Today's TV News

The big news story of the morning was that the Supreme Court struck down DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act.  This is a victory for marriage equality.  There was one network TV news segment on CNN that made me say, "Wow.  I never thought I'd see that."

As I have blogged before, I eventually quit a local morning TV news show job I had back in the 1990s.  I was a regular on the hit show but my boss seemed to have some diversity issues.  I'd taped an interview of Tony Award winning playwright/actor Harvey Fierstein.  Harvey wrote the current Tony-winning Broadway hit musical, Kinky Boots.

Back when I taped that interview, Harvey was promoting his sweet and funny role in Mrs. Doubtfire.  You've seen that comedy.  It's a family movie.  Harvey played the brother to Robin Williams' divorced dad character.  The gay brother and his partner helped the straight dad become Mrs. Doubtfire.  Audiences loved Harvey in his scenes.

If I say so myself (and a 20th Century Fox publicity exec would agree as he was in the room during our taping), it was a delightful interview.  Harvey and I chatted about the film and how being an "out" gay actor occasionally limited the amount of work he was being offered.

My news VP boss would not let me air the interview because, he said, "I have a problem with him being openly gay."  That was in a New York City newsroom.

Today, Don Lemon, who is an openly gay news anchor on CNN, did a live segment from inside a historical gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village.  The Stonewall Inn.  And the patrons inside did not try to hide their faces when the camera was on them.  The journalist was there to get reaction to today's Supreme Court decision.

Back in 1993 when I was fighting to get my Mrs. Doubtfire celebrity interview on the air,  I never would've guessed I'd see that kind of progress on a live TV newscast.  Wow.

Good work, Don.

Diesel Fueled by Sidney Lumet

Master movie director Sidney Lumet was born on this day in history.  From 12 Angry Men to troubled news anchor Howard Beale taking over the live TV airwaves and proclaiming "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!" in Network, Lumet gave us some true classics.

 Those two excellent movies plus The Pawnbroker, The Hill, Fail-Safe, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Murder on the Orient Express and The Verdict.  There were Lumet films that weren't nearly so excellent -- like the comedy Garbo Talks and his movie adaptation of the Broadway musical, The Wiz, starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as Scarecrow.  Jackson died on this day in history four years ago.  There were fine Lumet films that deserve more attention today than get -- like Long Day's Journey Into Night with a terrific performance by Katharine Hepburn as the drug addicted mother, Prince of the City with Treat Williams as a conflicted New York cop and the legal drama based on a true life story, Find Me Guilty.

To date, the  best movie performance that Van Diesel has given was as the lead character in Lumet's Find Me Guilty (2006).  It proved that Diesel is not a graduate of the Barbell Acting Academy.  With good material and skilled direction, he delivered the acting goods as the mobster who defended himself in court for what became the longest Mafia trial in U.S. history.  Vin Diesel played the low-level hood, Jackie DiNorscio.

The courtroom proceedings take on a bit of a live theater quality with a circus theme.  This infuriates the judge.  Is Find Me Guilty as good a legal drama movie as The Verdict?  No.  And it feels about 20 minutes too long.  But it's entertaining and I was fascinated to see the mature acting work Diesel delivered under Lumet's direction (seen in pic below with the actor).  Diesel does this while wearing hair, no less.  Find Me Guilty proved he's not just a flex-the-pecs action star.  He gave a smart, effective performance.

The film also has an actor now popular on HBO -- Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage.

This movie is worth another look to remind us that Van Diesel is not all Fast and Furious and gettin' butch with bitchin' hot wheels.  The actor can handle more challenging work.

About Network -- the classic satire of TV that won the Oscars for Best Actor (Peter Finch), Best Actress (Faye Dunaway), Best Supporting Actress (Beatrice Straight) and Best Original Screeplay (Paddy Chayefsky) -- if you have not seen Sidney Lumet's 1976 film in a while, see it.  Network holds up.  It is still scathingly brilliant, biting and powerful.  As I have said to friends, when Paddy Chayefsky gave us that script, he was not just a screenwriter.  He was also a modern-day prophet.

When that movie came out, there was still a definite line between news and entertainment.  I paid to see Network more than once.  I was truly amazed by it.  As were my friends.  I lived in Milwaukee at the time and was a couple of years away from starting my professional TV career.  I vividly recall how audiences howled with laughter at the notion of the network newscast having a studio audience and a psychic as a regular contributor (Sybil the Soothsayer).  They laughed at Diana (Dunaway's network executive character) pitching new ideas...like a weekly show that followed a SWAT team and another one that followed a group of political terrorists.

Years later, TV got a reality show called Cops.  Look at our other reality shows -- Survivor, two hours of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette, Real Housewives, Honey Boo Boo.  We can call in and vote on what reporters should wear to cover the Academy Awards.  Reporters.  The line between news and entertainment has been erased.

TV today has become Diana Christensen in Network.  She won.

Twenty years after Network came out, I worked on a live news program in New York City that had viewer call-in segments with a pet psychic.  People called in to ask about their dead and living pets.

And we the viewers?  Well, with the Paula Deen racial slur controversy, today's Supreme Court decision regarding the Voting Rights Act, unemployment still widespread and many of us unable to afford healthcare...millions can still connect passionately to the rage of Howard Beale:  "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"

Carrie Fisher and the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Jennifer Lopez got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last Thursday.  Jane Fonda, her Monster in Law comedy movie co-star, was present at the festivities to praise JLo's talents.  Today, producer Jerry Bruckheimer gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  He produced Disney's upcoming movie version of The Lone Ranger.  It opens soon. Starring Johnny Depp...as Tonto.  Next year, actors Orlando Bloom and Matthew McConaughey get stars on the celebrated stretch of Hollywood Blvd.

Why doesn't Carrie Fisher have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame yet?  If she does not, here's why she should and perhaps be put in line ahead of Orlando. She's got more than one impressive talent.  She starred in three of the biggest blockbuster hits to come out of Hollywood  -- movies that were a cultural phenomenon.  Even renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell talked about the power of Star Wars.

She was Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy!  Even her initial hairdo became part of pop culture history all over the world.  Then came the golden bikini.

OK, Hollywood, let's talk about this:  The first Star Wars adventure was one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture of 1977.  Its cultural and financial impact was the stuff of Hollywood legend.   Carrie Fisher was the female lead in that movie, released in 1977...the same year Orlando Bloom was born.  He'd not yet reached puberty when we saw her again as Princess Leia in the further Star Wars adventures, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983).

Remember how folks stood in long, long lines in Hollywood to see those movies more than once?

She's also a princess of Hollywood royalty.  Her parents were two of the biggest stars of the 1950s -- people who have their own stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame -- Singin' in the Rain, The Tender Trap and The Unsinkable Molly Brown musical comedy film actress Debbie Reynolds and hit pop music recording star Eddie Fisher.

Besides the three globally successful sci-fi action adventures, Carrie Fisher also co-starred in another Oscar nominee for Best Picture -- Woody Allen's 1986 classic Hannah and Her Sisters.  Carrie, on the right, acted and sang in this Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor and Actress.  Woody Allen won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Carrie co-starred in another big hit, the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally.  She was Marie, the friend to Meg Ryan's Sally.  Those are five heavyweight credits for an actor to put on one's resumé.

Well, she doesn't just act.  Besides writing hysterically funny memoirs, Carrie Fisher has written best-selling novels.  That's plural.  The first novel was Postcards from the Edge.

Her screenplay adaptation of her first novel is stunning.  The actress mother is a minor character in the book.  Only in a few pages.  Her screenplay expanded the show biz mother/daughter relationship brilliantly and provided Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine each with one of the juiciest roles of their film careers.  Carrie wrote Meryl to another Best Actress Oscar nomination in this 1990 Hollywood-on-Hollywood comedy directed by Mike Nichols.  The movie's celebrated mother/daughter staircase argument scene was not in the book.  Streep starred as Suzanne Vale, who survived a near-fatal accidental party drug overdose, and Shirley MacLaine as her loving but overprotective movie star mom.  MacLaine should've been nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

Inspired by her real-life relationship with her own former movie musical queen mom, Carrie Fisher wrote a script that should have landed her an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.  She gave us memorable characters and lines that people still quote.  I'm one of those people.  ("It twirled up!" and "Instant gratification takes too long.")  The scene with fresh out-of-rehab and insecure actress Suzanne Vale playing a cop and Annette Bening as an actress playing a hooker having "girl talk" during a break in shooting was brilliant.  Suzanne's horndog boyfriend had a fling with the slutty actress and it's really an interrogation scene with an "art imitates life" vibe.  Fabulous.

Carrie Fisher co-wrote the 2001 ABC TV comedy movie, These Old Broads.  It starred Carrie's mom, Debbie Reynolds (who got the movie musical starring role in The Unsinkable Molly Brown that Shirley MacLaine expected to to), Shirley MacLaine (who got the part in Postcards from the Edge that Debbie Reynolds wanted to do), Elizabeth Taylor ( Carrie's former stepmother who got Eddie Fisher when he was still married to Carrie's mom, Debbie Reynolds) and Joan Collins (who once got Shirley's brother, actor/director Warren Beatty.  He starred in the hit 1975 movie Shampoo, in which Carrie made her film acting debut. She did her scene with Warren.  This was two years before the birth of actor Orlando Bloom).

So, Hollywood...Carrie Fisher been an actress in Oscar-nominated movies and she's written the screenplay for an Oscar-nominated movie.  She's been doing this since the 1970s.  Where is her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?  I think she's due.  Let her hit the pavement -- in a good way.

On DEVIOUS MAIDS

When I first read about the upcoming Lifetime TV series, Devious Maids, I wasn't very excited.  I thought "Why do the Latinas have to be maids?  Why can't they be the powerful Hollywood wives like in the Jackie Collins novels or the top Hollywood agents on a show like Entourage?"  Then I saw the premiere episode of Devious Maids that airs tonight at 10:00 (check your listings).  It's a glossy delight, very entertaining, funny and deliciously subversive thanks to executive producer Eva Longoria and Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry.  It's good Sunday night fun.  I was pleasantly surprised.

Longoria takes a Latina stereotype you may be expecting, shakes it vigorously, turns it upside down and  gives you something fresh with a little vintage flavor.  You can feel the nod to telenovelas on Spanish TV and long-running shows like the Mexican favorite about a housekeeper's life called La Criada Bien Criada (The Well-Bred Maid).  There's also a touch of classic Hollywood directors like Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Frank Capra in the staging.  One young maid, Marisol, feels momentarily trapped by her lusty new male boss in Beverly Hills.  He's middle-aged and married.  In a voice laced with sexual intent, he asks "Are you ambitious, Marisol?"  The camera cuts to her.  Behind her on his walls are butterflies, pinned down and framed in boxes hung up as decoration.  That reminded me of the opening scene in All About Eve.  Devious Eve Harrington is being awarded a big Broadway honor.  But that conniving bitch is about to be shot down as we learn her real story.  Notice the prop guns on the wall behind her. A clever, telling Mankiewicz detail.

Devious Maids is nighttime soap that, like Desperate Housewives, is also satirical while lightly touching on social issues.  Susan Lucci broke me up laughing with her brief role as the woman whose aging issues in L.A. have her hiding underneath the furniture.

It was the kind of performance that could lead to Lucci being considered for sitcom work.

I got interested in watching the show when I read that Judy Reyes was in it.  I love me some Judy Reyes.  I loved her as Nurse Carla on Scrubs.  I loved her in this episode.

I'll use her as an example of how Devious Maids flips the stereotype.  Judy Reyes is like a modern-day Thelma Ritter.  She could steal a scene from a couple of big stars with just a deadpan look and a wisccrack.  Think of Thelma Ritter as the maid/longtime friend to Bette Davis as 40-year old Broadway legend Margo Channing in All About Eve.

Think of her serving up common sense and helping to solve a crime as the visiting nurse to James Stewart's injured photographer in Hitchcock's Rear Window.

Judy Reyes has that quality and that's the kind of maid she is in this show.  She's not a passive scrub-bot with a vague identity.  These women know what they're doing.  The scene where the maids get together outside on a lunchbreak?  LOVED it.

Being essentially a nighttime soap opera means there must be sex and desire.  That's because daytime soap operas are driven by sex and desire.  Such is the format here, whether that desire is for show business recognition or simply for sex.

Oh.  And the story opens with a murder and the body falling into a swimming pool.  Just like in Billy Wilder's Hollywood-on-Hollywood classic, Sunset Blvd.  Marc Cherry's Desperate Housewives also opened with a death.

Don't think these maids are devious in the sense that they're seeking sex with the men of the house and plotting to do away with their wives.  They're devious in ways to be treated equally and to get equal opportunities.  They're devious in ways to battle the class barriers and distinguish themselves.  In that sense, they reminded me of my mother.  Not that she's a Latina but, after my parents divorced, she was a working and single black woman in South Central L.A. with three kids to raise.  She was not getting alimony.  Mom is college-educated and worked as a registered nurse.  In order to makes ends meet when we were kids, she did domestic work briefly for a Hollywood wife.  My mother obscured her educational background so she could get the job.  She wanted to fit the image the upscale folks may have had of a domestic employee.  She was, in her way, auditioning to play the part.  Also, I have seen women like these maids when I was growing up and working part-time jobs in Los Angeles.  We all stood at the same RTD bus stops, waiting for mass transit to take us back home.  I felt a connection to the characters.

One of my favorite scenes in tonight's episode is the celebrity TV interview.  An actress is being interviewed at her enormous Hollywood Hills home by an entertainment reporter.  The Devious Maids writers nailed this kind of E! Television celeb profile business.  It also reminded me of daytime talk show segments I've seen where upscale white women are being interviewed.  We see them at home.  They have two cars, one well-employed husband and a home with a kitchen big enough for a Bob Fosse dance number.  In that kitchen is a refrigerator the size of the monolith in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The home is clean and tastefully decorated.  The kids are being tended to by a brown woman who is the nanny/assistant/maid.

And what is the privileged white woman talking about?  The stress of being a Mommy.  She either blogs and/or has written a book about the importance of taking Mommy "Me" Time.  That means meeting your girlfriends for Cobb Salads while the kids are at home -- with the brown nanny/assistant/maid.  The episode plays on that kind of thing. The interview scene was a devious highlight.

To repeat, this is a deliciously subversive show.  It has ethnic actors in lead roles and -- are you sitting down? --  good roles for actresses over 50.  ¡Viva, Diversity!  If you liked the early episodes of Desperate Housewives, I think you'll dig Devious Maids.

Thank you, Eva Longoria.

I wish her, Marc Cherry and the cast the best of luck.  I hope these Devious Maids sweep us some good numbers in the ratings.