Program scripts from week of April 8, 2013
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
R.I.P. Roger Ebert
It’s only been a couple weeks since I noted that when I do the memoriam programs I try to stick to folks that I don’t think will get massive coverage in the mainstream media. I will now promptly break that rule. But I need to offer up my own eulogy for the late Roger Ebert.
Prior to discovering the show “Sneak Previews” I was just a guy who liked to go to the movies. I don’t remember exactly when I started watching but my bet is that it wasn’t long after the show began airing on PBS in 1975. My dad loved the movies too so I’m sure we picked up on this show very quickly. What we didn’t know at the time was that we were watching TV movie criticism changing forever.
Think about it, movie reviews on TV prior to this were Gene Shalit on “The Today Show” doing something short and maybe with an interview with someone from the production. It was the newspaper review read on air. What Siskel and Ebert did was different. This was a pass fail grading system, thumb up or thumb down. Plus you got two guys who really knew the movies talking about WHY they liked or didn’t like them. Plus they took a few good humored shots at each other. Remember this is 1975, this is radical stuff.
And don’t forget the network that was willing to take a shot at this madness was PBS. It would be seven years before someone on the commercial media side would sit and and say “Hey, we can make some money on these guys”.
For me personally it was epiphany time, that moment when the light comes on and suddenly things that were hidden become obvious. I was studying acting so I was already looking at the movies from that point of view. It was Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel (two guys who you would NOT have chosen as great TV stars) that inspired me to spend more time thinking a little more deeply about all the aspects of what I saw on that screen. From those moments watching the two Chicago newspaper critics speak from their personal passion for the movies grew my own passion.
Maybe I would have come to know and respect the work of Howard Hawks, maybe I would have come to appreciate the difference between a movie that’s great fun and one that’s great.
Maybe. But thankfully Roger Ebert was there to show me the way.
Roger Ebert was 70 years old.
April Foolishness
I actually held off on this story for a week because the ending could have gone two different ways. You should always be careful when reacting to April Fools Day pranks done by radio stations. I’ve played a couple of them myself over the years. The idea is to play the joke just as close to the edge as you can while still never slipping over that edge.
So on the whole I would actually have given very high marks to the morning team of Val St John and Scott Fish at Gator Country 101.9 in southwestern Florida. The duo went on air last week on Monday and announced that their listeners should be aware that a substance called “di-hydrogen monoxide” had been found coming out of faucets all over the listening area. I’m sure all the chemistry teachers in the audience got quite the chuckle (chemistry teachers have been trotting out this particular joke for years) but a great many people in the rest of the audience panicked. And flooded the local water authority with upset phone calls.
In case you did as poorly in chemistry as I did “di-hydrogen monoxide” is also called H2O or water. That’s right the DJs announced that water was coming out of the water faucet.
This is where the story starts getting really stupid. The water authority began making noises that the duo could face felony charges for making a false report. The radio station yanked them off the air before their airshift was over, suspended them indefinitely and began making repeated apologies on the air.
All because two air personalities had said that water was coming out of the water faucets on April Fools Day.
I’m really not sure who should be more embarrassed here. The candidates are the water authority for over reacting to what was without a doubt a major annoyance, the radio station for over reacting to radio personalities being, well, radio personalities or the listeners of Gator Country for well, let’s be nice about this, being astoundingly gullible.
But I’m pretty sure I know who feels the most embarrassed. A station poll asked listeners when St. John and Fish should be returned to the air. At one point 78% said “Never”. I’m happy to report they were back on the job Wednesday morning.
All for saying water was coming out of the water faucet.
Amazing.
Satire Danger
One of the great advantages of the World Wide Web is that it allows everyone to take a shot at being what they’ve always wanted to be. Whether that’s writer or movie maker, journalist or model It’s the great democratization of the media. In many ways that’s a really good thing.
But not always.
The problem is that a lot of those roles are a lot harder to pull off than people realize. Doing it well is a whole ‘nother question.
Plus you get people who don’t really understand the medium or genre they’re trying to create. I think that may have been part of the problem for a disgruntled high school senior recently.
Suzie Lee Weiss is a very bright young woman from my hometown of Pittsburgh PA. She really wanted to go to an Ivy League school, applied to a bunch as was turned down by every single one. Now she had the basic qualifications but those selection processes get really competitive and she came up short. Not surprisingly she was a little miffed. Out of that unhappiness came an open letter to those schools published in the “Wall Street Journal” that was, shall we say, fairly scathing.
There was an immediate backlash calling her spoiled and suffering from entitlement issues. To which she responded that it had been a satire. I’ve read the original piece and I think I see the problem.
You see if you’re a well known satirist like say Jonathan Swift people know not to take you seriously. How else do you think he got away with “A Modest Proposal” where he suggested the solution to Ireland’s problems was to use their children for food. Most performers will agree with the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean who said that dying was easy but comedy was hard. Trying to be funny or ironic or satirical is very difficult. It’s even harder when you don’t set it up right.
I think that’s where the young lady came up short. Without the right set up she wrote something that a lot of people took seriously (either in favor or against).
In the end the answer is just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
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