Actors of color dominated the cast, among them Laurence Fishburne and S. Epatha Merkerson. ‘‘The King of Cartoons was black!’’ Reubens says. ‘‘Not just anybody. The king! That came out of growing up in Florida under segregation. I felt really good about that.’’
..One of the greatest achievements of ‘‘Playhouse’’ was that it created a place where desires are not policed, otherness is not demonized, gender roles are juggled and erotic energies attach where they will: Pterri the Pterodactyl ogles Miss Yvonne’s breasts, Conky the robot enjoys a robot-nudie magazine, Pee-wee play-acts a date with Cowboy Curtis. In one ‘‘Playhouse’’ episode, a monster named Roger appears, scaring the Playhouse dwellers; Pee-wee fixes him a snack and strikes up a friendship. In another, Pee-wee loves a fruit salad so much he marries it, ceremony and all. Reubens told me, ‘‘I’ve had so much feedback from people saying, ‘I was so confused as a kid, and your show helped.’ ’’
..from the start, Pee-wee offered Reubens a way to transform into, and armor himself within, his own ventriloquist dummy; when Pee-wee grew popular enough to attract interviewers, Reubens often insisted on receiving them in character, and in the credits for Pee-wee projects the character was listed as played by ‘‘Himself.’’
..‘‘Part of the reason why I wanted to come back,’’ he says, ‘‘is that I didn’t have a real good ending to my career.’’
..For Reubens, plots are excuses to pile up gags and set pieces. In his most famous moment, from ‘‘Big Adventure,’’ Pee-wee, in platform shoes, dances with manic verve to ‘‘Tequila’’ in a motorcycle bar.
.. Reubens called digital retouching ‘‘a huge secret in Hollywood. People aren’t really aware that stars have secret riders in their contracts’’ stipulating that money will be devoted to preserving their youthful appearances with computers.
.. His parents, Milton and Judy Rubenfeld, owned a lamp shop; Milton was one of five founding members of the Israeli Air Force. ‘‘My dad was real swaggery, like a Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones kind of guy,’’ Reubens says.
.. The sensibility of stoned 20-somethings at midnight, he realized — marked by an unreasonable love of repetition, absurdity, narrative disjuncture and jokes that either last way too long or flit by in a short-attention-span-accommodating blink — had significant overlap with that of little kids in pajamas, laughing themselves silly over breakfast cereal. ‘‘Those are the times of the day when there aren’t rules,’’ Reubens said of morning and night, standing as they do in idiosyncratic opposition to the more conventional prerogatives of the prime-time dial. ‘‘Rules are for the other times.’’
“Saturday Night Live” Gets Trumped
The show didn’t, in any truly cutting way, make fun of Trump: it made fun of Trump voters, or at least the people it imagined them to be. Instead of looking for the weakness in the Republican front-runner, the show looked for the weak characters drawn to him.
Non-stop action: why Hollywood’s ageing heroes won’t give up the gun
There is now apparently no age limit to an action career in Hollywood. The expendables are no longer unemployables, and actors in their 60s and even 70s are high-kicking in can-can routines of choreographed violence. After making a third Indiana Jones sequel in his mid-60s,Harrison Ford was over 70 when he joined the grizzled crew of The Expendables 3 (with Sylvester Stallone weighing in at 68 and Arnold Schwarzenegger at 67), in which the mercenary group does battle with its founder, now resolved to destroy them
.. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler, agonising over whether he might have managed to save one more life, has been made over into a killing machine.
Neeson’s Taken character is a civilian whose unending mission is to rescue and secure his family, which gives him the moral stature to justify any amount of bloodshed.
.. It is easy to feel that the main event of celebrity culture is now the showing-up of the failing flesh, and all the acclaim of youth and freshness that goes before is only a pretext. When identification fails, when the idol fails to retire gracefully, things can turn nasty. Films are so centrally about youth and beauty that ageing on screen is a real taboo
.. The current incarnation of youth in films is not in the equivalent of a John Hughes comedy, but in Richard Linklater’s high-concept movie Boyhood, in which Ellar Coltrane is made to age convincingly from child to man by the drastic decision to film him over 12 years. Linklater’s film seems to have outwitted the enemy, containing and controlling the poignancy of the passage of time, but that is just how it looks now. There is no inoculation against mortality on film, except, strangely, tragic early death. If Coltrane is spared that, then one day soon he will be snapped unshaven and with bags under his eyes, and then he will be all over the media world, the shaming image appearing alongside the dewiest frame of him from Boyhood.
.. a broken nose takes away the potential stigma of prettiness from a male face
.. There is no facial characteristic that communicates, however misleadingly, fearlessness and lack of vanity in women. In film terms, experience seems to add to a man, but subtract from a woman.
.. Anyone who has seen Pedro Aldomóvar’s Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown will have seen the director’s cheeky casting of Francisca Caballero – his mother – as a television newsreader. Women who work in front of a television camera and are unwise enough to pass their 40th birthdays are losing their jobs all the time, but one look at Almodóvar’s film should convince any sensible person that newsreaders in their 40s are not slightly too old, but much too young. What you want, when it is time to hear about the day’s events, is not some glamourpuss but someone who has been around for a bit, someone who has seen a few things in her time, a few wars, floods and Oscar nomination
.. A shrewd film star is both a work of art and its curator. The supreme practitioner in this line must be Marlene Dietrich – when you hired her, you got her lighting man, too, so that she retained full control over the product
.. The first Taken film was made before Neeson’s wife, Natasha Richardson, died suddenly in 2009. If it seems crass to connect a film star’s changing persona with his life experiences, then it is a crassness that was built into the workings of stardom even before modern communications made sure that there was no such thing as a secret sorrow. Film is porous. An event such as Neeson’s bereavement echoes backward in time, filling his segment of Love Actually (widowed father tries to teach his son how to approach the girl he is besotted with) with new associations, though it is anything but classic material in itself.
.. To have gravitas means to inhabit your history, and not to be diminished by your losses. And if that isn’t quite the same thing as real-world maturity, on the big screen it is the best we are going to get.
The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t
It turns out that Ulrich was incontrovertibly correct on one point: Napster did pose a grave threat to the economic value that consumers placed on recorded music. And yet the creative apocalypse he warned of has failed to arrive. Writers, performers, directors and even musicians report their economic fortunes to be similar to those of their counterparts 15 years ago, and in many cases they have improved. Against all odds, the voices of the artists seem to be louder than ever.
].. And yet collectively, the figures seem to suggest that music, the creative field that has been most threatened by technological change, has become more profitable in the post-Napster era — not for the music industry, of course, but for musicians themselves. Somehow the turbulence of the last 15 years seems to have created an economy in which more people than ever are writing and performing songs for a living.
.. It’s true that most of that live-music revenue is captured by superstar acts like Taylor Swift or the Rolling Stones. In 1982, the musical 1-percenters took in only 26 percent of the total revenues generated by live music; in 2003, they captured 56 percent of the market, with the top 5 percent of musicians capturing almost 90 percent of live revenues. But this winner-takes-all trend seems to have preceded the digital revolution; most 1-percenters achieved their gains in the ’80s and early ’90s, as the concert business matured into a promotional machine oriented around marquee world tours. In the post-Napster era, there seems to have been a swing back in a more egalitarian direction. According to one source, the top 100 tours of 2000 captured 90 percent of all revenue, while today the top 100 capture only 43 percent.
.. Economic Modeling Specialists International reports that the number of self-employed actors has grown by 45 percent since 2001.
.. ‘‘Back in the 1980s and 1990s,’’ Jason Bailey wrote on Flavorwire, ‘‘it was possible to finance — either independently or via the studio system — midbudget films (anywhere from $5 million to $60 million) with an adult sensibility. But slowly, quietly, over roughly the decade and a half since the turn of the century, the paradigm shifted.’’ Movies like ‘‘Blue Velvet,’’ ‘‘Do the Right Thing’’ or ‘‘Pulp Fiction’’ that succeeded two or three decades ago, the story goes, would have had a much harder time in the current climate.
.. The numbers seem to suggest that the market for books may be evolving into two distinct systems. Critically successful works seem to be finding their audience more easily among indie-bookstore shoppers, even as the mainstream market has been trending toward a winner-takes-all sweepstakes.
.. Indie bookstores account for only about 10 percent of overall book sales, but they have a vastly disproportionate impact on the sale of the creative midlist books that are so vital to the health of the culture.
.. American households in 2013 spent 4.9 percent of their income on entertainment, the exact same percentage they spent in 2000.
.. It has never been easier to start making money from creative work, for your passion to undertake that critical leap from pure hobby to part-time income source.