Program scripts from week of January 20, 2014
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.
RIP Russell Johnson
For an actor there’s always the question of whether you really want a role that will stay with you for the rest of your career. That Captain Kirk or Doctor Who role that will make your name familiar to virtually everyone but might just limit your future roles because they will always see as THAT character.
If you’re leading actor it can probably be survived. I mean Bill Shatner has had several more big time character since the original Star Trek went off the air. If you’re a character actor it can be more of a problem. Your bread and butter is disappearing into supporting roles and it can be tough if everyone says “Wait, it’s so and so!”
So when I saw that Russell Johnson had passed away last week I wondered how he’d done after his iconic role. Johnson played the Professor on the ‘60s classic TV show “Gilligan’s Island” (Do you know the character’s real name? I had to look it up. Roy Hinkley). A quick check showed me that Johnson had a solid career before becoming a castaway and an equally solid one after.
Johnson was born in northeastern Pennsylvania, served in World War II as a B-24 crew member and was awarded a variety of medals including the Purple Heart. By 1952 he had begun his Hollywood career and it was a career where he worked with a lot of interesting people including Audie Murphy, George Raft, Ronald Reagan and Robert Redford. He also appeared in a lot of popular TV shows through the years including “The Twilight Zone”, “Lassie”, “Lou Grant”, “Dallas”, “McGyver”, “Dynasty” and “Alf” among many, many others.
There was always a big question surrounding his best known character. If the Professor could make almost anything out of bamboo and coconuts why couldn’t he fix the boat and get them off the island? Johnson was asked that question for years. His answer was simple. Boat building was not among the Professor’s skills.
With Johnson’s death only two members of the original cast still survive. Curiously they are the two at the center of the longest running discussion concerning the show - Ginger or Mary Ann?
While I’m a Mary Ann guy all the way I can’t tell you who was the Professor’s favorite.
Russell Johnson was 89 years old.
Adult Monster
We are discussing a certain genre of adult literature normally referred to by a four letter word that begins with the letter “P”. Now maybe you’re thinking I’m being overly cautious. This kind of material has even gone mainstream through titles like “50 Shades of Gray”. But that’s pretty tame compared to the topic at hand. Take the “P word” and put the word “monster” in front of it. As in it involves Bigfoot or Pterodactyls.
The bad news is I’m not kidding. The good news is we’re going to talk about something else from now on.
The upside of the brave new digital publishing world is that it’s allowing many more authors to get their work before an audience and, hopefully, make some money. Titles that won’t generate enough sales to interest a major publisher can actually be quite successful at the self-published level because so much of even a modest sales price goes to profit. The overhead can be virtually zero.
Of course the artistic value of a lot of these books can be virtually zero as well. But that’s fine, there’s very little money on the line for anyone.
The amazing thing about the books in question here is that they’re actually selling pretty well. Well enough that one author brings in anywhere from six thousand to thirty thousand dollars a month in sales. Enough that she has funded her daughter’s college education with the proceeds. At least she was until folks like Amazon were shocked, shocked do you hear to discover they were selling this sort of thing. They began pulling the books from the listings claiming they somehow violated their extremely vague content guidelines.
You couldn’t pay me to read these books. But I think the folks at the major online outlets that handle self published books are kidding themselves if they think this is going to go away.
They may want to call this kind of publishing a monster. But it’s a monster they’ve helped to create.
Net Neutrality
You may have recently heard that the Internet as we have come to know and love it is coming to an end. All delivered in properly apocalyptic prose certain Chicken Littles are declaring that the sky is falling.
The truth is somewhat more complicated than that. The discussion revolves around a concept called “Net Neutrality” and it was the subject of a court decision a week or so ago.
First, let’s define “net neutrality” in case you’re not clear on the concept. It means that everybody gets treated the same on the World Wide Web. So you, the consumer, can access my blog just the same as you access your streaming videos on Netflix. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) can’t charge you more to visit certain sites over other sites. It’s all “neutral”.
The problem comes up that treating all web sites equally isn’t really fair because, well, they’re not all equal. My blog has a small but dedicated readership. At peak hours Netflix accounts for 32% of total traffic according to some studies. Believe it or not there are limitations to how much traffic the Internet can bear. So the ISPs would like the big bandwidth users, like Netflix, to pay a little more.
A lot of the furor has to do with how much more and who would pay it.
But that’s not the only issue. If net neutrality goes bye bye it actually opens up all kinds of potential issues that would make life on the Internet less pleasant. We’ve seen the kind of stupid games that get played between cable channels and the service providers. Channels being blacked out and endless finger pointing. Well without net neutrality the same thing could happen with services on the Internet. Suddenly there’s some kind of argument and service to those sites suddenly slooooooows down.
In reality the final word is a long way from being spoken on this subject. The FCC can still appeal the current court decision including taking it eventually to the Supreme Court. Or they could re-write the regulations to suit the current ruling or get around the current ruling. Or Congress could decide to change the law.
But what I can say without any great fear of contradiction is that stories of the Internet’s demise are decidedly premature.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
