Ann Coulter actually endorses Hillary Clinton over John McCain
Friday, February 1, 2008
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Worst Movie Pitches of All Time
Wheels
The Pitch: Jerry Maguire in a wheelchair.
The Premise: "A hotshot sports agent parks in a handicapped spot and gets sentenced by a judge to spend a month in a wheelchair," recalls a creative exec at a major production house. "Which is fine, until he falls for a woman with a real disability, but doesn't explain that he isn't actually handicapped. How's that for a third-act complication, motherfucker?!"
Suggested Tagline: You had me at paraplegic.
Homeless Friends
The Pitch: Like Friends, except everyone's homeless.
The Premise: "The cast was supposed to be young and good-looking; they just happened to live on the streets," recalls a prominent TV agent. "The conceit was that everyone would hang out in Central Park instead of Central Perk. The guy really thought we could sell it to NBC."
Suggested Cast: Michael Pitt (Chandler), Courtney Love (Rachel), Gary Busey (Joey), Pete Doherty (Ross), Natasha Lyonne (Phoebe), Mary-Kate Olsen (Monica).
Rock Op
The Pitch: Empire Records meets Rendition.
The Premise: "A DJ who specializes in playing 'torture' music to extract information from detainees. A major producer took my partner and me out to China Grill to discuss his idea," says a screenwriter. "He said he had Jim Carrey on board for the title role. He described the first scene of the movie as, 'Jim Carrey hops into a limo after getting a page in the middle of a show he's performing. Cut to him walking, slow motion, into a dark room, where a tense interrogation of a drug dealer is taking place. He proceeds to break out two black bags that contain ... turntables.' That was the last we heard."
Suggested Tagline: Rockin' for the free world.
Spayed in Manhattan
The Pitch: Sex and the City meets Trading Places meets Homeward Bound meets The Emperor's New Groove.
The Premise: "An heiress party girl trades places with her dog in a freak accident and is forced to make it on the streets of Manhattan," says an agent at CAA. "If she doesn't change back before she gets spayed, she has to stay a dog forever."
Suggested Tagline: You'll howl, beg, and roll over as the summer's biggest little comedy warms its way into your heart.
Suggested Cast: Haylie Duff (the party girl), Nicollette Sheridan and Kevin Kline (the parents), Morgan Freeman (the dogcatcher with a heart of gold).
McBeggar
The Pitch: I Am Sam meets The Goonies.
The Premise: "A ragtag band of physically and mentally challenged vigilantes tries to take down McBeggar, an evil capitalist who has enslaved a group of handicapped folks to work in a panhandling scheme," recalls a development exec. "Presumably, their handicaps made them more likely to solicit donations. That's as far as I got."
Suggested Cast: Robin Williams, Tim Allen, Artie Lange, and Steve Buscemi (the vigilantes); Alan Cumming (the evil capitalist).
Sneakers
The Pitch: The Wizard of Oz meets Seabiscuit.
The Premise: "A down-on-his-luck racehorse is worried he may be off to the glue factory because he just can't seem to win the big one," remembers a development exec at an animation studio. "Until one day he stumbles upon a pair of magic tennis shoes to run in."
Suggested Tagline: The neighs have it!
From Project Redlight
Tom Waits Meets Super-Joel by Paul Krassner
A recent obituary in the Los Angeles Times began: "Bernie Boston, the photojournalist who captured the iconic image of a young Vietnam War protester placing a flower in the barrel of a rifle held by a National Guardsman died...The photo known as 'Flower Power' became Boston's signature image and earned him acclaim in the world of photojournalism. Taken during an antiwar march on the Pentagon on Oct. 22, 1967, the photo was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize."
The protester, not identified, was Joel Tornabene. In my autobiography - Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture, published by Simon & Schuster in 1993 - I described him as "an unheralded Yippie organizer known as Super-Joel. His grandfather was Mafia boss Sam Giancana, but Super-Joel had dropped out of the family business. Instead, he let his hair grow long and distributed LSD. The intelligence division of the Chicago Police Department warned Giancana that Super-Joel shouldn't hang around with me. The cops were telling the Mafia that I was a bad influence. It could've been worse. The FBI planned to 'neutralize' Dick Gregory by alerting the Mafia to his verbal attacks on the crime syndicate."
Super-Joel once told me, "If it wasn't for acid, I with my Sicilian ancestry and you with your Jewish ancestry, we would never have become such close friends." And he kissed me on the forehead. But that was okay. It meant love now, not murder.
Super-Joel was arrested during the 1968 Democratic convention. He yelled and gave the cops the finger through the caged door at the back of the paddy wagon. He got arrested three times that week. He was just another anonymous Yippie. FBI files indicated that the government wanted to indict twenty individuals for conspiracy to cross state lines for the purpose of inciting a riot at the convention, but the grand jury woudn't go along with such a wholesale indictment.
I wrote in my memoir that "Super-Joel's indictment was dropped when an attorney for...Sam Giancana, managed to persuade them that not only did Super-Joel come from 'a socially prominent family' in Chicago, but also that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial." However, in 2006, I learned that his sister, Fran, had said, "Our grandfathers were a Sicilian doctor and a Norwegian Irish carpenter. I can't imagine how anyone would actually believe that Giancana relationship."
I contacted her immediately, apologizing "for passing on false information," adding that "Although I included that story in my autobiography, recently I've had the rights reverted back to me, and I plan to have it re-published in an updated edition, so I will certainly include a postscript revealing that hoax."
She replied, "I think that Joel must have had quite a good time with the 'Giancana connection hoax.' I was first made aware of this story after his death in Mexico in 1993. His attorney, Dennis Roberts, came to Chicago to meet with my mother and our family. He seemed to be quite surprised to see a simple middle-class family home in Franklin Park, rather than a River Forest Mafia compound. I wasn't aware of the extent of this story until Prairie Prince, who I know Joel was close to for years, asked me a few years ago which side of the family was Giancana. Since then, I've seen your tale regarding his being moved to the unindicted co-conspirator list due to the 'grandfather connection.'"
"I'm embarrassed to admit that I believed it," I confessed, "simply because Joel was extremely convincing when he told me - so I'm a professional prankster who got pranked himself - but I really had no way of double-checking his personalized put-on."
And I'm not the only one who's been fooled like that. Another sister, Felicia, has located an interview in which Tom Waits is asked who Joel is.
Q. "Who's Joel Tornabene?"
A. "He's in the concrete biz. Mob guy. He was the grandson of Sam Giancana from Chicago. He did some yard work for me, and I hung out with him most of the time. He died in Mexico about five years ago. He was a good friend of [producer/composer] Hal Wilner, and he was a good guy. He had an errant--I don't know how to put this--he used to go around, and when he saw something he liked in somebody's yard, he would go back that night with a shovel, dig it up and plant it in your yard. We used to get a kick out of that. So I stopped saying, 'I really like that rosebush, I really like that banana tree, I really like that palm.' Because I knew what it meant. He came over once with twelve chickens as a gift. My wife said, 'Joel, don't even turn the car off. Turn that car around and take those chickens back where you found them.' He was a good friend, one of the wildest guys I've ever known."
Waits has written a song that includes this lyric: "Joel Tornabene lies broken on the wheel...."
And the ten-year-old son of Joel's cousin recently used Joel as a topic for a history project - he centered it on the '68 convention - titled "Someone Who Took a Stand."
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Good idea
World's First Weed ATM
Available at:
Melrose Quality Pain Relief, 4906 Melrose Ave, Mid-Wilshire; 323.957.7777
Herbal Nutrition Center, 1435 S. La Cienega Blvd. Suite G, Mid-Wilshire; 310.855.9484
Available at:
Melrose Quality Pain Relief, 4906 Melrose Ave, Mid-Wilshire; 323.957.7777
Herbal Nutrition Center, 1435 S. La Cienega Blvd. Suite G, Mid-Wilshire; 310.855.9484
Most of your essentials are already distributed by vending machines: condoms, electronics, luscious 1-calorie Tab... But now, you can finally get what you really need: medical marijuana, from Anytime Vending Machines.
The AVMs are already in place at their respective dispensaries and will be fully-operational by Monday, though their vestibules are still under construction; future plans include machine-vended pharmaceuticals like Vicodin, Viagra, and Propecia -- for when the excessive chemicals in Tab have wracked you with pain, limpness, and baldness.
Check out one of the dispensaries that's stocking the AVM at HerbalNutritionCenterLA.com
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