Judge Vaughn Walker is expected to issue his response today to a request that he stay his ruling that California's anti-gay Proposition 8 was unconstitutional. Supporters of that law want to ensure that no new same-sex marriages take place before the appeal is heard at the circuit court level. (And even then, of course, nothing's final; this is going to the U.S. Supreme Court no matter what.)
The decision is expected to be made public this morning, between 9 am and 12 noon, Pacific time. LGBT POV has some analysis of the likely effects of the decision, whichever way Judge Walker rules.
Personally, I was initially overly cautious about the survivability of Walker's decision, simply because I think the general mood across the country and especially in the U.S. Supreme Court is still in favor of discrimination. But I've heard from enough legal experts to learn that Walker's decision was apparently very strongly written, and that makes it harder to win an appeal against it. Furthermore, some are suggesting that there's actually a hope that this could survive the Supreme Court, which I'd written off as a bastion of the ultra-Right. These folks are saying that the swing vote on the court might actually go our way.
Here's to hoping they're correct.
And here's also a toast to California Attorney General (and former/future governor) Jerry Brown and to current Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who both filed requests that the judge not stay his ruling. Schwarzenegger has played Hamlet on the gay marriage issue, but he seems to have recovered his moderate Republican social principles lately, and he issued a warm welcome to Walker's original ruling. The warmest toast, of courst, has to go to San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who took a lot of heat and derision for his decision to allow marriages in the city and county of San Francisco, and the municipality is one of the plaintiffs in this case.
One last treat: Below is a HD video of Prop 8 plaintiff attorney David Boies, one half of the David Boies-Ted Olson bipartisan team that put together the winning legal argument. It's a fantastic speech and audience Q&A. What you don't see, simply because videotaping starts with the official start of the program, is that when Boies entered the auditorium, the sold-out crowd gave him a loud standing ovation.
Thursday, August 12, 2010
The Starlog Project: Starlog #158, September 1990: Darkman Cometh
What makes his fan favorites special is not just that they’re geek-bait and popular. He adds something to them that I don’t think other writers or directors would do. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it seems something like a mixture of realism and humor and humanity that makes even a fairly standard story such as Darkman into something more, something that is remembered long after you leave the theater (or turn off the DVD player).
Raimi’s 1990 gem gets its due focus this month in Starlog.
Starlog #158
76 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $3.95
Unfortunately, there was a sequel to Darkman. There’s always a sequel.
Marc Shapiro interviews Flatliners director Joel Schumacher, who notes that it was not difficult to get stars William Baldwin, Oliver Platt, Kevin Bacon, Julia Roberts, and Kiefer Sutherland for his film: “We had people lining up around the block wanting to be in this movie”; David Hutchison’s Videolog column reports another Kevin Bacon film heading to video: Tremors; in probably the only Starlog article ever to include a photo of a cover of Playboy magazine, Marc Shapiro talks with Total Recall star Sharon Stone, who explains how Arnold Schwarzenegger “did little to cure Stone of her nervousness,” teasing her a lot – “In that jockstrap kind of world that Arnold lives in," she said, "I had become one of the guys” (maybe it was just Stockholm Syndrome); the Fan Network pages include a Darkman contest, a directory to fan organizations, and a convention calendar; Will Murray interviews another leading woman of Total Recall, Rachel Ticotin, who plays Melina in the film; and Bill Warren talks with the legendary Christopher Lee about Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
“The movie came from the idea of a man who can change his face to become other people. It was originally a short story I wrote, which was accepted with encouragement by friends. It segued into a longer story, and then became a story of a man who had lost his face and had to take on other faces. Then, it became the story of a man who battled criminals using this power. And then, because he lost his face, the idea of what would happen if he had a relationship before became important.”
–Sam Raimi, director, interviewed by Bill Warren: “Darkman Director”To see more issues, click on Starlog Internet Archive Project below or visit The Starlog Project’s permanent home.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Preview of 2012? Obama Beats Palin – on Facebook
I just noticed that Sarah Palin's Facebook page has 2,096,096 people who like it, and my heart sank. But then I checked President Barack Obama's Facebook page, and he has 12,337,794 who like it, so my fog lifted.*
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, Palin's competitor in the American Crazy Idol contest, is liked by a mere 76,614 people on Facebook.
Things continue to look up for Obama.
* Not that you asked, but Obama's Twitter account has 4,874,016 followers, while Palin (217,466) and Newt (1,308,492) trail there, too. Hey, my mayor, Gavin Newsom, has 1,337,034 Twitter followers, so what does that say about Palin and Newt?
UPDATE: Know who else has more Twitter followers than Palin? Hugh Hefner (323,293), Stephen Colbert (1,662,757), William Shatner (314,353), Paul Krugman (419,988), Lady Gaga (5,455,146), and CNN (1,213,488), just to name a handful.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, Palin's competitor in the American Crazy Idol contest, is liked by a mere 76,614 people on Facebook.
Things continue to look up for Obama.
UPDATE: Know who else has more Twitter followers than Palin? Hugh Hefner (323,293), Stephen Colbert (1,662,757), William Shatner (314,353), Paul Krugman (419,988), Lady Gaga (5,455,146), and CNN (1,213,488), just to name a handful.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
The Starlog Project: Starlog #157, August 1990: Domo Arigato Mr. RoboCop 2
Twenty years later, there are still some people in Hollywood who are ready to make another RoboCop, at least as a remake. The remake appears to be stalled at the moment, a victim of MGM’s severe financial troubles. But if you like remakes, I suppose you can rely on the fact that when Hollywood gets a bad idea in its mind, sooner or later it films it.
How a couple decades worth of achievement can change things, Part II: In this 1990 issue of Starlog, British novelist Terry Pratchett is interviewed. At that point, only a handful of his Discworld novels had been printed, but they were already popular enough for the magazine to sit him down for a good talk. However, it appears that the editors didn’t consider him to be a big enough draw in the United States to warrent even mentioning his name on the cover. Now cut to 2010, where Sir Terry Pratchett has recently served as guest editor of UK SF magazine SFX, and he is celebrated around the world for his now very lengthy list of Discworld books. It makes this 1990 interview worth tracking down. Just don’t look for it by scanning the cover blurbs.
Starlog #157
76 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $3.95
Classified ad of the month: “HOLOGRAM WRISTWATCHES Quality digital timepieces. Years warranty, specific image: eye, watchworks, skull, cat $14.95 + $3.00 S&H to ...” Well, the poor punctuation aside, it’s a good deal, considering that ten years earlier, Starlog tried selling its own branded wristwatch for $50.
Julia Roberts announced in 2010 that she's converted to Hinduism, which is quite a switch from the spiritual implications of her 1990 movie, Flatliners, but nonetheless she is – in circa-1990 big hair – one of the brat pack stars (along with Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, and others) of this movie, which Marc Shapiro previews with a set visit; the Fan Network pages include a RoboCop contest, a directory of fan organizations and publications, and a convention calendar; Erid Niderost interviews Dick Tracy villain actor William Forsythe; David Hutchison's Videolog column notes recent genre releases, such as old Three Stooges work; Marc Shapiro travels to the Old West to talk with actor Thomas F. Wilson, who portrays Biff in the Back to the Future films; Mark Philips profiles actor Paul Comi, who guest starred on the original Star Trek as well as The Twilight Zone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and more; Marc Shapiro talks with producer Frank Marshall about Arachnophobia; and Paul Tomlinson talks with Discworld creator Terry Pratchett.
“Equal Rites is where I found that you can only go so far by running from gag situation to gag situation. From Equal Rites onwards, I began to explore what I was doing. I think many readers who were attracted to the first two [Discworld novels] were a bit taken aback by Equal Rites. They liked it, but it wasn’t what they were expecting. When I got to Mort, I got it just about right. Equal Rites might be just too far off the centerline, but Mort got back to it. I found out how you do it, I was beginning to learn.”
–Terry Pratchett, author, interviewed by Paul Tomlinson: “Gag Writer”To see more issues, click on Starlog Internet Archive Project below or visit The Starlog Project’s permanent home.
Monday, August 9, 2010
New Column in Northside San Francisco: Is Pirate Radio Passe?
COMMON KNOWLEDGETalk like a pirate
By John Zipperer
Every time I walk downstairs to Caroline’s office, it’s like heading down to the laboratory to see experiments in progress. I feel like James Bond visiting Q to see what’s in the pipeline, only Caroline has fewer exploding gadgets.
“Pirates!” she exclaimed when I asked her what she was working on.
Norman Spinrad on the Publishing Death Spiral, or: Why You Can't Buy Any New Spinrad Novels
Writer Norman Spinrad writes on his blog that a cruel math at the largest book retailers is putting ever-downward pressure on authors like him, resulting in fewer book orders and eventually no publisher is willing to take the risk of buying a manuscript.
Read his blog posts for the full scoop: Part One | Part Two
I'll just add that from what I've heard from people in the industry, publishers are expecting new authors to come to them with existing audiences, often audiences that have been followers of a writer's blog. Show me that 5,000 people read your blog every month, or that 15,000 people have downloaded your free self-published fiction on the web, and then we'll talk about a print run. Whatever the numbers are, I'm not sure. But publishers want a built-in audience, because they're not taking chances. They're also not doing as much promotion of books as they used to do. Book tours are nearly a thing of the past. Authors are expected to become distribution experts in their own right.
In the comments section of Spinrad's first blog post, he responds to readers who push electronic publishing as an alternative to the print model. It's something he's tried, but he says the money's just not there yet. That's a pretty telling commentary, because e-books are where those big booksellers are going in a big way. They are retooling their entire businesses to push e-books.
As a magazine publisher, I've been watching (and discussing on this blog) the disarray in print publishing for years. To an important extent, it's an inevitable change, the outcome of which is not yet clear. But it's also partly a self-fulfilling groupthink momentum. Everyone knows print is dead, but they can't figure out why it won't die, nor can they figure out a business model to replace it. As I've written here before, I think the people who are most eager for magazines, books, and newspapers to cease publishing are the same people who most misunderstand what a reader actually gets out of reading those publications. But the momentum is behind the idea that everything must go electronic.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The internet does some things much better than print, and print does some things better than the 'net. Each should do what it does best, and they can complement each other that way. But when even print publishers are eager to shed their print side because their funders, critics, and some readers have emotionally invested in the death of print, then we are not likely to see a workable realignment of the print industry come about with the current generation of print leaders (most of whom seem to be MBAs instead of publishers).
Writers such as Norman Spinrad get hurt in this situation. Periodicals writers and editors get hurt in this situation. And readers get hurt in this situation, as their print publications become thinner and stupider and abbreviated and less frequent.
Read his blog posts for the full scoop: Part One | Part Two
I'll just add that from what I've heard from people in the industry, publishers are expecting new authors to come to them with existing audiences, often audiences that have been followers of a writer's blog. Show me that 5,000 people read your blog every month, or that 15,000 people have downloaded your free self-published fiction on the web, and then we'll talk about a print run. Whatever the numbers are, I'm not sure. But publishers want a built-in audience, because they're not taking chances. They're also not doing as much promotion of books as they used to do. Book tours are nearly a thing of the past. Authors are expected to become distribution experts in their own right.
In the comments section of Spinrad's first blog post, he responds to readers who push electronic publishing as an alternative to the print model. It's something he's tried, but he says the money's just not there yet. That's a pretty telling commentary, because e-books are where those big booksellers are going in a big way. They are retooling their entire businesses to push e-books.
As a magazine publisher, I've been watching (and discussing on this blog) the disarray in print publishing for years. To an important extent, it's an inevitable change, the outcome of which is not yet clear. But it's also partly a self-fulfilling groupthink momentum. Everyone knows print is dead, but they can't figure out why it won't die, nor can they figure out a business model to replace it. As I've written here before, I think the people who are most eager for magazines, books, and newspapers to cease publishing are the same people who most misunderstand what a reader actually gets out of reading those publications. But the momentum is behind the idea that everything must go electronic.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The internet does some things much better than print, and print does some things better than the 'net. Each should do what it does best, and they can complement each other that way. But when even print publishers are eager to shed their print side because their funders, critics, and some readers have emotionally invested in the death of print, then we are not likely to see a workable realignment of the print industry come about with the current generation of print leaders (most of whom seem to be MBAs instead of publishers).
Writers such as Norman Spinrad get hurt in this situation. Periodicals writers and editors get hurt in this situation. And readers get hurt in this situation, as their print publications become thinner and stupider and abbreviated and less frequent.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
The Starlog Project: Starlog #156, July 1990: Total Recall of Total Recall
The part of this that should give one hope is that it’s Straczynski, the man behind the five-year novel-for-television Babylon 5. Based on that (hey, anyone who brings Harlan Ellison aboard as a consultant has some integrity going for him), I think people can have faith that he will not debase the story for the studios.
In this issue of Starlog, the classic original Forbidden Planet is given a three-article treatment, including an interview with the great Leslie Nielsen, star of the film. It’s a pretty fine treatment to give to a movie from the 1950s, but then again, few films from the 1950s laid the groundwork for much of the genre cinema that would follow, the way Forbidden Planet did.
Starlog #156
100 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $4.95
This 100-page, 14th anniversary issue is another example of why I liked Starlog’s 100-page special issues so much. It’s full of articles on classics (as in Forbidden Planet), recently deceased (as in Starman), and the new, such as Total Recall. That last film is another adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story; though it was not as good or as trend-setting as Blade Runner, it was still a huge movie and one of the big ones that helped establish Arnold Schwarzenegger as a major box-office draw.
By the way, on page 88, Starlog announces that it will be publishing the official movie magazine for Total Recall.
Michael Dorn, who portrays the Klingon Worf in Star Trek: the Next Generation, tells interviewer David McDonnell that the scene with Worf having a tea party with Dr. Pulaski (in “Up the Long Ladder”) was good for developing the character’s story; Bill Warren interviews actor Leslie Nielsen, who was long known for playing serious roles (such as Commander Adams in Forbidden Planet) but who later carved out an even higher-profile career playing comedic roles; Tom and Jon Weaver share a byline for a talk with actor Richard Anderson, another Forbidden Planet veteran and later the man of authority on The Six Million Dollar Man; Lynne Stevens takes a look at Return to the Forbidden Planet, a sort-of Shakespearan stage rock musical version of the classic (so, if I were being exact, then J. Michael Straczynski’s version would really be the second remake, not the first); Marc Shapiro talks with Back to the Future III writer/producer Bob Gale; and Bill Warren interviews Gremlins-maker Joe Dante, who quips that if Gremlins was “like It’s a Wonderful LIfe Meets The Birds,” then the sequel is “The Gremlins’ New York Adventure to be sure, and I suppose you could say it’s Executive Suite with Gremlins.”
“Forbidden Planet was, I think, the forerunner of all good science fiction films. It could very easily have been the pilot for Star Trek, which is intriguing, because I never was called to do a Star Trek. I know William Shatner, and Jimmy Doohan is a very dear friend of mine. I know Gene Roddenberry and have great respect for him. And if Forbidden Planet had anything to do with Star Trek, I can understand it, because Forbidden Planet still plays every year.”
–Leslie Nielsen, actor, interviewed by Bill Warren: “Tales of the Naked Planet”To see more issues, click on Starlog Internet Archive Project below or visit The Starlog Project’s permanent home.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Donna Shalala Detained at Airport & Questioned for Two Hours
Donna Shalala, head of the University of Miami and the former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Clinton, was detained for two hours at an Israeli airport upon her attempt to leave the country after a trip there by university presidents.
Shalala was the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison when I was a student there in the second half of the 1980s. I always knew she was a trouble-maker. :)
Shalala, of Lebanese descent, took the matter in stride and said she understood the Israelis' security concerns.
Shalala was the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Madison when I was a student there in the second half of the 1980s. I always knew she was a trouble-maker. :)
Shalala, of Lebanese descent, took the matter in stride and said she understood the Israelis' security concerns.
Tony Judt, R.I.P.
Now we'll get no new work from him, but I still can read his previously published book for the first time. Tony Judt is dead.
The New York Times reports that Judt, suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, died at the age of 62 yesterday. The paper notes:
Mr. Judt (pronounced Jutt), who was British by birth and education but who taught at American universities for most of his career, began as a specialist in postwar French intellectual history, and for much of his life he embodied the idea of the French-style engaged intellectual. An impassioned left-wing Zionist as a teenager, he shed his faith in agrarian socialism and Marxism early on and became, as he put it, a “universalist social democrat” with a deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues, identity politics and the emerging role of the United States as the world’s sole superpower.In an age when even supposedly independent intellectuals have broadly sold out to ideologies and money, Judt embodied something that's rare today. I still appreciate a recent essay in which he embraced being called a rootless cosmopolitan, because it was what helped him see things from outside the groupthink of the rooted.
Judt was independent, smart, human and humane, and controversial. I'll miss him not only because I always found something of interest in his essays, but also because there are too few people like him today.
The Starlog Project: Starlog #155, June 1990: Threepeat – Back to the Future III
BTTF III is arguably the best of the trilogy. There’s less lazy pop-culture riffing and more storytelling. Plus they set the film in the old West, rather than rehashing the setting and story of the first BTTF. In this issue, writer and producer Bob Gale says, “Are we sick and tired of Back to the Future at this point? In a way, yes. But every time we look at the dailies or some great cut-together sequences, it gets everybody excited again.”
Starlog #155
76 pages (including covers)
Cover price: $3.95
This issue announces the second (and, alas, what would be the last) issue of the Starlog Science-Fiction Video Magazine. Editor David McDonnell says “We’re already at work on volume three, uhh, possibly because we prepared more special features and video reviews for #2 than we had space to print.” But there would never be a third issue. Too bad; the Starlog SF video mags were nicely done and are still enjoyable to read two decades later. Find ‘em on eBay.
The rundown: Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox share the cover for the second time in seven issues (the last time was #149); Denise Crosby, out of uniform and in a bikini, is featured on the contents page in a photo from the Seatrek Star Trek fan cruise. Communications letters include reaction to Michael Wolff’s article “Pigment of the Imagination” about racism, plus thoughts on Back to the Future II and TV’s War of the Worlds; and David McDonnell’s Medialog column backtracks on its prediction of a few issues back and announces that Arnold Schwarzenegger will indeed return to the Terminator story in James Cameron’s sequel – apparently some studio shuffling, changes in ownership to the film’s rights, and a mega-million-dollar paycheck for the future California governor changed enough minds to greenlight Terminator 2 (which, in my humble opinion, would tie with The Abyss as James Cameron’s best film).
David Hutchison previews the moon-colony film Plymouth; the Fan Network pages include a directory of fan clubs and the convention calendar (where it becomes clear that the Starlog festivals have dropped by the wayside, but the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors franchise has taken off); Marc Shapiro interviews actress Michele Scarabelli, who talks about portraying Susan Francisco in Alien Nation; in the first of a two-part interview, Will Murray asks writer Philip Jose Farmer about writing the Doc Savage novels; Marc Shapiro talks with Peter Filardi, the writer of Flatliners, a brat-pack scare flick; and Will Murray has another chat with actor Michael Ironside, who discusses his role as Richter in Total Recall, as well as acting in V, Top Gun, Watchers, and more.
"Because you're on the moon, certain ideas and standards that you take for granted on Earth, change drastically here. In our first story, Cindy Pickett, who plays the lead character Addy Matthewson, the town physician, becomes pregnant by a guy who isn't really part of the town, but is one of Unidac's technical people. Immediately, we have a multi-level story situation. On one level, she's unmarried, a widow with four kids. But because it all happens here in Plymouth, her actions have implications for everybody in town: If she chooses to have her child on the Moon, the community is morally bound on some level to stay with her, because, in all likelihood, a child raised in the one-sixth gravity field of the moon can never go back to Earth. The community will be committed to the Moon; now they can never just evacuate the base and return to Earth. "
–Lee David Zlotoff, writer/director/producer, interviewed by David Hutchison: "Plymouth Adventure"To see more issues, click on Starlog Internet Archive Project below or visit The Starlog Project’s permanent home.
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