comes back. I mean, that can't have a positive effect on our ability to come up with practical solutions if our political leadership believes that everything is coming to an end soon anyway."

To be honest, Maher wasn't any easier on me when I volunteered my own criticism of the movie. Is it really possible that he doesn't find anything positive about religion at all? 

Just when you thought Dodger Stadium couldn't get more cluttered with ads and promotions and marketing hype, here comes the news that the William Morris Agency has been hired by Frank McCourt and Co. to exploit even more branding opportunities for the team. No stone will remain unturned--or more accurately, no public space will remain bare in the Dodgers constant search for new revenue streams. As Variety put it, the team "is exploring sponsors for everything from the bullpens, baselines and the team dugouts," along with sponsorship arrangements for the team's new retail outlet project that will be under construction for the next several years.

As Big Picture loyalists may have noticed, I'm a Cubs fan, so I'm especially sensitive to ballparks being turned into giant billboards. Wrigley Field has largely remained a holdout from the current mania for commercial exploitation, although you could argue that the Cubs' ballpark--built in 1914--was one of the first stadiums to endorse a commercial sponsor, since the park's very name touts its former owner's chewing gum brand. But do we really want to see a Dodger pitcher warming up in the "Shrek 4" bullpen? Or watch the home team take the field, scrambling out of a dugout emblazoned with a giant severed head logo for "Saw 5"? Where would it end? What would stop Disney from emblazoning "Bolt" on all the Dodgers bats? Or Fox from doing giveaways for every ball that bounces on "The Day the Earth Stood Still" warning track? Who knows--maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg will give away 50,000 3D glasses to fans on Opening Day so they can watch clips from "Monsters vs. Aliens" on the stadium's jumbo video screen during the seventh-inning stretch.

It's almost impossible to exaggerate what marketers will do if given "virtually limitless" possibilities, to quote Dodgers COO Dennis Mannion's breathless description of the team's master marketing plan. Baseball purists will remember that in 2004 Sony launched a "Spider-Man" promotion designed to put the movie's logo on all the bases at ballparks during inter-league play that year. The studio was forced to scale back the promotion after a storm of protest from outraged fans. With the Dodgers playoff hopes hanging by a thread right now, I don't want to do anything to jinx the team's chances. But I'd like to hear from baseball fans: Are ballparks already filled with too much advertising clutter and showbiz marketing? Or are you OK with owners using whatever means necessary to generate revenue to stock the team with the most highly paid stars imaginable?

"Shrek the Third" photo from DreamWorks Animation

When it rains, it pours. It's no secret that Hollywood isn't exactly a Republican stronghold, so the GOP values every conservative celebrity vote it has in its back pocket. On the other hand, Hollywood is, well, a town that loves front-runners, so when things aren't going good, you can expect celebrities to jump ship at the slightest provocation.

That just happened to Dennis Hopper. After having voted a straight GOP ticket for Bush (both father and son), not to mention costarring in "An American Carol," the current David Zucker right-wing comedy that mocks Michael Moore, Hopper has gone overboard, telling reporters in Paris that he's voting for Barack Obama this time around. Even though he voted for George W. Bush--twice--Hopper blasted his administration for its many "lies," saying "I pray God, Barack Obama is elected."

This is especially bad news, since Hopper is McCain's demographic peer--the legendary star of "Easy Rider" is actually three months older than McCain, having turned 72 in May. I guess if I were a die-hard conservative, I'd say, "It figures that Hopper would wait till he was in (ahem) France to deliver the bad news." Speaking of bad news, as we mentioned the other day, the McCain campaign has been running out of pop anthems to play at campaign rallies after a slew of performers--including the Foo Fighters, Van Halen and Jackson Browne--all complained that the McCain campaign had never gotten permission to use their music.

I asked readers for helpful suggestions for new songs the McCain campaign might play instead. And oh boy, did we get suggestions! I guess we have a lot of liberal readers, since most of the ideas were--shall we say--somewhat sarcastic. I've gone through the lengthy list to cull a few highlights. Which songs were my favorites? Keep reading:

There was a time, oh so long ago, when music videos were cool. Every Hollywood agent and movie studio executive had MTV playing in the background in their offices and were on the lookout for the hot new video wunderkind. Everyone seemed happily persuaded that every fresh-faced 23-year-old straight out of USC film school might turn out to be the next David Fincher, Tarsem Singh or Spike Jonze. Then it all started to fall apart, with MTV pretty much going down the drain and all too many of the alleged hot-shot directors turning out be one-hit wonders. 

Could music videos possibly make a comeback? Wired magazine argues that we could be in the dawn of a new golden age of music video, thanks largely to the digital reach of YouTube, which has replaced MTV as the popular proving ground for the best new videos. As Weezer's "Pork and Beans" director Mathew Cullen puts it: "MTV has become an afterthought." He should know. When "Pork and Beans" (which is filled with cameos from the latest and greatest Web celebs) was posted on YouTube earlier this year, it became an instant sensation, attracting 4 million views in its first week.

Wired spotlighted six videos, nearly all of 2008 vintage. "Pork and Beans" is the best known, but it's hardly the only one worth watching. My favorite was "Toe Jam," by Brighton Port Authority, actually a Fatboy Slim spinoff group featuring David Byrne. Directed by Keith Schofield, it's a comic delight, featuring a host of naked women cavorting on shag carpet, their breasts and bottoms all carefully obscured with black censor bars. Schofield choreographs their movements so the censor bars spell out words or form Busby Berkeley-style geometric patterns.

One of the other treats is an interactive video of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," which allows you to create all sorts of cool effects by clicking on the screen as the video plays. Another video worth watching is Bright Eyes' "At the Bottom of Everything," directed by Cat Solen, which features playful stop-motion animation and special guests Terence Stamp and Evan Rachel Wood getting to know each other in a plane that's spiraling earthward in the most ethereal fashion. I also liked the low-fi quality of Animal Collective's "Taste." The only real clinker in the bunch is Rik Cordero's draggy, eight-minute-long video of a Nas song, which is undercut by the solemn pretense of the video. It's surely the only music video that actually has a "key grip" credit.

Still, five out of six isn't bad. Maybe music video has a future after all.

Photo of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video from YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

'Soul Men' delivers mixed verdict on Obama victory

Over the past few days, everyone has been offering words of wisdom about what Barack Obama's historic presidential victory means, especially in terms of it being a seismic political event. But after I got over the emotional experience of seeing America embrace an African American as its president, I found myself wondering: Did this election really represent a huge cultural triumph as well as a political mandate? That was a big reason why I spent Friday night with "Soul Men" producer David Friendly, watching him do what producers often do on their film's opening night, traveling around to local theaters to see whether their movie has any juice at the box office.

"Soul Men" isn't just any movie. It's a comedy starring two prominent African Americans, Sam Jackson and the late Bernie Mac, playing '70s-era backup singers who reluctantly reunite three decades later to play at a memorial concert for their old frontman. So it was an intriguing cultural test case: Would white audiences come out to watch an R-rated comedy with two black actors engaging in uproarious, but often barbed and profane insult humor? The box-office results provided a simple answer: No.

The problem wasn't playability--the movie earned an A-minus CinemaScore, meaning that audiences largely enjoyed the film. Its reviews were mixed, but it actually earned warm notices from top critics like Roger Ebert and the New York Times' A.O. Scott. Its tracking numbers were originally pretty solid, solid enough for the Weinstein Co, which made the film, to predict a decent weekend performance. When Friendly and I grabbed a bite in Century City, before ducking into the AMC complex there, he said he'd been told to expect "somewhere between $9 and $10 million" for the weekend, citing various Internet box-office tracking services.

But audiences simply didn't show. The movie ended up making a dismal $5.6 million (that's the Monday-morning estimate--the final numbers could be even lower Tuesday). Since Tyler Perry films regularly draw far bigger numbers without crossing over to white audiences, it means that neither black nor white moviegoers came out in droves to see the film. But as my travels on Friday night revealed, "Soul Men" is just another reminder that we still have a bifurcated pop culture. Will Smith and Denzel Washington are movie stars to all people, but when it comes to more specific film genres, notably black family dramas and raunchy black comedies--even in this age of Obama---there remains a huge gulf between African American and white audience tastes.

What's going on here? Did "Soul Men" play completely differently at the Magic Johnson Theaters than it did in Century City? Keep reading:   

As the enormity of Barack Obama's win last night begins to sink in around the country, I've been hearing from friends -- some of them giddy, some of them in awe, some of them simply amazed that after so many decades of racial strife, that this country has freely elected an African American president. It's hard to put it all in perspective, though I will try to give it a shot later today. However, my friend Howard Rodman, the screenwriter and USC film school guru, just passed along a wonderfully perceptive observation about America and how we symbolize the ideals of people all around the globe. It comes from the great filmmaker Sergio Leone, someone who admired America from afar, but who found a way to express many of our most potent myths and dreams in his movies. He says: 

"In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life -- in jeeps -- and upset all my dreams. I admired the Americans on the screen a lot -- their style, their way of speaking, and their way of wearing hats. But after a while I began to realize that America is really the property of the world. America was something dreamed by philosophers, vagabonds and the wretched of the earth long before it was discovered by Spanish ships and populated by colonies of the world. The Americans have only rented it -- temporarily. If their movies don't work, if the mythical level is lowered, if they don't behave well -- then the contract can always be withheld. We can evict them. Or discover another America...."

As Howard explains: "I always thought he was talking about tomorrow.  But perhaps, just perhaps, he was talking about yesterday, Nov. 4, 2008."

Obama poster by Shepard Fairey

It feels like nearly every journalist I've talked to this week has just been to a screening of "Milk," Gus Van Sant's lively biopic about San Francisco's pioneering gay activist Harvey Milk. The chatter about the film -- Is it an Oscar contender? Is it too admiring? Does Sean Penn sound exactly like your Aunt Sophie from the Bronx? -- has been nonstop, which is only pouring more salt on the wounds over at the Hollywood Reporter, which ran a piece Monday claiming that Focus, the film's distributor, was hiding the movie.

Even more embarrassing, the piece went on to contend that Focus needs to persuade senior citizens to see the movie in order for it to succeed, citing a recent Las Vegas screening where several seniors attempted to leave the movie during a brief gay love scene. Even though the seniors actually stayed -- they were trapped in a middle aisle -- the Reporter concluded that "these are the viewers Focus must woo." If Focus really needs to woo my Aunt Toots to make "Milk" a success, we're all in a heap of trouble, but I suspect that this anecdote tells us more about clueless trade reporting than an actual marketing challenge.

Focus chief James Schamus was so insulted that he fired off a cranky letter to the Reporter, slagging its story, boasting about his own marketing campaign and rattling off the names of all the California politicians who are on the film's benefit committee. He did manage to make one salient point--the "Milk" premiere arrives the week before a crucial election, "one which includes an anti-gay state proposition much like the one Harvey Milk vanquished 30 years ago."

Today the anti-gay measure is Proposition 8. Thirty years ago, it was Proposition 6, a ballot initiative masterminded by California state senator John Briggs, which would ban gays and lesbians - as well as any gay rights supporter -- from teaching in California public schools. To add insult to injury, Briggs publicly called gay-friendly San Francisco a "sexual garbage heap." Milk led the opposition to the incendiary initiative, traveling across the state engaging Briggs in a series of colorful debates. "Milk" re-creates one of their public encounters where Milk quipped: "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around." The proposition lost by more than a million votes. It was the high water mark of Milk's political career.

The parallels between the events of 30 years ago and today are striking. My colleague Rachel Abramowitz has talked to the "Milk" filmmakers about the film's connection with today's events. Here's her report:

Movie studios may still have enough dough to run full-page ads for a special tribute in Variety honoring the trade paper's venerable Peter Bart, but it's become pretty obvious that most of Hollywood is in the grip of a deep recession. When I showed up for lunch yesterday at the Peninsula Hotel, the hotel's swank Belvedere restaurant--normally buzzing with agents, producers and aging TV actors--was practically deserted. When I found my lunch date, producer Charlie Corwin, we had our pick of any booth in the place. (It's like this everywhere--a friend in New York says the restaurants and theaters there are empty as well.)

Corwin made his money from the Internet, but for the past few years he's quietly become an intriguing player in Hollywood. The company he co-founded, Original Media, has been involved with everything from hip indie films ("The Squid and the Whale" and "Half Nelson") to edgy reality TV shows like "LA Ink," "Miami Ink" and "Storm Chasers." He's now producing one of NBC's most ambitious new shows, "The Philanthropist," which is due early next year, starring James Purefoy as a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

Corwin doesn't need much help when it comes to clout and connections. One of his good pals is NBC's Ben Silverman, who greenlit "The Philanthropist" after hearing Corwin's pitch over drinks one night at the Chateau Marmont. Another good buddy is Sting, who was a producer on "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," another one of Corwin's indie pictures. The money man for "Saints" was yet another good pal, Bobby Sager, a former corporate raider from Boston who's now ... a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

In other words, Sager's the role model for "The Philanthropist." It's quite a nice little circle. When Silverman, who'd been Corwin's agent at William Morris, wanted to see a maverick billionaire in action, Corwin took him to Las Vegas to meet Sager and go to one of Sting's Police reunion shows. Corwin insists that Sager is the real deal. "He's devoted his life to changing the world," he told me. "He's a hands on, boots on the ground kind of guy. His beat is Palestine, Pakistan, Rwanda and Iraq."

To hear Corwin tell it, a TV show about Sager would be like going globe-trotting to every hot spot around the world with a swashbuckling do-gooder as your guide. "One week he's in the West Bank, then he's in Iraq, then he's in Tibet with the Dalai Lama," Corwin says. "Bobby also goes to Rwanda, where he created a business that makes scarves, made by the women whose husbands were murdered during the genocide there, working alongside the women whose husbands had been in jail for murdering them."

It could be totally cheesy, but it could also be guilty-pleasure-style Feel Good TV: following a guy who cuts through the red tape, writes the checks, can get the U.N. ambassador or CIA station chief on the phone in the middle of the night. So why has "The Philanthropist" had such a rocky start?

Keep reading:   

Bill Maher just won't go away. His documentary, "Religulous," grossed nearly $1 million over the weekend, putting it over the $10-million mark in its fourth week in theaters. Granted, that's still about $68 million less than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" has made, but it's a pretty impressive performance for a documentary. In fact, at $10.6 million, the movie is now in the all-time box office Top 10 for documentaries. Lionsgate execs say "Religulous" isn't just a hit among the nonbelieving, non-"true American" crowd. They say the doc has been putting fannies in the seats in every state in the country. Most of its top performing theaters have been in New York and L.A., but two of the film's Top 20 theaters were in Denver and one was the Broadway Center Six in (gasp!) Salt Lake City.

Since I'm still getting comments from my last Maher interview, I decided to check in with him again, just to see if success had softened his loathing for any and all religion. I think its fair to say the answer is--no, no way, not a chance. You might say Maher has a gift for the wicked jab. So far Maher has been getting mostly kudos for the film, so I thought I'd try to rattle him by raising some of the complaints registered by the Weekly Standard's critic John Podhoretz, who grouched that Maher repeatedly made fun of obese people in the film. The comic's response: "What did you expect? We did the film in America and it's a fat country. I think Podhoretz is fat and he's just especially sensitive to it."

OK. What about Podhoretz's claim that he's never seen anyone conduct himself as rudely on camera ("or in real life") as Maher. Podhoretz wrote that Maher's method in "Religulous'" is "to interview people who are far poorer, far less sophisticated and vastly better mannered than he, and as he does so, to laugh at them, tell them that their deepest beliefs are the sort of nonsense he gave up when he was 11 years old, and then press ahead with another question intended only to expose their idiocy."

Maher's response? "That's ridiculous. Even the people who didn't want to like this movie say how genteel I was. They were expecting me to be snotty and rude and I was nothing of the kind. I don't know what movie Podhoretz saw, but it clearly wasn't mine. To say that I only pick on the weak-minded is totally bogus. I interviewed a U.S. senator--is he poorer or more unsophisticated than me? What about the Vatican astronomer I interviewed? Is he less intellectual than me? Please!"

Podhoretz also complained that the only rabbi Maher interviewed was an anti-Zionist nut. Wasn't that unfair, I asked.

Maher's response: "We don't present him as representing the entire Jewish religion. It was actually difficult, ironically, to find a Jewish guy who was funny. Because it's not fear based, their religion is a harder target for ridicule. The Jews just don't believe a lot of the crazy things I find so dangerous in Christianity and Islam. They don't look forward to Armageddon, like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush and all the other end-timers do. It's one reason I find them so dangerous. It makes me nervous that people are convinced that Jesus is going to fix all of mankind's problems when he comes back. I mean, that can't have a positive effect on our ability to come up with practical solutions if our political leadership believes that everything is coming to an end soon anyway."

To be honest, Maher wasn't any easier on me when I volunteered my own criticism of the movie. Is it really possible that he doesn't find anything positive about religion at all? 

Just when you thought Dodger Stadium couldn't get more cluttered with ads and promotions and marketing hype, here comes the news that the William Morris Agency has been hired by Frank McCourt and Co. to exploit even more branding opportunities for the team. No stone will remain unturned--or more accurately, no public space will remain bare in the Dodgers constant search for new revenue streams. As Variety put it, the team "is exploring sponsors for everything from the bullpens, baselines and the team dugouts," along with sponsorship arrangements for the team's new retail outlet project that will be under construction for the next several years.

As Big Picture loyalists may have noticed, I'm a Cubs fan, so I'm especially sensitive to ballparks being turned into giant billboards. Wrigley Field has largely remained a holdout from the current mania for commercial exploitation, although you could argue that the Cubs' ballpark--built in 1914--was one of the first stadiums to endorse a commercial sponsor, since the park's very name touts its former owner's chewing gum brand. But do we really want to see a Dodger pitcher warming up in the "Shrek 4" bullpen? Or watch the home team take the field, scrambling out of a dugout emblazoned with a giant severed head logo for "Saw 5"? Where would it end? What would stop Disney from emblazoning "Bolt" on all the Dodgers bats? Or Fox from doing giveaways for every ball that bounces on "The Day the Earth Stood Still" warning track? Who knows--maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg will give away 50,000 3D glasses to fans on Opening Day so they can watch clips from "Monsters vs. Aliens" on the stadium's jumbo video screen during the seventh-inning stretch.

It's almost impossible to exaggerate what marketers will do if given "virtually limitless" possibilities, to quote Dodgers COO Dennis Mannion's breathless description of the team's master marketing plan. Baseball purists will remember that in 2004 Sony launched a "Spider-Man" promotion designed to put the movie's logo on all the bases at ballparks during inter-league play that year. The studio was forced to scale back the promotion after a storm of protest from outraged fans. With the Dodgers playoff hopes hanging by a thread right now, I don't want to do anything to jinx the team's chances. But I'd like to hear from baseball fans: Are ballparks already filled with too much advertising clutter and showbiz marketing? Or are you OK with owners using whatever means necessary to generate revenue to stock the team with the most highly paid stars imaginable?

"Shrek the Third" photo from DreamWorks Animation

When it rains, it pours. It's no secret that Hollywood isn't exactly a Republican stronghold, so the GOP values every conservative celebrity vote it has in its back pocket. On the other hand, Hollywood is, well, a town that loves front-runners, so when things aren't going good, you can expect celebrities to jump ship at the slightest provocation.

That just happened to Dennis Hopper. After having voted a straight GOP ticket for Bush (both father and son), not to mention costarring in "An American Carol," the current David Zucker right-wing comedy that mocks Michael Moore, Hopper has gone overboard, telling reporters in Paris that he's voting for Barack Obama this time around. Even though he voted for George W. Bush--twice--Hopper blasted his administration for its many "lies," saying "I pray God, Barack Obama is elected."

This is especially bad news, since Hopper is McCain's demographic peer--the legendary star of "Easy Rider" is actually three months older than McCain, having turned 72 in May. I guess if I were a die-hard conservative, I'd say, "It figures that Hopper would wait till he was in (ahem) France to deliver the bad news." Speaking of bad news, as we mentioned the other day, the McCain campaign has been running out of pop anthems to play at campaign rallies after a slew of performers--including the Foo Fighters, Van Halen and Jackson Browne--all complained that the McCain campaign had never gotten permission to use their music.

I asked readers for helpful suggestions for new songs the McCain campaign might play instead. And oh boy, did we get suggestions! I guess we have a lot of liberal readers, since most of the ideas were--shall we say--somewhat sarcastic. I've gone through the lengthy list to cull a few highlights. Which songs were my favorites? Keep reading:

There was a time, oh so long ago, when music videos were cool. Every Hollywood agent and movie studio executive had MTV playing in the background in their offices and were on the lookout for the hot new video wunderkind. Everyone seemed happily persuaded that every fresh-faced 23-year-old straight out of USC film school might turn out to be the next David Fincher, Tarsem Singh or Spike Jonze. Then it all started to fall apart, with MTV pretty much going down the drain and all too many of the alleged hot-shot directors turning out be one-hit wonders. 

Could music videos possibly make a comeback? Wired magazine argues that we could be in the dawn of a new golden age of music video, thanks largely to the digital reach of YouTube, which has replaced MTV as the popular proving ground for the best new videos. As Weezer's "Pork and Beans" director Mathew Cullen puts it: "MTV has become an afterthought." He should know. When "Pork and Beans" (which is filled with cameos from the latest and greatest Web celebs) was posted on YouTube earlier this year, it became an instant sensation, attracting 4 million views in its first week.

Wired spotlighted six videos, nearly all of 2008 vintage. "Pork and Beans" is the best known, but it's hardly the only one worth watching. My favorite was "Toe Jam," by Brighton Port Authority, actually a Fatboy Slim spinoff group featuring David Byrne. Directed by Keith Schofield, it's a comic delight, featuring a host of naked women cavorting on shag carpet, their breasts and bottoms all carefully obscured with black censor bars. Schofield choreographs their movements so the censor bars spell out words or form Busby Berkeley-style geometric patterns.

One of the other treats is an interactive video of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," which allows you to create all sorts of cool effects by clicking on the screen as the video plays. Another video worth watching is Bright Eyes' "At the Bottom of Everything," directed by Cat Solen, which features playful stop-motion animation and special guests Terence Stamp and Evan Rachel Wood getting to know each other in a plane that's spiraling earthward in the most ethereal fashion. I also liked the low-fi quality of Animal Collective's "Taste." The only real clinker in the bunch is Rik Cordero's draggy, eight-minute-long video of a Nas song, which is undercut by the solemn pretense of the video. It's surely the only music video that actually has a "key grip" credit.

Still, five out of six isn't bad. Maybe music video has a future after all.

Photo of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video from YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

Obama and America: The Movie

As the enormity of Barack Obama's win last night begins to sink in around the country, I've been hearing from friends -- some of them giddy, some of them in awe, some of them simply amazed that after so many decades of racial strife, that this country has freely elected an African American president. It's hard to put it all in perspective, though I will try to give it a shot later today. However, my friend Howard Rodman, the screenwriter and USC film school guru, just passed along a wonderfully perceptive observation about America and how we symbolize the ideals of people all around the globe. It comes from the great filmmaker Sergio Leone, someone who admired America from afar, but who found a way to express many of our most potent myths and dreams in his movies. He says: 

"In my childhood, America was like a religion. Then, real-life Americans abruptly entered my life -- in jeeps -- and upset all my dreams. I admired the Americans on the screen a lot -- their style, their way of speaking, and their way of wearing hats. But after a while I began to realize that America is really the property of the world. America was something dreamed by philosophers, vagabonds and the wretched of the earth long before it was discovered by Spanish ships and populated by colonies of the world. The Americans have only rented it -- temporarily. If their movies don't work, if the mythical level is lowered, if they don't behave well -- then the contract can always be withheld. We can evict them. Or discover another America...."

As Howard explains: "I always thought he was talking about tomorrow.  But perhaps, just perhaps, he was talking about yesterday, Nov. 4, 2008."

Obama poster by Shepard Fairey

It feels like nearly every journalist I've talked to this week has just been to a screening of "Milk," Gus Van Sant's lively biopic about San Francisco's pioneering gay activist Harvey Milk. The chatter about the film -- Is it an Oscar contender? Is it too admiring? Does Sean Penn sound exactly like your Aunt Sophie from the Bronx? -- has been nonstop, which is only pouring more salt on the wounds over at the Hollywood Reporter, which ran a piece Monday claiming that Focus, the film's distributor, was hiding the movie.

Even more embarrassing, the piece went on to contend that Focus needs to persuade senior citizens to see the movie in order for it to succeed, citing a recent Las Vegas screening where several seniors attempted to leave the movie during a brief gay love scene. Even though the seniors actually stayed -- they were trapped in a middle aisle -- the Reporter concluded that "these are the viewers Focus must woo." If Focus really needs to woo my Aunt Toots to make "Milk" a success, we're all in a heap of trouble, but I suspect that this anecdote tells us more about clueless trade reporting than an actual marketing challenge.

Focus chief James Schamus was so insulted that he fired off a cranky letter to the Reporter, slagging its story, boasting about his own marketing campaign and rattling off the names of all the California politicians who are on the film's benefit committee. He did manage to make one salient point--the "Milk" premiere arrives the week before a crucial election, "one which includes an anti-gay state proposition much like the one Harvey Milk vanquished 30 years ago."

Today the anti-gay measure is Proposition 8. Thirty years ago, it was Proposition 6, a ballot initiative masterminded by California state senator John Briggs, which would ban gays and lesbians - as well as any gay rights supporter -- from teaching in California public schools. To add insult to injury, Briggs publicly called gay-friendly San Francisco a "sexual garbage heap." Milk led the opposition to the incendiary initiative, traveling across the state engaging Briggs in a series of colorful debates. "Milk" re-creates one of their public encounters where Milk quipped: "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around." The proposition lost by more than a million votes. It was the high water mark of Milk's political career.

The parallels between the events of 30 years ago and today are striking. My colleague Rachel Abramowitz has talked to the "Milk" filmmakers about the film's connection with today's events. Here's her report:

Movie studios may still have enough dough to run full-page ads for a special tribute in Variety honoring the trade paper's venerable Peter Bart, but it's become pretty obvious that most of Hollywood is in the grip of a deep recession. When I showed up for lunch yesterday at the Peninsula Hotel, the hotel's swank Belvedere restaurant--normally buzzing with agents, producers and aging TV actors--was practically deserted. When I found my lunch date, producer Charlie Corwin, we had our pick of any booth in the place. (It's like this everywhere--a friend in New York says the restaurants and theaters there are empty as well.)

Corwin made his money from the Internet, but for the past few years he's quietly become an intriguing player in Hollywood. The company he co-founded, Original Media, has been involved with everything from hip indie films ("The Squid and the Whale" and "Half Nelson") to edgy reality TV shows like "LA Ink," "Miami Ink" and "Storm Chasers." He's now producing one of NBC's most ambitious new shows, "The Philanthropist," which is due early next year, starring James Purefoy as a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

Corwin doesn't need much help when it comes to clout and connections. One of his good pals is NBC's Ben Silverman, who greenlit "The Philanthropist" after hearing Corwin's pitch over drinks one night at the Chateau Marmont. Another good buddy is Sting, who was a producer on "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," another one of Corwin's indie pictures. The money man for "Saints" was yet another good pal, Bobby Sager, a former corporate raider from Boston who's now ... a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

In other words, Sager's the role model for "The Philanthropist." It's quite a nice little circle. When Silverman, who'd been Corwin's agent at William Morris, wanted to see a maverick billionaire in action, Corwin took him to Las Vegas to meet Sager and go to one of Sting's Police reunion shows. Corwin insists that Sager is the real deal. "He's devoted his life to changing the world," he told me. "He's a hands on, boots on the ground kind of guy. His beat is Palestine, Pakistan, Rwanda and Iraq."

To hear Corwin tell it, a TV show about Sager would be like going globe-trotting to every hot spot around the world with a swashbuckling do-gooder as your guide. "One week he's in the West Bank, then he's in Iraq, then he's in Tibet with the Dalai Lama," Corwin says. "Bobby also goes to Rwanda, where he created a business that makes scarves, made by the women whose husbands were murdered during the genocide there, working alongside the women whose husbands had been in jail for murdering them."

It could be totally cheesy, but it could also be guilty-pleasure-style Feel Good TV: following a guy who cuts through the red tape, writes the checks, can get the U.N. ambassador or CIA station chief on the phone in the middle of the night. So why has "The Philanthropist" had such a rocky start?

Keep reading:   

Bill Maher just won't go away. His documentary, "Religulous," grossed nearly $1 million over the weekend, putting it over the $10-million mark in its fourth week in theaters. Granted, that's still about $68 million less than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" has made, but it's a pretty impressive performance for a documentary. In fact, at $10.6 million, the movie is now in the all-time box office Top 10 for documentaries. Lionsgate execs say "Religulous" isn't just a hit among the nonbelieving, non-"true American" crowd. They say the doc has been putting fannies in the seats in every state in the country. Most of its top performing theaters have been in New York and L.A., but two of the film's Top 20 theaters were in Denver and one was the Broadway Center Six in (gasp!) Salt Lake City.

Since I'm still getting comments from my last Maher interview, I decided to check in with him again, just to see if success had softened his loathing for any and all religion. I think its fair to say the answer is--no, no way, not a chance. You might say Maher has a gift for the wicked jab. So far Maher has been getting mostly kudos for the film, so I thought I'd try to rattle him by raising some of the complaints registered by the Weekly Standard's critic John Podhoretz, who grouched that Maher repeatedly made fun of obese people in the film. The comic's response: "What did you expect? We did the film in America and it's a fat country. I think Podhoretz is fat and he's just especially sensitive to it."

OK. What about Podhoretz's claim that he's never seen anyone conduct himself as rudely on camera ("or in real life") as Maher. Podhoretz wrote that Maher's method in "Religulous'" is "to interview people who are far poorer, far less sophisticated and vastly better mannered than he, and as he does so, to laugh at them, tell them that their deepest beliefs are the sort of nonsense he gave up when he was 11 years old, and then press ahead with another question intended only to expose their idiocy."

Maher's response? "That's ridiculous. Even the people who didn't want to like this movie say how genteel I was. They were expecting me to be snotty and rude and I was nothing of the kind. I don't know what movie Podhoretz saw, but it clearly wasn't mine. To say that I only pick on the weak-minded is totally bogus. I interviewed a U.S. senator--is he poorer or more unsophisticated than me? What about the Vatican astronomer I interviewed? Is he less intellectual than me? Please!"

Podhoretz also complained that the only rabbi Maher interviewed was an anti-Zionist nut. Wasn't that unfair, I asked.

Maher's response: "We don't present him as representing the entire Jewish religion. It was actually difficult, ironically, to find a Jewish guy who was funny. Because it's not fear based, their religion is a harder target for ridicule. The Jews just don't believe a lot of the crazy things I find so dangerous in Christianity and Islam. They don't look forward to Armageddon, like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush and all the other end-timers do. It's one reason I find them so dangerous. It makes me nervous that people are convinced that Jesus is going to fix all of mankind's problems when he comes back. I mean, that can't have a positive effect on our ability to come up with practical solutions if our political leadership believes that everything is coming to an end soon anyway."

To be honest, Maher wasn't any easier on me when I volunteered my own criticism of the movie. Is it really possible that he doesn't find anything positive about religion at all? 

Just when you thought Dodger Stadium couldn't get more cluttered with ads and promotions and marketing hype, here comes the news that the William Morris Agency has been hired by Frank McCourt and Co. to exploit even more branding opportunities for the team. No stone will remain unturned--or more accurately, no public space will remain bare in the Dodgers constant search for new revenue streams. As Variety put it, the team "is exploring sponsors for everything from the bullpens, baselines and the team dugouts," along with sponsorship arrangements for the team's new retail outlet project that will be under construction for the next several years.

As Big Picture loyalists may have noticed, I'm a Cubs fan, so I'm especially sensitive to ballparks being turned into giant billboards. Wrigley Field has largely remained a holdout from the current mania for commercial exploitation, although you could argue that the Cubs' ballpark--built in 1914--was one of the first stadiums to endorse a commercial sponsor, since the park's very name touts its former owner's chewing gum brand. But do we really want to see a Dodger pitcher warming up in the "Shrek 4" bullpen? Or watch the home team take the field, scrambling out of a dugout emblazoned with a giant severed head logo for "Saw 5"? Where would it end? What would stop Disney from emblazoning "Bolt" on all the Dodgers bats? Or Fox from doing giveaways for every ball that bounces on "The Day the Earth Stood Still" warning track? Who knows--maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg will give away 50,000 3D glasses to fans on Opening Day so they can watch clips from "Monsters vs. Aliens" on the stadium's jumbo video screen during the seventh-inning stretch.

It's almost impossible to exaggerate what marketers will do if given "virtually limitless" possibilities, to quote Dodgers COO Dennis Mannion's breathless description of the team's master marketing plan. Baseball purists will remember that in 2004 Sony launched a "Spider-Man" promotion designed to put the movie's logo on all the bases at ballparks during inter-league play that year. The studio was forced to scale back the promotion after a storm of protest from outraged fans. With the Dodgers playoff hopes hanging by a thread right now, I don't want to do anything to jinx the team's chances. But I'd like to hear from baseball fans: Are ballparks already filled with too much advertising clutter and showbiz marketing? Or are you OK with owners using whatever means necessary to generate revenue to stock the team with the most highly paid stars imaginable?

"Shrek the Third" photo from DreamWorks Animation

When it rains, it pours. It's no secret that Hollywood isn't exactly a Republican stronghold, so the GOP values every conservative celebrity vote it has in its back pocket. On the other hand, Hollywood is, well, a town that loves front-runners, so when things aren't going good, you can expect celebrities to jump ship at the slightest provocation.

That just happened to Dennis Hopper. After having voted a straight GOP ticket for Bush (both father and son), not to mention costarring in "An American Carol," the current David Zucker right-wing comedy that mocks Michael Moore, Hopper has gone overboard, telling reporters in Paris that he's voting for Barack Obama this time around. Even though he voted for George W. Bush--twice--Hopper blasted his administration for its many "lies," saying "I pray God, Barack Obama is elected."

This is especially bad news, since Hopper is McCain's demographic peer--the legendary star of "Easy Rider" is actually three months older than McCain, having turned 72 in May. I guess if I were a die-hard conservative, I'd say, "It figures that Hopper would wait till he was in (ahem) France to deliver the bad news." Speaking of bad news, as we mentioned the other day, the McCain campaign has been running out of pop anthems to play at campaign rallies after a slew of performers--including the Foo Fighters, Van Halen and Jackson Browne--all complained that the McCain campaign had never gotten permission to use their music.

I asked readers for helpful suggestions for new songs the McCain campaign might play instead. And oh boy, did we get suggestions! I guess we have a lot of liberal readers, since most of the ideas were--shall we say--somewhat sarcastic. I've gone through the lengthy list to cull a few highlights. Which songs were my favorites? Keep reading:

There was a time, oh so long ago, when music videos were cool. Every Hollywood agent and movie studio executive had MTV playing in the background in their offices and were on the lookout for the hot new video wunderkind. Everyone seemed happily persuaded that every fresh-faced 23-year-old straight out of USC film school might turn out to be the next David Fincher, Tarsem Singh or Spike Jonze. Then it all started to fall apart, with MTV pretty much going down the drain and all too many of the alleged hot-shot directors turning out be one-hit wonders. 

Could music videos possibly make a comeback? Wired magazine argues that we could be in the dawn of a new golden age of music video, thanks largely to the digital reach of YouTube, which has replaced MTV as the popular proving ground for the best new videos. As Weezer's "Pork and Beans" director Mathew Cullen puts it: "MTV has become an afterthought." He should know. When "Pork and Beans" (which is filled with cameos from the latest and greatest Web celebs) was posted on YouTube earlier this year, it became an instant sensation, attracting 4 million views in its first week.

Wired spotlighted six videos, nearly all of 2008 vintage. "Pork and Beans" is the best known, but it's hardly the only one worth watching. My favorite was "Toe Jam," by Brighton Port Authority, actually a Fatboy Slim spinoff group featuring David Byrne. Directed by Keith Schofield, it's a comic delight, featuring a host of naked women cavorting on shag carpet, their breasts and bottoms all carefully obscured with black censor bars. Schofield choreographs their movements so the censor bars spell out words or form Busby Berkeley-style geometric patterns.

One of the other treats is an interactive video of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," which allows you to create all sorts of cool effects by clicking on the screen as the video plays. Another video worth watching is Bright Eyes' "At the Bottom of Everything," directed by Cat Solen, which features playful stop-motion animation and special guests Terence Stamp and Evan Rachel Wood getting to know each other in a plane that's spiraling earthward in the most ethereal fashion. I also liked the low-fi quality of Animal Collective's "Taste." The only real clinker in the bunch is Rik Cordero's draggy, eight-minute-long video of a Nas song, which is undercut by the solemn pretense of the video. It's surely the only music video that actually has a "key grip" credit.

Still, five out of six isn't bad. Maybe music video has a future after all.

Photo of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video from YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

'Milk' and California politics: It's deja vu all over again

It feels like nearly every journalist I've talked to this week has just been to a screening of "Milk," Gus Van Sant's lively biopic about San Francisco's pioneering gay activist Harvey Milk. The chatter about the film -- Is it an Oscar contender? Is it too admiring? Does Sean Penn sound exactly like your Aunt Sophie from the Bronx? -- has been nonstop, which is only pouring more salt on the wounds over at the Hollywood Reporter, which ran a piece Monday claiming that Focus, the film's distributor, was hiding the movie.

Even more embarrassing, the piece went on to contend that Focus needs to persuade senior citizens to see the movie in order for it to succeed, citing a recent Las Vegas screening where several seniors attempted to leave the movie during a brief gay love scene. Even though the seniors actually stayed -- they were trapped in a middle aisle -- the Reporter concluded that "these are the viewers Focus must woo." If Focus really needs to woo my Aunt Toots to make "Milk" a success, we're all in a heap of trouble, but I suspect that this anecdote tells us more about clueless trade reporting than an actual marketing challenge.

Focus chief James Schamus was so insulted that he fired off a cranky letter to the Reporter, slagging its story, boasting about his own marketing campaign and rattling off the names of all the California politicians who are on the film's benefit committee. He did manage to make one salient point--the "Milk" premiere arrives the week before a crucial election, "one which includes an anti-gay state proposition much like the one Harvey Milk vanquished 30 years ago."

Today the anti-gay measure is Proposition 8. Thirty years ago, it was Proposition 6, a ballot initiative masterminded by California state senator John Briggs, which would ban gays and lesbians - as well as any gay rights supporter -- from teaching in California public schools. To add insult to injury, Briggs publicly called gay-friendly San Francisco a "sexual garbage heap." Milk led the opposition to the incendiary initiative, traveling across the state engaging Briggs in a series of colorful debates. "Milk" re-creates one of their public encounters where Milk quipped: "If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you'd sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around." The proposition lost by more than a million votes. It was the high water mark of Milk's political career.

The parallels between the events of 30 years ago and today are striking. My colleague Rachel Abramowitz has talked to the "Milk" filmmakers about the film's connection with today's events. Here's her report:

Movie studios may still have enough dough to run full-page ads for a special tribute in Variety honoring the trade paper's venerable Peter Bart, but it's become pretty obvious that most of Hollywood is in the grip of a deep recession. When I showed up for lunch yesterday at the Peninsula Hotel, the hotel's swank Belvedere restaurant--normally buzzing with agents, producers and aging TV actors--was practically deserted. When I found my lunch date, producer Charlie Corwin, we had our pick of any booth in the place. (It's like this everywhere--a friend in New York says the restaurants and theaters there are empty as well.)

Corwin made his money from the Internet, but for the past few years he's quietly become an intriguing player in Hollywood. The company he co-founded, Original Media, has been involved with everything from hip indie films ("The Squid and the Whale" and "Half Nelson") to edgy reality TV shows like "LA Ink," "Miami Ink" and "Storm Chasers." He's now producing one of NBC's most ambitious new shows, "The Philanthropist," which is due early next year, starring James Purefoy as a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

Corwin doesn't need much help when it comes to clout and connections. One of his good pals is NBC's Ben Silverman, who greenlit "The Philanthropist" after hearing Corwin's pitch over drinks one night at the Chateau Marmont. Another good buddy is Sting, who was a producer on "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," another one of Corwin's indie pictures. The money man for "Saints" was yet another good pal, Bobby Sager, a former corporate raider from Boston who's now ... a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

In other words, Sager's the role model for "The Philanthropist." It's quite a nice little circle. When Silverman, who'd been Corwin's agent at William Morris, wanted to see a maverick billionaire in action, Corwin took him to Las Vegas to meet Sager and go to one of Sting's Police reunion shows. Corwin insists that Sager is the real deal. "He's devoted his life to changing the world," he told me. "He's a hands on, boots on the ground kind of guy. His beat is Palestine, Pakistan, Rwanda and Iraq."

To hear Corwin tell it, a TV show about Sager would be like going globe-trotting to every hot spot around the world with a swashbuckling do-gooder as your guide. "One week he's in the West Bank, then he's in Iraq, then he's in Tibet with the Dalai Lama," Corwin says. "Bobby also goes to Rwanda, where he created a business that makes scarves, made by the women whose husbands were murdered during the genocide there, working alongside the women whose husbands had been in jail for murdering them."

It could be totally cheesy, but it could also be guilty-pleasure-style Feel Good TV: following a guy who cuts through the red tape, writes the checks, can get the U.N. ambassador or CIA station chief on the phone in the middle of the night. So why has "The Philanthropist" had such a rocky start?

Keep reading:   

Bill Maher just won't go away. His documentary, "Religulous," grossed nearly $1 million over the weekend, putting it over the $10-million mark in its fourth week in theaters. Granted, that's still about $68 million less than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" has made, but it's a pretty impressive performance for a documentary. In fact, at $10.6 million, the movie is now in the all-time box office Top 10 for documentaries. Lionsgate execs say "Religulous" isn't just a hit among the nonbelieving, non-"true American" crowd. They say the doc has been putting fannies in the seats in every state in the country. Most of its top performing theaters have been in New York and L.A., but two of the film's Top 20 theaters were in Denver and one was the Broadway Center Six in (gasp!) Salt Lake City.

Since I'm still getting comments from my last Maher interview, I decided to check in with him again, just to see if success had softened his loathing for any and all religion. I think its fair to say the answer is--no, no way, not a chance. You might say Maher has a gift for the wicked jab. So far Maher has been getting mostly kudos for the film, so I thought I'd try to rattle him by raising some of the complaints registered by the Weekly Standard's critic John Podhoretz, who grouched that Maher repeatedly made fun of obese people in the film. The comic's response: "What did you expect? We did the film in America and it's a fat country. I think Podhoretz is fat and he's just especially sensitive to it."

OK. What about Podhoretz's claim that he's never seen anyone conduct himself as rudely on camera ("or in real life") as Maher. Podhoretz wrote that Maher's method in "Religulous'" is "to interview people who are far poorer, far less sophisticated and vastly better mannered than he, and as he does so, to laugh at them, tell them that their deepest beliefs are the sort of nonsense he gave up when he was 11 years old, and then press ahead with another question intended only to expose their idiocy."

Maher's response? "That's ridiculous. Even the people who didn't want to like this movie say how genteel I was. They were expecting me to be snotty and rude and I was nothing of the kind. I don't know what movie Podhoretz saw, but it clearly wasn't mine. To say that I only pick on the weak-minded is totally bogus. I interviewed a U.S. senator--is he poorer or more unsophisticated than me? What about the Vatican astronomer I interviewed? Is he less intellectual than me? Please!"

Podhoretz also complained that the only rabbi Maher interviewed was an anti-Zionist nut. Wasn't that unfair, I asked.

Maher's response: "We don't present him as representing the entire Jewish religion. It was actually difficult, ironically, to find a Jewish guy who was funny. Because it's not fear based, their religion is a harder target for ridicule. The Jews just don't believe a lot of the crazy things I find so dangerous in Christianity and Islam. They don't look forward to Armageddon, like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush and all the other end-timers do. It's one reason I find them so dangerous. It makes me nervous that people are convinced that Jesus is going to fix all of mankind's problems when he comes back. I mean, that can't have a positive effect on our ability to come up with practical solutions if our political leadership believes that everything is coming to an end soon anyway."

To be honest, Maher wasn't any easier on me when I volunteered my own criticism of the movie. Is it really possible that he doesn't find anything positive about religion at all? 

Just when you thought Dodger Stadium couldn't get more cluttered with ads and promotions and marketing hype, here comes the news that the William Morris Agency has been hired by Frank McCourt and Co. to exploit even more branding opportunities for the team. No stone will remain unturned--or more accurately, no public space will remain bare in the Dodgers constant search for new revenue streams. As Variety put it, the team "is exploring sponsors for everything from the bullpens, baselines and the team dugouts," along with sponsorship arrangements for the team's new retail outlet project that will be under construction for the next several years.

As Big Picture loyalists may have noticed, I'm a Cubs fan, so I'm especially sensitive to ballparks being turned into giant billboards. Wrigley Field has largely remained a holdout from the current mania for commercial exploitation, although you could argue that the Cubs' ballpark--built in 1914--was one of the first stadiums to endorse a commercial sponsor, since the park's very name touts its former owner's chewing gum brand. But do we really want to see a Dodger pitcher warming up in the "Shrek 4" bullpen? Or watch the home team take the field, scrambling out of a dugout emblazoned with a giant severed head logo for "Saw 5"? Where would it end? What would stop Disney from emblazoning "Bolt" on all the Dodgers bats? Or Fox from doing giveaways for every ball that bounces on "The Day the Earth Stood Still" warning track? Who knows--maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg will give away 50,000 3D glasses to fans on Opening Day so they can watch clips from "Monsters vs. Aliens" on the stadium's jumbo video screen during the seventh-inning stretch.

It's almost impossible to exaggerate what marketers will do if given "virtually limitless" possibilities, to quote Dodgers COO Dennis Mannion's breathless description of the team's master marketing plan. Baseball purists will remember that in 2004 Sony launched a "Spider-Man" promotion designed to put the movie's logo on all the bases at ballparks during inter-league play that year. The studio was forced to scale back the promotion after a storm of protest from outraged fans. With the Dodgers playoff hopes hanging by a thread right now, I don't want to do anything to jinx the team's chances. But I'd like to hear from baseball fans: Are ballparks already filled with too much advertising clutter and showbiz marketing? Or are you OK with owners using whatever means necessary to generate revenue to stock the team with the most highly paid stars imaginable?

"Shrek the Third" photo from DreamWorks Animation

When it rains, it pours. It's no secret that Hollywood isn't exactly a Republican stronghold, so the GOP values every conservative celebrity vote it has in its back pocket. On the other hand, Hollywood is, well, a town that loves front-runners, so when things aren't going good, you can expect celebrities to jump ship at the slightest provocation.

That just happened to Dennis Hopper. After having voted a straight GOP ticket for Bush (both father and son), not to mention costarring in "An American Carol," the current David Zucker right-wing comedy that mocks Michael Moore, Hopper has gone overboard, telling reporters in Paris that he's voting for Barack Obama this time around. Even though he voted for George W. Bush--twice--Hopper blasted his administration for its many "lies," saying "I pray God, Barack Obama is elected."

This is especially bad news, since Hopper is McCain's demographic peer--the legendary star of "Easy Rider" is actually three months older than McCain, having turned 72 in May. I guess if I were a die-hard conservative, I'd say, "It figures that Hopper would wait till he was in (ahem) France to deliver the bad news." Speaking of bad news, as we mentioned the other day, the McCain campaign has been running out of pop anthems to play at campaign rallies after a slew of performers--including the Foo Fighters, Van Halen and Jackson Browne--all complained that the McCain campaign had never gotten permission to use their music.

I asked readers for helpful suggestions for new songs the McCain campaign might play instead. And oh boy, did we get suggestions! I guess we have a lot of liberal readers, since most of the ideas were--shall we say--somewhat sarcastic. I've gone through the lengthy list to cull a few highlights. Which songs were my favorites? Keep reading:

There was a time, oh so long ago, when music videos were cool. Every Hollywood agent and movie studio executive had MTV playing in the background in their offices and were on the lookout for the hot new video wunderkind. Everyone seemed happily persuaded that every fresh-faced 23-year-old straight out of USC film school might turn out to be the next David Fincher, Tarsem Singh or Spike Jonze. Then it all started to fall apart, with MTV pretty much going down the drain and all too many of the alleged hot-shot directors turning out be one-hit wonders. 

Could music videos possibly make a comeback? Wired magazine argues that we could be in the dawn of a new golden age of music video, thanks largely to the digital reach of YouTube, which has replaced MTV as the popular proving ground for the best new videos. As Weezer's "Pork and Beans" director Mathew Cullen puts it: "MTV has become an afterthought." He should know. When "Pork and Beans" (which is filled with cameos from the latest and greatest Web celebs) was posted on YouTube earlier this year, it became an instant sensation, attracting 4 million views in its first week.

Wired spotlighted six videos, nearly all of 2008 vintage. "Pork and Beans" is the best known, but it's hardly the only one worth watching. My favorite was "Toe Jam," by Brighton Port Authority, actually a Fatboy Slim spinoff group featuring David Byrne. Directed by Keith Schofield, it's a comic delight, featuring a host of naked women cavorting on shag carpet, their breasts and bottoms all carefully obscured with black censor bars. Schofield choreographs their movements so the censor bars spell out words or form Busby Berkeley-style geometric patterns.

One of the other treats is an interactive video of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," which allows you to create all sorts of cool effects by clicking on the screen as the video plays. Another video worth watching is Bright Eyes' "At the Bottom of Everything," directed by Cat Solen, which features playful stop-motion animation and special guests Terence Stamp and Evan Rachel Wood getting to know each other in a plane that's spiraling earthward in the most ethereal fashion. I also liked the low-fi quality of Animal Collective's "Taste." The only real clinker in the bunch is Rik Cordero's draggy, eight-minute-long video of a Nas song, which is undercut by the solemn pretense of the video. It's surely the only music video that actually has a "key grip" credit.

Still, five out of six isn't bad. Maybe music video has a future after all.

Photo of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video from YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

Are the world's money woes good for 'The Philanthropist'?

Movie studios may still have enough dough to run full-page ads for a special tribute in Variety honoring the trade paper's venerable Peter Bart, but it's become pretty obvious that most of Hollywood is in the grip of a deep recession. When I showed up for lunch yesterday at the Peninsula Hotel, the hotel's swank Belvedere restaurant--normally buzzing with agents, producers and aging TV actors--was practically deserted. When I found my lunch date, producer Charlie Corwin, we had our pick of any booth in the place. (It's like this everywhere--a friend in New York says the restaurants and theaters there are empty as well.)

Corwin made his money from the Internet, but for the past few years he's quietly become an intriguing player in Hollywood. The company he co-founded, Original Media, has been involved with everything from hip indie films ("The Squid and the Whale" and "Half Nelson") to edgy reality TV shows like "LA Ink," "Miami Ink" and "Storm Chasers." He's now producing one of NBC's most ambitious new shows, "The Philanthropist," which is due early next year, starring James Purefoy as a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

Corwin doesn't need much help when it comes to clout and connections. One of his good pals is NBC's Ben Silverman, who greenlit "The Philanthropist" after hearing Corwin's pitch over drinks one night at the Chateau Marmont. Another good buddy is Sting, who was a producer on "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," another one of Corwin's indie pictures. The money man for "Saints" was yet another good pal, Bobby Sager, a former corporate raider from Boston who's now ... a maverick billionaire who uses his clout and connections to help people in need around the world.

In other words, Sager's the role model for "The Philanthropist." It's quite a nice little circle. When Silverman, who'd been Corwin's agent at William Morris, wanted to see a maverick billionaire in action, Corwin took him to Las Vegas to meet Sager and go to one of Sting's Police reunion shows. Corwin insists that Sager is the real deal. "He's devoted his life to changing the world," he told me. "He's a hands on, boots on the ground kind of guy. His beat is Palestine, Pakistan, Rwanda and Iraq."

To hear Corwin tell it, a TV show about Sager would be like going globe-trotting to every hot spot around the world with a swashbuckling do-gooder as your guide. "One week he's in the West Bank, then he's in Iraq, then he's in Tibet with the Dalai Lama," Corwin says. "Bobby also goes to Rwanda, where he created a business that makes scarves, made by the women whose husbands were murdered during the genocide there, working alongside the women whose husbands had been in jail for murdering them."

It could be totally cheesy, but it could also be guilty-pleasure-style Feel Good TV: following a guy who cuts through the red tape, writes the checks, can get the U.N. ambassador or CIA station chief on the phone in the middle of the night. So why has "The Philanthropist" had such a rocky start?

Keep reading:   

Bill Maher just won't go away. His documentary, "Religulous," grossed nearly $1 million over the weekend, putting it over the $10-million mark in its fourth week in theaters. Granted, that's still about $68 million less than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" has made, but it's a pretty impressive performance for a documentary. In fact, at $10.6 million, the movie is now in the all-time box office Top 10 for documentaries. Lionsgate execs say "Religulous" isn't just a hit among the nonbelieving, non-"true American" crowd. They say the doc has been putting fannies in the seats in every state in the country. Most of its top performing theaters have been in New York and L.A., but two of the film's Top 20 theaters were in Denver and one was the Broadway Center Six in (gasp!) Salt Lake City.

Since I'm still getting comments from my last Maher interview, I decided to check in with him again, just to see if success had softened his loathing for any and all religion. I think its fair to say the answer is--no, no way, not a chance. You might say Maher has a gift for the wicked jab. So far Maher has been getting mostly kudos for the film, so I thought I'd try to rattle him by raising some of the complaints registered by the Weekly Standard's critic John Podhoretz, who grouched that Maher repeatedly made fun of obese people in the film. The comic's response: "What did you expect? We did the film in America and it's a fat country. I think Podhoretz is fat and he's just especially sensitive to it."

OK. What about Podhoretz's claim that he's never seen anyone conduct himself as rudely on camera ("or in real life") as Maher. Podhoretz wrote that Maher's method in "Religulous'" is "to interview people who are far poorer, far less sophisticated and vastly better mannered than he, and as he does so, to laugh at them, tell them that their deepest beliefs are the sort of nonsense he gave up when he was 11 years old, and then press ahead with another question intended only to expose their idiocy."

Maher's response? "That's ridiculous. Even the people who didn't want to like this movie say how genteel I was. They were expecting me to be snotty and rude and I was nothing of the kind. I don't know what movie Podhoretz saw, but it clearly wasn't mine. To say that I only pick on the weak-minded is totally bogus. I interviewed a U.S. senator--is he poorer or more unsophisticated than me? What about the Vatican astronomer I interviewed? Is he less intellectual than me? Please!"

Podhoretz also complained that the only rabbi Maher interviewed was an anti-Zionist nut. Wasn't that unfair, I asked.

Maher's response: "We don't present him as representing the entire Jewish religion. It was actually difficult, ironically, to find a Jewish guy who was funny. Because it's not fear based, their religion is a harder target for ridicule. The Jews just don't believe a lot of the crazy things I find so dangerous in Christianity and Islam. They don't look forward to Armageddon, like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush and all the other end-timers do. It's one reason I find them so dangerous. It makes me nervous that people are convinced that Jesus is going to fix all of mankind's problems when he comes back. I mean, that can't have a positive effect on our ability to come up with practical solutions if our political leadership believes that everything is coming to an end soon anyway."

To be honest, Maher wasn't any easier on me when I volunteered my own criticism of the movie. Is it really possible that he doesn't find anything positive about religion at all? 

Just when you thought Dodger Stadium couldn't get more cluttered with ads and promotions and marketing hype, here comes the news that the William Morris Agency has been hired by Frank McCourt and Co. to exploit even more branding opportunities for the team. No stone will remain unturned--or more accurately, no public space will remain bare in the Dodgers constant search for new revenue streams. As Variety put it, the team "is exploring sponsors for everything from the bullpens, baselines and the team dugouts," along with sponsorship arrangements for the team's new retail outlet project that will be under construction for the next several years.

As Big Picture loyalists may have noticed, I'm a Cubs fan, so I'm especially sensitive to ballparks being turned into giant billboards. Wrigley Field has largely remained a holdout from the current mania for commercial exploitation, although you could argue that the Cubs' ballpark--built in 1914--was one of the first stadiums to endorse a commercial sponsor, since the park's very name touts its former owner's chewing gum brand. But do we really want to see a Dodger pitcher warming up in the "Shrek 4" bullpen? Or watch the home team take the field, scrambling out of a dugout emblazoned with a giant severed head logo for "Saw 5"? Where would it end? What would stop Disney from emblazoning "Bolt" on all the Dodgers bats? Or Fox from doing giveaways for every ball that bounces on "The Day the Earth Stood Still" warning track? Who knows--maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg will give away 50,000 3D glasses to fans on Opening Day so they can watch clips from "Monsters vs. Aliens" on the stadium's jumbo video screen during the seventh-inning stretch.

It's almost impossible to exaggerate what marketers will do if given "virtually limitless" possibilities, to quote Dodgers COO Dennis Mannion's breathless description of the team's master marketing plan. Baseball purists will remember that in 2004 Sony launched a "Spider-Man" promotion designed to put the movie's logo on all the bases at ballparks during inter-league play that year. The studio was forced to scale back the promotion after a storm of protest from outraged fans. With the Dodgers playoff hopes hanging by a thread right now, I don't want to do anything to jinx the team's chances. But I'd like to hear from baseball fans: Are ballparks already filled with too much advertising clutter and showbiz marketing? Or are you OK with owners using whatever means necessary to generate revenue to stock the team with the most highly paid stars imaginable?

"Shrek the Third" photo from DreamWorks Animation

When it rains, it pours. It's no secret that Hollywood isn't exactly a Republican stronghold, so the GOP values every conservative celebrity vote it has in its back pocket. On the other hand, Hollywood is, well, a town that loves front-runners, so when things aren't going good, you can expect celebrities to jump ship at the slightest provocation.

That just happened to Dennis Hopper. After having voted a straight GOP ticket for Bush (both father and son), not to mention costarring in "An American Carol," the current David Zucker right-wing comedy that mocks Michael Moore, Hopper has gone overboard, telling reporters in Paris that he's voting for Barack Obama this time around. Even though he voted for George W. Bush--twice--Hopper blasted his administration for its many "lies," saying "I pray God, Barack Obama is elected."

This is especially bad news, since Hopper is McCain's demographic peer--the legendary star of "Easy Rider" is actually three months older than McCain, having turned 72 in May. I guess if I were a die-hard conservative, I'd say, "It figures that Hopper would wait till he was in (ahem) France to deliver the bad news." Speaking of bad news, as we mentioned the other day, the McCain campaign has been running out of pop anthems to play at campaign rallies after a slew of performers--including the Foo Fighters, Van Halen and Jackson Browne--all complained that the McCain campaign had never gotten permission to use their music.

I asked readers for helpful suggestions for new songs the McCain campaign might play instead. And oh boy, did we get suggestions! I guess we have a lot of liberal readers, since most of the ideas were--shall we say--somewhat sarcastic. I've gone through the lengthy list to cull a few highlights. Which songs were my favorites? Keep reading:

There was a time, oh so long ago, when music videos were cool. Every Hollywood agent and movie studio executive had MTV playing in the background in their offices and were on the lookout for the hot new video wunderkind. Everyone seemed happily persuaded that every fresh-faced 23-year-old straight out of USC film school might turn out to be the next David Fincher, Tarsem Singh or Spike Jonze. Then it all started to fall apart, with MTV pretty much going down the drain and all too many of the alleged hot-shot directors turning out be one-hit wonders. 

Could music videos possibly make a comeback? Wired magazine argues that we could be in the dawn of a new golden age of music video, thanks largely to the digital reach of YouTube, which has replaced MTV as the popular proving ground for the best new videos. As Weezer's "Pork and Beans" director Mathew Cullen puts it: "MTV has become an afterthought." He should know. When "Pork and Beans" (which is filled with cameos from the latest and greatest Web celebs) was posted on YouTube earlier this year, it became an instant sensation, attracting 4 million views in its first week.

Wired spotlighted six videos, nearly all of 2008 vintage. "Pork and Beans" is the best known, but it's hardly the only one worth watching. My favorite was "Toe Jam," by Brighton Port Authority, actually a Fatboy Slim spinoff group featuring David Byrne. Directed by Keith Schofield, it's a comic delight, featuring a host of naked women cavorting on shag carpet, their breasts and bottoms all carefully obscured with black censor bars. Schofield choreographs their movements so the censor bars spell out words or form Busby Berkeley-style geometric patterns.

One of the other treats is an interactive video of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," which allows you to create all sorts of cool effects by clicking on the screen as the video plays. Another video worth watching is Bright Eyes' "At the Bottom of Everything," directed by Cat Solen, which features playful stop-motion animation and special guests Terence Stamp and Evan Rachel Wood getting to know each other in a plane that's spiraling earthward in the most ethereal fashion. I also liked the low-fi quality of Animal Collective's "Taste." The only real clinker in the bunch is Rik Cordero's draggy, eight-minute-long video of a Nas song, which is undercut by the solemn pretense of the video. It's surely the only music video that actually has a "key grip" credit.

Still, five out of six isn't bad. Maybe music video has a future after all.

Photo of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video from YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

Bill Maher still hates your religion

Bill Maher just won't go away. His documentary, "Religulous," grossed nearly $1 million over the weekend, putting it over the $10-million mark in its fourth week in theaters. Granted, that's still about $68 million less than "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" has made, but it's a pretty impressive performance for a documentary. In fact, at $10.6 million, the movie is now in the all-time box office Top 10 for documentaries. Lionsgate execs say "Religulous" isn't just a hit among the nonbelieving, non-"true American" crowd. They say the doc has been putting fannies in the seats in every state in the country. Most of its top performing theaters have been in New York and L.A., but two of the film's Top 20 theaters were in Denver and one was the Broadway Center Six in (gasp!) Salt Lake City.

Since I'm still getting comments from my last Maher interview, I decided to check in with him again, just to see if success had softened his loathing for any and all religion. I think its fair to say the answer is--no, no way, not a chance. You might say Maher has a gift for the wicked jab. So far Maher has been getting mostly kudos for the film, so I thought I'd try to rattle him by raising some of the complaints registered by the Weekly Standard's critic John Podhoretz, who grouched that Maher repeatedly made fun of obese people in the film. The comic's response: "What did you expect? We did the film in America and it's a fat country. I think Podhoretz is fat and he's just especially sensitive to it."

OK. What about Podhoretz's claim that he's never seen anyone conduct himself as rudely on camera ("or in real life") as Maher. Podhoretz wrote that Maher's method in "Religulous'" is "to interview people who are far poorer, far less sophisticated and vastly better mannered than he, and as he does so, to laugh at them, tell them that their deepest beliefs are the sort of nonsense he gave up when he was 11 years old, and then press ahead with another question intended only to expose their idiocy."

Maher's response? "That's ridiculous. Even the people who didn't want to like this movie say how genteel I was. They were expecting me to be snotty and rude and I was nothing of the kind. I don't know what movie Podhoretz saw, but it clearly wasn't mine. To say that I only pick on the weak-minded is totally bogus. I interviewed a U.S. senator--is he poorer or more unsophisticated than me? What about the Vatican astronomer I interviewed? Is he less intellectual than me? Please!"

Podhoretz also complained that the only rabbi Maher interviewed was an anti-Zionist nut. Wasn't that unfair, I asked.

Maher's response: "We don't present him as representing the entire Jewish religion. It was actually difficult, ironically, to find a Jewish guy who was funny. Because it's not fear based, their religion is a harder target for ridicule. The Jews just don't believe a lot of the crazy things I find so dangerous in Christianity and Islam. They don't look forward to Armageddon, like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush and all the other end-timers do. It's one reason I find them so dangerous. It makes me nervous that people are convinced that Jesus is going to fix all of mankind's problems when he comes back. I mean, that can't have a positive effect on our ability to come up with practical solutions if our political leadership believes that everything is coming to an end soon anyway."

To be honest, Maher wasn't any easier on me when I volunteered my own criticism of the movie. Is it really possible that he doesn't find anything positive about religion at all? 

Just when you thought Dodger Stadium couldn't get more cluttered with ads and promotions and marketing hype, here comes the news that the William Morris Agency has been hired by Frank McCourt and Co. to exploit even more branding opportunities for the team. No stone will remain unturned--or more accurately, no public space will remain bare in the Dodgers constant search for new revenue streams. As Variety put it, the team "is exploring sponsors for everything from the bullpens, baselines and the team dugouts," along with sponsorship arrangements for the team's new retail outlet project that will be under construction for the next several years.

As Big Picture loyalists may have noticed, I'm a Cubs fan, so I'm especially sensitive to ballparks being turned into giant billboards. Wrigley Field has largely remained a holdout from the current mania for commercial exploitation, although you could argue that the Cubs' ballpark--built in 1914--was one of the first stadiums to endorse a commercial sponsor, since the park's very name touts its former owner's chewing gum brand. But do we really want to see a Dodger pitcher warming up in the "Shrek 4" bullpen? Or watch the home team take the field, scrambling out of a dugout emblazoned with a giant severed head logo for "Saw 5"? Where would it end? What would stop Disney from emblazoning "Bolt" on all the Dodgers bats? Or Fox from doing giveaways for every ball that bounces on "The Day the Earth Stood Still" warning track? Who knows--maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg will give away 50,000 3D glasses to fans on Opening Day so they can watch clips from "Monsters vs. Aliens" on the stadium's jumbo video screen during the seventh-inning stretch.

It's almost impossible to exaggerate what marketers will do if given "virtually limitless" possibilities, to quote Dodgers COO Dennis Mannion's breathless description of the team's master marketing plan. Baseball purists will remember that in 2004 Sony launched a "Spider-Man" promotion designed to put the movie's logo on all the bases at ballparks during inter-league play that year. The studio was forced to scale back the promotion after a storm of protest from outraged fans. With the Dodgers playoff hopes hanging by a thread right now, I don't want to do anything to jinx the team's chances. But I'd like to hear from baseball fans: Are ballparks already filled with too much advertising clutter and showbiz marketing? Or are you OK with owners using whatever means necessary to generate revenue to stock the team with the most highly paid stars imaginable?

"Shrek the Third" photo from DreamWorks Animation

When it rains, it pours. It's no secret that Hollywood isn't exactly a Republican stronghold, so the GOP values every conservative celebrity vote it has in its back pocket. On the other hand, Hollywood is, well, a town that loves front-runners, so when things aren't going good, you can expect celebrities to jump ship at the slightest provocation.

That just happened to Dennis Hopper. After having voted a straight GOP ticket for Bush (both father and son), not to mention costarring in "An American Carol," the current David Zucker right-wing comedy that mocks Michael Moore, Hopper has gone overboard, telling reporters in Paris that he's voting for Barack Obama this time around. Even though he voted for George W. Bush--twice--Hopper blasted his administration for its many "lies," saying "I pray God, Barack Obama is elected."

This is especially bad news, since Hopper is McCain's demographic peer--the legendary star of "Easy Rider" is actually three months older than McCain, having turned 72 in May. I guess if I were a die-hard conservative, I'd say, "It figures that Hopper would wait till he was in (ahem) France to deliver the bad news." Speaking of bad news, as we mentioned the other day, the McCain campaign has been running out of pop anthems to play at campaign rallies after a slew of performers--including the Foo Fighters, Van Halen and Jackson Browne--all complained that the McCain campaign had never gotten permission to use their music.

I asked readers for helpful suggestions for new songs the McCain campaign might play instead. And oh boy, did we get suggestions! I guess we have a lot of liberal readers, since most of the ideas were--shall we say--somewhat sarcastic. I've gone through the lengthy list to cull a few highlights. Which songs were my favorites? Keep reading:

There was a time, oh so long ago, when music videos were cool. Every Hollywood agent and movie studio executive had MTV playing in the background in their offices and were on the lookout for the hot new video wunderkind. Everyone seemed happily persuaded that every fresh-faced 23-year-old straight out of USC film school might turn out to be the next David Fincher, Tarsem Singh or Spike Jonze. Then it all started to fall apart, with MTV pretty much going down the drain and all too many of the alleged hot-shot directors turning out be one-hit wonders. 

Could music videos possibly make a comeback? Wired magazine argues that we could be in the dawn of a new golden age of music video, thanks largely to the digital reach of YouTube, which has replaced MTV as the popular proving ground for the best new videos. As Weezer's "Pork and Beans" director Mathew Cullen puts it: "MTV has become an afterthought." He should know. When "Pork and Beans" (which is filled with cameos from the latest and greatest Web celebs) was posted on YouTube earlier this year, it became an instant sensation, attracting 4 million views in its first week.

Wired spotlighted six videos, nearly all of 2008 vintage. "Pork and Beans" is the best known, but it's hardly the only one worth watching. My favorite was "Toe Jam," by Brighton Port Authority, actually a Fatboy Slim spinoff group featuring David Byrne. Directed by Keith Schofield, it's a comic delight, featuring a host of naked women cavorting on shag carpet, their breasts and bottoms all carefully obscured with black censor bars. Schofield choreographs their movements so the censor bars spell out words or form Busby Berkeley-style geometric patterns.

One of the other treats is an interactive video of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," which allows you to create all sorts of cool effects by clicking on the screen as the video plays. Another video worth watching is Bright Eyes' "At the Bottom of Everything," directed by Cat Solen, which features playful stop-motion animation and special guests Terence Stamp and Evan Rachel Wood getting to know each other in a plane that's spiraling earthward in the most ethereal fashion. I also liked the low-fi quality of Animal Collective's "Taste." The only real clinker in the bunch is Rik Cordero's draggy, eight-minute-long video of a Nas song, which is undercut by the solemn pretense of the video. It's surely the only music video that actually has a "key grip" credit.

Still, five out of six isn't bad. Maybe music video has a future after all.

Photo of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video from YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

The Dodgers go Hollywood: The sequel

Just when you thought Dodger Stadium couldn't get more cluttered with ads and promotions and marketing hype, here comes the news that the William Morris Agency has been hired by Frank McCourt and Co. to exploit even more branding opportunities for the team. No stone will remain unturned--or more accurately, no public space will remain bare in the Dodgers constant search for new revenue streams. As Variety put it, the team "is exploring sponsors for everything from the bullpens, baselines and the team dugouts," along with sponsorship arrangements for the team's new retail outlet project that will be under construction for the next several years.

As Big Picture loyalists may have noticed, I'm a Cubs fan, so I'm especially sensitive to ballparks being turned into giant billboards. Wrigley Field has largely remained a holdout from the current mania for commercial exploitation, although you could argue that the Cubs' ballpark--built in 1914--was one of the first stadiums to endorse a commercial sponsor, since the park's very name touts its former owner's chewing gum brand. But do we really want to see a Dodger pitcher warming up in the "Shrek 4" bullpen? Or watch the home team take the field, scrambling out of a dugout emblazoned with a giant severed head logo for "Saw 5"? Where would it end? What would stop Disney from emblazoning "Bolt" on all the Dodgers bats? Or Fox from doing giveaways for every ball that bounces on "The Day the Earth Stood Still" warning track? Who knows--maybe Jeffrey Katzenberg will give away 50,000 3D glasses to fans on Opening Day so they can watch clips from "Monsters vs. Aliens" on the stadium's jumbo video screen during the seventh-inning stretch.

It's almost impossible to exaggerate what marketers will do if given "virtually limitless" possibilities, to quote Dodgers COO Dennis Mannion's breathless description of the team's master marketing plan. Baseball purists will remember that in 2004 Sony launched a "Spider-Man" promotion designed to put the movie's logo on all the bases at ballparks during inter-league play that year. The studio was forced to scale back the promotion after a storm of protest from outraged fans. With the Dodgers playoff hopes hanging by a thread right now, I don't want to do anything to jinx the team's chances. But I'd like to hear from baseball fans: Are ballparks already filled with too much advertising clutter and showbiz marketing? Or are you OK with owners using whatever means necessary to generate revenue to stock the team with the most highly paid stars imaginable?

"Shrek the Third" photo from DreamWorks Animation

When it rains, it pours. It's no secret that Hollywood isn't exactly a Republican stronghold, so the GOP values every conservative celebrity vote it has in its back pocket. On the other hand, Hollywood is, well, a town that loves front-runners, so when things aren't going good, you can expect celebrities to jump ship at the slightest provocation.

That just happened to Dennis Hopper. After having voted a straight GOP ticket for Bush (both father and son), not to mention costarring in "An American Carol," the current David Zucker right-wing comedy that mocks Michael Moore, Hopper has gone overboard, telling reporters in Paris that he's voting for Barack Obama this time around. Even though he voted for George W. Bush--twice--Hopper blasted his administration for its many "lies," saying "I pray God, Barack Obama is elected."

This is especially bad news, since Hopper is McCain's demographic peer--the legendary star of "Easy Rider" is actually three months older than McCain, having turned 72 in May. I guess if I were a die-hard conservative, I'd say, "It figures that Hopper would wait till he was in (ahem) France to deliver the bad news." Speaking of bad news, as we mentioned the other day, the McCain campaign has been running out of pop anthems to play at campaign rallies after a slew of performers--including the Foo Fighters, Van Halen and Jackson Browne--all complained that the McCain campaign had never gotten permission to use their music.

I asked readers for helpful suggestions for new songs the McCain campaign might play instead. And oh boy, did we get suggestions! I guess we have a lot of liberal readers, since most of the ideas were--shall we say--somewhat sarcastic. I've gone through the lengthy list to cull a few highlights. Which songs were my favorites? Keep reading:

There was a time, oh so long ago, when music videos were cool. Every Hollywood agent and movie studio executive had MTV playing in the background in their offices and were on the lookout for the hot new video wunderkind. Everyone seemed happily persuaded that every fresh-faced 23-year-old straight out of USC film school might turn out to be the next David Fincher, Tarsem Singh or Spike Jonze. Then it all started to fall apart, with MTV pretty much going down the drain and all too many of the alleged hot-shot directors turning out be one-hit wonders. 

Could music videos possibly make a comeback? Wired magazine argues that we could be in the dawn of a new golden age of music video, thanks largely to the digital reach of YouTube, which has replaced MTV as the popular proving ground for the best new videos. As Weezer's "Pork and Beans" director Mathew Cullen puts it: "MTV has become an afterthought." He should know. When "Pork and Beans" (which is filled with cameos from the latest and greatest Web celebs) was posted on YouTube earlier this year, it became an instant sensation, attracting 4 million views in its first week.

Wired spotlighted six videos, nearly all of 2008 vintage. "Pork and Beans" is the best known, but it's hardly the only one worth watching. My favorite was "Toe Jam," by Brighton Port Authority, actually a Fatboy Slim spinoff group featuring David Byrne. Directed by Keith Schofield, it's a comic delight, featuring a host of naked women cavorting on shag carpet, their breasts and bottoms all carefully obscured with black censor bars. Schofield choreographs their movements so the censor bars spell out words or form Busby Berkeley-style geometric patterns.

One of the other treats is an interactive video of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," which allows you to create all sorts of cool effects by clicking on the screen as the video plays. Another video worth watching is Bright Eyes' "At the Bottom of Everything," directed by Cat Solen, which features playful stop-motion animation and special guests Terence Stamp and Evan Rachel Wood getting to know each other in a plane that's spiraling earthward in the most ethereal fashion. I also liked the low-fi quality of Animal Collective's "Taste." The only real clinker in the bunch is Rik Cordero's draggy, eight-minute-long video of a Nas song, which is undercut by the solemn pretense of the video. It's surely the only music video that actually has a "key grip" credit.

Still, five out of six isn't bad. Maybe music video has a future after all.

Photo of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video from YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

John McCain vs. Dennis Hopper?

When it rains, it pours. It's no secret that Hollywood isn't exactly a Republican stronghold, so the GOP values every conservative celebrity vote it has in its back pocket. On the other hand, Hollywood is, well, a town that loves front-runners, so when things aren't going good, you can expect celebrities to jump ship at the slightest provocation.

That just happened to Dennis Hopper. After having voted a straight GOP ticket for Bush (both father and son), not to mention costarring in "An American Carol," the current David Zucker right-wing comedy that mocks Michael Moore, Hopper has gone overboard, telling reporters in Paris that he's voting for Barack Obama this time around. Even though he voted for George W. Bush--twice--Hopper blasted his administration for its many "lies," saying "I pray God, Barack Obama is elected."

This is especially bad news, since Hopper is McCain's demographic peer--the legendary star of "Easy Rider" is actually three months older than McCain, having turned 72 in May. I guess if I were a die-hard conservative, I'd say, "It figures that Hopper would wait till he was in (ahem) France to deliver the bad news." Speaking of bad news, as we mentioned the other day, the McCain campaign has been running out of pop anthems to play at campaign rallies after a slew of performers--including the Foo Fighters, Van Halen and Jackson Browne--all complained that the McCain campaign had never gotten permission to use their music.

I asked readers for helpful suggestions for new songs the McCain campaign might play instead. And oh boy, did we get suggestions! I guess we have a lot of liberal readers, since most of the ideas were--shall we say--somewhat sarcastic. I've gone through the lengthy list to cull a few highlights. Which songs were my favorites? Keep reading:

There was a time, oh so long ago, when music videos were cool. Every Hollywood agent and movie studio executive had MTV playing in the background in their offices and were on the lookout for the hot new video wunderkind. Everyone seemed happily persuaded that every fresh-faced 23-year-old straight out of USC film school might turn out to be the next David Fincher, Tarsem Singh or Spike Jonze. Then it all started to fall apart, with MTV pretty much going down the drain and all too many of the alleged hot-shot directors turning out be one-hit wonders. 

Could music videos possibly make a comeback? Wired magazine argues that we could be in the dawn of a new golden age of music video, thanks largely to the digital reach of YouTube, which has replaced MTV as the popular proving ground for the best new videos. As Weezer's "Pork and Beans" director Mathew Cullen puts it: "MTV has become an afterthought." He should know. When "Pork and Beans" (which is filled with cameos from the latest and greatest Web celebs) was posted on YouTube earlier this year, it became an instant sensation, attracting 4 million views in its first week.

Wired spotlighted six videos, nearly all of 2008 vintage. "Pork and Beans" is the best known, but it's hardly the only one worth watching. My favorite was "Toe Jam," by Brighton Port Authority, actually a Fatboy Slim spinoff group featuring David Byrne. Directed by Keith Schofield, it's a comic delight, featuring a host of naked women cavorting on shag carpet, their breasts and bottoms all carefully obscured with black censor bars. Schofield choreographs their movements so the censor bars spell out words or form Busby Berkeley-style geometric patterns.

One of the other treats is an interactive video of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," which allows you to create all sorts of cool effects by clicking on the screen as the video plays. Another video worth watching is Bright Eyes' "At the Bottom of Everything," directed by Cat Solen, which features playful stop-motion animation and special guests Terence Stamp and Evan Rachel Wood getting to know each other in a plane that's spiraling earthward in the most ethereal fashion. I also liked the low-fi quality of Animal Collective's "Taste." The only real clinker in the bunch is Rik Cordero's draggy, eight-minute-long video of a Nas song, which is undercut by the solemn pretense of the video. It's surely the only music video that actually has a "key grip" credit.

Still, five out of six isn't bad. Maybe music video has a future after all.

Photo of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video from YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

Could music videos possibly be cool again?

There was a time, oh so long ago, when music videos were cool. Every Hollywood agent and movie studio executive had MTV playing in the background in their offices and were on the lookout for the hot new video wunderkind. Everyone seemed happily persuaded that every fresh-faced 23-year-old straight out of USC film school might turn out to be the next David Fincher, Tarsem Singh or Spike Jonze. Then it all started to fall apart, with MTV pretty much going down the drain and all too many of the alleged hot-shot directors turning out be one-hit wonders. 

Could music videos possibly make a comeback? Wired magazine argues that we could be in the dawn of a new golden age of music video, thanks largely to the digital reach of YouTube, which has replaced MTV as the popular proving ground for the best new videos. As Weezer's "Pork and Beans" director Mathew Cullen puts it: "MTV has become an afterthought." He should know. When "Pork and Beans" (which is filled with cameos from the latest and greatest Web celebs) was posted on YouTube earlier this year, it became an instant sensation, attracting 4 million views in its first week.

Wired spotlighted six videos, nearly all of 2008 vintage. "Pork and Beans" is the best known, but it's hardly the only one worth watching. My favorite was "Toe Jam," by Brighton Port Authority, actually a Fatboy Slim spinoff group featuring David Byrne. Directed by Keith Schofield, it's a comic delight, featuring a host of naked women cavorting on shag carpet, their breasts and bottoms all carefully obscured with black censor bars. Schofield choreographs their movements so the censor bars spell out words or form Busby Berkeley-style geometric patterns.

One of the other treats is an interactive video of Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible," which allows you to create all sorts of cool effects by clicking on the screen as the video plays. Another video worth watching is Bright Eyes' "At the Bottom of Everything," directed by Cat Solen, which features playful stop-motion animation and special guests Terence Stamp and Evan Rachel Wood getting to know each other in a plane that's spiraling earthward in the most ethereal fashion. I also liked the low-fi quality of Animal Collective's "Taste." The only real clinker in the bunch is Rik Cordero's draggy, eight-minute-long video of a Nas song, which is undercut by the solemn pretense of the video. It's surely the only music video that actually has a "key grip" credit.

Still, five out of six isn't bad. Maybe music video has a future after all.

Photo of Weezer's "Pork and Beans" video from YouTube

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

The Emmy Awards: Deja vu all over again

It's hard to imagine anyone managed to make it to the end of the interminable (and interminably snoozy) Emmy Awards on Sunday night. But if we could give an award -- let's call it a Snoozy -- to the journalist who made the most sense out of the entire humdrum event, it would go to my colleague Scott Collins, who had a smart front-page story today noting that many of the big awards went to cable programming whose audience barely equals the kind of numbers one "American Idol" episode gets in St. Louis. "Mad Men," which won the Emmy for outstanding drama series, averages roughly 925,000 viewers per episode -- a fraction of the audience that's watching "Lost" or "Two and a Half Men," two of the many network shows that came away empty-handed at the ceremony.

One of the stories in today's Variety echoed that theme, quoting unnamed network executives (in Variety, whenever anyone says anything bad, they always get to say it anonymously) as grumbling that the Emmys have become the Cable Ace Awards. That quip rang a bell. Of course! It's exactly what movie studio executives have been saying about the Academy Awards in recent years, except they derisively call the Oscars the Indy Spirit Awards. There are two Hollywoods -- the Hollywood that makes lots of money and the Hollywood that wins Oscars. In case you forgot the most recent Academy Awards, none of the five best picture nominees was among the year's Top 30 box-office performers (at the time of their nomination last January). And except for "Juno," none of the best picture nominees had made even $50 million before the ceremony.

We've entered an era when award shows like the Emmys and Oscars are increasingly devoted to giving out statuettes to (TV shows and films) whose commercial reach is dwarfed by the big dumb (TV shows and films) that rake in most of the dough. The comparisons are striking. HBO, which made off with huge caches of Emmys in recent years, is a lot like the Miramax Films, circa 1994-2002, that dominated the Oscars. They were both subsidiaries of giant media companies but run by strong, independent leadership that pursued quality craftsmanship over mass-production kitsch.

Reality TV is now a bread 'n' butter item for network TV, but it doesn't get any more respect at Emmy time than the dumb summer comedies that crank out profits for the studios do during Oscar season. As Collins pointed out today, TV networks now shy away from making expensive scripted series and long-form programming. He could've said the same thing about film studios, who've been bailing out of the business of bankrolling costly dramas and historical biopics, the genres that deliver the most Oscar statuettes. 

The big question: Is this so terrible?   

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

David Zucker on GOP babe Sarah Palin: She's hot!

I cover Hollywood, America's great liberal oasis, where there is an organic boneless breast of chicken in every pot and a Prius on every block. So when I canvassed my friends today, the verdict on Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's fiery speech Wednesday night at the GOP convention was clear: She's a menace to society, a hockey mom whose tough talk fell on deaf ears. She may be a hit with the Republican base, but in Hollywood, Palin's strident attacks on Barack Obama and her skepticism toward evolution and global warming make her something of a pariah. As one liberal commentator put it, it was the Speech to Nowhere.

But what do Hollywood conservatives think? I called up David Zucker (best known as one of the funny guys behind "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" series) whose upcoming film, "An American Carol," spoofs a cynical anti-American filmmaker (think Michael Moore) on a crusade to abolish the Fourth of July holiday. Zucker was impressed by Palin's composure, her feisty delivery and appalled by the media's double standard toward her. I mentioned that many in the media view her as a character out of an outlandish reality TV show, not a particularly experienced or thoughtful politician.

"That's totally unfair," he says. "Why put that label on her? I'd rather see her criticized for the shape of her eyeglasses. Actually, I'm a fan of reality TV shows, but I guess they're something liberals look down on. Look, we shouldn't be surprised, since the whole media is biased--including Fox News. But at least they admit it. It's the networks and the national press that won't admit it. Why won't Katie Couric admit that she's as biased as anyone at Fox News?"

As for Palin, Zucker says he agrees with 90% of her views. "I'm still pro-choice and I know there's some kind of climate change going on, though we may not know why. But it's a matter of priorities. The Democrats think the biggest threat to the world is global warming. It doesn't bother me that Sarah doesn't believe that. There are more important things to believe in, starting with the war on terror."

Zucker was in Minnesota the other day, showing an early cut of "An American Carol" to a friendly audience--2,400 conventiongoers along with the families of veterans who'd been killed in Iraq. Even in that setting, he managed to keep his comedy bearings. How funny was he? Keep reading:   

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

The Big Picture takes a vacation

How can you miss me when I won't go away? In August, the French leave Paris, the Italians leave Rome and the studio bosses leave Hollywood. That's a good enough sign for me that it's time to hit the road. The Cubs are still in first place, so the family is heading off to make our annual pilgrimage to Wrigley Field, where we hope to sing a few choruses of "Go Cubs Go," the Steve Goodman-penned tune all loyal Cub stalwarts croon after a Cubs victory. Then it's up to the mountains for some reading and hiking.

Look for the blog to be back up and running a day or so after Labor Day, when I'll weigh in on more of the fall films and see if any of my vacation reading could be made into a good movie. My thanks for reading the blog. It's been a great pleasure having such a spirited conversation with so many smart people. I'm betting there will be lots to talk about after I return. 

Photo of Ernie Banks statue at Wrigley Field by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

Bill Hader: Crazed movie fan?

Every comic who can tell a joke seems to be part of a newly launched Web comedy series. Some are really funny; some are, well, just as bad as anything on B.O.T ( or "boring old TV"). One of my current favorites is "The Line," which stars a host of "Saturday Night Live" writers and cast members, most notably Bill Hader and Simon Rich, who co-created the Web series. It was financed by Lorne Michaels' Broadway Video and debuted late last month on Crackle.com. It's now available everywhere--I've been watching the episodes on YouTube. The premise: Two pals are camping out in line 10 days before the premiere of a "Star Wars"-style summer blockbuster. The comedy is droll, goofy and something of a sociological study in obsessive fan behavior.

Now something of a regular Judd Apatow stock company member, having had parts in everything from "Pineapple Express" to "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" to "Superbad" (where he plays Officer Slater), Hader based the concept on some of his own past experiences. Like much of what we've been seeing on the Web lately, the whole series was concocted by funny guys sitting around out of work during the writers strike. As Hader explains: "I told Simon the story of my standing in line for 20 hours, waiting to see 'The Phantom Menace' and all the crazy stuff that happened--including a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend who kept telling her, 'Come over here, I've got to stay in line'--and Simon said, 'That's the show.' Within five or six minutes, we'd come up with the whole trajectory of the series."

Here are some other notable excerpts from our chat:

How is the Internet changing comedy? "We'd written the whole script, but we kept cutting it left and right because watching seven minutes of comedy on a computer can seem like a long time," says Hader. "After doing the Web series, Simon and I went back to a screenplay we were writing and suddenly we started going, 'Oh no, this scene is way too long. We've got to cut it!' The Internet definitely changes your way of thinking about comedy rhythm."

The Internet makes comedy instantly doable: "In the old days, you'd carry around tapes of your short films in the trunk of your car, waiting to give 'em to some producer. Now you can put it right up on YouTube. You have no excuse not to be making funny stuff on your own every weekend. It's so easy. You do it, cut it at your house and put it up online. And you get instant feedback."

So how did he become part of the Apatow stock company? "I had a small part in 'You, Me and Dupree' and I met Seth Rogen when we were shooting in Hawaii and we started talking about comic books     and after 10 minutes he said, 'Hey, you'd be great playing a cop in this script we wrote.' Ninety-nine percent of the time that's the last you hear about it. But later, when I had a meeting with Judd, he said, 'I think you're playing this cop in a movie I'm producing.' And when someone gave me the script to read, I went, 'Holy [smokes], that's a real part!' "

Here's the first episode from the series:

Photo of Bill Hader (left) and Seth Rogen in "Superbad" from Sony Pictures

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

Phone message of the week: Scott Rudin's office, returning

While I was away the New York Times had a great page one story about the instant popularity of Slydial, a new high-tech device that allows callers to dial a mobile phone and leave a message without the call ever being detected. It's a big hit--since being unveiled to the public last week, the Times reports that more than 200,000 people have used the service.

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was: Come on, Scott Rudin has been doing this for years! As Hollywood insiders will attest, the Oscar-winning, titanic-tempered producer has been famous for being impossible to reach by phone, often returning supplicants' phone calls in the wee hours of the morning or long after closing hours, anything to avoid actually speaking to the intended party. Entire memoirs have been written about playing phone tag with Rudin, who, according to former assistants, was a Slydialer long before this fancy new version of the technology was invented. He simply had two assistants sit next to each other, dialing the same (studio exec/agent/lowly reporter's) cellphone at exactly the same time, ensuring that the calls would come in simultaneously, bumping them both to voice mail.

For my money, Slydial is the ultimate Hollywood holiday gift, since it perfectly suits the prevailing ethos of show business: Always avoid confrontation. In Hollywood, no one ever wants to deliver bad news. After all, who wants to tell the poor schlub screenwriter that he's been taken off the movie after Brett Ratner threw his latest rewrite in the scrap heap? Who wants to tell Tom Cruise that the studio is happier spending a little less money and hiring Keanu Reeves for that new action thriller? Who wants to tell Dick Wolf his latest pilot didn't test well enough to get a series commitment? Who wants to call "X-Files: I Want to Believe's" Chris Carter on Saturday morning and give him the film's lousy second-weekend box-office numbers? I mean, who wanted to be the one to tell Lindsay Lohan that her mom was doing a reality TV show?

Just imagine the possibilities, Now no one in Hollywood ever has to have an awkward conversation, much less a rude confrontation. If you're a star and your career is going badly, Slydial makes it so much easier to call your agent and, without having to do any hemming or hawing, say, "Ari, I'm just thinking of going in a different direction. It's not that CAA made any special promises. They just seem to 'get' what I'm doing. Maybe it'll be good for us both to have a fresh start."

For those of us who cover the industry, it's somehow reassuring to know that an attitude we thought of as specific to Hollywood has become part of the zeitgeist. We're now a nation of non-confrontational duck-and-runners. You could even argue that Hollywood's fabled narcissism has also rubbed off on the hoi polloi. Not only did 26-year-old Alexis Gorman happily acknowledge using the new service to dump her boyfriend, but she eagerly posed for a stylish New York Times photo of her on the phone, eyes glinting with high expectation, presumably lining up a date with a new sucker. I say she's so ready for the new season of "Beauty and the Geek."

Photo of Scott Rudin by Jennifer S. Altman / For The Times

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

Elvis has left the building

And I'm taking a couple of days off to watch my 10-year-old run the fast break at basketball camp. When I return, we'll have a lively interview with Bill Maher about his controversial new film "Religulous," some late-summer funny business and a few surprises. Stay tuned.

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

'The Dark Knight' gets shock therapy

It's an old marketing maxim in Hollywood that you can tell that a movie is really a pop culture phenomenon when the buzz migrates to the op-ed pages. This has happened to "The Dark Knight" in spades. We know from today's Times story that the latest installment in Warners' Batman franchise has been racking up box-office milestones at a record pace, but it has also been inspiring an unlikely array of opinion pieces, especially from conservative commentators, who have been on something of a desperate search for new heroes lately.

The most provocative of the pieces, an essay by mystery writer Andrew Klavan that ran in the Wall Street Journal the other day, positions the film as a conservative movie about the war on terror, with Batman as--gasp!--George W. Bush. As Klavan puts it: The film is "at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand...."

The most playful of the pieces, by New York Post film critic Kyle Smith, proposes that Batman is--double gasp!--a dead ringer for the current administration's vice president. Once you relax and stifle your gag reflex--and if you're a liberal, this requires some serious yoga-style gag reflex contortions--you have to admit that Smith is on to something:

"Batman is not charming. He isn't popular, partly because he's a zealot and partly because he doesn't bother to explain himself to the press. He is independently wealthy, having spent years as the head of an industrial company. His methods are disturbing, his operations bathed in darkness. He is misunderstood, mistrusted, endlessly pursued by the attack dogs of the night.... And he lives in an undisclosed location. Isn't it obvious? Batman is Dick Cheney with hair."

Where does it end? Will Larry David soon surface on the op-ed page of the New York Times, claiming that the Dark Knight is really a nice Jewish boy simply in need of some serious psychoanalysis? Or will Arianna Huffington weigh in, arguing that the movie is a metaphor for the limits on American power and influence in the world? Is there anyone out there who is actually making sense? Actually, amazingly, we've stumbled onto someone with a surprisingly sane point of view:

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

New 'W' trailer: A walk on the wild side with Bush

It was just a couple of weeks ago that conservative commentators were all saying that liberals were humorless dolts, offering as Exhibit A the outraged reaction to the New Yorker's hilarious Barack Obama as Muslim terrorist cover cartoon. So I'm betting those same commentators will heartily embrace Lionsgate's first teaser trailer for Oliver Stone's "W," which just posted today on YouTube (with the admonition: "This is not a fake"), focusing on the young Dubya, acting like he's starring in a boozy remake of "Old School."

The reason "W" got turned down at every big studio in town wasn't because anyone was politically nervous about making the movie--Bush is too unpopular today to worry even the most timid Hollywood studio chief. In fact, the studio that came closest to saying yes was the Rupert Murdoch owned 20th Century Fox, which figured that having Fox release a wild-eyed anti-Bush movie would cause so much buzz that it would be a unique marketing ingredient unto itself.

The real worry has always been that the story itself was HBO docudrama material, with too many talky scenes set in White House war rooms. The Lionsgate trailer shrewdly explodes that notion. It opens with Dubya (played by Josh Brolin) being dressed down by his dad ("I remember correctly, you didn't like the sporting goods job...") before careening off into hard-partying, tail-chasing territory, ending up with the infamous drunken-driving incident that prompts another stern lecture from Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell), who says derisively: "Who do you think you are, a Kennedy? You're a Bush. Act like one." To make sure we get the point, the scenes are accompanied by George Thorogood's version of the roadhouse standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer."

The music then shifts to the serene "It's a Wonderful World," which plays as the trailer poses a question that could perhaps make us curious enough to see the movie in a theater. It asks: "What Drove George W. Bush ... From Here ..." (Dubya brawling with his old man) "To Here?" (Dubya in the Oval Office, cowboy boots cockily propped up on his desk). Movie executives always preach, ad nauseam, that a successful film needs a hero who overcomes a series of obstacles, making him a very different person at film's end from what he was at the beginning. "W" sounds like it fits the bill quite nicely, as long as you grade on a curve when it comes to the part about overcoming the obstacles. 

Photo of George W. Bush by Evan Vucci / Associated Press

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

Ricky Jay and his 52 assistants

I've seen Ricky Jay work his magic with cards in David Mamet movies, on "Deadwood" and in "The Prestige," but there's nothing like seeing him live, on stage, as he is this month at the Geffen Playhouse, reprising his Mamet-directed show, "Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants." His performance last night brought out a host of fans, including Buck Henry and his wife, Irene, who arrived with a posse of pals that included George Segal, Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss. Like everyone else in the packed house--including the woman in my row who brought a pair of binoculars to get a closer look--I stared intently at Jay's soft, supple hands, trying to steal a glimpse of how he was manipulating the cards and pulling off his tricks. All to no avail. His secrets will clearly go to the grave.

What's especially great about his act is that it combines a magician's bravura technique with a writerly passion for language. Part of the fun is hearing Jay lovingly recite all the arcane slang that earlier generations used to describe the colorful cheats who pulled off their audacious hustles and cons. Every dazzling demonstration in the art of deception is interwoven with a vivid tale about pioneering magicians of the past.

My favorite story was about Max Malini, a great early 20th century magician who performed for presidents and kings. A master of misdirection, Malini would borrow a gentleman's hat and fumble with a coin trick. When he'd finally remove the hat--voila!--a giant block of ice appeared. Malini was once invited to dine with the American governor of the Philippines, who, knowing Malini was Jewish, served a roast suckling pig with an apple in its mouth. Feigning horror and disgust, Malini hurriedly covered it with a tablecloth. Then, just as quickly, he swept aside the cloth, revealing a nice kosher chicken.

One of Jay's best routines, which he did last night, is a riveting dissertation on "The Cups and Balls," which you can watch here:

Photo of Ricky Jay in "Deadwood" by Doug Hyun / HBO

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

McCain vs. Obama: Still fighting the '60s culture wars?

If you ever want to know whether someone is really a Democrat or a Republican at heart, just ask them what they think about the '60s. As Bill Clinton, the shrewdest of all judges when it came to divining voters' subconscious political loyalties, memorably put it: "If you look back on the '60s and think there was more good than harm, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."

I was reminded of Clinton's axiom watching a new John McCain political ad--see below--that seems to foreshadow a renewed GOP effort to pin the excesses of the '60s on Barack Obama, even though he was just a tyke when the Yippies were battling Chicago police at the Democratic Convention and unwashed hippies were making the mythic trek to Woodstock. Obama is a fan of mellow funk and hip-hop, not Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix.

Still, the ad's coded language is a dead giveaway. It opens with grainy newsreel footage of long-haired '60s protesters, with the narration: "It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The summer of love. Half a world away, another kind of love. [Cue photos of a dashing war hero] John McCain. Shot down, bayoneted. Tortured. Offered early release. He said no. He'd sworn an oath...."

Geez, hope and change--whose issue is that? Are people who believe in hope really soft-headed acid heads? Is that what people will get by voting for Obama--a return to psychedelia and "Helter Skelter"? For a far more in-depth analysis, see Michael Scherer's smart take on the subject at Time's Swampland political blog, where he notes that the Republicans have had great luck pinning the excesses of the '60s on Democratic candidates:

"Every presidential election since Vietnam has, in some ways, been a retread of the '60s culture war. Bill Clinton smoked pot, remember. Gary Hart internalized the free love thing. Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Republicans like this theme because it unites the nation's hinterlands against the cultural elite, the liberals of New York and California. But ... does the theme still work with a post-baby boom candidate? Or for post-baby boom voters?"

It would be easy to dismiss this as a desperate attempt to turn Barack Obama into Abbie Hoffman. But hey--take a look for yourself:

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.   

The '60s: Not just a decade but a way of life

If the 1960s didn't exist, Martin Lewis would've had to invent them. The maestro behind the 9th annual Mods & Rockers Film Festival in Los Angeles, a two-week event that concludes next week, Lewis is steeped in all things '60s. A protege of Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, Lewis has worked with Paul McCartney on various post-Beatles projects, produced the DVD edition of "A Hard Day's Night" and launched "The Secret Policeman's Ball" benefit series for Amnesty International, which brought together '60s British comic talent (including alumni from Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe) with such rock icons as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Phil Collins and Sting.

Lewis is part impresario, part huckster, part one-man comedy act. When I tracked him down earlier this week, he was in Las Vegas, lounging in a penthouse suite at the Mirage Hotel with '60s icons Donovan and Patti Boyd, waiting to do emcee duty at a Beatles fest there. It was 110 degrees in the shade in Vegas that afternoon, so I asked Lewis what he was wearing. His answer tells you all you need to know about his impresario-huckster-comic persona.

"Being very British and always going against the grain, especially amongst all these Americans in shorts and sandals, I'm wearing a black Armani pin-stripe suit with my best Winklepickers," he explained, Winklepickers being a Cockney term for the stylish sharp-pointed boots that were the shoe of choice among Teddy Boys in the 1950s and were often worn by John Lennon and other '60s British musicians. Lewis insisted that sweltering in Armani was preferable to the comfort of squishy shorts and sandals. "Englishmen don't remove their jackets," he explained, "unless they're in the presence of their personal physician or their mother."

This year's Mods & Rockers Festival is largely a celebration of another fascinating '60s British icon, Tony Palmer. His little seen 17-hour TV series, "All You Need Is Love," is perhaps the most ambitious celebration ever of American popular music. (Read more from our Randy Lewis about Palmer's role in that series. Go here for a full schedule of events.) But I was interested in hearing Lewis talk about something even more strange, obscure and wonderful, a film that screens Monday night that celebrates one of America's landmark achievements, yet has gone virtually unseen here since its 1979 release.