The life of a film extra

I have often wondered, while watching scenes from some film or TV show that takes place in a public setting, about the people who are seen in the background doing everyday things. How many are they paid professionals who do this as a living? When a superhero film was shot in Cleveland some years ago, they sent out an appeal for people to appear as extras for a few street scenes and I think many responded just for the chance to be in a film. It involved just hanging around a lot, apparently. I don’t know if they got paid at all.
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The scandal of professional wrestling

I have never seen the appeal of professional wrestling because violence, even if simulated, makes me cringe so I never watch it. Also, even with scripted fights, there is real wear and tear on the body and actual injuries. The scandal of professional wrestling is not that the whole thing is faked because everyone knows that. It is that the wrestlers are treated like dirt by the monopolistic WWE and its owner Vince McMahon that results in many of them dying young and poor, as John Oliver points out in this expose.

Behind the scenes of Blackadder

I am always intrigued by the creative process and so am a sucker for documentaries along the lines of “The Making Of …”. Some of you may be familiar with the British TV comedy series Blackadder. I came across this program that goes behind the scenes of this show and talks to the writers and actors about how they conceived the show and their experience in being part of it.

Do people really do this?

In Sri Lanka, some people who are highly concerned about hygiene have developed the skill of pouring liquid from a container straight into their mouths without their lips touching it. Sometimes people do this even if they are served in a glass, because they fear that the rim of the glass may be unclean. I would not be surprised if this practice has its roots in the odious caste system that said that touching anything touched by supposedly ‘low caste’ people made you unclean.

But I have observed the other extreme many times in films and on TV in the US. Someone opens the refrigerator in a home, takes out a carton or bottle of milk or juice, and then drinks straight from it, putting their lips to the mouth of the container. This is even when the people live in a home they share with family members who presumably use the same container. This strikes me as pretty gross. But I have seen it so many times that I think it must be more common that I would have expected.

Is that the case?

Film review: Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)

This latest offering from documentary filmmaker Michael Moore looks at the election of Donald Trump as president and asks the question: How the hell did that happen?

He says that the precursor to Trump was Rick Snyder who, a businessman with no political experience who won the Michigan governorship in 2010 on promises much like Trump’s, that his background in business was what the state needed. He then proceeded to run the state for the benefit of the wealthy, gutting democracy by putting major cities in the state under a state of emergency and installing how own people as administrators to run them, sidelining the local elected officials.
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Cue cards

One of the things that surprise me is that hand-written cue cards are still used on some live TV shows. I would have thought that teleprompters with giant screens and lettering would have replaced a person standing in front and whipping out one card after another. Via Rusty Blazenhoff I came across this video of how Saturday Night Live uses cue cards, as narrated by their head cue card person. He makes a good point that since the show is live, they cannot afford the risk of a teleprompter glitch and that the old fashioned cue cards are fail safe.

Heaven is in vogue these days

I have written before about the TV comedy The Good Place and now there is apparently another one called Miracle Workers. I have not seen the latter show because it is on a network that I don’t get but it is based on a novel of the same name by Simon Rich that I read recently. Both shows take an irreverent attitude to the idea of an afterlife but while the The Good Place takes this as an opportunity to examine the question of what ethics and morality consists of and leaves gods out of the picture entirely, Miracle Workers focuses on the life of god and the people who work for him, mainly those who work in the Department of Answered Prayers.
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Katherine Helmond (1929-2019)

The actress has died at the age of 89. In a long career as a stage and screen and TV actor and director, she may be best remembered as part of a terrific ensemble cast in the prime time parody of daytime soap operas called, appropriately enough Soap, that ran from 1977 through 1981. It was utterly hilarious must-see TV until its last season when it succumbed to the disease of shows that run too long when the plots become increasingly absurd even for a parody and the quality of the writing weakens.
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