Who’s your audience? At what cost?

If you missed last night’s Oscars, lucky you!

I watched Seth MacFarlane as host — and yes, I had to Google him — and thought “Seriously?” I found him crude, sophomoric (freshmanic? even better) and deeply off-putting.

English: Seth MacFarlane at the 2010 Comic Con in San Diego (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am not, however, the demographic the Academy Awards producers so desperately crave, 18 to 49 year old men. By hiring MacFarlane, and larding the show with sexist, racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic “jokes”, they thought for sure they had a win.

And they did.

But for every teen boy yukking it up out there, a million others, men and women of all ages, were tweeting and Facebooking their shock and disgust throughout, and after, the show.

Sure, grow your audience…

At what cost?

From msn.money.com:

Seth MacFarlane was full of surprises when he hosted the Oscar awards show last night. This morning came another one: TV ratings for the 85th celebration of Hollywood’s love affair with the movies were up over last year in the key 18- to 49-year-old demographic.

Early tallies for the show say it earned a 12.1 rating for that group, up more than from 3% from last year’s final 11.7 figure, according to a report in Broadcasting & Cable, citing preliminary figures from Nielsen. Entertainment Weekly notes that total ratings for the Oscars also probably rose over last year’s show hosted by Billy Chrystal. Final ratings, which may be different, will be released by Nielsen later today.

If these ratings hold, it will be a pleasant surprise for ABC and its corporate parent Walt Disney (DIS +0.22%).Some had wondered whether MacFarlane, whose TV shows and movies appeal largely to men, would turn off the mostly female Oscar audience. His song-and-dance number celebrating actresses who have shown their breasts on the silver screen may have offended some, but it was tame stuff by MacFarlane’s standards.

Best known as the creator of “Family Guy,” MacFarlane got mixed reviews for his performance.

Best Actress Academy Awards (Photo credit: cliff1066™)

For Broadside, an unpaid gig, I want an engaged, civil conversation with smart, global, interesting people. I have them! Yay, you!

For my books, I want readers of all ages simply open to new ideas, especially those interested in a new spin on old narratives — whether gun use or low-wage labor. Fortunately, I’ve found them as well.

When I write on business for The New York Times, I want readers to enjoy, think, argue, share. My stories are consistently the third most read and emailed of the entire Sunday paper. So, I’m pleased that my fairly careful targeting of the audience I seek is indeed out there.

But the pursuit of the Big Bucks, in many fields, means lowering the bar — of taste, execution, style, content, tone or intelligence.

It’s not a trade-off I’m willing to make.

How about you?

Who is your audience?

How do you try to win and keep and grow them?

Does it involve making trade-offs between your personal ethics and principles — and making a decent living?

Related articles

• Why Seth MacFarlane Bombed The Oscars – And What It Says About Hollywood (thinkprogress.org)
• Oscars 2013: Seth MacFarlane’s lamely nasty jokes (telegraph.co.uk)
• Seth MacFarlane as Oscars Host: Grade Him! (thehollywoodgossip.com)
• Seth MacFarlane Opens Oscars With Painfully Long Monologue! Watch It Here! (perezhilton.com)

Caine’s Arcade: A little LA boy creates a cardboard world

Taipei Arcade Games (Photo credit: Michael Kwan (Freelancer))

Have you heard — surely, yes, by now if you live in the U.S. — about Caine’s Arcade?

Here’s the link.

In one of those unlikely fairy tales, a nine-year-old boy named Caine Monroy decided to build an entire amusement arcade out of cardboard boxes and packing tape. He created “fun passes” and used calculators to make sure each pass was legit. His arcade had every variety of game but the place, at the back of his father’s east Los Angeles auto body shop, lacked the crucial element — customers. Most people now buy auto parts on the Internet.

Until Nirvan Mullick, a film-maker, needed one for his old car.

He found Caine, played in his arcade, made a film — and asked everyone he knew to come and play there. They did. The event made NBC Nightly News and a college scholarship (and college prep tutoring) fund has topped $145,000 for Caine, a sweet-faced kid in a bright blue T-shirt.

Although — as someone not wild about traditional college education — I wonder where his amazing imagination would flourish best. Cal Arts?

It’s an astonishing video and I hope you’ll make the time, 10 minutes, to watch it.

It embodies everything I love:

Having a dream

Being persistent enough to make it into something real, even when no one is looking

Finding the tools to build your imagined world

Making stuff up from scratch

Finding someone who believes in you

Having that someone believe in you so much they want to do whatever they can to help you succeed.

I suspect for some people Caine’s win is that he’s now “famous”. It’s not.

The grin on his face when he saw how many people had finally shown up to play in his world was one of the sweetest sights you can imagine.

Related articles

• Awesome 9-year-old’s cardboard arcade gets flashmobbed (news.cnet.com)
• Caine’s Arcade (everwas.com)
• Get outside. Be creative. Dream. Create something. The story of 9-year-old Caine Monroy and Caine’s Arcade. (eugenecho.com)

Watching A Movie Over And Over And Over…

Cover of The Good Shepherd (Widescreen Edition)

Do you have favorite movies you’ve watched a dozen times, maybe more?

I recently watched “Any Given Sunday” again on TV; it’s a 1999 football movie by Oliver Stone. I’m not a big football fan but this has remained of my favorites. I love the hard-ass female team owner, played by Cameron Diaz, the crazed characters of the coach (played by Al Pacino) and his players, the scary wives, the creepy team doctor who keeps shoving badly injured players onto the field. The soundtrack is fantastic, the editing dizzying.

Every time I re-watch a film, I find something I missed or forgot — a line of dialogue or a snippet of music. Or I simply revel in familiar and well-loved images, whether the snow-crusted towers of Varykino in Dr. Zhivago or the astonishing and awful shots of a white wedding dress falling from the sky in The Good Shepherd or Michael Clayton’s car exploding as he stands on a wintry hill with a trio of quiet horses.

I’ve seen Dr. Zhivago, David Lean’s gorgeous 1965 epic, probably a dozen times and have memorized entire scenes. I love analyzing the color palette of any film — Dr. Z’s is severely and beautifully limited to khaki, cream, red and black. A few touches of lilac, a specific pale shade, mark Lara’s initial innocence. (It’s the eighth-highest grossing film of all time and won five Academy Awards.) I love the irony that Canada, Finland and Spain all stood in for Russia — as the book had been banned there, and so was filming it.

I’ve also watched The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid many times and (dare I admit it?) love re-viewing all the Bourne movies starring Matt Damon. I even know its signature opening music off by heart.

In crazy and uncertain times like these, when the Dow plummets overnight, when unemployment is still appallingly high, when protest and rage erupt worldwide, there’s something very comforting about knowing how it all turns out. (And that it’s usually for the best.)

Another recent favorite I’ve seen repeatedly is The Good Shepherd, from 2006,  a scene of which was filmed on my town’s main street; it was pretty funny, trying to walk to my accountant’s office, to be told that Matt Damon was filming on that block and I’d just have to wait. It’s about the birth of the CIA, focused on one man and his relationship with his son. Despite a few scenes of unwatchable violence, there are others of haunting beauty. I love the film’s themes: to whom do we owe our deepest loyalty? Why? When does one evil act outweigh another?

My father made films for a living, so maybe this explains my ongoing fascination with the medium. I’m in awe of the many skills it takes to create (even a lousy) movie — writer(s), editor(s), director, producers, designers, grips and gaffers and, oh, yeah, the actors.

Here’s a fun post by one of the bloggers I read listing her faves.

What films have you watched over and over — and why?

The C-Word We Avoid — Class

Image by christian.greller via Flickr

Finally!

Even if it’s only in the entertainment pages, we’re talking out loud in the U.S. — land of the mythical meritocracy — about social class and who’s rising, who’s (much more likely now) falling, and who’s most terrified of sliding from “middle” (defined as…?) to lower or working class, words used more easily in nations whose central identity doesn’t rely as heavily on the idea of equality and assured social mobility.

In a recent New York Times piece by film critic A.O. Scott:

The idea of the universal middle class is a pervasive expression of American egalitarianism — and perhaps the only one left. In politics the middle has all but swallowed up the ends. Tax cuts aimed at the wealthy and social programs that largely benefit the poor must always be presented as, above all, good for the middle class, a group that thus seems to include nearly everyone. It is also a group that is, at least judging from the political rhetoric of the last 20 years, perennially in trouble: shrinking, forgotten, frustrated, afraid of falling down and scrambling to keep up.

In the movies, which exist partly to smooth over the rough patches in our collective life, the same basic picture takes on a more benign coloration. Middle-classness is a norm, an ideal and a default setting. For a long time most commercial entertainments not set in the distant past or in some science-fiction superhero fantasyland have taken place in a realm of generic ease and relative affluence. Everyone seems to have a cool job, a fabulous kitchen, great clothes and a nice car. Nothing too fancy or showy, of course, and also nothing too clearly marked with real-world signs of status or its absence.

Last year I viciously mocked “It’s Complicated” in this blog for the absurd affluence of a divorced woman character, played by Meryl Streep, who lives in a $5 m home, runs her own bakery business and wears impossibly lush clothing and jewelry. Most women divorcees fall far and fast from their married affluence, if they had any, drained from the start by legal fees.

It’s a mug’s game to try and pinpoint “middle class” in New York, where I live in a a suburban town, when a 1,000 square foot shoebox of a 60-year-old house on a postage stamp lot runs $400,000 with $12,000 a year in taxes — barely affordable on an income of $100,000 to 150,000 a year.

In New York, you can make six figures and not have someone snort in derision for calling yourself “middle class.”

Fact is, anyone paying $30-50 per trip by (subsidized) commuter train into the city to work or look for a job, struggles hard here on an income of less than $50,000 for one, let alone $40,000 or less trying to raise a family.

Only now are we seeing films address how we really feel about money and what we really feel about who has it, who doesn’t and what we’re willing to do to get and keep some.

In the New York Post, critic Kyle Smith writes:

Without ever saying so, “Blue Valentine” is centrally about class, and class, in America, anyway, is centrally about much more than income — it’s about tastes and values, as we see when Dean’s idea of a healing getaway means a cheesy lovers’ motel. It seems obvious that if Dean had arranged such a trip with cool irony instead of urgent eagerness, Cindy would have accepted it in a larky spirit. And if Dean painted canvases instead of houses, his lack of accomplishment wouldn’t be an issue.

American filmmakers largely avoid class, which is fine because virtually all of them were well-born and tend to portray their inferiors as piteous, comical or (especially when they’re minorities) as sprites whose magical simplicity can be used to cure the angst of therapy-needing professionals.

As someone whose own income plummeted by 75 percent after losing my last full-time job in 2006, this is no idle fantasy. When I went to work as a sales associate for $11 an hour, no commission, at a mall, I began to understand the extraordinary income inequality that is increasingly defining life in the United States.

Our mall attracted the hedge fund guys and their size 0 wives tending their 10,000 square foot Greenwich mansions.

Such attitude! Such entitlement! People who think nothing of snapping their fingers in the faces of the growing servant class.

You and me, babe!

From the Huffington Post:

Income inequality in the United States is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez. The paper, which covers data through 2007, points to a staggering, unprecedented disparity in American incomes. On his blog, Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the numbers “truly amazing.”

Though income inequality has been growing for some time, the paper paints a stark, disturbing portrait of wealth distribution in America. Saez calculates that in 2007 the top .01 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000.

As of 2007, the top decile of American earners, Saez writes, pulled in 49.7 percent of total wages, a level that’s “higher than any other year since 1917 and even surpasses 1928, the peak of stock market bubble in the ‘roaring” 1920s.’”

Related Articles

• To Be Middle-Class in NYC (Lol!) [Creative Underclass] (gawker.com)
• A tale of two Torontos (theglobeandmail.com)
• Who’s Defining Middle-Class Values? (nytimes.com)
• Middle class just trying to survive (timesunion.com)

Here's A Movie I Want To See — Trolls!

Some of you are too young to remember when a troll wasn’t just a jerk on a comments page but a small, rubbery Danish-made doll with a head full of hair that came in neon colors.

Now they’re about to star in a film made by DreamWorks Animation:

The trolls, with unique faces and shocks of colorful hair, were first sold in the early 1960s and experienced a resurgence in the 1990s. Several competitors have sold copies of the original trolls.

“My father would have been very happy to know that his troll has found its dream partner in DreamWorks Animation,” said Niels Dam, who owns the family business.

DreamWorks Animation produced “How To Train Your Dragon” this past spring and has announced plans for a sequel. Its other movie franchises are “Shrek,” “Kung Fu Panda” and “Madagascar.”

As an only child who hated classic girly dolls, and who spent hours playing with Lego and trolls — what makes Danes such great toy inventors? — I think this is a hoot. I loved their simian little faces and crazy hair. It’s time a new generation gets to know them as well.

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Colin Firth was robbed! 'Crazy Heart' no match for 'A Single Man'

Colin Firth. Image by nicogenin via Flickr

It was a rainy, miserable Saturday, so what better way to spend it than nestled deep in a cinema chair? My local indie film house had both films, a 20-second indoor walk apart between the two theaters, so I saw both of these films back to back.

I didn’t expect to like “A Single Man”, even though critics dubbed it “rapturous and remarkable” (Pete Travers, Rolling Stone) and “the role of a lifetime” for Firth (Time.) I was dubious that Tom Ford, a fashion designer, could direct an entire feature film first time out of the gate.

I loved it.

Firth, who seems to have gotten stuck (Bridget Jones, Love Actually, Mamma Mia) in too many roles where he plays the cosy, overlooked Englishman, is extraordinary. Bitter, anguished, private, wary. The scene where he is told his lover has died, far away, in a car crash, is shot in tight close-up and — like a baby’s face, changing every few seconds — his crumples from disbelief to dismay to agony. It is astonishing acting.

If you love pure aesthetics and gorgeous design, this is a film for you. Everything is fab — his bottle-green Mercedes, his thick black eyeglass frames, his gold signet ring, worn on his pinky, his gray flannel bathrobe. Julianne Moore is terrific as Charley, his one-time lover, another ex-pat from London, now his boozy, lonely next-door neighbor. They need one another like oxygen and their moments of shared laughter are delicious.

Nicholas Hoult, with eyes the color of turquoise, pursues this wounded widower. Hoult, who was wonderful in the 2002 film “About A Boy” is slyly, slowly seductive as Kenny, one of George’s English students. Writes Hamish Bowles in Vogue:

In the key role of Kenny, a student of George’s who will prove something of a redeeming angel in his life, Ford had already cast a well-known English actor when Chris Weitz, one of his coproducers, showed him an audition tape made by Nicholas Hoult, whom Weitz had directed in 2002’s About a Boy with Hugh Grant. “I felt sick inside,” says Ford. “He read the part so beautifully—he was Kenny. I was not about to get rid of someone already attached to the project, but on the first day of rehearsal the other actor pulled out. He never called me—no excuses. But it became a really great moment; Nick was meant to play the role of Kenny. As George says in the film, ‘Everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be.’ ”

For the 20-year-old Hoult—a heartthrob for his role in the BBC’s edgy high school drama series Skins who will appear in Louis Leterrier’s forthcoming sword-and-sandals epic Clash of the Titans—the summons to Los Angeles was initially underwhelming. “To be perfectly honest, growing up in Reading I wasn’t really aware of Tom Ford,” he admits. When he checked his credits on the Internet Movie Database, “all that came up was an extra in Zoolander!” he says, laughing. But when he sat down with Ford, he “realized how passionate he was about the project. In many ways it was autobiographical—a love poem to Richard [Buckley, Ford’s longtime partner]—and my character was Tom when he was eighteen.” Following the meeting Hoult researched Ford and sheepishly “realized what a phenomenon he was.”

Ford, of course, has every detail down, from the Smythson stationery George uses to the white boatneck sweater Kenny wears. There are ravishing shots: a moon, a wet rose, a revolver.

I found it deeply moving — and far fresher a subject — a gay man in 1962 mourning the loss of his lover of 16 years — than Bridges’ (Oscar-winning) portrayal of Bad Blake, a 57-year-old alcoholic country singer pursued (why?!) by a young reporter (sigh), played by Maggie Gyllenhall.

Firth was robbed!

Footballs and Hankies — Do Chick Flicks Need More Grit, or Gridiron?

Cover via Amazon

Can men and women go to the same movie and enjoy it equally?  So asks a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Movie-watching has become nearly as solitary as reading. Should we be surprised that films are being crafted for ever more specific audiences, just as books have been?

Yet several of the most successful movies of the season buck the trend. Take the surprise hit “The Blind Side,” which combines a venerable female genre (the tale of a mother’s determined struggles on behalf of her ward) with reliably male subject matter (football). I’m surprised it took a smart producer so long after “Jerry Maguire” to realize that, to reach a broad audience, you can do worse than to craft a gridiron chick flick.

One of my absolutely favorite films — this from a woman who thinks of split ends as  hair-related and has yet to watch a live football game — is “Any Given Sunday”, a 1999 drama starring Cameron Diaz as a ferocious pro football team owner and a sodden, raging Al Pacino as her coach. Diaz’ character is riddled with insecurity and greed; her mother is a sad, rich drunk; the wife of the quarterback is a razor-tongued shrew who couldn’t care less if her injured husband dies on the field as long as he maintains her lifestyle.

Oh, yeah, and football scenes, a terrific soundtrack, all of it with the intensity of any Oliver Stone film.

I also loved “North Dallas 40″, a 1979 film starring Nick Nolte; what hit me hardest in both were the graphic scenes of venal team physicians juicing, taping and injecting their battered bodies to keep them playing.

Porn For 50-something Women, Nancy Meyers' Film 'It's Complicated'

Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife

If you take the broadest view of porn, as that which stimulates desire, have I got a movie for you.

I know, films are meant to be fantasies, but this one — so deliciously lubricious in its parade of the pleasures older white women arguably crave — takes the cake. It even merited a New York Times Magazine cover story, written with a distinct wistfulness by its mid-life author, Daphne Merkin.

In it, the central character, Jane, played by Meryl Streep, lives in a house that’s about 3,000+ square feet, with a red-tiled roof, exquisite landscaping, a huge, immaculate jardin potager and a kitchen bigger than my living room. But (no recession here!), she wants an even bigger kitchen, the kitchen of her dreams. Oy.

She’s been divorced for a decade from her lawyer husband, Jake, who left her for a hard-bodied young’un (that part I believe) with whom he is now unhappy, (not quite clear why), who suddenly, ardently and insistently begins declaring he never lost his love for Jane (distinctly not clear why.)

It’s the ultimate revenge fantasy that the rejecting hubby comes crawling back. Gloss this with eyeball-rolling sex with him (good for her) and her memory of how to make his favorite meal (good for him) and the scene where they smoke a joint together; I guess this passes for deeply transgressive mid-life behavior somewhere since it won the movie an R rating.

Jane hires Adam, an architect, to design and create an addition (?!) to her gazillion-dollar home — the money coming from…?

Jane runs a bakery.

I wonder how many women: 1) snag and hang onto such a great house post-divorce, especially after their lawyer husband bails; 2) start and run a business so effectively they can afford such pricey real estate, let alone an addition; this film is set in Santa Barbara, home to such mega-celebs as Oprah herself; 3) raise three apparently solid kids, now 20, 22 and 27 alone yet 4) who still pronounce themselves shattered, a decade later, by their parents’ divorce.

It’s a pretty gauzy, Vaseline-on-the-lens vision of late middle age. Jane’s wardrobe is nothing but silk, linen and cashmere, the sort that’s always hard to find outside of pricey boutiques and fab gold jewelry; I admit it, I really want the necklace she wears in almost every scene and those yummy Pomellato amethyst earrings. No Target for her!

Now she’s fending off two guys at once, one of whom — sorry, I spluttered at this one — says “Your age is one of the things I find attractive about you.” If she’s so tough a businesswoman it wrecked her marriage, as Jake tells us it did, surely she might ask, “Really, why?” Instead, she melts with relief and gratitude that a guy with white hair and a fancy job is paying attention to her.

The sadder reality is that so many divorced women Jane’s age don’t run their own thriving business but instead are are scrapping out there in a crappy job market, also fighting age discrimination, can’t find a guy who isn’t looking at women 20 years their junior and usually plunge post-divorce into a much-reduced lifestyle (lawyer husbands tend to fight hard and well in this respect.) Many kids do actually find their feet young and quickly, as they must, when Dad splits for the much-younger woman, not pouting about it even after graduating college.

The movie has many terrific laugh-out-loud moments, but its central premise is as sweet and thin on sustenance as one of Jane’s chocolate croissants. She frets about never having sex, as though taking care of things herself wasn’t an option. And hasn’t she heard of match.com or EHarmony?

Her girlfriends in the film, all in their 50s, it appears, would have come of age in the 1970s at the height of feminism. They’ve somehow gotten all the material goodies.

But empowerment?  Not so much.

Having Just Watched My Favorite Movie For The Umpteenth Time, I'm Still Discovering It

Image via Wikipedia

I know, you’re going to laugh, but I’m OK with it. Nothing could separate me from a movie whose dialogue, costumes, characters, music and scenes I know by heart after seeing it so many times — Dr. Zhivago. And when did you last see a film that has, labeled, an overture, an intermission and exit music? I can think of few films that, 44 years after their release, still thrill me with such pleasure: David Lean’s direction, Maurice Jarre’s unforgettable music, Freddie Young’s cinematography, Ron Bolt’s screenplay (the latter three won Oscars for their work on the film.)

Many of its actors went on to greater stardom, from Omar Sharif, (whose own son, Tarek, played him as a small child in the opening scenes), Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie to Klaus Kinski, even then a wild-eyed scary blond I’d later admire in the films of Werner Herzog (I can watch Aguirre, Wrath of God about as often as Dr. Zhivago.) While others, of course, were considered for almost every role, I can’t imagine anyone else in them.

What amazes me is that, having watched Dr. Zhivago again last night, I saw a host of images I’d never seen before. Almost every single scene — I might go back and storyboard it for fun — has a window or a mirror, usually fogged or crusted with snowflakes. The film is a parade of loss and gain, troops and trains and trams and horses and carriages constantly thundering in and racing off again in a tableau of intimacy quickly torn to shreds by external circumstance. Its palette is powerful in its restraint; the only colors throughout are gray, black, white, cream, brown, lavender, punctured with bursts of bright red: blood on snow, fluttering flags atop a speeding train, a Communist star on a hat. Yellow is allowed only twice in more than two hours, in daffodils and sunflowers — transient beauty.

I never noticed before how Tonya’s initial costuming, in the scenes when she is still rich and innocent, is so fluffy she looks like a newborn chick, something that can only survive with constant attention and protection. Lara, poor and compromised, is often draped in lace. Why, carrying his mother’s balalaika throughout his entire life, does Zhivago never learn to play it?

I’ll just have to watch it again.

Do you have a movie you’ve loved as deeply over decades?

What Does a Miracle Sound Like? She Knows

Image via Wikipedia

When Toronto sound designer Jane Tattersall, considered Canada’s best, needed to illustrate a scene of a tree in bloom, considered a magical event in one film, she had to think of a way to make the sound of a miracle.

“I used a beautiful ring-off of a bell, not the strike but the end of it, and a gentle whoosh of air. It was both natural and unnatural. That is, not synthetic, but still not realistic. An organic miracle.”

Jane works on a wide range of films and television projects. If you’ve watched the popular series “The Tudors”, you’ve heard the many different sound of horses’ hooves she recorded herself north of Toronto. A quiet, calm, thoughtful woman, she travels the world with her microphone, capturing everything from the sound of nightingales to the noise of a car’s handbrake. She’s a gentle obsessive — with an entire wall and case of trophies and awards for her and her company’s work.

Please check out my story about her in the Leisure & Arts page of today’s Wall Street Journal.