Editor’s note: Michael Ackley’s columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.
Blasphemy, profanity and sexual innuendo all are on the rise on television – because it makes better art.
At least, that’s what TV executives told the Los Angeles Times recently.
Todd A. Kessler told the Times the FX network’s “Damages” didn’t aim “to push boundaries,” but the show’s attorney protagonist “functions in a society where she does battle not with guns, but with words. So words become very potent ant powerful.”
FX’s President John Landgraf was more pointed: “There’s very little you won’t see on our air, as long as it’s in context and not gratuitous. Because, frankly, it would be ludicrous to write shows about high-stakes litigators, cops, firemen, plastic surgeons or tabloid journalists without using profanity.”
This explains why such films as “Twelve Angry Men,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Inherit the Wind” were artistic and box-office flops. The same would go for war films like “Patton” and “The Longest Day.” Without a liberal sprinkling of F-bombs, I guess they just weren’t real enough.
As David Eick, executive producer of the Sci-Fi channel’s “Battlestar Galactica,” put it in the Times story, when you encounter a script that skirts obvious opportunities for profanity, “instead of losing yourself in the story, you’re being yanked out of the experience, and it’s much harder to suspend disbelief.”
I discussed this concept with script writer Howard Bashford, who works in television, film and stage, and found him in total agreement with Kessler, Landgraf and Eick.
“Listen,” he said emphatically. “When the @#!!-ing script leans on high-flown language rather than the way people really talk, reality is out the @#!!-ing window.
“That’s why we’re reworking a lot of the @#!!-ing classics. They have good plots, but they don’t have staying power – they don’t really reach people – because they don’t communicate any more. And that’s why they’re bad @#!!-ing art.”
“Reworking the classics?” I asked. “You don’t mean… ?”
“You @#!!-ing-A bet your @#!!” said Howard. “@#!!-ing Shakespeare. We’re going to make his stuff live again.”
“Look,” he said, “rummaging in his brief case. Here’s a bit from “New Hamlet”:
“To be, or not to be: That is not a tough @#!!-ing question.
We don’t off ourselves because we’re @#!!-ing afraid of dying.”
“That’s it?” I asked. “No ‘slings and arrows,’ no ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’? No ‘fardles’? No ‘bare bodkin’?”
“Well, we thought we might do something scatological with fardles,” said Howard, still shuffling though his papers. “Then we found out it didn’t mean what we thought it meant, so we left it out. The thing is, you have to get to the point – with real emotion and real language.
“Ah! Here’s a scene were working on for ‘New Macbeth.’ Lady Macbeth is speaking:
‘Out, damned spot!’ (“This is good,” said Howard. “Old Will was onto the idea that it’s chic for women to swear.”) Out I say! Who would have thought the old man to have had so much @#!!-ing blood in him?
‘I’d better get back to my @#!!-ing bed. What’s done cannot be @#!!-ing undone. To @#!!-ing bed, to @#!!-ing bed, to @#!!-ing bed.'”
“Howard,” I said, “that’s was too little and way too much. Four ‘@#!!-ing beds’ in one line?”
“We liked the double entendre,” he said defensively. “Don’t you think we understand the need for a little subtlety? Here. Read Marc Antony’s soliloquy from ‘Jealous Caesar.'”
“You mean, ‘Julius Caesar,'” I corrected.
“No,” he said. “The new version will be ‘Jealous Caesar’ because we worked in a couple of love triangles involving Caesar, Brutus and Cassius, and Caesar, Cassius and Calpurnia.”
“But why Caesar, Brutus and Cassius?” I asked.
“You know the old saying about Big Julius: ‘Every man’s wife, every woman’s husband,’ eh?” Howard replied. “These days, if you’re going to make it in Hollywood, every plot has to have a sympathetic look at homosexuality.”
“Didn’t know your background in the classics was so broad,” I said.
“@#!!-ing-A!” said Howard, “but check out the soliloquy:
‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend my your @#!!-ing ears;
I come to bury this mother…”
“That’s enough, Howard,” I said. “All of this is just abominable.”
Howard looked hurt momentarily but quickly became patronizing.
“Not everybody understands art,” he said. And we asked him to define the term.
“Art is whatever we can sell,” he said. “And as long as we can sell this stuff, ‘artists’ like me will keep laughing at you snobs – all the way to the bank.”
I had to admit he had a point, which brings to mind – ever and again – H.L. Mencken’s famous maxim: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American people.”
Mark Van Der Hoek and Bill Good were among those responding to our query of two weeks past about the title and author of a science fiction story about the stultifying effects of pocket calculators.
The story is “The Feeling of Power” by Isaac Asimov. Van Der Hoek even included a link that will take you to the yarn: http://www.themathlab.com/writings/short%20stories/feeling.htm
The prescience of Asimov’s 1958 tale is amply demonstrated today. Read it, and you’ll understand why Van Der Hoek says, aphoristically, “Ignorance confers no advantages on its often boastful adherents.”
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