Congress gives analog TV yet another reprieve

The never-ending saga for America’s transition to digital television just got a little more never-ending.

The U.S. Senate voted Monday for a four-month delay that would encourage but not require over-the-air TV stations to continue broadcasting both analog and digital signals until June 12. House Republicans blocked the measure Wednesday, but Democrats plan to bring it up again and have the votes to pass it. After June 12, all stations would finally turn off their analog signals.

President Barack Obama made the delay a top priority upon taking office, arguing that the original Feb. 17 deadline would leave millions of Americans unable to receive over-the-air TV broadcasts.

Despite a year of public service announcements and a government program to subsidize people buying analog-to-digital converter boxes for their old TV sets, it seems a lot of people still haven’t gotten the message. And some who did get it are out of luck.

The converter boxes range in price from $40 to $80, and the Commerce Department has run out of money for the coupon program intended to help people pay for them. The program’s funding limit is $1.34 billion, but the number of people on the waiting list for the $40 coupons has reached 2.6 million. Dangle “free” money around, and the world will beat a path to your door.

This, however, is just the latest screw-up in the long and convoluted transition to digital television. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have been bungling the process for 20 years. Concessions to broadcasters delayed DTV implementation, which resulted in there being little incentive, until recently, for consumers to buy DTV-ready TV sets or converter boxes.

Those concessions are on top of the fact that the government gave additional broadcast spectrum to the stations free of charge.

One rule of economics is that people care more about something when they have to pay for it. But according to one estimate, TV broadcasters received up to $100 billion worth of prime broadcast real estate for nothing. That certainly didn’t give TV stations an incentive to quickly implement DTV and offer high-quality digital programming that would entice viewers to buy digital televisions. Instead, most stations just sat on that spectrum for years.

Now that broadcasters are finally ready to go all-digital, this latest delay has some of them asking for even more concessions. PBS chief executive Paula Kerger said Monday that continuing to broadcast in analog until June 12 would cost PBS affiliates $22 million, and she wants the federal government — meaning taxpayers — to pick up the tab.

Like most things the government does, there was a better way.

Congress and the FCC could have abandoned the fiction that the broadcast spectrum is and must remain a public resource, which broadcasters merely use so long as they promote “the public interest,” which is whatever politicians say it is. Broadcast spectrum is valuable property. Congress could have auctioned it off, forcing broadcasters to pay market prices. That would have ensured the spectrum would have gone to broadcasters who were prepared to exploit it as soon as possible and to its fullest.

Then, Congress could have allowed broadcasters to auction off their old analog spectrum to recoup some of their costs. As it is, as soon as broadcasters shut off their analog signals, that spectrum will go to wireless services and local public safety agencies. But there is no reason why TV stations couldn’t have sold those frequencies to wireless companies or back to the government. That would have been a fair concession to broadcasters.

Of course, this mess means nothing to the vast majority of TV viewers. More than 80 percent get their TV via cable or satellite. This expensive, drawn-out process is about the 20 percent of viewers who still rely on rabbit ears. And that number would be smaller if Congress and the FCC hadn’t spent most of the past 40 years restricting pay-TV’s growth and stifling competition — yet another gift to over-the-air broadcasters.

Obama is not America’s first celebrity president

There already was a fine line between being a politician and being a celebrity, but President Barack Obama has just erased it.

If the millions of people who turned the National Mall into a giant mosh pit during Tuesday’s inaugural ceremonies weren’t evidence enough, you only have to look to the thousands more who filled stadiums last year to hear candidate Obama speak. It’s difficult to tell the difference between a politician and a rock star when you have people fainting in the audience.

You may chalk that up to “hope” or “change you can believe in,” but more likely it’s simply the culmination of the obvious: Presidential elections have, for a long time, been mostly high-stakes popularity contests. Instead of getting a recording contract, you get to be the most powerful man in the world.

William Henry Harrison won the election of 1840 with the help of a song, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” The song’s title doubled as his campaign slogan. Even back then, branding was everything, although it helped that the Democrats that year were too busy beating up each other to worry about Harrison and the Whig Party.

Franklin Pierce won the election of 1852 in a landslide, aided in part by a campaign biography written by his old pal and college roommate Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose novel “The Scarlet Letter” has tortured high school students for decades. Say what you will about Pierce’s presidency, his political propaganda had the best pedigree ever. The closest President Obama could come to topping that was writing two autobiographies of his own.

Even if he isn’t the first celebrity president, President Obama has played the part better than any of his predecessors — although I have heard that President James Buchanan could really tell a joke. He even has suggested CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta as the nation’s surgeon general. What’s next? “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh as FBI director?

One thing is certain. The new president is well on his way to being the most commercialized public figure since Elvis Presley. You can’t watch television without being bombarded by advertisements for Obama commemorative plates and laser-dyed Obama coins. That’s in addition to the ubiquitous T-shirts, posters and tote bags. Can velvet paintings of the commander in chief be far behind?

But it gets stranger. The New York Times found Obama hot sauce, Obama soap and even Obama toilet paper, which is just decorative because the ink on the paper is toxic. What would Surgeon General Gupta have to say about that? Nothing good, I bet.

Then it gets downright insane. If a T-shirt isn’t enough of a statement, you can always wear the Obama thong, although hopefully not in public. And then, the Times reported, there is the Obama sex toy, which, given recent federal court decisions, is illegal under Alabama law, unless used for a legitimate medical purpose, whatever that means.

The world hasn’t seen such a marketing blitz since George Lucas unleashed the first batch of “Star Wars” lunchboxes and bed sheets.

At this rate, how long will it be before presidential elections are determined by text messaging, just like “American Idol” winners are? Some people have already proposed allowing Americans to vote for president via the Internet, which isn’t much different.

Other countries have the same idea. According to The Hollywood Reporter, “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek will soon be back in his native Canada to host a reality show called “Canada’s Next Prime Minister.” Will the winner become a serious contender? Who knows? But the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. has already licensed the show’s format to the BBC, so Great Britain won’t be far behind.

When voters start following candidates from campaign stop to campaign stop — like fans following the Grateful Dead — we’ll know the age of celebrity presidents has truly arrived.

Poe gains respect in time for his 200th birthday

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe died too soon and under mysterious circumstances, a sad yet somehow fitting end for America’s master of the macabre.

He died Oct. 7, 1849, four days after being discovered delirious and “in great distress” on the streets of Baltimore. Poe never regained his senses, so he never said how he came to be wandering the streets alone. He was 40 years old, and his cause of death remains mostly speculation. Newspaper reports at the time attributed it, more or less, to alcoholism. Thus began the legend of Poe — the tortured, self-destructive, unfairly maligned and often misunderstood artist.

Poe himself, however, began 200 years ago Monday.

He was born Jan. 19, 1809, in Boston. His parents died when he was young, and John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Va., took him in. The couple never adopted him, but they did give him his middle name, and because of his time growing up in Virginia, Poe always thought of himself as a Southern gentleman. The Southern literary establishment reciprocated by claiming Poe as one of its own.

While some critics debate just how Southern Poe was, there seems little question that the bleak, gothic style of Poe’s poems and stories fits well with the Southern mindset after the Civil War. The crumbling castles and corrupt bloodlines of Poe are a non-regional counterpart to the wrecked plantations and ruined families of the South. Obvious comparisons between Poe and William

Faulkner are the stuff of which college and high school term papers are made.
But it was much later before the rest of America’s literary establishment — the critics and the college professors — would give Poe his due.

Poe did himself no favors. He disliked most of the powerful and influential literary figures of his day, except Nathaniel Hawthorne. He practically dared later critics to take sides against him.
Sure, the French have always loved Poe, but they also think Jerry Lewis is a comic genius. So, what do they know?

Stephen King counts Poe as an influence. So did H.P. Lovecraft, the early 20th century pulp writer who admired Poe above all other American writers.

King won a National Book Award in 2003, which dismayed self-appointed keepers of the American literary canon like Yale professor Harold Bloom. Meanwhile, the Library of America recently published a collection of Lovecraft’s stories, admitting Lovecraft into that canon that Bloom so loves to defend.

In the 1960s, director Roger Corman made a series of films loosely based on Poe’s stories and starring Vincent Price. Some critics now rank Corman and Price’s Poe adaptations — considered cheap, drive-in fare at the time — among the finest horror films ever produced.

Poe’s own reputation has undergone a similar rehabilitation, and perhaps it’s because his critics have finally caught up to him. They now have a healthy appreciation for a finely crafted weird tale filled with horror and despair.

But Poe has never needed the appreciation of the literary gatekeepers to capture his readers’ imaginations. And even some people who have never read his poems can quote the first lines of his most famous work, “The Raven.”

“Once upon a midnight dreary…”

So, on Monday, the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth, a 60-year-old ritual will continue. A person concealed beneath a heavy coat and hat will visit Poe’s grave in Baltimore and leave three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac. It’s a ritual begun by one of Poe’s admirers and carried on still, supposedly as a family tradition.

Few people have ever tried to discover the mysterious mourner’s identity. Knowing would spoil the mystery, and mystery has been part of Poe’s legend since the day he was laid to rest.

Critical favorites undergo changes for ’09

The new year means change, and television is no exception. Three critically acclaimed TV shows are either winding down, with an eye toward spin-offs, or undergoing radical makeovers.

First is “Scrubs,” which returned this week for its eighth and possibly final season. The hospital-based comedy had been a staple on NBC but is now on ABC. I guess NBC has used up its good karma for picking up the final season of “Taxi” in 1982 after ABC canceled it.

“Scrubs” has had a good run, and this slightly abbreviated season of 18 episodes should give it a satisfying conclusion. I know other critics love the American version of “The Office” more, but I’ll nominate “Scrubs” as the funniest half hour on television since Fox canceled “Arrested Development.”

Still, even after this year, “Scrubs” could continue.

The show’s star, Zack Braff, is definitely leaving. Creator and executive producer Bill Lawrence is probably moving on, too. But there is persistent talk in Hollywood of either a spin-off or continuing of the series with a new cast.

I think it’s best to let “Scrubs” end now. Eight seasons is a lot for a TV show — especially a good one, because the good die young.

Besides, the last time a medical show mixing comedy and drama spawned a spin-off, we got “After M*A*S*H.” And I don’t think anybody wants another “After M*A*S*H.”

Meanwhile, I’m awaiting the return of “Battlestar Galactica” on Jan. 16 on the Sci-Fi Channel.

The mid-season cliffhanger was the most shocking — and depressing — of the series’ run, which has always been full of dramatic and daring plot twists.

The show’s producers have promised more of the same for the series’ final 10 episodes, which will close out arguably the best science fiction series ever aired on American television. Who would have expected so much from “Galactica” given the show’s pedigree? The current version of “Galactica,” which won a Peabody Award in 2005, is in an entirely different universe than its cheesy 1970s counterpart.

To get viewers ready, Sci-Fi is posting 10 mini-episodes on its Web site, Scifi.com. Also, the first half of the current season, season 4, was released Tuesday on DVD.

What’s next after “Battlestar Galactica”? Sci-Fi has set a 2010 premier for “Caprica,” a prequel series set decades before the events of “Galactica.” Prequels are usually a bad idea (for example, the “Star Wars” prequels), but the early footage from “Caprica” looks promising.

The biggest news of the past week, however, came from Britain, where the BBC announced the 11th actor to take on the lead role of “Doctor Who,” the longest-running sci-fi franchise in television.

Twenty-six-year-old Matt Smith will become to the youngest actor to play the role of the 900-year-old Time Lord, replacing David Tennant, who has become one of the series’ most popular Doctors, probably second only to Tom Baker, who held the mantle from 1974 to 1981. In Britain, picking a new Doctor is more important than picking a new James Bond.

Smith has a short but impressive resume, but his hiring has raised about the same amount of controversy as Auburn University’s latest pick for head football coach. Fortunately, I have confidence in incoming “Doctor Who” producer Steven Moffat, writer of most of the best “Doctor Who” stories since the series’ return in 2005.

Like soccer, “Doctor Who” is something the entire English-speaking world obsesses over — except the United States. The show was a cult phenomenon here during its original run (1963-1989). But the revived series has gained a larger following after airing on Sci-Fi and BBC America. And if any sci-fi series can challenge “Galactica” for best ever, it’s not “Star Trek.” It’s “Doctor Who.”

Tennant will remain the Doctor for a few specials throughout 2009, but in 2010 the team of Smith and Moffat will take the long-lived program into its sixth decade.

This New Year’s, resolve to fight pessimism

It’s the start of a new year, a time when most of us are hopeful about what the future will bring.

Unfortunately, that hope tends to fade quickly, and not only in tough times. Even though America is the “land of opportunity,” most Americans — in fact, most people everywhere — are pessimistic about the long run.

That is the bad news. The good news is our pessimism is unfounded.

Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia, calls this “pessimistic bias.” It is one of four biases he cites in his 2007 book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter,” as leading to bad public policy.

Caplan shows that people are generally too pessimistic about long-term economic trends. In short, they believe things are bad when they’re actually good, and they believe things are worse when they’re merely bad. This is despite overwhelming evidence that, in the long run, economic conditions are improving overall.

Long-run improvement wasn’t always the case. Throughout most of history, living conditions barely improved at all.

In his recent book “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, chairman of the economics department at the University of California, Davis, writes that for most of the last 100,000 years, living conditions stayed the same — awful. Even with improvements in technology, the arts and science, people ate poorly and died young. Short-term improvements in living standards led to larger populations that then overwhelmed available resources, causing living standards to drop. Over the long run, life for the vast majority of people remained nasty, brutish and short.

But in 1800, all of that changed. The Industrial Revolution made long-run improvements in living standards possible, at least in countries that had an industrial revolution. In the 21st century, we’re reaping the benefits of more than 200 years of economic growth.

Still, the pessimistic bias remains, with many people and interest groups predicting the End of the World is just around the corner. Professional pessimists still cite books written in the early 1970s that predicted a worldwide economic collapse by the 1990s. Even the current recession isn’t that bad.

With the U.S. and most of the rest of the industrialized world in a recession, some measure of short-term pessimism is understandable. But as a whole, we’re almost always more pessimistic than we should be, whatever the economic conditions.

Yet, while the bias toward economic pessimism is important — especially if, as Caplan argues, it leads to voters voting irrationally — it’s not our only pessimistic bias.

Various studies have found that people overestimate their cancer risk, think divorce rates are increasing when the opposite is true and greatly overestimate the threat of terrorist attacks following 9/11. Pessimistic bias is everywhere.

French researchers have found that people are most pessimistic when they think they have no control over a situation. Thus, many have a pessimistic bias against airplane travel, even though flying is far safer than being behind the wheel of a car.

Caplan’s George Mason colleague Tyler Cowen devotes a chapter of his 1998 book, “In Praise of Commercial Culture,” to cultural pessimism, the belief that art, music and culture as a whole are always getting worse.

“The later we stand in history, the more likely that our favorite cultural products will lie in the relatively distant past,” he writes. “The passage of time implies that the entirety of the past contains an increasing amount of culture relative to any single point in time, such as the present. Cultural pessimism therefore appears increasingly persuasive over time.”

Persuasive? Yes. But not justified, as Cowen shows.

So, this New Year’s Day, resolve to hang on to that optimism you’re feeling. Even when everything around you seems to be falling apart, chances are at least some of that pessimism that taunts you is just in your head.

End of piracy lawsuits an early gift to music lovers

For many Americans, it was an early Christmas present.

Friday, the Recording Industry Association of America announced it is ending its five-year campaign of suing people who share music via the Internet.

The RIAA declared victory, but to anyone reading between the lines, the triumphant bluster seemed a lot more like an admission of defeat. Although the RIAA claimed its lawsuits were necessary to save the music industry, no data indicates the suits had any impact on people’s behavior.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the RIAA initiated legal proceedings against 35,000 people — ranging from college students to grandmothers — during its war on music piracy. That number, however, was a just small fraction of the 19 percent of Internet users estimated to have shared music via peer-to-peer networks. So, unsurprisingly, fear of being sued wasn’t much of a deterrent. You might as well worry about being struck by lightning. From 2003 to 2007, that 19 percent figure remained virtually constant, and the number of songs downloaded actually increased.

Most of the RIAA’s targets settled out of court, and, ultimately, the RIAA spent more on legal fees than it recovered from shaking down defendants.

Yet, the RIAA’s president, Cary Sherman, claims the suits were a success. In an interview with CNET.com, he points to the spectacular growth of authorized downloads from for-profit sites like iTunes. But all that proves is that a lot of consumers are willing to pay for digital music — if, of course, the big music companies are willing to offer it.

During most of the past decade, the music industry hurt itself by not selling music downloads. Instead, the RIAA sued Web sites like Napster to prevent people from sharing songs. Then, when peer-to-peer software made it possible for computer users to share music with each other directly, without needing centralized hubs like Napster, the RIAA went after individuals.

When that didn’t work, the music companies finally, grudgingly, started entering into agreements to sell music downloads online, first through iTunes and, later, through sites like Amazon.com and MySpace. But by then, many of that pesky 19 percent were already used to not paying for music. And the music industry had only itself to blame.

Still, selling music downloads has become big business, even as sales of compact discs continue to fall. Who wants a bunch of CDs littering the house when you can store thousands of songs on a computer or iPod?

According to NPD Group, paid music downloads rose 29 percent in the third quarter of 2008 compared to the same period in 2007, with iTunes and Amazon gaining 2.8 million music buyers, or about 15 percent of Internet users, CNET reported. Two major music labels, Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group, reported strong gains in digital sales, with Warner posting a 27 percent increase in the third quarter. Universal reported that its digital sales more than made up for the continued decline in CD sales.

Not coincidentally, as the music industry finally began offering legal downloads, the number of people illegally downloading music finally started to creep lower in 2008, falling to 14 percent, according to NPD.

Does that look like the result of the RIAA’s lawsuits, or the result of the RIAA’s members finally getting around to offering a legal alternative? Consumers aren’t greedy, and they want their favorite music artists to make money, even if that also means giving money to the music labels that wanted to sue them.

Nevertheless, the RIAA says it still plans to send warning letters to Internet service providers when it discovers computer users who are major copyright violators. The RIAA wants ISPs to limit or block Internet access for repeat offenders. But I have to wonder, is an ISP more likely to heed the RIAA or its own paying customers?

Somehow, I doubt the RIAA’s new strategy will be any more successful than its old one. And with legal downloads becoming easier to get, I also doubt it will matter much either way.

Childhood holds memories of the best Christmas gift ever

I suspect most people can recall one special Christmas — the Christmas when they received a present so cool, so amazing that it could only be the Best. Christmas. Present. Ever.

For Ralphie Parker, the hero of “A Christmas Story,” it was a Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot Range Model air rifle BB gun with a compass in the stock and a thing that tells time. I’m still not sure about the “thing.” A clock? A sundial?

For me, it was the Christmas of 1982, when I received my Atari 2600 game console. OK, yeah, what I’d really wanted was a state-of-the-art ColecoVision game system. But it was more expensive than the Atari, and money was tight. Besides, it wasn’t as if any of my friends had a ColecoVision, anyway. 

They all had 2600s, too. Except for the ones who had Mattel’s Intelevision system or Magnavox’s Odyssey2.

Actually, I don’t know anyone who owned an Odyssey2. But I do remember the floor model that mostly gathered dust at the local Otasco store.

Before the Christmas of the Atari, my best present ever had been a Mego brand Batmobile with Batman and Robin action figures. That must have been about 1975. Obviously, in just seven years, my requirements for a satisfactory Christmas present had gotten a lot more stringent.

Christmas ’77 would have been a great Christmas if the first batch of “Star Wars” toys had arrived on time. George Lucas was smart enough to keep all of the licensing rights to his movies, but not smart enough to get the toys into stories in time for the holidays. But maybe some children actually had fun playing with their Early Bird Gift Certificates, which were basically IOUs for action figures.

Some children this year will get MP3 players that have more processing power than my first game system did. It’s easy to forget, especially when the economy is in the dumps, but we’re a lot wealthier as a nation now than we were just 30 years ago.

In the early ’80s, William Shatner appeared in ads extolling the Commodore Vic-20 — “the wonder computer of the 1980s” — which cost “under $300.” The wristwatch I’m wearing now is smarter than a Vic-20, and for about $300 I can buy a decent desktop PC.

Each new Christmas brings rising expectations. I was once happy to get this thing called a “turntable” on which I placed a large, wax disk called a “record album.” When spun on the turntable, the album would play music, along with assorted hisses, pops and crackles.

Today, I’d insist that Santa Claus bring me an iPod that could hold thousands of songs. And, no, a Zune would not be a reasonable substitute.

But even with rising expectations, you reach a point when nostalgia trumps all else. I’ve received better, more advanced Christmas gifts since that Atari 2600, but none that can top it as my best gift ever. After a certain age, Christmas loses something, and not just because children stop believing in Santa. I suspect it’s when puberty hits, and suddenly you have more important things on your mind — like girls or boys or whatever — than what’s under the tree.

That’s when Christmas goes into a time capsule, waiting to be opened only when you have children of your own. And the memories in that capsule can’t be surpassed.

Lexus is running a TV advertisement in which a young child talks excitedly about how his new Big Wheel is the greatest Christmas present ever — at least until the ad shifts to the same child, now an adult, staring starry-eyed at a new Lexus in his driveway.

No one has ever given me a car for Christmas, so I’m not exactly certain how I would react. But, somehow, I think it wouldn’t top a Big Wheel. Or an Atari.

Uncle Forry inspired Hollywood with his love of sci-fi, horror

The world’s greatest fan has died.

But Forrest J  Ackerman was more than just a fan. With his boundless enthusiasm for horror and science fiction, he inspired a generation of Hollywood filmmakers.

Ackerman, 92, died Dec. 4 of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles. His death elicited tributes from the many who knew him and the many more who only knew of him.

How different might the world have been without the man everyone called Uncle Forry? 

“Many of the technicians, special effects masters and filmmakers that work in the realms that Forry loved … do so in no small part based on the childhood passion that Forry gave them,” wrote Harry Knowles at his Web site, Ain’t It Cool News.

Knowles is often guilty of overstatement — just read some of his movie reviews — but not this time. For many young, would-be storytellers, Uncle Forry was the center of the universe.

Imagine a world without “Star Wars” or “Jaws.” George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are two of the many directors, writers and producers who were captivated by Ackerman’s magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland. Imagine a world without “The Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451.” Ray Bradbury credits Ackerman with helping him get his start as a writer.

“Forry changed my life,” Bradbury said in 2000, when both he and Ackerman visited Florence. “He paid attention when no one else cared.”

As Bradbury later told The Associated Press, Ackerman paid Bradbury’s way to New York for an authors meeting that launched Bradbury’s career.

“I hadn’t published yet, and I met a lot of these people who encouraged me and helped me get my career started, and that was all because of Forry Ackerman,” Bradbury said.

It started in the 1920s, when Ackerman, then 9 years old, discovered Amazing Stories. That magazine, which inaugurated the Golden Age of science fiction, gave the young Ackerman his lifelong love of the genre. He would keep that first issue his entire life, and it would become the cornerstone of his private museum of SF and horror memorabilia.

But at that point, Forry was still just a fan. In his teens, he and several other teenage SF fans — including future DC Comics editors Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger — founded the first science fiction fanzine, The Time Traveller(two Ls). It was a start, but Forry’s big breakthrough came in February 1958. That was when Warren Publishing unveiled the first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, with Ackerman as its editor.

Aimed at adolescents and young teenagers, Famous Monsters featured stories about the greatest horror, fantasy and sci-fi filmmakers of the day. It capitalized on the newfound popularity of classic monster movies from the 1930s and ’40s, which were beginning to air on TV stations throughout America.

Note that I’m now using the term “sci-fi” instead of “science fiction” or “SF.” That’s because Uncle Forry coined it. Without Ackerman, the Sci-Fi Channel would have to call itself something else.

Famous Monsters let its readers in on the inner workings of sci-fi and horror movies. Some of those readers got the idea that they could make movies, too.

Ackerman left Famous Monsters in the late 1970s, and the magazine’s original incarnation ceased publication a few years later. But Ackerman still found ways to inspire the next generation of fans.

Every weekend, Ackerman opened his home to visitors, who traveled from just about everywhere to see the artifacts he had spent decades assembling. When I met Uncle Forry eight years ago, he had a few mementos with him: the cape Bela Lugosi wore in the stage production of “Dracula,” the ring Boris Karloff wore in “The Mummy” and face paint that had belonged to Lon Chaney Sr. And each item had a story.

Uncle Forry’s gift for storytelling is what set him apart. He seemed to know everything and everyone, and he counted people like Bradbury, Karloff and Vincent Price among his closest friends.

Sure, he edited a magazine and several books. And he had small roles in numerous films made by the people he helped lure into moviemaking. But he remained, first and foremost, a fan. And his infectious love of sci-fi helped change the world.

The Rickroll is dead; long live the Rickroll

I hereby declare the end of the Rickroll.

The Internet prank, which involves a seemingly cool Web link that goes instead to a video of ’80s pop star Rick Astley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up,” is passé now that the ultimate Rickroll has been pulled.

During NBC’s annual broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade last week, Astley got the last laugh. He appeared unexpectedly on the Cartoon Network float and lip-synced his most infamous hit single.

In an instant, Astley had Rickrolled more people than any online prankster could ever dream of. No one can top that, so it’s time to stop trying.

The Rickroll is over. Now we need a replacement.

Fortunately, the 1980s is a treasure trove of ghastly songs that soared to the top of the pop charts. I blame cocaine abuse.

“The Girl Is Mine.” Before they tangled over the rights to the Beatles catalog, Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney recorded two duets. The first, and worst, was 1982’s “The Girl Is Mine” from Jackson’s “Thriller.” As the first single off the most popular album of all time, “The Girl Is Mine” was everywhere. Now that the drugs have worn off, however, we can recognize what an unbearably hokey song it is.

“Ebony and Ivory.” Earlier that year, McCartney teamed up with Stevie Wonder for another duet, “Ebony and Ivory.” The song reached No. 1 on both the U.S. and British pop charts, proving that bad taste doesn’t respect geographic boundaries. As trite as it is awful, “Ebony and Ivory” uses the black and ivory keys of a piano as a metaphor for racial harmony. And in case you don’t get the message, McCartney and Wonder’s harmonizing is also a metaphor for racial harmony. Listening to the song today is like having a piano dropped on your head.

Let this be a lesson to everyone: If McCartney wants to record a duet with you, just say no.

“Ice Ice Baby.” This song was Vanilla Ice’s contribution to bad music, giving the world insightful lyrics like “Will it ever stop? Yo, I don't know/Turn off the lights, and I'll glow.” Vanilla Ice, aka Robert Matthew Van Winkle, almost won a Grammy for this atrocity. However, he lost to ...

“U Can’t Touch This.” Yes, there was a time when people thought MC Hammer was cool. He was so cool, in fact, that you couldn’t touch him — presumably because you’d get frostbite if you did. So, he penned the song “U Can’t Touch This.”

Most recently, the man otherwise known as Stanley Kirk Burrell was getting in touch with his spiritual side as the host of a show on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. But whether or not his soul is immortal, his song is — like a vampire sucking the life out of anyone it encounters.

“Who Can It Be Now?” I will admit a nostalgic fondness for Men at Work’s other hit, “Down Under,” a reggae-tinged anthem to the manly virtues and poor dietary habits of Australians. But “Who Can It Be Now?” hasn’t aged well. Neither has …

“Somebody’s Watching Me.” This is the only hit by Rockwell, son of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy. Both “Who Can It Be Now?” and “Somebody’s Watching Me” deal with paranoia and have lyrics such as “Is it the man come to take me away?/Why do they follow me?” and “When I’m in the shower/I’m afraid to wash my hair/’Cause I might open my eyes/And find someone standing there.”

Why were these songs so popular in the ’80s? Again, I fault cocaine, which is said to cause paranoid delusions. These were songs cokeheads could relate to.

But probably the best potential successor to “Never Gonna Give You Up” is …

“Girl You Know It’s True.” Milli Vanilli won a Grammy for Best New Artist after releasing this earnestly lame single in 1989. But the duo had to give back their award because someone else actually recorded the vocals. The truth, however, is this song is bad no matter who sings it.

The ’80s gave us so much terrible music that I could go on for hours. But it takes a truly heartfelt, unironic and irredeemably shallow song to replace “Never Gonna Give You Up.” It set the standard.

Auburn and Alabama fans are driven by tribal instinct

If you think we’ve come a long way from our primitive ancestors, look around at your neighbors this weekend, and you’ll likely see we haven’t evolved all that much.

In fact, you may only have to look in a mirror.

A significant proportion of Alabamians will be decked out in tribal colors — either orange and blue for Auburn University, or crimson and white for The University of Alabama. But the odd thing is that most people wearing those colors in anticipation of the annual Auburn/Alabama football game didn’t attend either university.

It doesn’t end there. Some members of each tribe turn entire rooms of their homes into shrines filled with football memorabilia. They dress the family dogs in team sweaters. They walk down the wedding aisle to the tune of their school’s fight song. They name their children after dead coaches.

Making fun of such excess is easy. Actually, I encourage it. But that extreme behavior is, in a way, only natural. In fact, it has roots in 200,000 years of human pre-history.

Our earliest human ancestors lived in the African savanna and survived by hunting and gathering. The rule of the day was eat or be eaten. In such an unforgiving environment, cooperation within a tribe was a necessity.

Every living being, humans included, is a complex machine with one biological purpose — to spread its genetic material. “Be fruitful and multiply” isn’t just a Biblical commandment. It is encoded in our DNA.

Members of hunter-gatherer societies best fulfilled their genetic imperative by cooperating with the people they saw every day, mostly close relations. That’s how tribal bonds formed, and it’s why, even today, people have an enormous capacity for social cooperation. Evolutionary biologists call it “reciprocal altruism,” but everyone else calls it “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” (In fact, our chimpanzee cousins practice this literally when they groom each other.) Our brains are wired for it because it’s a powerful survival mechanism, and thus favored by natural selection.

But there is a downside to our mental wiring. While it encourages cooperation within a tribe, it often leads to conflict with other tribes, especially if those other tribes are competing for the same resources. We are “us,” and they are “them.”

Down through the centuries, that tribal instinct had led to racism, ethnic hatred, religious conflict and, on a larger scale, wars between nations fighting to control land, resources and wealth.

Fortunately, human societies evolve far more quickly than human biology does. So, we’ve come up with ways to close the distance between us and them. The most successful is trade. Frederic Bastiat, a 19th century French economist, said, “When goods don’t cross borders, armies will.” Today, large-scale trade between nations is the norm, not the exception. The more trade there is between any two given countries, the less likely those countries will end up at war with one another. As a result, the number of wars going on at any particular time has dropped steadily since the end of the Cold War.

Within nations, individuals are also interconnected by trade. We all do business with each other, and most of our old tribal divisions have broken down or substantially weakened. But we still have that tribal instinct, which now expresses itself, usually, in more peaceful ways — like identifying with collegiate and professional sports teams. We have rituals, like tailgating, that we share with fellow tribesmen, and we compete with other tribes by participating in office betting pools.

We’re driven to join tribes, which is why people who never attended Auburn or Alabama still choose sides. And all tribes seek to grow, which is why natives often pressure newcomers from out of state to pick a team.

You can join a tribe even if you don’t care about sports. For better or worse, tribes form around everything from TV shows (Trekkies) to rock bands (Deadheads) to political candidates (Obamaniacs).

So, when you’re putting on your war paint for the big game Saturday, remember that you’re part of a tradition that dates to the Stone Age. And if your team loses, just tell yourself that football is still better than hunting zebras.

New ‘Star Trek’ prequel promises everything you don’t want to know

Growing up in the 1970s and watching reruns of “Star Trek,” I always wondered what Capt. Kirk was like when he was young.

Wait. No I didn’t. Actually, the thought never crossed my mind. But now that it has, I’m reasonably sure I don’t want to know what James T. Kirk was like before he became captain of the USS Enterprise.

But the idea of going back in time to explore the early years of beloved characters is just too tempting for Hollywood. So, on May 8, 2009, we’ll get to see Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest of the Enterprise crew as they were before they began their famous five-year mission.

The trailer for director J.J. Abrams’ new “Star Trek” debuted last weekend in front of “Quantum of Solace,” and it confirmed my worst suspicions. It’s no wonder some longtime “Star Trek” fans have already dubbed this latest installment in the franchise “Dawson’s Trek.” I, however, prefer to think of it as “Young Phasers.”

The preview opens with a vintage 20th century sports car speeding across a desert, and just before the car flies off a cliff, its young driver jumps out. That’s when a 23rd century police officer walks up and asks the boy his name. “My name is James Tiberius Kirk,” the mop-headed little punk says.
Yes, before he became the greatest captain in Starfleet history, Kirk was an annoying brat with authority issues. Does that remind you of any other famous sci-fi character you know?

The trailer then jumps forward, where we get to see a brooding, twentysomething Kirk (Chris Pine) riding a motorcycle and watching the Enterprise’s construction at a Starfleet shipyard. (My inner science geek insists that I now note how silly it is to build a ship like the Enterprise on Earth rather than in orbit.) Meanwhile, voiceover narration describes Kirk’s troubled youth and unfulfilled destiny, and I half expect Samuel L. Jackson to appear and tell me Kirk is the chosen one who will bring balance to the Force.

Sorry. I was thinking about that other sci-fi character again. You know — the one who used to be cool. The one who was the baddest bad guy ever to appear on a movie screen. Until, that is, we saw him as a whiny 8-year-old and then, later, as an even whinier young adult.

Darth Vader killed incompetent subordinates on a whim and struck fear into an entire galaxy. Anakin Skywalker, on the other hand, complained a lot and missed his mommy. Are we really supposed to buy that Anakin could eventually become Vader?

When you venture into an iconic character’s past you’re treading on sacred ground. We knew before the “Star Wars” prequels that Anakin had a tragic fall from grace, but seeing it only cheapened it. So, do we really want to take the risk of watching Kirk grow up? We know he was the only Starfleet cadet ever to beat the no-win scenario of the Kobayashi Maru test. (He cheated, and then received a commendation for original thinking.) Do we really want to see the gory details?

The fact that Pine looks like he just stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch advertisement doesn’t help. No one ever confused William Shatner with an underwear model.

Face it. No matter how cool you are as an adult, you still don’t want your parents showing your friends old photographs and home movies of you. Unfortunately, Abrams’ “Star Trek” reboot looks an awful lot like Kirk’s home movies. How is he supposed to score with alien women and the occasional android if everyone sees what he was like as a petulant youth?

Hannibal Lecter was a scarier villain before “Hannibal Rising” delved into his childhood and revealed the trauma that turned him into Hannibal the Cannibal. Darth Vader was more menacing before we learned he was an idiot whose only qualification for being a Jedi was a high midi-chlorian count. (They probably have antibiotics for that.) And, trust me, Capt. Kirk is cooler without our knowing about all of his youthful screw-ups.

Is ‘Star Trek’ actors’ feud real or a fraud?

Just when you thought it was safe to go to a “Star Trek” convention, Kirk and Sulu are fighting again.
Tales of how William Shatner is hated by most of his former “Star Trek” co-stars — with the exception of Leonard Nimoy — are legendary. But during the past few years, it seemed most of the old feuds subsided. That is, until the latest round of sparring broke out between Shatner and George Takei.

The latest flare-up began when Shatner complained on his Web site that Takei hadn’t invited him to his wedding. Takei then said he had invited Shatner. Takei issued the following statement: “It is unfortunate that Bill was unable to join us for our wedding as he indeed was invited to attend. It is our hope that at this point he joins us in voting NO on Proposition 8, which seeks to eliminate the fundamental right for same-sex couples to marry in California.”

The situation deteriorated from there. Shatner said something about Takei having a “psychosis,” and Takei responded by basically calling Shatner an egomaniac.

The back-and-forth continued. Takei sounded off on “Entertainment Tonight,” then Shatner retaliated with a video on YouTube.

It’s times like this that I’m reminded of a scene in “Fight Club”:

Narrator: If you could fight any celebrity, who would you fight?
Tyler Durden: Alive or dead?
Narrator: Doesn’t matter. Who’d be tough?
Tyler Durden: Hemingway. You?
Narrator: Shatner. I’d fight William Shatner.

Maybe Takei is like the unnamed narrator of “Fight Club.” He just really, really wants to fight William Shatner. At the rate it’s going, the Shatner/Takei feud will soon reach the epic heights of Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford.

Or will it?

I don’t have any evidence to back it up, but I have a suspicion that the war of words between Shatner and Takei is an elaborate put-on, just like the feuds in professional wrestling. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the greatest faux feud of them all: Andy Kaufman vs. Jerry “The King” Lawler.

In the early 1980s, Kaufman started wrestling women as part of his comedy act, proclaiming himself the “World Intergender Champion.” Lawler, a popular wrestler in Memphis, became incensed, believing that Kaufman was making a mockery of wrestling by beating up women. So, he challenged Kaufman to a match, which lasted all of a few seconds, as Lawler quickly dispatched Kaufman with a pile driver. When Kaufman got out of the hospital, he threatened to sue Lawler.

From there, the feud continued on television. Both Kaufman and Lawler appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman,” where Lawler slapped Kaufman and Kaufman, after a profanity-laced tirade, threatened to sue, well, just about everyone.

That led back to the ring, where Kaufman schemed with wrestling manager Jimmy Hart to trick Lawler. The plan worked, and instead of Lawler pile-driving Kaufman again, Lawler fell to his own signature move, delivered by other rival wrestlers.

But as Lawler now admits, the whole thing was, in wrestling jargon, a work, a scripted stunt engineered by the two of them. And it worked so well that some people still believe that maybe, just maybe it was real.

So, is that what Shatner and Takei are up to?

Think about it. The feud serves both Shatner’s and Takei’s interests. Takei can use it as a platform to speak out for gay marriage. Meanwhile, Shatner can use it to do what he does best, which is play up his exaggerated public persona, something he has been doing successfully since he portrayed himself in the 1998 comedy “Free Enterprise” and in the first batch of Priceline commercials. It’s a win-win.
But maybe I’m guilty of wishful thinking. Having to take sides in a battle of “Star Trek” icons is like a child having to pick sides in a divorce.

Probably the only way we’ll ever know for sure is if Shatner tries to pile-drive Takei or Takei hits Shatner with a steel chair.

Orson Welles remains a study in fact vs. fiction

Tim Burton’s 1994 film “Ed Wood” features a scene in which one of the greatest directors who ever lived meets one of the worst.

Frustrated with the progress of his latest project, “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” Edward D. Wood Jr. (Johnny Depp) storms into a Hollywood bar only to meet his hero, Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio). After complaining about his own struggles with financial backers, Welles gives Wood the confidence to return to the set and finish shooting “Plan 9,” making Welles, ironically, responsible for a movie frequently cited as the worst ever made, usually by people who have not seen “Doomsday Machine” (1972).

Of course, like many events depicted in “Ed Wood,” the meeting between Wood and Welles never happened. Oh, yes, Edward D. Wood Jr. was a real director who made some really bad movies, but one must never let truth stand in the way of art. And the meeting between Wood and Welles works beautifully because Wood and Welles had so much in common, except that Welles was a genius and Wood was, to put it charitably, not.

Several years ago, I met Forrest J. Ackerman, the original editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Ackerman was also once a literary agent, representing such renowned authors as Ray Bradbury. He also represented Wood. “I was his illiterary agent,” Ackerman quipped.

Wood struggled to get money to make his schlocky sci-fi and horror movies, and after “Plan 9,” he faded into a more obscure obscurity than he had occupied before, directing sleazy sex films and hitting his friends up for work until his death in 1978 at age 54.

Welles’ problem, however, wasn’t a lack of talent. He had loads of it. Director, screenwriter, producer, actor — Welles did it all. At age 23, he conquered radio. During an Oct. 30, 1938, broadcast of H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds,” he fooled (inadvertently) more than a million listeners into believing the Earth was really being invaded by Martians.

He then moved to Hollywood and seemed primed to conquer it, too. But “Citizen Kane,” the film that would eventually establish Welles as a great filmmaker, was a disappointment at the box office. Afterward, Hollywood studios were reluctant to give Welles the total creative control he enjoyed with “Kane.” RKO, which had released “Citizen Kane,” re-edited and re-shot portions of Welles’ next film, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” and Universal took over Welles’ 1958 thriller “Touch of Evil,” which was finally re-released in a form close to Welles’ vision 10 years ago.

Welles turned to financing his films independently. He spent years trying to complete his adaptation of “Don Quixote” without success, just one of many projects he left unfinished, usually because of a lack of money. Only one of those films, “The Other Side of the Wind,” seems likely to ever be released. Director Peter Bogdanovich has been working on editing Welles’ footage into a finished product.

As an actor, Welles often took jobs just to finance his movies. Most famously, he became a TV pitchman. He would “sell no wine before its time.” His legendary voice lent authority to everything from frozen peas to a dubious documentary about Nostradamus. He even had a part — his last, as it turned out — in the animated feature “Transformers: The Movie.” As he put it, “I play a big toy who attacks a bunch of smaller toys.”

But still, Welles carried on, directing films that include an inspired adaptation of Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” and his not-quite-a-documentary “F for Fake,” which was his last completed movie.
Long overlooked, “F for Fake” is one of Welles’ finest films. It’s a meditation on art and fakery, taking as its subjects art forger Elmyr de Hory and Clifford Irving, who wrote a hoax biography of Howard Hughes and a real biography of de Hory. But more than that, “F for Fake” is a magic trick. Welles was an amateur magician and knew all the tricks, especially the fine art of misdirection.

You never let truth stand in the way of art.

Palin, economy can’t scare people from Halloween

If on Halloween night you should find yourself surrounded by Sarah Palins, don’t be alarmed. It’s not an attack of the clones.

The Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate may or may not be a maverick, but she definitely is one of the hottest Halloween costumes this year. And you can take “hottest” in any sense you like.

Ricky’s Halloween Costume Superstore in New York City has come up with a “Miss Alaska” costume that is little more than a sash that says “Miss Alaska” on one side and “Miss Vice President” on the other. It does, however, include a facsimile pair of Palin’s stylish Kazuo Kawasaki eyeglasses. It’s up to the wearer to supply a star-spangled bikini like the one the model wears on the Ricky’s Web site. But what do you expect for only $22.99? It’s a costume priced for a sagging economy.

Somehow, I suspect most Palin impersonators this Halloween will stick with the standard-issue latex mask. At least I hope so, unless they happen to have a Miss Alaska figure.

As if Halloween night weren’t scary enough, the streets are sure to be crawling with people dressed as — shudder — politicians. And because this is a presidential election year, there will be plenty of Barack Obamas and John McCains to go along with such evergreens as Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.

The proprietors of online retailer Annie’s Costumes claim that since 1980, the presidential candidate to sell the most Halloween masks at Annie’s has gone on to win the election. So, in case you’re wondering, Obama has a slight lead.

That leaves Joe Biden. Is anyone dressing up as the Democratic VP nominee? Anyone? Hello?
Even with the economy slumping toward a seemingly inevitable recession, Americans seem eager to spend money on celebrating Halloween. Of course, maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise. The Golden Age of horror movies — Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula” and Boris Karloff’s “Frankenstein,” among many others —occurred during the Great Depression. Economic hardship and the macabre seem to go together.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans plan to celebrate Halloween this year, according to the National Retail Federation, which expects $5.8 billion in Halloween-related sales, up from $5.7 billion last year.

Popular non-political costumes include the Joker (as played by Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight”) and Iron Man. But unfortunately the Iron Man costume you can buy off the rack isn’t as cool as the one in the movie.

And if you want something really scary, the most popular movie-related costumes for groups, according to Fandango.com, are the women of “Sex and the City.” Who hasn’t run in terror from Sarah Jessica Parker’s hats?

Everyone from Wal-Mart to Papa John’s is trying to cash in on Halloween, reported The New York Times.

“Halloween is a huge day for Papa John’s,” a spokesman for the pizza chain told The Times, “and having it fall on a Friday is a double benefit because we know there will be a lot of big parties.”
Of course, if your costume is a Sarah Palin bikini, you should probably steer clear of pizza until after Halloween.

Cable television always skews heavily toward horror programming during October, but this year offers more than usual. The Sci-Fi Channel, for example, has replaced its traditional “13 Days of Halloween” with “31 Days of Halloween” and has seen its year-on-year ratings rise as a result, The Times reported.

“With the financial turmoil, people want to escape and think about something else,” said Sci-Fi President Dave Howe.

“Something else” apparently means pleasant things like zombies, ghosts and masked serial killers. Just keep the slashers away from my 401(k).

‘Cinematic Titanic’ invites you to go down with the ship

I love bad movies — the really bad ones that are so bad they’re good. But some are so mind-numbingly awful I can’t imagine watching them alone.

Thankfully, I don’t have to. I can board the “Cinematic Titanic” and go down with the ship, along with the creator and original cast members of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

What made “Mystery Science Theater 3000” so great was that no matter how terrible the movie, those three wisecracking shadows on the screen could make it not just bearable, but enjoyable. Along with Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot and Joel Robinson (later replaced by Mike Nelson), I not only survived “Manos: The Hands of Fate” and “Red Zone Cuba,” I lived to watch them again and again.

When MST3K ended after 11 seasons, it seemed like all hope was lost. I was again left to watch the worst of the worst alone.

Eventually, Michael J. Nelson, along with fellow MST3K alums Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy, would return with RiffTrax, a Web site that lets you download audio commentaries to play along with DVDs of recent movies. It’s an experiment in giving an old-style MST3K riffing to recent theatrical releases.

But Hollywood doesn’t make bad movies like it used to. “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace” isn’t just bad, it’s sad. Watching it is like counting every penny wasted to produce it. A truly bad movie needs more than stilted dialog and dumb characters. It needs wobbly sets dressed in dime-store Halloween cobwebs or last year’s Christmas tinsel. It needs condiments standing in for blood and entrails. In short, it needs character. Also, with RiffTrax you don’t get to see shadows talking back to the movie.

While RiffTrax is a noble effort, leave it to the rest of the MST3K cast and writing staff to get as close to the old MST3K format as possible. The result is “Cinematic Titanic.”

“Cinematic Titanic” features MST3K creator Joel Hodgson (Joel Robinson’s civilian identity), Trace Beaulieu (the original Crow T. Robot), Frank Conniff, Mary Jo Pehl and J. Elvis “Josh” Weinstein, who was the voice and puppeteer of Tom Servo when MST3K aired on Minnesota’s KTMA.

So far, the “Cinematic Titanic” crew has released four DVDs, and the response has been so positive that the plan is to release a new DVD just about every month, with each movie thoroughly eviscerated for your enjoyment. All “Cinematic Titanic” releases are available exclusively at www.cinematictitanic.com, which also offers digital downloads via EZTakes.com.

And what a worthy batch of cinematic abortions it has been so far:

“The Oozing Skull”: The timely tale of a dictator who loves his people so much he wants his brain transplanted into a young, healthy body. He can’t just die and let any old strongman oppress his people, you know. Unfortunately his HMO doesn’t cover brain transplants, so the dictator must call on a mad scientist.

“Doomsday Machine”: It’s the end of the world, and the only survivors aren’t exactly the strongest swimmers in the gene pool. For starters, they’re on a spaceship to Venus, which isn’t exactly the most hospitable planet for refugees. Mike Farrell (“M*A*S*H”) and Casey Kasem appear in bit roles. (They needed the money, I’m sure.)

“The Wasp Woman”: A non-classic from Roger Corman, the king of B movies. This movie is why we now test cosmetics out on rabbits. A Wasp Rabbit isn’t nearly as big a deal.

“Legacy of Blood”: A dysfunctional family must survive a week in a creepy mansion in order to claim an inheritance. One of them doesn’t want to share. Stop me if you’ve heard this plot before.
Each film is a big, fat target for the put-downs the CT crew hurls at it. And best of all, we get to see the gang’s silhouettes on screen. For MST3K fans, it’s just like old times. And for everyone else, there’s no better way to watch lousy horror and sci-fi movies.

Trust me, you don’t want to watch these movies alone.

Infamous clone of ‘The Exorcist’ is due new respect

“The Exorcist” inspired its fair share of low-budget imitators, and probably the most famous — or infamous, depending on your point of view — is 1974’s “Beyond the Door.”

Warner Bros., which released “The Exorcist,” sued the makers of “Beyond the Door” for copyright infringement but lost, clearing the way for other Italian “Exorcist” clones like “The Antichrist” (1974), which added sex and exploitation to the mix. Released on DVD in 2002, “The Antichrist” is now, sadly, out of print.

Meanwhile, “Beyond the Door” became a hit, grossing about $15 million in the U.S. That may not sound like a lot of money now, but it was a respectable sum in the early ’70s for an independently produced, Italian horror movie.

A staple at mom-and-pop video stores during the heyday of VHS rentals, “Beyond the Door” is only now available on DVD, along with two commentary tracks, interviews and trailers. Best of all, the newly remastered film looks better than it did when it originally played to theater audiences across America.

At last, we can assess this blatant — but non-infringing — attempt to cash in on the success of “The Exorcist” on its own merits.

First, to be fair to “Beyond the Door,” it’s more than just an “Exorcist” clone. It’s also a rip-off of Roman Polanski’s 1968 shocker “Rosemary’s Baby.” If Linda Blair were not only possessed by the devil but also expecting his little bundle of joy, it would look a lot like “Beyond the Door.”

Jessica and Robert Barrett are a happily married couple in San Francisco. Robert (Gabriele Lavia of Dario Argento’s “Deep Red”) is a music producer, while Jessica (Juliet Mills, most recently seen in the TV soap opera “Passions”) is a housewife. They already have two children: a pre-teen daughter who never goes anywhere without a copy of Erich Segal’s “Love Story” tucked under her arm and a young son with a pea soup fetish.

Children didn’t have juice boxes in the ’70s, so I guess it was normal back then for a boy to slurp pea soup through a straw — and to have a Warholesque poster of a soup can hanging above his bed.
No, wait, there’s nothing normal about that at all. But the conspicuous, not to mention absurd, emphasis on pea soup does blatantly conjure images of a key scene in “The Exorcist.”

The Barretts already are stuck with a daughter who swears like a sailor and a son who is just plain weird. So, the last thing they need is another child, especially one who is the spawn of Satan. But if the devil wants a baby, he’s not going to let a little thing like birth control get in the way. So, Jessica unexpectedly finds herself pregnant. And worse still, the fetus is growing at an unnatural rate. Satan, it seems, is in a hurry. Plus, the movie is only an hour and 40 minutes long.

To make matters worse, Jessica’s ex-boyfriend Dimitri (Richard Johnson of Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie”) is lurking in the shadows, occasionally emerging to intone, “The child must be born!” He is not exactly a disinterested party. Having let Jessica escape from his satanic cult years earlier, he’s now once again doing Satan’s bidding.

As the devil’s baby grows inside her, Jessica goes from wanting to abort it to threatening to kill anyone who tries to take it from her. She levitates above the bed, turns her head 360 degrees and occasionally speaks in a demonic voice. Pretty much, it’s all the same stuff we saw in “The Exorcist,” only with ridiculous dialog and those two annoying children.

But you can’t dismiss “Beyond the Door” that easily. Mills delivers a chilling and, at times, grotesque performance, and director Ovidio G. Assonitis is no slouch behind the camera. While he filmed the interior scenes in Italy, Assonitis shot most of the exteriors in San Francisco, and he makes good use of that gorgeous backdrop.

Even if Assonitis set out to do nothing more than hop on the “Exorcist” bandwagon, he did so ably. It’s no surprise “Beyond the Door” was such a success when it was first released. And now it’s a welcome addition to any horror aficionado’s DVD collection.

Horror master Dario Argento concludes 30-year-old trilogy

Just in time for Halloween, the final installment of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy has hit DVD. So, the question is: Was it worth the 30-year wait?

“Mother of Tears” completes a cycle that began with Argento’s 1977 masterpiece “Suspiria” — a film that routinely makes most “scariest horror movie” lists — and continued in 1980 with “Inferno.” Inspired by “Suspiria de Profundis,” a 19th century “prose poem” by English essayist Thomas de Quincey, the trilogy tells of three witches known as the Three Mothers.

Hundreds of years old and leaving only misery and death in their wake, the three are the Mother of Sighs, based in Freiburg, Germany, and the oldest of the Mothers; the Mother of Darkness, based in New York City; and Mater Lachrimarum — the Mother of Tears — who lives in Rome, Italy.

“Suspiria” and “Inferno” dealt with the Mother of Sighs and the Mother of Darkness, respectively. Now, it’s the Mother of Tears’ turn to unleash chaos on unsuspecting mortals.

And that’s just what she does, when she reawakens after an urn containing her relics is unearthed in a church graveyard and opened by two unsuspecting museum curators.

As he did in “Suspiria,” Argento opens with a grizzly murder that makes everything that follows seem almost tame. Without cataloging the — ahem! — gory details, it’s a new height of carnage even for Argento, who has never exactly been shy when it comes to gore and bloodletting.

One curator’s death scene is so brutal, it would probably be more at home in a Lucio Fulci film. If Argento is Italy’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock, Fulci was Italy’s George Romero, except his films are even gorier than Romero’s.

The other curator, Sarah, played by Dario’s daughter, Asia Argento (“Land of the Dead,” “The Last Mistress”), escapes the slaughter only through the supernatural intervention of her dead mother, played by Asia’s real-life mother, Daria Nicolodi (“Deep Red,” “Tenebre”).

As Mater Lachrimarum’s influence spreads, Rome descends into chaos. People randomly commit acts of murder and destruction, while witches from around the world converge to celebrate the Third Mother’s rebirth.

Meanwhile, on the run from the witches and their minions, Sarah learns her mother was a white witch who died, not in an accident, but during a failed attempt to kill the Mother of Sighs. (She did, however, weaken the First Mother, leading up to the events in “Suspiria.”) Now, having inherited her mother’s supernatural abilities, only Sarah can stop the Mother of Tears before she can plunge the world into a new Dark Age.

While not perfect, “The Mother of Tears” is a satisfying conclusion to Dario’s saga. His films have always been more about visual flair than plot coherence, and this one is no exception. (If you’re looking for a flawless Argento story, you’ll have to go back to the one he co-wrote for Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.”) The script relies heavily on coincidence, starting with the urn just happening to be opened by someone already connected to the Three Mothers.

Some of the casting is also suspect. Unless ghosts continue to age, which would make the afterlife suck even more, Nicolodi is 30 years too old for her role. As for the Mother of Tears herself, Israeli model-turned-actress Moran Atias spends most of the movie naked, which makes up somewhat for her deficiencies as an actress.

But nobody watches Argento’s films for their plots, and “Mother of Tears” has everything you could want from the master director, from gorgeous cinematography to meticulously staged death scenes. Of course, the film also gives Argento’s critics plenty of new ammunition — especially critics who believe Dario really, really hates women.

Even if it isn’t a masterpiece like “Suspiria” or “Deep Red” (1975), “Mother of Tears” is still probably Argento’s best film since 1982’s “Tenebre.” And that makes it well worth a rental on a cool October night.

The Lone Ranger gets a new faithful ‘Indian’ sidekick

Johnny Depp is a busy man.

Last week, Depp announced he has signed deals to reprise the role of Capt. Jack Sparrow in a fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie and play the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s new version of “Alice in Wonderland.”

Unlike the latter tale’s Queen of Hearts, I have a difficult time believing six impossible things before breakfast. Actually, I have a hard time believing six impossible things before lunch. So, when I read about a third role Depp is undertaking, I didn’t believe it. Not at first, anyway. I checked with at least a half dozen sources before it finally sank in.

Depp has also agreed to portray Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s “faithful Indian sidekick,” in a new version of “The Lone Ranger” to be produced by “Pirates” producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Just repeat it to yourself: “Johnny Depp is Tonto.”

All three films are Disney projects, and the executives at Disney no doubt hope their take on the Lone Ranger is more successful than the last one, 1981’s “Legend of the Lone Ranger,” which starred two nobodies as the Lone Ranger and Tonto and was a colossal box-office flop. At least Michael Horse, who played Tonto, went on to better things, like a supporting role on “Twin Peaks.”

This is a big risk for Depp. The question is, will Native American activists be more upset that a white actor is playing a Native American character, or will they be more upset that Tonto is in the movie in the first place? I understand that in some circles, Tonto is viewed as a negative stereotype.

This could be the worst case of Native American miscasting since Burt Reynolds starred in “Navajo Joe” or William Shatner starred in “White Comanche.” Take your pick.

Actually, Depp has played a Native American before, in 1997’s “The Brave,” which he also directed.
Fun fact: Iron Eyes Cody, who portrayed “the crying Indian” in a famous 1970s public service announcement, was actually Italian. Jay Silverheels, however, who played Tonto on television in the 1950s, was actually a Native American — and also a Canadian.

While nothing is official yet, George Clooney is reportedly in negotiations to wear the mask, white hat and powder-blue cowboy outfit. Hopefully, this turns out better than the last time Clooney played a masked crime fighter. Otherwise we can look forward to Christian Bale resurrecting the Lone Ranger franchise 10 years from now in a film titled “The Lone Ranger Begins,” to be followed by either “The Lone Knight” or “The Dark Ranger.”

So, let me get this straight: The actor who killed the 1990s Batman franchise might star in a new franchise based on a character who flopped in his most recent movie outing. And the casting of another actor could lead to angry protests. Who greenlights these projects?

Still, I’ll admit I’m interested in seeing exactly how Depp plays Tonto, if for no other reason than it’s certain to be weird. Keith Richards inspired Depp’s portrayal of Capt. Jack, while Depp based his performance of Ichabod Crane in “Sleepy Hollow” on Angela Lansbury. Who will Depp channel for his portrayal of Tonto? Whoever it ends up being, I expect Depp to blow Clooney off the screen. And Depp has, on occasion, made even bad movies watchable — like “Once Upon a Time in Mexico.”

The Lone Ranger was created for radio by Fran Striker, who also created the Green Hornet. In fact, the Green Hornet is the Lone Ranger’s grand-nephew, which I guess makes it appropriate that the upcoming “Green Hornet” movie also involves an odd casting decision.

Stephen Chow is set to direct as well as co-star as the Green Hornet’s partner, Kato, taking on the role that the legendary Bruce Lee filled in the 1960s TV series. If anyone can stand in for Lee, it’s Chow. He’s not the issue.

What I want to know is, who thinks of Seth “Knocked Up” Rogen when casting the Green Hornet?
Of course, this means that in a weird, only-in-Hollywood way, Seth Rogen is related to George Clooney. And that may be stranger than anything Depp can come up with.

Emmy honors go to programs that have found a niche

So, did you watch the Emmy Awards on Sunday night? Me neither.

This year’s awards telecast was the lowest-rated Emmy ceremony in history, and not just because of its five lackluster hosts: Ryan Seacrest, Heidi Klum, Tom Bergeron, Howie Mandel and Jeff Probst. You’d probably find more talent in a police lineup.

In Hollywood, the Emmy Awards show’s low ratings didn’t come as a surprise.

“Industry insiders expected the awards to sink to a grim new watermark given that AMC’s low-rated ‘Mad Men’ was the most-nominated drama and NBC’s modestly rated ‘30 Rock’ was the most-honored comedy,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Some of the other shows — such as FX’s ‘Damages’ and HBO’s ‘John Adams’ — likewise drew niche audiences.”

But as they say in computing, this is a feature, not a bug.

If programs aimed at niche audiences are finally attaining the level of quality necessary to rack up Emmy nominations, then we’re finally seeing the promise of having upwards of 100 cable channels from which to choose. This is how it’s supposed to work.

Say the words “golden age,” and most people instinctively think of some period in the past. That’s because they remember the good parts and forget the bad. But as I’ve written before, the Golden Age of Television is now.

If you like comedy, there are at least two cable channels devoted just to comedy. If you like cartoons, there are at least three cartoon channels. How about sports? There are five flavors of ESPN alone, never mind the other sports channels. If classic movies are your thing, you have two channels from which to choose. If you like gritty dramas about morally ambiguous characters who swear a lot, FX is the place for you. And if you like sci-fi, there is a channel called Sci-Fi that has, on occasion, been known to show sci-fi programming.

There’s a Travel Channel, a Golf Channel, a History Channel and a Food Network.

And if you’re still nostalgic for the television of your childhood, there are at least two channels for that. Sometimes I, too, am a sucker for 40-year-old repeats of “Mission: Impossible” and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”

Anyway, my point is that in this sea of channels, each one aimed at some niche audience, it’s inevitable that we’ll get a decent number of daring, well-made, risk-taking shows.

AMC is a channel that has struggled to find its place. It began as American Movie Classics and aired classic movies without commercial interruption. But it was pushed out of that market by two other channels with stronger movie libraries — The Fox Movie Channel and Turner Classic Movies.

It took several years, but AMC seems to have found its niche with a format of recent movies and original dramas. Two of those dramas won big at this year’s Emmy Awards. “Mad Men,” a period piece set at an ad agency in the 1960s, won the award for best drama series. Meanwhile, Bryan Cranston took home the Emmy for best lead actor in a drama series for “Breaking Bad,” in which he plays a terminally ill man who becomes a meth dealer to support his family. Neither is the sort of show that would have found a home back when there were only three broadcast networks and PBS.

The only thing that could ruin this Golden Age is the Federal Communications Commission, which is considering mandating that cable systems offer channels on an a la carte basis, meaning customers would pay only for the channels they want. The FCC claims that would lower cable bills by letting people drop channels they don’t want. Some in Congress have been agitating for a la carte cable TV, too, including presidential candidate Sen. John McCain.

Whether your total cable bill would go down with a la carte is debatable and depends on how many channels you want. What is not debatable is that the per-channel price of cable TV would rise and some channels with niche audiences wouldn’t have enough viewers to survive.

That would be bad news for shows like “Mad Men,” and for our new era of diverse TV programming.

No link can be found between crime and video gaming — again

I know this may come as a disappointment to some people, but when it comes to violent crime, you have less to worry about than a decade ago.

Why would good news like that disappoint anyone? Well, as it happens, there are people who have made their careers by trying to scare the rest of us. There is an entire industry of child psychologists, “public health experts” and lawyers whose livelihoods depend on Americans being scared to death that we are raising a generation of dangerous criminals reared on violent movies and video games.

The numbers, however, tell a different story.

According to FBI statistics released Monday, violent crime was down in 2007. That follows two straight years when violent crime increased slightly, but it also continues the overall trend since 1993, when the violent crime rate plunged for 10 years before leveling out and remaining mostly stable ever since.

You certainly wouldn’t get the idea that violent crime is falling or stable from watching a typical episode of “Nancy Grace” on Headline News. You might, however, think that “Grand Theft Auto” is turning the nation’s children into vicious gangsters with no regard for human life.

Yet while violent crime stubbornly refuses to skyrocket, more American children are playing video games than ever before.

A new study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 97 percent of American children play video games. Now, I don’t want to seem judgmental, but if your child is in that remaining 3 percent, he is probably going to be shunned by his peers. You might want to invest in a Wii.

Not all video games are created equal, of course. While there are some child psychologists — I suspect they are shilling for the theme park lobby — who insist that all video games can turn children into snarling sociopaths, most of the focus is on violent games.

Well, fully half of the boys in the Pew survey listed games rated either M (mature) or AO (adults only) among their favorites. That means efforts to keep M and AO games away from children have failed miserably. It also means it doesn’t matter. Mature and adults-only video games aren’t creating delinquents any more than comic books did during the comics scare of the 1950s.

As a rather antisocial person, I don’t regard “civic engagement” as a particularly great thing. Still, for those of you who do, I have good news: The Pew study shatters the conventional wisdom that video games make children into antisocial hermits.

The study found that the young people who spent the most time playing video games were no less likely to be involved in their communities than the young people who spent relatively little time gaming. That surprised even me because you would expect some sort of trade-off. But whatever it is gamers are giving up to have time for their video games, it doesn’t appear to be community involvement.

As an aside, do you think that when books were invented, people worried about books making children antisocial? There’s no more solitary activity than reading.

Ultimately, despite claims to the contrary, no study has found hard evidence that watching or participating in violent entertainment leads children to be more violent. The studies claiming to find such a link don’t account for the fact that naturally violent children might be drawn toward violent games.

There are, however, studies that have found children are more aggressive right after playing violent video games or watching violent movies, but that effect is only temporary. It’s nothing that would lead to an increase in violent crime, which is why there isn’t an increase in violent crime. And it’s no different than the increased aggressiveness most people experience right after watching an exciting sporting event. Anything that gets you excited is going to make you temporarily more aggressive, whether it’s “Halo 3” or the Auburn/Alabama football game.

Personally, I tend to become temporarily more aggressive after watching the evening news.