On The Positive Friday

Loves Me Some Kaskade ...
"Steppin' Out"

On The Positive Friday

Get schooled by One Soulful Negro. It's like Music Appreciation 101 through 400 level served up on a blog.

The World War II documentary "The Messenger" has been pulled from the Philadelphia Film Festival because so much of it was, well, made up according to USA Today.

I had a feeling this would happen to some film eventually. "Anybody" can make a documentary now, but not everybody should. Relatively affordable digital video equipment and software are the building blocks. Theatrical and critical success of docus like "Fahrenheit 911" and "Supersize Me" made making a documentary sexy. It even looked like you could make money. That's unchartered territory for most documentarians.

The small shame is the filmmaker is squirming around and trying to employ that awful new concept of "truthiness."

And the real shame is the well-meaning producer sank $100,000 into the 16 minute long project. A lot of legitimate filmmakers could turn out two pretty nice 28 minute PBS length projects for that amount of money.

One of my veteran documentarian friends wrily observed that it's easier to get money for a reception than a film. The reception food is a little harder to swallow today, thinking about the good money wasted on this episode of phony documentary making.

Photo of the SONY DCRVX 2100 from one of my favorite tech sources: JR.com

Quote of the Week ... or Month

"It's really, really hard when you are a creative person in America. Whether you're a fashion designer or a painter or a writer, it's really hard to get paid what you're worth. We have a strange structure in this country, or maybe it's just western culture in general, but art is considered somehow like play, and it's not."

-Andrae Gonzalo
The Torrid Interview

I See Dead People Moving Product

Choosing the right dead celebrity can help you launch a product.

As numerous outlets including The Los Angeles Times report, the image of Chris Farley on a number of billboards around Los Angeles will promote an upstart company's commercial drug treatment clinics. They do have Farley's family's permission and the family's foundation was compensated $25,000. Um, that's not much money.

In the story, Terren S. Peizer, Hythiam's CEO and major stockholder says talks are underway with estates of "several" other dead celebrities.

But you tell me, what bothers you more? A celebrity brought back from the dead to move product? Or is it the loop-de-loop of the commercial clinics, the ad agencies, the drug companies supplying the clinics and the investors? A lot of people are going to make a lot of money while "fighting drugs."

The company that owns the clinics saw it's stock jump 20% on the NASDAQ last week based on results on test patients. Looks like everybody is set up to make out well on this one, except poor Chris Farley, who just wanted to be John Belushi.

PS And from Washington Post's Celebritology the finish I wish I had written:

"Any person -- megastar or not -- who self-medicates enough to end life deserves to be remembered, missed and retired."