Television Director Quotes

Any pile of stunted growth unaware that entertainment is just that and nothing more deserves to doom themselves to some dank cell somewhere for having been so stupid!! Movies, books, T.V., music - they're all just entertainment, not guidebooks for damning yourself!

If we really exist merely to fulfill God’s plan: then life is a television drama; with God being the scriptwriter, the director, and, the audience.

Six months out of college and I was already questioning my occupational direction. Screenwriter? Actor? Director? Movie and television producer? What the hell was I thinking?

But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, "Let me think about that" or "I don't know" or "What do you mean when you say...?" or "From what sources does your information come?" This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art.

I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before. In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras!They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want. Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.

That night, Brazilian TV audiences saw the director of the Center for Physical Research welcome the Visiting Professor from the United States, but little did they know that the subject of their conversation was finding a girl to spend the night with!

Today's television sitcoms...the father is typically depicted as a clumsy buffoon, an inane and even unnecessary appendage. In creating that caricature, producers and directors have done irreparable damage to the God-ordained image of what may be one of the most significant roles and offices in eternity - that of a father, that of a real man.

What is a club in any case? Not the buildings or the directors or the people who are paid to represent it. It’s not the television contracts, get-out clauses, marketing departments or executive boxes. It’s the noise, the passion, the feeling of belonging, the pride in your city. It’s a small boy clambering up stadium steps for the very first time, gripping his father’s hand, gawping at that hallowed stretch of turf beneath him and, without being able to do a thing about it, falling in love.

singer you did really well. You saved the number.” The director said the same thing at the end of the show. “You did a great job,” he told me. To which I replied: “Mr. Voice has sung his last song.” Messing up on live TV taught me an important lesson about show business: learn to laugh at yourself.

what I defend above all is the possibility and the necessity of the critical intellectual, who is firstly critical of the intellectual doxa secreted by the doxosophers. there is no genuine democracy without genuine opposing critical powers. the intellectual is one of those, of the first magnitude. that is why I think that the work of demolishing the critical intellectual, living or dead - marx, nietzsche, sartre, foucault, and some others who are grouped together under the label pansee 68- is as dangerous as the demolition of the public interest and that it is part of the same process of restoration. of course I would prefer it if intellectuals had all, and always, lived up to the immense historical responsibility they bear and if they had always invested in their actions not only their moral authority but also their intellectual competence- like, to cite just one example, pierre vidal-naquet, who has engaged all his mastery of historical method in a critique of the abuses of history. having said that, in the words of karl kraus, 'between two evils, I refuse to choose the lesser.' whole I have little indulgence for 'irresponsible' intellectuals, I have even less respect for the 'intellectuals' of the political-administrative establishment, polymorphous polygraphs who polish their annual essays between two meetings of boards of directors, three publishers' parties and miscellaneous television appearances.

If a Writer births the baby, then a Producer raises the child and sends it off to school.” ― Rona Edwards, I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development from the Inside Out

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything’s handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven’t understood what the director’s on about… The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you’re reading.

we wanted to pay homage to TV producer-director-actor Sheldon Leonard [the Emmy-winning producer and director of shows like The Danny Thomas Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and more], so that’s where Sheldon and Leonard came from.

Edward Lasco was on the screened porch of his rented house in a comfortable but not elegant older section of the town where he'd lived for the past fifteen years when his wife, Elise, who six months before had left him and moved to a nearby city to work in a psychiatric hospital, came around the side of the house and stood beside the screen looking in. She had on a business outfit—natural linen suit, knee-high boots, dark glasses with at least three distinguishable colors tiered top to bottom in the lenses—and she carried a slick briefcase, thin and shiny. Her hair was shorter than he'd seen it, styled in a peculiar way so that it seemed it spots to jerk away from her head, to say, "I'm hair, boy, and you'd better believe it." Edward had come outside with a one-pint carton of skim milk and a ninety-nine-cookie package of Oreos and a just-received issue of InfoWorld, and he was entirely content with the prospect of eating his cookies and drinking his milk and reading his magazine, but when he saw Elise he was filled with a sudden, very unpleasant sense that he didn't want to see her. It'd been a good two and a half months since he'd talked to her, and there she was looking like an earnest TV art director's version of the modern businesswoman; it made him feel that his life was fucked, and this was before she'd said a word.

The couple in the Skyline came to mind. Why did I have this fixation on them? Well, what else did I have to think about? By now, the two of them might be snoozing away in bed, or maybe pushing into commuter trains. They could be flat character sketches for a TV treatment: Japanese woman marries Frenchman while studying abroad; husband has traffic accident and becomes paraplegic. Woman tires of life in Paris, leaves husband, and returns to Tokyo, where she works in Belgian or Swiss embassy. Silver bracelets, a memento from her husband. Cut to beach scene in Nice: woman with the bracelets on left wrist. Woman takes bath, makes love, silver bracelets always on left wrist. Cut: enter Japanese man, veteran of student occupation of Yasuda Hall, wearing tinted glasses like lead in Ashes and Diamonds. A top TV director, he is haunted by dreams of tear gas, by memories of his wife who slit her wrist five years earlier. Cut (for what it's worth, this script has a lot of jump cuts): he sees the bracelets on woman's left wrist, flashes back to wife's bloodied wrist. So he asks woman: could she switch bracelets to her right wrist? "I refuse," she says. "I wear my bracelets on my left wrist.

a myth that the church has very successfully used to its advantage. Many people were under the same impression that there are tons of Scientologists in the film and television business and that we all help each other out. The real truth is that while the church would like you to believe it wields a tremendous amount of influence in Hollywood, that is simply not the case. Throughout my career I knew of one minor casting director who was a Scientologist, but other than that, no real movers and shakers. As a matter of fact, I think identifying myself publicly as a Scientologist probably hurt my career more than it helped it as far as perception was concerned. And while some of the courses the church offered provided me with better communication skills to help land roles, the time, money, and effort I invested certainly didn’t outweigh the benefit for me.

This question was fired at me by one Ulf Bronner, an assistant director, in his mid-thirties perhaps, and a strikingly ill-dressed man. Still, he was not dressed as shabbily as the cameramen; through my recent work for and with broadcasting companies I have discovered that they are the scruffiest-looking individuals in any form of employment, outdone only by press photographers. I have no idea why it should be thus, but as far as I can make out press photographers seem to wear the ragged cast-offs of television cameramen. Perhaps they imagine that nobody will ever see them, because after all the camera is in front of their faces. Whenever I come across an unflattering picture of someone in a magazine—they may be grimacing or similar—I frequently wonder what the photographer must have looked like. This Bronner fellow was better dressed than that, but not much.

About those gender binaries that still govern the world most of us live in: it’s important that in fanfiction, women are largely running the show. Where else is that true? Today, less than 30 percent of television writers are women;2 in film, that figure is below 20 percent.3 Oscar-nominated women directors? Four. In 2012, women comprised roughly 30 percent of the writers reviewed by the combined forces of the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Paris Review.4 Women dominate in romance writing (sometimes, even in the romances themselves)—only to have their accomplishments derided or ignored by the broader literary culture whose efforts their profits nonetheless help underwrite. In sum, those numbers mean there’s a lot of variously talented women we haven’t been hearing from. A great many of these women are writing fic.

May 11, Trump admitted to Lester Holt of NBC News that he was determined to fire Comey “regardless” of the recommendation from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in order to stop the investigation of the “Russia thing.” Trump isn’t the first president to attempt to obstruct justice. But he is the first to admit what he was doing on national TV, and his admissions led to the appointment of former FBI director Robert S. Mueller as a special counsel.

I had put it off and put it off and got extension after extension (all sorts of other things were going on at the time, like the stage show and the TV series), but eventually the managing director of Pan said, 'We've given you all these extensions and we have got to have it: sudden death or else, we have to have it in four weeks. Now, how far have you got with it?' I didn't like to tell him I hadn't started it; it seemed unfair on the poor chap's heart." —Douglas Adams

Everything I had done up to this point in my life was live: live TV, live stage, live competitions. Film is different. Whether you get it right or you get it wrong, you’re still going to do it over and over again. I was doing a dance number and I wasn’t happy with how it was turning out. The old perfectionist in me came out; I was frustrated and angry with myself for messing it up. The director came up to me and said, “Derek, calm down. We’re going to do at least twelve takes of this to get the camera angles.” Oh.

Tony Williams: You’ve often mentioned that Tales of Hoffmann (1951) has been a major influence on you. George Romero: It was the first film I got completely involved with. An aunt and uncle took me to see it in downtown Manhattan when it first played. And that was an event for me since I was about eleven at the time. The imagery just blew me away completely. I wanted to go and see a Tarzan movie but my aunt and uncle said, “No! Come and see a bit of culture here.” So I thought I was missing out. But I really fell in love with the film. There used to be a television show in New York called Million Dollar Movie. They would show the same film twice a day on weekdays, three times on Saturday, and three-to-four times on Sunday. Tales of Hoffmann appeared on it one week. I missed the first couple of days because I wasn’t aware that it was on. But the moment I found it was on, I watched virtually every telecast. This was before the days of video so, naturally, I couldn’t tape it. Those were the days you had to rent 16mm prints of any film. Most cities of any size had rental services and you could rent a surprising number of films. So once I started to look at Tales of Hoffmann I realized how much stuff Michael Powell did in the camera. Powell was so innovative in his technique. But it was also transparent so I could see how he achieved certain effects such as his use of an overprint in the scene of the ballet dancer on the lily ponds. I was beginning to understand how adept a director can be. But, aside from that, the imagery was superb. Robert Helpmann is the greatest Dracula that ever was. Those eyes were compelling. I was impressed by the way Powell shot Helpmann sweeping around in his cape and craning down over the balcony in the tavern. I felt the film was so unique compared to most of the things we were seeing in American cinema such as the westerns and other dreadful stuff I used to watch. Tales of Hoffmann just took me into another world in terms of its innovative cinematic technique. So it really got me going. Tony Williams: A really beautiful print exists on laserdisc with commentary by Martin Scorsese and others. George Romero: I was invited to collaborate on the commentary by Marty. Pat Buba (Tony’s brother) knew Thelma Schoonmaker and I got to meet Powell in later years. We had a wonderful dinner with him one evening. What an amazing guy! Eventually I got to see more of his movies that I’d never seen before such as I Know Where I’m Going and A Canterbury Tale. Anyway, I couldn’t do the commentary on Tales of Hoffmann with Marty. But, back in the old days in New York, Marty and I were the only two people who would rent a 16mm copy of the film. Every time I found it was out I knew that he had it and each time he wanted it he knew who had it! So that made us buddies.

Pan, The House of Bernarda Alba, Transform Caithness: Hunter, Be Near Me, Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us, The Bacchae (also Lincoln Center), Elizabeth Gordon Quinn, Home: Glasgow, and Black Watch, which toured internationally and for which he won Olivier and Critics’ Circle awards. He was Associate Director of the Traverse Theatre from 1996 to 2001, Paines Plough from 2001 to 2005, the National Theatre of Scotland from 2005 to 2012, and was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University in the 2010–2011 academic year. JACK THORNE writes for theater, film, television, and radio. His theater credits include Hope and Let the Right One In, both directed by John Tiffany, Junkyard, a Headlong, Rose Theatre Kingston, Bristol Old Vic & Theatr Clwyd co-production, The Solid Life of Sugar Water for the Graeae Theatre Company and the National Theatre,

Hitler and Mussolini were indeed authoritarians, but it doesn’t follow that authoritarianism equals fascism or Nazism. Lenin and Stalin were authoritarian, but neither was a fascist. Many dictators—Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, Perón in Argentina, Amin in Uganda—were authoritarian without being fascists or Nazis. Trump admittedly has a bossy style that he gets from, well, being a boss. He has been a corporate boss all his life, and he also played a boss on TV. Republicans elected Trump because they needed a tough guy to take on Hillary; previously they tried bland, harmless candidates like Romney, and look where that got them. That being said, Trump has done nothing to subvert the democratic process. While progressives continue to allege a plot between Trump and the Russians to rig the election, the only evidence for actual rigging comes from the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to rig the 2016 primary in favor of Hillary over Bernie. This rigging evoked virtually no dissent from Democratic officials or from the media, suggesting the support, or at least acquiescence, of the whole progressive movement and most of the party itself. Trump fired his FBI director, provoking dark ruminations in the Washington Post about Trump’s “respect for the rule of law,” yet Trump’s action was entirely lawful.18 He has criticized judges, sometimes in derisive terms, but contrary to Timothy Snyder there is nothing undemocratic about this. Lincoln blasted Justice Taney over the Dred Scott decision, and FDR was virtually apoplectic when the Supreme Court blocked his New Deal initiatives. Criticizing the media isn’t undemocratic either. The First Amendment isn’t just a press prerogative; the president too has the right to free speech.

Thirty-nine-year-old moderately successful Human Resources Director. Interests include regency romances, reality TV, and baking large novelty birthday cakes for other people’s children. Hobbies include drinking Tia Maria and eating Turkish delight in the bath and dining out with her mum and dad. Wanted to be a ballerina but didn’t end up with a ballerina body; however, has been told she is an impressive dirty dancer when drunk. Knows her wine, so please just hand the wine list over. Godmother to nine children, member of two book clubs, Social Club Manager for the Australian Payroll Officers’ Association. Suffers from a severe blushing problem but is not shy and will probably end up better friends with your friends than you, which you’ll find highly irritating after we break up. Has recently become so worried about meeting the love of her life and having children before she reaches menopause that she has cried piteously in the middle of the night. But otherwise is generally quite cheerful and has on at least three separate occasions that she knows of been described as ‘Charming’. Yep, that about summed it up. What a catch.

Sex may be completely out in the open now, but it's still defined and controlled by a powerful subset of elite men. In the past thirty years, ideas about what makes women sexy have become narrower, more rigid, and more pornographic in their focus on display and performance. Nancy Jo Sales wrote an article in Vanity Fair about the 'porn star' aesthetic and young girls' behavior on social media, observing that pornography is not about liberation but about control. The more pornography, the more control. 'Girls talk about feeling like they have to be like what they see on TV,' the director of a youth-counseling service for teens told Sales. 'They talk about body-image issues and not having any role models. They all want to be like the Kardashians.' The pervasiveness of the porn aesthetic, combined with the under-representation of more multidimensional female characters, affects the attitudes, behavior, and ideas about gender roles in both girls and boys, but it's especially insidious for girls' self-concept; as they constantly absorb the message that the choice comes down to either duck-faced selfies across a portfolio of social-media accounts, or abject invisibility.

For years I’ve been asking myself (and my readers) whether these propagandists—commonly called corporate or capitalist journalists—are evil or stupid. I vacillate day by day. Most often I think both. But today I’m thinking evil. Here’s why. You may have heard of John Stossel. He’s a long-term analyst, now anchor, on a television program called 20/20, and is most famous for his segment called “Give Me A Break,” in which, to use his language, he debunks commonly held myths. Most of the rest of us would call what he does “lying to serve corporations.” For example, in one of his segments, he claimed that “buying organic [vegetables] could kill you.” He stated that specially commissioned studies had found no pesticide residues on either organically grown or pesticide-grown fruits and vegetables, and had found further that organic foods are covered with dangerous strains of E. coli. But the researchers Stossel cited later stated he misrepresented their research. The reason they didn’t find any pesticides is because they never tested for them (they were never asked to). Further, they said Stossel misrepresented the tests on E. coli. Stossel refused to issue a retraction. Worse, the network aired the piece two more times. And still worse, it came out later that 20/20’s executive director Victor Neufeld knew about the test results and knew that Stossel was lying a full three months before the original broadcast.391 This is not unusual for Stossel and company.

It's hard to form a lasting connection when your permanent address is an eight-inch mailbox in the UPS store. Still,as I inch my way closer, I can't help the way my breath hitches, the way my insides thrum and swirl. And when he turns,flashing me that slow, languorous smile that's about to make him world famous,his eyes meeting mine when he says, "Hey,Daire-Happy Sweet Sixteen," I can't help but think of the millions of girls who would do just about anything to stand in my pointy blue babouches. I return the smile, flick a little wave of my hand, then bury it in the side pocket of the olive-green army jacket I always wear. Pretending not to notice the way his gaze roams over me, straying from my waist-length brown hair peeking out from my scarf, to the tie-dyed tank top that clings under my jacket,to the skinny dark denim jeans,all the way down to the brand-new slippers I wear on my feet. "Nice." He places his foot beside mine, providing me with a view of the his-and-hers version of the very same shoe. Laughing when he adds, "Maybe we can start a trend when we head back to the States.What do you think?" We. There is no we. I know it.He knows it.And it bugs me that he tries to pretend otherwise. The cameras stopped rolling hours ago, and yet here he is,still playing a role. Acting as though our brief, on-location hookup means something more. Acting like we won't really end long before our passports are stamped RETURN. And that's all it takes for those annoyingly soft girly feelings to vanish as quickly as a flame in the rain. Allowing the Daire I know,the Daire I've honed myself to be, to stand in her palce. "Doubtful." I smirk,kicking his shoe with mine.A little harder then necessary, but then again,he deserves it for thinking I'm lame enough to fall for his act. "So,what do you say-food? I'm dying for one of those beef brochettes,maybe even a sausage one too.Oh-and some fries would be good!" I make for the food stalls,but Vane has another idea. His hand reaches for mine,fingers entwining until they're laced nice and tight. "In a minute," he says,pulling me so close my hip bumps against his. "I thought we might do something special-in honor of your birthday and all.What do you think about matching tattoos?" I gape.Surely he's joking. "Yeah,you know,mehndi. Nothing permanent.Still,I thought it could be kinda cool." He arcs his left brow in his trademark Vane Wick wau,and I have to fight not to frown in return. Nothing permanent. That's my theme song-my mission statement,if you will. Still,mehndi's not quite the same as a press-on. It has its own life span. One that will linger long after Vane's studio-financed, private jet lifts him high into the sky and right out of my life. Though I don't mention any of that, instead I just say, "You know the director will kill you if you show up on set tomorrow covered in henna." Vane shrugs. Shrugs in a way I've seen too many times, on too many young actors before him.He's in full-on star-power mode.Think he's indispensable. That he's the only seventeen-year-old guy with a hint of talent,golden skin, wavy blond hair, and piercing blue eyes that can light up a screen and make the girls (and most of their moms) swoon. It's a dangerous way to see yourself-especially when you make your living in Hollywood. It's the kind of thinking that leads straight to multiple rehab stints, trashy reality TV shows, desperate ghostwritten memoirs, and low-budget movies that go straight to DVD.

Rebecca Wallace-Segall, who teaches creative-writing workshops for kids and teens as director of Writopia Lab in New York City, says that the students who sign up for her classes “are often not the kids who are willing to talk for hours about fashion and celebrity. Those kids are less likely to come, perhaps because they’re less inclined to analyze and dig deep—that’s not their comfort zone. The so-called shy kids are often hungry to brainstorm ideas, deconstruct them, and act on them, and, paradoxically, when they’re allowed to interact this way, they’re not shy at all. They’re connecting with each other, but in a deeper zone, in a place that’s considered boring or tiresome by some of their peers.” And these kids do “come out” when they’re ready; most of the Writopia kids read their works at local bookstores, and a staggering number win prestigious national writing competitions. If your child is prone to overstimulation, then it’s also a good idea for her to pick activities like art or long-distance running, that depend less on performing under pressure. If she’s drawn to activities that require performance, though, you can help her thrive. When I was a kid, I loved figure skating. I could spend hours on the rink, tracing figure eights, spinning happily, or flying through the air. But on the day of my competitions, I was a wreck. I hadn’t slept the night before and would often fall during moves that I had sailed through in practice. At first I believed what people told me—that I had the jitters, just like everybody else. But then I saw a TV interview with the Olympic gold medalist Katarina Witt. She said that pre-competition nerves gave her the adrenaline she needed to win the gold. I knew then that Katarina and I were utterly different creatures, but it took me decades to figure out why. Her nerves were so mild that they simply energized her, while mine were constricting enough to make me choke. At the time, my very supportive mother quizzed the other skating moms about how their own daughters handled pre-competition anxiety, and came back with insights that she hoped would make me feel better. Kristen’s nervous too, she reported. Renée’s mom says she’s scared the night before a competition. But I knew Kristen and Renée well, and I was certain that they weren’t as frightened as I was

But there were problems. After the movie came out I couldn’t go to a tournament without being surrounded by fans asking for autographs. Instead of focusing on chess positions, I was pulled into the image of myself as a celebrity. Since childhood I had treasured the sublime study of chess, the swim through ever-deepening layers of complexity. I could spend hours at a chessboard and stand up from the experience on fire with insight about chess, basketball, the ocean, psychology, love, art. The game was exhilarating and also spiritually calming. It centered me. Chess was my friend. Then, suddenly, the game became alien and disquieting. I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled.

In the shock of the moment, I gave some thought to renting a convertible and driving the twenty-seven hundred miles back alone. But then I realized I was neither single nor crazy. The acting director decided that, given the FBI’s continuing responsibility for my safety, the best course was to take me back on the plane I came on, with a security detail and a flight crew who had to return to Washington anyway. We got in the vehicle to head for the airport. News helicopters tracked our journey from the L.A. FBI office to the airport. As we rolled slowly in L.A. traffic, I looked to my right. In the car next to us, a man was driving while watching an aerial news feed of us on his mobile device. He turned, smiled at me through his open window, and gave me a thumbs-up. I’m not sure how he was holding the wheel. As we always did, we pulled onto the airport tarmac with a police escort and stopped at the stairs of the FBI plane. My usual practice was to go thank the officers who had escorted us, but I was so numb and distracted that I almost forgot to do it. My special assistant, Josh Campbell, as he often did, saw what I couldn’t. He nudged me and told me to go thank the cops. I did, shaking each hand, and then bounded up the airplane stairs. I couldn’t look at the pilots or my security team for fear that I might get emotional. They were quiet. The helicopters then broadcast our plane’s taxi and takeoff. Those images were all over the news. President Trump, who apparently watches quite a bit of TV at the White House, saw those images of me thanking the cops and flying away. They infuriated him. Early the next morning, he called McCabe and told him he wanted an investigation into how I had been allowed to use the FBI plane to return from California. McCabe replied that he could look into how I had been allowed to fly back to Washington, but that he didn’t need to. He had authorized it, McCabe told the president. The plane had to come back, the security detail had to come back, and the FBI was obligated to return me safely. The president exploded. He ordered that I was not to be allowed back on FBI property again, ever. My former staff boxed up my belongings as if I had died and delivered them to my home. The order kept me from seeing and offering some measure of closure to the people of the FBI, with whom I had become very close. Trump had done a lot of yelling during the campaign about McCabe and his former candidate wife. He had been fixated on it ever since. Still in a fury at McCabe, Trump then asked him, “Your wife lost her election in Virginia, didn’t she?” “Yes, she did,” Andy replied. The president of the United States then said to the acting director of the FBI, “Ask her how it feels to be a loser” and hung up the phone.

It was discussed and decided that fear would be perpetuated globally in order that focus would stay on the negative rather than allow for soul expression to positively emerge. As people became more fearful and compliant, capacity for free thought and soul expression would diminish. There is a distinct inability to exert soul expression under mind control, and evolution of the human spirit would diminish along with freedom of thought when bombarded with constant negative terrors. Whether Bush and Cheney deliberately planned to raise a collective fear over collective conscious love is doubtful. They did not think, speak, or act in those terms. Instead, they knew that information control gave them power over people, and they were hell-bent to perpetuate it at all costs. Cheney, Bush, and other global elite ushering in the New World Order totally believed in the plan mapped out by artificial intelligence. They were allowing technology to dictate global control. “Life is like a video game,” Bush once told me at the rural multi-million dollar Lampe, Missouri CIA mind control training camp complex designed for Black Ops Special Forces where torture and virtual reality technologies were used. “Since I have access to the technological source of the plans, I dictate the rules of the game.” The rules of the game demanded instantaneous response with no time to consciously think and critically analyze. Constant conscious disruption of thought through television’s burst of light flashes, harmonics, and subconscious subliminals diminished continuity of conscious thought anyway, creating a deficit of attention that could easily be refocused into video game format. DARPA’s artificial intelligence was reliant on secrecy, and a terrifying cover for reality was chosen to divert people from the simple truth. Since people perceive aliens as being physical like them, it was decided that the technological reality could be disguised according to preconceptions. Through generations of genetic encoding dating back to the beginning of man, serpents incite an innate autogenic response system in humans to “freeze” in terror. George Bush was excited at the prospects of diverting people from truth by fear through perpetuating lizard-like serpent alien misconceptions. “People fear what they don’t know anyway. By compounding that fear with autogenic fear response, they won’t want to look into Pandora’s Box.” Through deliberate generation of fear; suppression of facts under the 1947 National Security Act; Bush’s stint as CIA director during Ford’s Administration; the Warren Commission’s whitewash of the Kennedy Assassination; secrecy artificially ensured by mind control particularly concerning DARPA, HAARP, Roswell, Montauk, etc; and with people’s fluidity of conscious thought rapidly diminishing; the secret government embraced the proverbial ‘absolute power that corrupts absolutely.’ According to New World Order plans being discussed at the Grove, plans for reducing the earth’s population was a high priority. Mass genocide of so-called “undesirables” through the proliferation of AIDS4 was high on Bush’s agenda. “We’ll annihilate the niggers at their source, beginning in South and East Africa and Haiti5.” Having heard Bush say those words is by far one of the most torturous things I ever endured. Equally as torturous to my being were the discussions on genetic engineering, human cloning, and depletion of earth’s natural resources for profit. Cheney remarked that no one would be able to think to stop technology’s plan. “I’ll destroy the planet first,” Bush had vowed.

Anna Chapman was born Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, in Volgograd, formally Stalingrad, Russia, an important Russian industrial city. During the Battle of Stalingrad in World War II, the city became famous for its resistance against the German Army. As a matter of personal history, I had an uncle, by marriage that was killed in this battle. Many historians consider the battle of Stalingrad the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of warfare. Anna earned her master's degree in economics in Moscow. Her father at the time was employed by the Soviet embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, where he allegedly was a senior KGB agent. After her marriage to Alex Chapman, Anna became a British subject and held a British passport. For a time Alex and Anna lived in London where among other places, she worked for Barclays Bank. In 2009 Anna Chapman left her husband and London, and moved to New York City, living at 20 Exchange Place, in the Wall Street area of downtown Manhattan. In 2009, after a slow start, she enlarged her real-estate business, having as many as 50 employees. Chapman, using her real name worked in the Russian “Illegals Program,” a group of sleeper agents, when an undercover FBI agent, in a New York coffee shop, offered to get her a fake passport, which she accepted. On her father’s advice she handed the passport over to the NYPD, however it still led to her arrest. Ten Russian agents including Anna Chapman were arrested, after having been observed for years, on charges which included money laundering and suspicion of spying for Russia. This led to the largest prisoner swap between the United States and Russia since 1986. On July 8, 2010 the swap was completed at the Vienna International Airport. Five days later the British Home Office revoked Anna’s citizenship preventing her return to England. In December of 2010 Anna Chapman reappeared when she was appointed to the public council of the Young Guard of United Russia, where she was involved in the education of young people. The following month Chapman began hosting a weekly TV show in Russia called Secrets of the World and in June of 2011 she was appointed as editor of Venture Business News magazine. In 2012, the FBI released information that Anna Chapman attempted to snare a senior member of President Barack Obama's cabinet, in what was termed a “Honey Trap.” After the 2008 financial meltdown, sources suggest that Anna may have targeted the dapper Peter Orzag, who was divorced in 2006 and served as Special Assistant to the President, for Economic Policy. Between 2007 and 2010 he was involved in the drafting of the federal budget for the Obama Administration and may have been an appealing target to the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Agency. During Orzag’s time as a federal employee, he frequently came to New York City, where associating with Anna could have been a natural fit, considering her financial and economics background. Coincidently, Orzag resigned from his federal position the same month that Chapman was arrested. Following this, Orzag took a job at Citigroup as Vice President of Global Banking. In 2009, he fathered a child with his former girlfriend, Claire Milonas, the daughter of Greek shipping executive, Spiros Milonas, chairman and President of Ionian Management Inc. In September of 2010, Orzag married Bianna Golodryga, the popular news and finance anchor at Yahoo and a contributor to MSNBC's Morning Joe. She also had co-anchored the weekend edition of ABC's Good Morning America. Not surprisingly Bianna was born in in Moldova, Soviet Union, and in 1980, her family moved to Houston, Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, with a degree in Russian/East European & Eurasian studies and has a minor in economics. They have two children. Yes, she is fluent in Russian! Presently Orszag is a banker and economist, and a Vice Chairman of investment banking and Managing Director at Lazard.

When she’s in a courtroom, Wendy Patrick, a deputy district attorney for San Diego, uses some of the roughest words in the English language. She has to, given that she prosecutes sex crimes. Yet just repeating the words is a challenge for a woman who not only holds a law degree but also degrees in theology and is an ordained Baptist minister. “I have to say (a particularly vulgar expletive) in court when I’m quoting other people, usually the defendants,” she admitted. There’s an important reason Patrick has to repeat vile language in court. “My job is to prove a case, to prove that a crime occurred,” she explained. “There’s often an element of coercion, of threat, (and) of fear. Colorful language and context is very relevant to proving the kind of emotional persuasion, the menacing, a flavor of how scary these guys are. The jury has to be made aware of how bad the situation was. Those words are disgusting.” It’s so bad, Patrick said, that on occasion a judge will ask her to tone things down, fearing a jury’s emotions will be improperly swayed. And yet Patrick continues to be surprised when she heads over to San Diego State University for her part-time work of teaching business ethics. “My students have no qualms about dropping the ‘F-bomb’ in class,” she said. “The culture in college campuses is that unless they’re disruptive or violating the rules, that’s (just) the way kids talk.” Experts say people swear for impact, but the widespread use of strong language may in fact lessen that impact, as well as lessen society’s ability to set apart certain ideas and words as sacred. . . . [C]onsider the now-conversational use of the texting abbreviation “OMG,” for “Oh, My God,” and how the full phrase often shows up in settings as benign as home-design shows without any recognition of its meaning by the speakers. . . . Diane Gottsman, an etiquette expert in San Antonio, in a blog about workers cleaning up their language, cited a 2012 Career Builder survey in which 57 percent of employers say they wouldn’t hire a candidate who used profanity. . . . She added, “It all comes down to respect: if you wouldn’t say it to your grandmother, you shouldn’t say it to your client, your boss, your girlfriend or your wife.” And what about Hollywood, which is often blamed for coarsening the language? According to Barbara Nicolosi, a Hollywood script consultant and film professor at Azusa Pacific University, an evangelical Christian school, lazy script writing is part of the explanation for the blue tide on television and in the movies. . . . By contrast, she said, “Bad writers go for the emotional punch of crass language,” hence the fire-hose spray of obscenities [in] some modern films, almost regardless of whether or not the subject demands it. . . . Nicolosi, who noted that “nobody misses the bad language” when it’s omitted from a script, said any change in the industry has to come from among its ranks: “Writers need to have a conversation among themselves and in the industry where we popularize much more responsible methods in storytelling,” she said. . . . That change can’t come quickly enough for Melissa Henson, director of grass-roots education and advocacy for the Parents Television Council, a pro-decency group. While conceding there is a market for “adult-themed” films and language, Henson said it may be smaller than some in the industry want to admit. “The volume of R-rated stuff that we’re seeing probably far outpaces what the market would support,” she said. By contrast, she added, “the rate of G-rated stuff is hardly sufficient to meet market demands.” . . . Henson believes arguments about an “artistic need” for profanity are disingenuous. “You often hear people try to make the argument that art reflects life,” Henson said. “I don’t hold to that. More often than not, ‘art’ shapes the way we live our lives, and it skews our perceptions of the kind of life we're supposed to live." [DN, Apr. 13, 2014]

In Buddhist art, the portrayals of the Buddha are suffused with shanta rasa, a sense of transcendental peace, as are the Hindu depictions of Lord Shiva in meditation. One movie is brought to mind that strikes me as a yogic parable—The Truman Show. It seems to me reminiscent of the life of the Buddha, though told in a curious way. Truman’s entire life is a television show. Unknown to him, the community where he lives is actually a giant stage set and all the people in his life—including his wife and co-workers—are actors. People in the outside world avidly follow Truman’s every move, and everything is under the control of a Svengali-like director, of whom Truman is unaware. Truman’s controlled environment is like the Buddha’s. Both were shielded from the truth since birth. As cracks in the edifice of untruth start to appear they begin to wake up. They look around and inquire, ‘What’s going on?’ In a great leap both leave their lives and, risking everything, go through a doorway into the unknown. Of course, while the Buddha went through the door that led to enlightenment, Truman went through the door that led to the backlot of a movie studio. Both stories are parables of our soul’s journey of awakening. We discover that things are completely different from the way we thought, and we wake up to a new reality. But we can only follow Truman to the point where he makes that heroic choice. That is his enlightenment.

When I ask people who work in television why there aren’t more women directing, some privately say they can’t find them. It’s so annoying. I’d like to call on the heads of these companies — Amazon, Netflix, HBO, AMC, etc. — to make it a company mandate to have an equal number of women directing. If you can’t find a woman you like to direct, then damn it, develop the female directors yourselves. The women who can direct are out there. Just call me, I’ll send them over.” Barbara Schock, Filmmaker and chair of the graduate film program, Tisch School of the Arts, N.Y.U.

10 Ideas For Transforming Advertising 1. No cranberry bagels at meetings. No exceptions. 2. While on duty, copywriters required to wear those Peruvian knit hats with the funny earflaps. 3. Reinstatement of the three martini lunch. After a 6-month trial period, optional upgrade to four. 4. Confiscate all computers and baseball caps from art directors. 5. Use of the following terms will be considered justifiable cause for termination: ecosystem, conversation, engagement, landscape, seared ahi tuna, and quirky. 6. When making presentations, account planners must dress up as pirates and hop around on one foot. 7. Breakthrough idea for tv spots: Animals that talk! 8. Criminalize all products containing pomegranates or acai berries. 9.  Increase touch points from 360 degrees to 380 degrees. 10. Require Sir Martin Sorrell to walk around with his weenie out.

What?” the Director snapped. “Am I telling stories out of school? Was it a secret that I preside over a large sweaty pile of people in a useless fake profession who somehow didn’t have the mental fortitude to play pretend in return for paychecks all day? While I, Chief Asswiper to the Thought-Leader Elite, have to pay for three evil children, two shitty houses, and one supposed woman who stopped fucking me five years before she threw me out, literally, onto the street, where I was hit by some fat neckbeard on a Vespa so now in addition to all of the above I have to pay for five stupidly costly medications prescribed just to stop me from shrieking like a stuck pig all fucking day. And your issue is what? That I am revealing to people who piss their pants if they see a TV remote that they are in fact so damaged that they piss their pants if they see a TV remote? Eat shit and die.

Did these two actors, both quite conservative, see the parallels between Norton and studio moguls like Sam Goldwyn? Did Norton’s private police force suggest to these men who began as extras the incipient fascism of the system they had endured? In Brennan’s case, the answer is probably yes. Years later, reminiscing about the Hollywood studio system, he told a television director that the studio guard was among “the feared men in Hollywood.” Walter remembered the day he arrived in his car for work on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a David O. Selznick production. “What’s your name?” the studio guard asked. “Do you have a pass to drive on?” Walter said, “My name is Walter Brennan. If Mr. Selznick asks where I am, tell him I’m at the beach.” The guard asked, “Which beach?” Walter replied, “Just the beach,” and drove away. Sounding like the Colonel, Brennan told a reporter, “My weakness is talking about how I’m always going to punch somebody in the nose.” Sometimes he did take a swing and even cussed out “some overbearing studio hireling who picks on extras or on one of Brennan’s friends of the hard luck days.

As TV and film writer/director Joss Whedon said, “The enemy of Humanism is not faith—the enemy of Humanism is hate, it is fear, it is ignorance, it is the darker part of man that is in every Humanist, and every person in the world…But faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God means believing absolutely in something, with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers.”4

As scientists linked smoking to cancer, the tobacco industry was under particularly pointed attack, which might have heightened Powell’s alarmism. As a director at Philip Morris from 1964 until he joined the Supreme Court, Powell was an unabashed defender of tobacco, signing off on a series of annual reports lashing out at critics. The company’s 1967 annual report, for instance, declared, “We deplore the lack of objectivity in so important a controversy…Unfortunately the positive benefits of smoking which are so widely acknowledged are largely ignored by many reports linking cigarettes and health, and little attention is paid to the scientific reports which are favorable to smoking.” Powell took umbrage at the refusal by the Federal Communications Commission to grant the tobacco companies “equal time” to respond to their critics on television and argued that the companies’ First Amendment rights were being infringed.

Years later, reporters would link together the deaths of many members of the cast and crew of The Conqueror (1955), including Susan, John Wayne, Agnes Moorehead, Pedro Armendariz, and director Dick Powell. All of them eventually developed cancer; the cause seems to have been the radiation that hovered over the Utah filming site in 1955 after government A-bomb tests.

The growing interest in medieval-period reconstruction is vividly legible in the music, cinema listings and television schedules of the late 1960s and early 70s. Besides the BBC Tudor series mentioned earlier – which led to a spin-off cinema version, Henry VIII and his Six Wives, in 1972 – there was Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), centred on Henry’s first wife Anne Boleyn, starring Richard Burton and Geneviève Bujold; the Thomas More biopic A Man for All Seasons (1966); Peter O’Toole as Henry II in Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter (1968); David Hemmings as Alfred the Great (1969); the hysterical convent of Russell’s The Devils (1971); and future singer Murray Head in a melodramatic retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight (1973). In the same period HTV West made a series of often repeated mud-and-guts episodes of Arthur of the Britons (1972–3), and visionary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini unveiled his earthy adapations of the Decameron (1970) and The Canterbury Tales (1971). From the time of the English Civil War, Ken Hughes cast Richard Harris in his erratic portrait of Cromwell (1970); and the twenty-three-year-old doomed genius Michael Reeves made his Witchfinder General in 1968, in which the East Anglian farmland becomes a transfigured backdrop to a tale of superstition and violent religious persecution in 1645. Period reconstruction, whether in film, television or music, has been a staple of British culture, innate to a mindset that always finds its identity in the grain of the past.

Campaigners for God, Country and the American Way of Life did not stop when they had crushed radical trade unions and jailed socialist, syndicalist and communist spokespeople. They also bought out and took over the communication apparatus: the press, the schools and colleges, the libraries, the churches, civic organizations, the movies, radio and television. The professions, notably education were purged of subversive teachers, textbooks and ideas. The same men who operated mines, factories and department stores became owners, directors and trustees of the entire communication apparatus. Communication, like merchandising and farming became parts of the big business octopus that was reaching its tentacles into every profit-yielding corner of American life. ….Papers that spoke for the Oligarchs and their interests got the advertising. Others died of financial malnutrition…. ….Book publishers and magazine editors were members of the American Oligarchy. They were not top-flight members; they held their jobs so long as they built readership, got advertising and showed profits on the investment…

There used to be well over a dozen A-list directors working in Hollywood at any given time who could get most any movie they wanted greenlit at any studio where they chose to work. Today there are only three: Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, and Christopher Nolan. In the franchise age, directors increasingly resemble hired hands who are brought in to helm a single sequel or spinoff but aren’t integral to the brand. The fourteen Marvel Studios films released through 2016, for instance, had eleven different directors. The model is similar to that of a television series. Directors come and go for different episodes and are valued largely for their ability to maintain the tone of the series and bring their installment in on time and on budget. In TV, the power has traditionally lain with writers and producers—many of whom serve both roles—who work on every episode, maintaining long-running story arcs and the consistency and coherence of story lines and characters.

Exhibit #2 ________ Director of Marketing Dear ________: Special, highly effective TV exposure at half the ordinary cost, even a smaller fraction of the ordinary cost — even free! Yes, it is possible. Our annual ARTHRITIS FOUNDATION TELETHON has moved to CHANNEL 10 (Phoenix' CBS affiliate), and we are offering an expanded, more flexible, more creative range of Sponsor Opportunities to businesses of all sizes in the valley. Many corporate sponsors last year actually participated spending little or no money — the funds were raised through fundraising events or promotions involving their employees or customers. For example, one major corporation used several Employee Promotions, and raised over $50,000.00. A small company used a Bowl-A-Thon with their employees, employees' family members, and friends, and raised $5,000.00. Both received excellent exposure on the Telethon. AND THIS YEAR, THE OPPORTUNITIES ARE EVEN GREATER.

Rakesh Roshan Rakesh Roshan is a producer, director, and actor in Bollywood films. A member of the successful Roshan film family, Mr. Roshan opened his own production company in 1982 and has been producing Hindi movies ever since. His film Kaho Naa…Pyaar Hai won nine Filmfare awards, including those for best movie and best director. I didn’t have the privilege of meeting Diana personally, but as a keen observer I learned a lot about her through the media and television coverage of her various activities and her visits to various countries, including India. I vividly remember when she came to my country and visited places that interested her, such as Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, various homes of the destitute, orphanages, hospitals, and so on. On all of these occasions, her kind looks, kind words, and kind actions, such as holding the poor orphan children in her lap, caring for them with love, and wiping their tears, were sufficient indications to convey the passion that Diana had in her heart for the service of the poor and underprivileged. Wherever she went, she went with such noble mission. She derived a sort of divine pleasure through her visits to charitable institutions, orphanages, and homes of the destitute. By minutely looking at her, one could see a deity in Diana--dedicated to love and kindness--devoted to charity and goodness and the darling of all she met. For such human virtues, love for the poor and concern for the suffering of humanity, Diana commands the immense respect, admiration, and affection of the whole world. Wherever she went, she was received with genuine affection and warmth, unlike politically staged receptions.

Rakesh Roshan Rakesh Roshan is a producer, director, and actor in Bollywood films. A member of the successful Roshan film family, Mr. Roshan opened his own production company in 1982 and has been producing Hindi movies ever since. His film Kaho Naa…Pyaar Hai won nine Filmfare awards, including those for best movie and best director. When I remember Diana and her activities in the last years of her life, I strongly feel that God sends some special people into this world to perform some special duties. Diana was one of these special people. Advancing on this godly path of love and goodness, Diana was blossoming like a flower, and with her captivating fragrance she started infusing new life in our dangerously sick garden--which was apparently at the brink of a precipice. The irony is that the cruel winds of autumn ruthlessly blew away this rare flower and deprived the world of its soothing fragrance. Diana, Princess of Wales, is no longer present in this world, but Diana, the queen of millions of hearts, is immortal and will live forever. My heart breaks when I think of her last journey, her funeral, which was brilliantly covered all over the world. One could see the whole of England in tears, and the eyes of all the television viewers were also flooded. Thousands of men, women, and children had lined up along the entire route from the palace to the church where the services were held. All the fresh flowers available in the United Kingdom were there on the passage. All eyes were tearful, and one could clearly hear the sobs of people. There were heartrending scenes of people paying tribute to their departed darling. Last, I would like to write here a translation in English of a poem written in Urdu. We hope you will come back…dear friend But why this pervading sadness…dear friend The familiar flavor in the atmosphere is singing… You are somewhere around…dear friend Please come back, Diana; this sinking world desperately needs a savior.

Jack Reacher made his first appearance in print on March 17, 1997—St. Patrick’s Day—when Putnam published Killing Floor in the United States, which was Reacher’s—and my—debut. But I can trace his, and the book’s, genesis backward at least to New Year’s Eve 1988. Back then I worked for a commercial television station in Manchester, England. I was eleven years into a career as a presentation director, which was a little like an air traffic controller for the network airwaves. In February 1988, the UK commercial network had started twenty-four-hour broadcasting. For a year before that, management had been talking about how to man the new expanded commitment. None of us really wanted to work nights. Management didn’t really want to hire extra people. End of story. Stalemate. Impasse. What broke it was the offer of a huge raise. We took it, and by New Year’s Eve we were ten fat and happy months into the new contract. I went to a party, but didn’t feel much like celebrating. Not that I wasn’t content in the short term—I sleep better by day than night, and I like being up and about when the world is quiet and lonely, and for sure I was having a ball with the new salary. But I knew in my bones that management resented the raise, and I knew that the new contract was in fact the beginning of the end. Sooner or later, we would all be fired in revenge. I felt it was only a matter of time. Nobody agreed with me, except one woman. At the party, in a quiet moment, she asked me, “What are you going to do when this is all over?

The Director’s Chair is with Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, etc.), and Robert refers later to this quote from Francis: “Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.” ROBERT: “Even if I didn’t sell Mariachi, I would have learned so much by doing that project. That was the idea—I’m there to learn. I’m not there to win; I’m there to learn, because then I’ll win, eventually. . . . “You’ve got to be able to look at your failures and know that there’s a key to success in every failure. If you look through the ashes long enough, you’ll find something. I’ll give you one. Quentin [Tarantino] asked me, ‘Do you want to do one of these short films called Four Rooms [where each director can create the film of their choosing, but it has to be limited to a single hotel room, and include New Year’s Eve and a bellhop]?’ and my hand went up right away, instinctively. . . . “The movie bombed. In the ashes of that failure, I can find at least two keys of success. On the set when I was doing it, I had cast Antonio Banderas as the dad and had this cool little Mexican as his son. They looked really close together. Then I found the best actress I could find, this little half-Asian girl. She was amazing. I needed an Asian mom. I really wanted them to look like a family. It’s New Year’s Eve, because [it] was dictated by the script, so they’re all dressed in tuxedos. I was looking at Antonio and his Asian wife and thinking, ‘Wow, they look like this really cool, international spy couple. What if they were spies, and these two little kids, who can barely tie their shoes, didn’t know they were spies?’ I thought of that on the set of Four Rooms. There are four of those [Spy Kids movies] now and a TV series coming. “So that’s one. The other one was, after [Four Rooms] failed, I thought, ‘I still love short films.’ Anthologies never work. We shouldn’t have had four stories; it should have been three stories because that’s probably three acts, and it should just be the same director instead of different directors because we didn’t know what each person was doing. I’m going to try it again. Why on earth would I try it again, if I knew they didn’t work? Because you figured something out when you’re doing it the first time, and [the second attempt] was Sin City.” TIM: “Amazing.

Instead, the weeds are being read as a parable, a lesson that a monolithic, oil-based urban culture is unsustainable in the twenty-first century, and that there might be other, more ecologically gentle ways of living in cities. Families too poor to buy fresh food are starting neighbourhood organic farms on the sites of demolished local blocks. Young people from all over America – musicians, Green activists, social pioneers – are flooding into the abandoned areas, keen to experiment with new patterns of urban living which accept nature – including its weedy frontiersmen – rather than attempting to drive it out. As Julien Temple, director of the remarkable TV documentary Requiem for Detroit, has written: ‘amid the ruins of the Motor City it is possible to find a first pioneer’s map to the post-industrial future that awaits us all’.

Our SUV and four other cars accelerated fast and skidded up over the grass on Professor Peter Yu’s property, tearing up the lawn and destroying shrubs. I’m told that this dramatic entrance, which you’d think was made up by TV-movie directors, is in fact the most efficient way to approach a suspect. It’s all about intimidation. We

I began to delight in surprising adults with my refined palate and disgusting my inexperienced peers with what I would discover to be some of nature's greatest gifts. By the age of ten I had learned to break down a full lobster with my bare hands and a nutcracker. I devoured steak tartare, pâtés, sardines, snails baked in butter and smothered with roasted garlic. I tried raw sea cucumber, abalone, and oysters on the half shell. At night my mother would roast dried cuttlefish on a camp stove in the garage and serve it with a bowl of peanuts and a sauce of red pepper paste mixed with Japanese mayonnaise. My father would tear it into strips and we'd eat it watching television together until our jaws were sore, and I'd wash it all down with small sips from one of my mother's Coronas. Neither one of my parents graduated from college. I was not raised in a household with many books or records. I was not exposed to fine art at a young age or taken to any museums or plays at established cultural institutions. My parents wouldn't have known the names of authors I should read or foreign directors I should watch. I was not given an old edition of Catcher in the Rye as a preteen, copies of Rolling Stones records on vinyl, or any kind of instructional material from the past that might help give me a leg up to cultural maturity. But my parents were worldly in their own ways. They had seen much of the world and had tasted what it had to offer. What they lacked in high culture, they made up for by spending their hard-earned money on the finest of delicacies. My childhood was rich with flavor---blood sausage, fish intestines, caviar. They loved good food, to make it, to seek it, to share it, and I was an honorary guest at their table.

his five-decade dictatorial control of the FBI to transform the agency into a vehicle for shielding organized crime, fortifying his corrupt political partners, oppressing Black Americans, surveilling his political enemies, suppressing free speech and dissent, and as a platform for building a cult of personality around his own inflated ego. More recently, Dr. Fauci’s perennial biographer, Charles Ortleb, analogized Dr. Fauci’s career and pathological mendacity to the sociopathic con men Bernie Madoff and Charles Ponzi.37 Another critic, author J. B. Handley, labeled Dr. Fauci “a snake oil salesman” and a “bigger medical charlatan than Rasputin.”38 Economist and author Peter Navarro, former Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, observed during a national network television interview in April 2021 that “Fauci is a sociopath and a liar.”39 His white lab coat, his official title, and his groaning bookshelves crowded with awards from his medical cartel collaborators allow Dr. Fauci to masquerade as a neutral, disinterested scientist and selfless public servant driven by a relentless commitment to public health. But Dr. Fauci doesn’t really do public health. By every metric, his fifty-year regime has been a catastrophe for American health. But as a businessman, his success has been boundless. In 2010, Dr. Fauci told adoring New Yorker writer Michael Specter that his go-to political playbook is Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather.40 He spontaneously recited his favorite line from Puzo’s epic: “It’s nothing personal, it’s strictly business.

An official Taliban gazette published a week before the September 11 attacks clarified the following list of items formally banned in the Islamic Emirate: “The pig itself; pork; pig fat; objects made of human hair; natural human hair; dish antennas; sets for cinematography and sound recording projectors; sets for microphotography, in case it is used in the cinema; all instruments which themselves produce music, such as the piano, the harmonium, the flute, the tabla, the tanbour, the sarangi; billiard tables and their accessories; chess boards; carom boards; playing cards; masks; any alcoholic beverage; all audio cassettes, video cassettes, computers and television which include sex and music; centipedes; lobsters (a kind of sea animal); nail polish; firecrackers; fireworks (for children); all kinds of cinematographic films, even though they may be sent abroad; all statues of animate beings in general; all sewing catalogues which have photos of animate beings; published tableaus (photos); Christmas cards; greeting cards bearing images of living things; neckties; bows (the thing which strengthens the necktie); necktie pins.

They are underrepresented as directors of state companies and in administrative positions. • Except for the music and sport sectors and the armed forces, they rarely assume leadership positions of national and international projection. • The presence of blacks and mulattos in mass media is still feeble, especially in television and cinema. • According to statistics, black and racially mixed people occupy labor and social positions that do not correspond with the educational levels that they have attained.

also trying to act in good faith and also becoming useful idiots for big business and the rich. Another of them was Martin Feldstein, the conservative Harvard superstar who became the new president’s chief economic adviser—but only nominally, because Reagan ignored him. Feldstein actually hated deficits, as true conservatives did, and called his supply-side colleagues “extremists.” Stockman’s chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget—who left in 1983 to earn a fortune on Wall Street, then become a cocaine addict and TV pundit—said that Feldstein “has failed at making the transition from academic economist to political economist.” That was thirty-six-year-old Larry Kudlow, defining political economist to mean not an expert on political economics but an economist willing and eager to dissemble and lie to suit his political masters, thirty-five years before he returned to government work as Trump’s director of the National Economic Council.

Working on a shoestring, which in my case is more often a matter of circumstance than of choice, never appeared to me as a cornerstone for aesthetics, and Dogme-type stuff just bores me. So it’s rather in order to bring some comfort to young filmmakers in need that I mention these few technical details: The material for La Jetee was created with a Pentax 24x36, and the only “cinema” part (the blinking of the eyes) with an Arriflex 35mm film camera, borrowed for one hour. Sans Soleil was entirely shot with a 16mm Beaulieu silent film camera (not one sync take within the whole film), with 100-foot reels – 2'44" autonomy! –and a small cassette recorder (not even a Walkman; they didn’t exist yet). The only “sophisticated” device – given the time – was the spectre image synthesizer, also borrowed for a few days. This is to say that the basic tools for these two films were literally available to anyone. No silly boasting here, just the conviction that today, with the advent of computer and small DV cameras (unintentional homage to Dziga Vertov), would-be directors need no longer submit their fate to the unpredictability of producers or the arthritis of televisions, and that by following their whims or passions, they perhaps see one day their tinkering elevated to DVD status by honorable men.

Manga represents and extremely unfiltered view of the inner workings of their creator's minds. This is because manga are free of the massive editing and "committee"-style production used in other media like film, magazines and television. Even in American mainstream comics, the norm is to have a stable of artists, letterers, inkers, and scenario writers all under the control of the publisher. In Japan, a single artist might employ many assistants and act as a sort of "director," but he or she is usually at the core of the production process and retains control over the rights to the material created. That artists are not necessarily highly educated and deal frequently in plain subject matter only heightens the sense that manga offer the reader an extremely raw and personal view of the world. Thus, of the more than 2 billion manga produced each year, the vast majority have a dreamlike quality. They speak to people's hope, and fears. They are where stressed-out modern urbanites daily work out their neuroses and their frustrations. Viewed in their totality, the phenomenal number of stories produced is like the constant chatter of the collective unconscious -- and articulation of the dream world. Reading manga is like peering into the unvarnished, unretouched reality of the Japanese mind.

On Stage was a groundbreaking dramatic series capping the radio careers of Cathy and Elliott Lewis. It came in what might have been a watershed era but was instead radio’s last hurrah. The Lewises reached the crest as the ship began to sink, though in a strange way it was a time of peace. The war with television had been lost in a single season, and the big money had gone, as it always does, with the winner. What was left on radio fell into several broad categories, none ruled by money as they had been in the old days. Agencies and producers still had radio budgets, but the tide had irrevocably turned. The end of big-time radio had for its best artists a liberating effect. “I can do things now that I wouldn’t dare to do two or three years ago,” said Elliott Lewis in Newsweek in mid-1953. As producer-director of Suspense, he had just aired a two-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello, which would have been unthinkable for the thrill show in 1945. Network people paid less attention, and if money was tighter, there was no lack of talent to prove it. People still wanted to work in radio: they remained because it was a dear first love, terminally ill and soon to disappear. Jack Benny and Jack Webb were still on the air; Gunsmoke was in its first year, and just ahead were more frugal but extremely creative shows—X-Minus One, Frontier Gentleman, and The CBS Radio Workshop. These were produced and enacted by people who loved what they were doing: some would mourn its final loss so deeply that they spoke of it reluctantly even two decades later. It was in this time that the Lewises produced On Stage, by some accounts the best radio anthology ever heard.

On one of those nights in January 2014, we sat next to each other in Maria Vostra, happy and content, smoking nice greens, with one of my favorite movies playing on the large flat-screen TVs: Once Upon a Time in America. I took a picture of James Woods and Robert De Niro on the TV screen in Maria Vostra's cozy corner, which I loved to share with Martina. They were both wearing hats and suits, standing next to each other. Robert de Niro looked a bit like me and his character, Noodles, (who was a goy kid in the beginning of the movie, growing up with Jewish kids) on the picture, was as naive as I was. I just realized that James Woods—who plays an evil Jewish guy in the movie, acting like Noodles' friend all along, yet taking his money, his woman, taking away his life, and trying to kill him at one point—until the point that Noodles has to escape to save his life and his beloved ones—looks almost exactly like Adam would look like if he was a bit older. “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts.” – William Shakespeare That sounds like an ancient spell or rather directions, instructions to me, the director instructing his actors, being one of the actors himself as well, an ancient spell, that William Shakespeare must have read it from a secret book or must have heard it somewhere. Casting characters for certain roles to act like this or like that as if they were the director’s custom made monsters. The extensions of his own will, desires and actions. The Reconquista was a centuries-long series of battles by Christian states to expel the Muslims (Moors), who had ruled most of the Iberian Peninsula since the 8th century. The Reconquista ended on January 2, 1492. The same year Columbus, whose statue stands atop a Corinthian custom-made column down the Port at the bottom of the Rambla, pointing with his finger toward the West, had discovered America on October 12, 1492. William Shakespeare was born in April 1564. He had access to knowledge that had been unavailable to white people for thousands of years. He must have formed a close relationship with someone of royal lineage, or used trick, who then permitted him to enter the secret library of the Anglican Church. “A character has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure what he/she’s supposed to be doing.” – Anthony Burgess Martina proudly shared with me her admiration for the Argentine author Julio Cortazar, who was renowned across South America. She quoted one of his famous lines, saying: “Vida es como una cebolla, hay que pelarla llorando,” which translates to “Life is like an onion, you have to peel it crying.” Martina shared with me her observation that the sky in Europe felt lower compared to America. She mentioned that the clouds appeared larger in America, giving a sense of a higher and more expansive sky, while in Europe, it felt like the sky had a lower and more limiting ceiling. “The skies are much higher in Argentina, Tomas, in all America. Here in Europe the sky is so low. In Argentina there are huge clouds and the sky is huge, Tomas.” – Martina Blaterare “It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.” – George Orwell, 1984

I phoned Tom and said we had to air Twin Peaks. By that point, there was already a tremendous buzz in and outside of Hollywood that we were doing this. There was even an article on the front page of The Wall Street Journal about this buttoned-up guy at ABC who was taking huge creative risks. Suddenly I was getting calls from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. I visited Steven on the set of Hook, which he was directing at the time, and George at his Skywalker Ranch. They were both interested in talking about what they might do for ABC. That notion, that directors of that caliber would be interested in making television shows, was unheard of until we started making Twin Peaks.

In the television show, Mad Men, creative director and Madison Avenue lothario Don Draper provides a quick lesson when a copywriter’s words lack impact. Don says, “Stop writing for other writers.” The lesson is: put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Real life mad man Leo Burnett, eponymous creator of a great advertising firm, emphasized the same point: “If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all.” Marketing stories have to be real, relevant, and relatable.

If the Sussexes had any residual misgivings about whether they wanted out, those doubts vanished when they viewed the Queen’s 2019 televised Christmas message. With their own eyes, they saw that they had been kicked to the margins of the monarchy. Her Majesty eloquently made the point in her speech by saying nothing. The subtext was all in the flotilla of carefully arranged family photographs positioned on her writing desk, a grouping that, in case anyone thinks is accidental, has been artfully changed every year since the monarch’s first televised seasonal message in 1957. The previous Christmas, a family portrait of Charles, Camilla, the five Cambridges, and Harry and Meghan was exhibited at Her Majesty’s elbow. But in December 2019, the Sussexes had evaporated, their image excised as skillfully as Stalin would have done to an apparatchik out of favor. According to author Christopher Andersen, the Queen told the director of the broadcast that all the displayed photographs were fine to remain in the shot except for one. Her Majesty pointed at a winsome portrait of Harry, Meghan, and baby Archie. “ That one,” said the Queen. “I suppose we don’t need that one.” And a happy Christmas to you too, Granny! William was said to have been appalled when he saw the Sussexes had been edited out. He knew his brother well enough to predict a Category 5 tantrum brewing.

In Chapter 22, I mentioned people who fit the Seven S’s criteria, whose opinions have informed my own and provide me with further reasons to take the life-after death hypothesis seriously. They included: 1.A CEO of a major corporation 2.A former publisher who is the editor-in-chief of an award-winning newspaper 3.A former chairman of the department of surgery at a major university 4.A former chairman of the department of material sciences at a major university 5.An award winning composer for movies and television 6.A former high ranking staff member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 7.The director of a major foundation, educated at Harvard University, and 8.A distinguished anthropologist who was the director of an internationally known research institute. In the spirit of Criterion 5, I have reviewed this list and attempted to determine whether there were any responsible and justified reasons for challenging my evaluations of these people. Try as I might I cannot in good conscience dismiss any of these people as being untrustworthy. In sum, I cannot find valid reasons for concluding that these individuals no longer deserve my admiration and respect. Yes, I can point out a given person’s limitations (at least the ones I am aware of), but these do not impact the logic of my concluding that they meet each of the 7 S’s criteria for being credible and trustworthy. Hence, Criterion 3 passes the test posed by Criterion 5.

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That is the television director’s technical craft. It sounds and is complicated at first, but you work backward from what the audience has to see and what you want them to see, and then you figure it out.

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, the legendary San Francisco-based ad agency behind such classic campaigns as “Got Milk” and the Foster Farm Chickens, had found itself in a funk—and felt increasingly irrelevant in an emerging, transmedia world of social networking, user-generated content, mobile, Internet video, and more. So a few years ago, the agency set an ambitious goal to completely revamp itself for the digital age. “Our goal is to be unrecognizable twelve months from now,” creative director Jamie Barrett said at the time. The idea: transform an agency known primarily for eye-popping television spots into one badass, multiplatform marketing machine. It was well worth the effort. In less than a year, Goodby saw revenues leap 20 percent to $102 million. At the start of its transformation effort, 80 percent of the twenty-five-year-old agency’s revenues came from traditional advertising campaigns, while less than 20 percent came from digital initiatives. Today, after three years of reinvention, those numbers are nearly flip-flopped, with 60 percent of revenues now coming from digital initiatives, and 40 percent from traditional. Now, a team once vexed by what it called “Crispin Envy”—for all the attention Crispin Porter + Bogusky receives for its groundbreaking work in digital media—has found its own footing, and then some. While many have driven the transformation, no one has received more credit as a catalyst for change than Derek Robson, forty-two, whom Goodby recruited from adverting agency powerhouse Bartle Bogle Hegarty in London.

If those insane evangelicals hear about it, they’ll claim that this was some type of judgment from their God and we can’t have that. I will get my people to work on intercepting anything on the internet, on TV, or the radio about the disaster. Can you take care of it without the federal government looking over your shoulder?” “Yes, Mr. President,” “That’s what I want to hear. Goodbye.” then Collins hung up on Governor Hunt. Collins called the NSA, “Director Patrick, I need you to shut down the internet providers that connect California to the rest of the nation,

Joe Gordon, the team’s longtime public relations director, said he would be right over. The Rooneys had hired Gordon in 1969, the same year they had hired Chuck Noll, in an effort to upgrade the previously dismal franchise. Gordon was a Pittsburgh native who had played varsity baseball at Pitt and whose hard-knuckle attitude fit perfectly with the brawling team. In the days preceding the 1976 AFC Championship Game against the hated Raiders, Gordon decked an Oakland TV reporter. Asked the next day if his team was ready, Noll said, “I don’t know, but Joe Gordon is.

Nowadays films and television are what I like to call "Microwave Media". I like mine in the oven, giving the production time to simmer; get the juices flowing, and cooked to perfection. And that takes time. Slow, precious, tempered time. A script is a film's recipe. It's just a piece of paper to the novice cook, but even a recipe needs time to be perfected before it's given to the masses.

A starlet in whom Shukla took a special interest was a curvaceous beauty called Vijay Kumari, known by her pet name, Candy. Students at the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune, recall how one day in August 1976 film director G.P. Sippy turned up at the institute along with Candy dressed in blue jeans, a yellow top and dark glasses. They were told that Candy, who had ‘high connections’, was to be given a place in the girls’ hostel even though she had taken none of the mandatory admission tests. N.V.K. Murthy, the then director of FTII, at first resisted her admission but was told by Sippy that it was a direct order from Shukla. Shortly afterwards Murthy was transferred to Delhi and replaced by Jagat Murari.

In an interview on German TV, Edward J. Snowden said that his “breaking point” was “seeing Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress” by denying the existence of a domestic spying program conducted by the National Security Agency. Snowden elaborated that “the public had a right to know about these programs. The public had a right to know that which the government is doing in its name, and that which the government is doing against the public.” The

awkward televised hug from the new president of the United States. My curtain call worked. Until it didn’t. Still speaking in his usual stream-of-consciousness and free-association cadence, the president moved his eyes again, sweeping from left to right, toward me and my protective curtain. This time, I was not so lucky. The small eyes with the white shadows stopped on me. “Jim!” Trump exclaimed. The president called me forward. “He’s more famous than me.” Awesome. My wife Patrice has known me since I was nineteen. In the endless TV coverage of what felt to me like a thousand-yard walk across the Blue Room, back at our home she was watching TV and pointing at the screen: “That’s Jim’s ‘oh shit’ face.” Yes, it was. My inner voice was screaming: “How could he think this is a good idea? Isn’t he supposed to be the master of television? This is a complete disaster. And there is no fricking way I’m going to hug him.” The FBI and its director are not on anyone’s political team. The entire nightmare of the Clinton email investigation had been about protecting the integrity and independence of the FBI and the Department of Justice, about safeguarding the reservoir of trust and credibility. That Trump would appear to publicly thank me on his second day in office was a threat to the reservoir. Near the end of my thousand-yard walk, I extended my right hand to President Trump. This was going to be a handshake, nothing more. The president gripped my hand. Then he pulled it forward and down. There it was. He was going for the hug on national TV. I tightened the right side of my body, calling on years of side planks and dumbbell rows. He was not going to get a hug without being a whole lot stronger than he looked. He wasn’t. I thwarted the hug, but I got something worse in exchange. The president leaned in and put his mouth near my right ear. “I’m really looking forward to working with you,” he said. Unfortunately, because of the vantage point of the TV cameras, what many in the world, including my children, thought they saw was a kiss. The whole world “saw” Donald Trump kiss the man who some believed got him elected. Surely this couldn’t get any worse. President Trump made a motion as if to invite me to stand with him and the vice president and Joe Clancy. Backing away, I waved it off with a smile. “I’m not worthy,” my expression tried to say. “I’m not suicidal,” my inner voice said. Defeated and depressed, I retreated back to the far side of the room. The press was excused, and the police chiefs and directors started lining up for pictures with the president. They were very quiet. I made like I was getting in the back of the line and slipped out the side door, through the Green Room, into the hall, and down the stairs. On the way, I heard someone say the score from the Packers-Falcons game. Perfect. It is possible that I was reading too much into the usual Trump theatrics, but the episode left me worried. It was no surprise that President Trump behaved in a manner that was completely different from his predecessors—I couldn’t imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush asking someone to come onstage like a contestant on The Price Is Right. What was distressing was what Trump symbolically seemed to be asking leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to do—to come forward and kiss the great man’s ring. To show their deference and loyalty. It was tremendously important that these leaders not do that—or be seen to even look like they were doing that. Trump either didn’t know that or didn’t care, though I’d spend the next several weeks quite memorably, and disastrously, trying to make this point to him and his staff.

HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL, western adventure. BROADCAST HISTORY: (Originated on TV: Sept. 14, 1957–Sept. 21, 1963, CBS.) Radio: Nov. 23, 1958–Nov. 27, 1960, CBS. 30m, Sundays at 6. Multiple sponsorship. CAST: John Dehner as Paladin, soldier of fortune, western knight errant, gunfighter. Ben Wright as Heyboy, the Oriental who worked at the Carlton Hotel in San Francisco, where Paladin lived. Virginia Gregg as Missy Wong, Heyboy’s girlfriend. Virginia Gregg also in many leading dramatic roles. Supporting players from Hollywood’s Radio Row, most of the same personnel listed for Gunsmoke. ANNOUNCER: Hugh Douglas. PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: Frank Paris. CREATORS-WRITERS: Herb Meadow and Sam Rolfe. WRITERS: Gene Roddenberry, John Dawson, Marian Clark, etc. SOUND EFFECTS: Ray Kemper, Tom Hanley. Have Gun, Will Travel was an oddity: the only significant radio show that originated on television. Beginning as a TV series for Richard Boone, Have Gun leaped immediately into the top ten and gained such an enthusiastic following that CBS decided to add it to the fading radio chain.

Watch nearly any documentary film that uses CGI to recreate dinosaurs in their natural Mesozoic habitats and you will never see a dinosaur sitting, lying down, sleeping, or otherwise taking it easy. That is understandable on the part of the director and animators, because the attention span of viewers would decrease in inverse proportion to the lenght of such segment and they would quickly switch to the channel to watch they favorite reality-TV stars. (Coincidentally, these "stars" will be mostly sitting, lying down, sleeping, or otherwise taking it easy.)

There is a scene in the movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. At the beginning, in the woods, Robert Ford, played by Casey Affleck, illustrates this phenomenon. He thinks the outlaw Jesse James is a great man. He thinks that he, himself, is a great man, too. He wants someone to recognize that in him. He wants someone to give him an opportunity—a project through which he can prove his worth. It just happens that Frank James would size the delusional, awkward boy up in the woods outside Blue Cut, Missouri: “You don’t have the ingredients, son.” In contrast, Mr. A is ambitious, but it’s paired with self-confidence, social adeptness, and a clear sense of what Thiel wanted. Even so, the prospect of meeting with Thiel is intimidating: his stomach churning, every nerve and synapse alive and flowing. He’s twenty-six years old. He’s sitting down for a one-on-one evening with a man worth, by 2011, some $ 1.5 billion and who owns a significant chunk of the biggest social network in the world, on whose board of directors he also sits. Even if Thiel were just an ordinary investor, dinner with him would make anyone nervous. One quickly finds that he is a man notoriously averse to small talk, or what a friend once deemed “casual bar talk.” Even the most perfunctory comment to Thiel can elicit long, deep pauses of consideration in response—so long you wonder if you’ve said something monumentally stupid. The tiny assumptions that grease the wheels of conversation find no quarter with Thiel. There is no chatting with Peter about the weather or about politics in general. It’s got to be, “I’ve been studying opening moves in chess, and I think king’s pawn might be the best one.” Or, “What do you think of the bubble in higher education?” And then you have to be prepared to talk about it at the expert level for hours on end. You can’t talk about television or music or pop culture because the person you’re sitting across from doesn’t care about these things and he couldn’t pretend to be familiar with them if he wanted to.

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For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic. He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bona-fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America. The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell. The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years. Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffen Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts. In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised. “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.” But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity. And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.

Forcing an entire population to accept an arbitrary and risky medical intervention is the most intrusive and demeaning action ever imposed by the United States Government, and perhaps any government. And it is based upon a lie. The Director of the CDC, Dr. Fauci, and the WHO have all had to reluctantly acknowledge that the vaccines cannot stop transmission. When Israel’s Director of Public Health addressed the FDA Advisory Panel, she left no doubt about the vaccines’ inability to stop transmission of the virus, or stop sickness, or stop death. Describing Israel’s situation as of September 17th, 2021, she said: Sixty percent of the people in severe and critical condition were, um, were immunized, doubly immunized, fully vaccinated. Forty-five percent of the people who died in this fourth wave were doubly vaccinated. Even so, three weeks later, on October 7th—just days before this book went to press—the President of the United States announced that he was ensuring healthcare workers are vaccinated, “because if you seek care at a healthcare facility, you should have the certainty that the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you.” The President just told Americans that being vaccinated provides “certainty” that vaccinated people are “protected from COVID and cannot pass it to you.” Not one question was posed to the President about this stunning disconnect, about the obvious untruth—and that speech gives us a stark example of what’s going on. A televised image of an unchallenged leader mouthing untrue pronouncements to mislead and control the population—that is the world of George Orwell’s sadly prophetic novel, 1984. It