Ellen – Page 25 – Hypomania Content

Janet Mock on MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry 10/26/14 & 10/28/14

October 27, 2014May 8, 2015 Ellen

Shonda Rhimes rewriting rules for black women

10/26/2014 MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry

VIDEO

The MHP table discusses how Shonda Rhimes is using “How To Get Away With Murder” to rewrite the TV rules for on-screen representations of African American women.

http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/watch/shonda-rhimes-rewriting-rules-for-black-women-348065859665

How Shonda Rhimes is opening doors for gay characters on TV

10/28/2014 MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry

VIDEO

The MHP table discusses how Shonda Rhimes is using “How To Get Away With Murder” to rewrite the TV rules for on-screen representations of African American women.

http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/watch/shonda-rhimes-rewriting-rules-for-black-women-348065859665

CAA Sale to TPG Ups the Talent Agency Arms Race – With Wall Street Providing the Bullets

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 Ellen

10/22/2014 The Wrap By Sharon Waxman and Jeff Sneider

“It’s a great time to be in the agency business if you’re prepared to adapt to a rapidly changing climate,” says an agency veteran

The sale to private equity firm TPG of a majority stake in CAA has sent a ripple through the Hollywood agency world, as the competition to grow and diversify intensifies in what used to be a purely star-driven business.

From a practical standpoint TPG’s majority stake – which insiders tell TheWrap involved an influx of $200 million cash – will not significantly change the day-to-day management of the talent powerhouse.

CAA will still be run by the top partners Bryan Lourd, Kevin Huvane, Richard Lovett and David O’Connor, and will continue to represent much of the Hollywood A-list including Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr.

But it does add to the adrenaline rush at other agencies around town, which are excited by the draw of Wall Street and Silicon Valley dollars into a business that big capital had traditionally shunned.

“It’s a great time to be in the agency business if you’re prepared to adapt to a rapidly changing climate,” said one agency veteran, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It’s a tough time if either you don’t have the resources or the capability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.”

Silver Lake Partners, the Silicon Valley hedge fund, now owns a majority stake in WME-IMG. TPG bought a 35 percent stake four years ago before upping its CAA ownership this week to 51 percent.

It was hard to miss the pulses racing at UTA, which as the third-largest agency must be hoping that it’s the next dance partner for private equity or hedge fund money. Last year, UTA hired an investment banker to help them find investors, and CEO Jeremy Zimmer and his agents spend significant time courting Silicon Valley.

“I think in the next year or so, something will happen for UTA as well,” said this individual.

Insiders at WME believe that the TPG investment has much to do with Silver Lake backing its purchase of the sports marketing giant IMG last year.

Acquisitions are probably on the horizon for CAA. Indeed, the word on the street is that CAA is looking to buy Infront Sports & Media, a sports marketing agency that is up for sale. The asking price is believed to be $1.2 billion, which means that once again TPG, led by David Bonderman, would be putting up cash to drive growth at CAA.

While Infront is significantly smaller than IMG, it would put CAA significantly in the lucrative sports marketing game, and Infront has won the marketing rights from FIFA for the next World Cup. It also has a significant winter sports business. (CAA declined to comment on any interest in purchasing Infront.)

That kind of diversification is now preoccupying what used to be a traditional service business.

Big capital on Wall Street or Silicon Valley has traditionally not been interested in the agency business. Agencies are service businesses, highly volatile, dependent on personal relationships and hard-to-replace executives, be they Michael Ovitz in his time, or Ari Emanuel now.

“It makes no sense for non-agents to own an agency,” insisted one agency veteran to TheWrap. “Unlike any other business, you can’t just bring in someone from General Motors to represent your clients.”

And while TPG might try to sway CAA to tighten its belt, effectively it doesn’t have leverage, said this veteran.

“If Bryan Lourd says ‘I’m going to charter a plane to Italy to see my clients,’ And David Bonderman says, ‘You’re not chartering a plane. Take Alitalia,’ and Bryan says, ‘That’s not the way I do things,’ what is Bonderman going to say? That’s what no one is putting into the mix. That’s the thing that makes no sense.”

All of the insiders across the agency world agreed that CAA is likely to use the influx of cash to lock down its non-partner talent, granting big bonuses and rich five-year contracts to its most valuable agents who are not partners, including Joe Cohen in the TV department, Beth Swofford and Todd Feldman in the literary division.

CAA has a number of other choices ahead. Most think that an acquisition to diversify out of the representation business is going to be next, since taking in this cash – which includes a requirement to pay TPG from its net revenue every year – requires producing significant growth to result in a win for the partners.

“CAA is not diversified enough to go public with what they have now. They are pure representation in sports and movies.,” said one knowledgeable observer. “They’re going to have to go buy something that diversifies them. And then they’ll try to sell privately or take it public.”

That, or TPG may itself go public.

Regardless of that outcome, the agency landscape is not done shifting.

http://www.thewrap.com/caa-sale-to-tpg-ups-the-talent-agency-arms-race-with-wall-street-providing-the-bullets/

George Lucas Rips Hollywood Studios: They’ve ‘Always Been the Problem’

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 Ellen

10/20/2014 The Wrap By Greg Gilman

“Star Wars” writer and director does not think corporations are capable of nurturing talent

“Star Wars” creator George Lucas thinks the biggest problem in the movie business today is the corporations that are running it.

“You’re selling creativity. Raw creativity from talented people. Now, the problem has always been the studios,” Lucas told CBS anchor Charlie Rose during an interview at Chicago Ideas Week. ”Although the beginning of the studios, the entrepreneurs who ran the studios were sort of creative guys. They would just take books and turn them into movies and do things like that. Suddenly all these corporations were coming in. They didn’t know anything about the movie business.”

Lucas, a University of Southern California graduate, explained that there was a time in the beginning of his career when executives trusted creatives emerging from film schools. But that time was short lived.

“The studios went back to saying, Well we don’t trust you people and we think we know how to make movies,’” Lucas said. “The studios change everything all the time. And, unfortunately, they don’t have any imagination and they don’t have any talent.”

The filmmaker best known for introducing the world to The Force added that his brand of science fiction, now a massive franchise owned by Disney, would never be made today. He credited one studio executive at 20th Century Fox for trusting his vision.

“He believed in me because he loved ‘American Graffiti.’ He said, ‘You’re a talented guy. I’ll do whatever you want to do.’ But you’d never hear that today,” Lucas said. “He said, ‘You know, I don’t understand what this thing is about big dogs flying spaceships around. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Are you sure this is going to work?’ And I said, ‘Well, I know it’s different but, you know, I believe in it.’”

http://www.thewrap.com/george-lucas-star-wars-cbs-charlie-rose-chicago-ideas-week/

Toxic Partisanship? Bill Clinton Says He Had It Worse Than Obama

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 Ellen

10/24/2014 The New York Times By AMY CHOZICK

Former President Bill Clinton in New Hampshire on Oct. 16. He says that while the partisan gridlock is worse today, the attacks he faced were more personal than those President Obama has experienced.

President Obama heads into midterm elections in which he may face crushing losses. He has been spurned by his own party, whose candidates do not even want to be seen with him. The president’s supporters say the toxic atmosphere in Washington has made it impossible for Mr. Obama to succeed.

But there is a counter view being offered by a former Democratic president that as far as personal attacks go, he, Bill Clinton, had it worse. “Nobody’s accused him of murder yet, as far as I know. I mean, it was pretty rough back then,” Mr. Clinton said last month in an interview aired by PBS, when asked about the partisan climate facing Mr. Obama.

Whatever Mr. Clinton’s motivations, his comments, which his former aides frequently refer to when the topic comes up, do not permit Mr. Obama to excuse his legislative setbacks by simply citing hyper-partisanship. As one former White House aide to Mr. Clinton put it: “They impeached our guy.”

The tumult of the Clinton years — including conspiracy theories about the death of Vincent W. Foster Jr., a deputy White House counsel and friend of the Clintons’ from Arkansas who committed suicide in 1993, the investigation into Whitewater, the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment — has come back as Hillary Rodham Clinton inches toward a run for president in 2016.

When asked last month what the single biggest misconception about his presidency was, Mr. Clinton told Charlie Rose on PBS, “I think that most people underappreciate the level of extreme partisanship that took hold in ’94.”

Twenty years later, Mr. Clinton has devoted much of his energy to campaigning for Democrats who do not want to be associated with Mr. Obama. At frequent campaign stops across the country, the former president does not specifically talk about who had it worse, but instead emphasizes that polarization and an inability to work together are the cause of the country’s problems.

“Every place in the world people take the time to work together, good things are happening,” Mr. Clinton said this week at a campaign stop in Hazard, Ky., for the Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes. “Every place in the world where people spend all their time fighting each other and telling everybody how sorry they are, bad things happen.”

If Mr. Clinton does not spell out on the campaign trail how bad things were for him, his Democratic supporters do.

“Everyone looks at Clinton in this hazy glow of, ‘He’s so wonderful,’ ” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist. “But when he was president, boy, were there a lot of people who went after him in a very personal, some would say dirty, way.”

Even Mr. Clinton’s old rival, Newt Gingrich, a former Republican speaker of the House, said people had a gauzy view of the Clinton years. “Everyone is doing the, ‘Gee, Newt and Bill got things done, why can’t Obama get anything done?’ routine,” Mr. Gingrich said. “Maybe it’s driving Bill nuts.”

The underlying implication is that Mr. Obama does not have it so rough. Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Clinton criticize the current president for being less able or willing than his Democratic predecessor to woo congressional Republicans.

VIDEO:

Bill Clinton Talks About Partisanship

Mr. Clinton talked to Charlie Rose of PBS about the level of partisanship during his presidency compared with what President Obama is facing now.

Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican who served as Senate majority leader from 1996 to 2001, said Mr. Clinton was “affable” and “approachable,” even toward his political opponents.

“You could talk to him,” Mr. Lott said. “He was also willing to make a deal for the good of the country.” In contrast, he argued, Mr. Obama “has just walked away” — so if Mr. Clinton even tried to give the current president a pass, it “just won’t sell.”

Congressional Republicans, of course, have also refused to reach across the aisle and work with Mr. Obama the way they did in Mr. Lott’s era. The current Congress is on track to become one of the least legislatively productive in recent history. That is partly because Mr. Obama faces a far more polarized electorate than Mr. Clinton did.

Over the past 20 years, the number of Americans who hold extreme conservative or liberal views has doubled from 10 percent in 1994 to 21 percent in 2014, according to the Pew Research Center. And the middle ground has shrunk, with 39 percent of Americans taking a roughly equal number of liberal and conservative positions, compared with 49 percent in 1994.

Mr. Clinton often talks about this polarization and says that while the partisan gridlock is worse today, and the American electorate is less willing to hear arguments they disagree with, the attacks he faced were more personal than those Mr. Obama has experienced.

In a 2012 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Clinton mentioned the “murder” conspiracy theory in the 1990s, and said of Mr. Obama’s tenure: “Nobody has tried to bankrupt him with bogus investigations, so it’s not quite as bad. But the political impasse has gone on longer.”

“I will certainly not contradict the president I worked for when he argues that it was even more personal then,” said William A. Galston, a former policy adviser to Mr. Clinton. “But the polarization of our official political institutions and our political parties has become even more acute than in the Clinton days,” he added.

Mr. Clinton in 1996 with the House speaker, Newt Gingrich, left, and the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott.

That argument absolves Mr. Clinton of his own part in the scandals of the 1990s, several historians said. “They’re different situations because there were criminal allegations” against Mr. Clinton, said Ken Gormley, the author of “The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr,” about the investigation led by Kenneth W. Starr.

“President Obama has attracted a lot of attacks when it’s hard to point to something exactly he has done that warranted them,” Mr. Gormley added.

Some of the venom directed at Mr. Obama has a racial component that Mr. Clinton, a relatable white Southerner, never had to deal with, said Douglas G. Brinkley, a presidential historian and professor at Rice University. “The Clintons created huge problems of their own making,” Mr. Brinkley added, while “Obama’s problem is that he bullheadedly pushed Obamacare, and he happens to be African-American.”

“You can’t get more personal than questioning a person’s veracity for where he was born,” said Mr. Galston, the former Clinton aide, referring to the “birther” conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate.

Mr. Clinton’s reminders about how bitter things were in Washington when he was in the White House might not be the best message as Mrs. Clinton eyes an attempt at getting back there, as president herself this time.

Senator Rand Paul, a potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate, has already seized on the Lewinsky scandal as a way to remind voters that the Clinton years were not just “peace and prosperity,” as Mrs. Clinton often characterized her husband’s presidency during her 2008 presidential campaign.

Mr. Clinton is not the only president who weathered harsh attacks. Harry Reid, the Senator majority leader, called former President George W. Bush a “liar” and a “loser,” and protesters depicted him as Hitler.

“Every president probably thinks he had it worse than all his predecessors,” said Kenneth L. Khachigian, a Republican strategist who served as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. “But,” he added, “those of us in the Nixon years would have gladly traded places with Bill Clinton’s White House.”

When Will Big Hollywood Studios Aggressively Produce Original Shows For Digital TV?

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 Ellen

10/24/2014 Deadline by David Lieberman

That could start to happen soon based on some of the trends that RBC Capital Markets’ David Bank identifies in a new report exploring the traditional and digital syndication markets — the latest in his must-read “Deep Dive Series.” He notes that Netflix likely will spend around $3.3B next year on content, while Amazon ponies up $1.7B, and Hulu follows with $1.5B. And they’re hungry for original productions; they’ll probably account for 10% of Netflix’s outlay.

Yet except for Lionsgate, “the dominant players on the network TV first window side (CBS, Warner Brothers, Fox, etc.) are playing a virtually immaterial role in the production of content for the emerging original content SVOD [subscription video-on-demand] ecosystem, even as its growth accelerates,” the analyst says. Smaller firms including Legendary TV and Electus, he finds, “are taking the lead on …originals, increasingly through co-production roles with the SVOD platforms themselves.”

No wonder. The Hollywood powers are doing just fine as they focus on the $23B a year off-network domestic syndication market, producing sitcoms and hour-long procedurals that they can sell to TV stations and cable networks, and arc-based dramas that can be re-run on SVOD. Their business could grow as channels including WGN America and FXX buy additional off-network fare.

And Bank acknowledges that there isn’t a clear financial model yet for shows that debut on digital platforms, such as Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black or Amazon’s Alpha House. We haven’t seen one of these shows jump to another platform “that would demonstrate that SVOD originals have true syndication value outside of window one.” What’s more, Netflix, Amazon, and others “are seeking long-term exclusivity in both time and geography, which would essentially prevent real exploitation of content in syndication even if demand developed.”

He already sees interesting experiments – particularly as big studios cut deals for individual shows, as opposed to libraries. CBS paved the way last year with Under The Dome, which also appeared on Amazon. It seems that these days studios “can make more from one show than they would have from a library sale only a few years ago,” Bank says. For example CBS probably made more from its sale of CSI: Miami to Netflix in 2012 than it did from its first library deal with the streaming service.

But the big guys may have to explore new opportunities. “Fewer linear syndication-friendly format shows are ‘breaking,’ and they are breaking later,” the analyst observes. And investors may fail to see the value from the new array of complicated, one-off, and often opaque deals. Unlike a few years ago, “today we have limited visibility into 2015 and none into 2016,” Bank says. Yet he takes a stab at it: he predicts that next year SVOD syndication deals will provide CBS Studios with $179M, Warner Bros. with $106M, Lionsgate with $61M, Sony with $43M, Fox and ABC Studios with $40M apiece, and UTV with $22M.

http://deadline.com/2014/10/studios-wary-produce-original-shows-digital-859489/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Is the Future of Comedy the Comedy/Drama Hybrid?

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 Ellen

10/23/2014 Split Sider by Chris Kopcow

In a recent Salon interview, Bob Odenkirk warns aspiring writers to “get out of comedy, because it’s about to collapse.” Sketch comedy, he says, is having its time in the sun now — what with YouTube, Comedy Central’s burgeoning lineup and the legions of theater sketch teams popping up all over — but the market is becoming saturated. What’s next then? He suggests that once the market tires of short sketches, it may turn to more long-form, dramatic material. “I do think that after sketch comes story,” he speculates.

And when you look at the TV landscape, that makes sense. (Plus, Odenkirk’s been ahead of the game for years. Why wouldn’t you listen to him now?) Louie and Girls, two shows that are nominally considered comedies but regularly flirt with drama within their svelte 30-minute timeframes, are setting the tone for many of the new comedies cropping up everywhere. Some of that influence manifests itself in different ways, whether it’s other series copping their surface premise (Maron), their intimate, semi-vérité style (Broad City, Looking) or their personal, insular subject matter (Transparent, Hello Ladies).

But regardless of exactly how each show borrows, the bottom line is that all these series are following Louie and Girls’ lead by digging beneath the obvious elements of comedy to explore the uncomfortable or painful issues that lie beneath any good punchline. In short, they’re acting more like dramas. So that begs the question: are we entering some new era dominated by that nebulous thing known as the “comedy-drama”?

Well, I’m not sure. Given the proliferation of these comedy-dramas, it sure would seem like it. Yet while we’ve started heading in that direction, I don’t think we’re quite there yet. As influential as Louie or Girls are, it’s not like they are ratings juggernauts or anything. The crossover between fans of Louis C.K.’s standup and his show is surprisingly small. Granted, neither of those shows are trying to court a wide audience, both because of their placement on cable and because their sensibilities can be deliberately alienating, as the many, many, many thinkpieces written about both shows make perfectly clear. What’s just as clear, though, is that writers and network heads are learning from these shows and applying them to their own, possibly more accessible, series.

Now, I’m not suggesting that comedy-dramas will replace typical, jokes-first sitcoms. Those will continue to thrive as they always have and always should. But I do think that, if we’re really going to move forward, we need to embrace a broader idea of what comedies are capable of. If you think that isn’t a big obstacle…well, how many times have you seen someone complain an episode of, say, Parks and Recreation was terrible because it “wasn’t funny enough” when it really just dealt with weightier material or took a breather to develop its characters?

Part of the problem in overcoming that obstacle has to do with the comedy-drama label itself. See, dramas never have to prove they’re dramas. Jesse Pinkman can say “yeah, bitch!” and we all giggle, but we never question if Breaking Bad is moving into sitcom territory. Comedies, on the other hand, don’t have that luxury. They have to remain funny at all times to prove their worth. And if the jokes don’t come fast enough, if two characters spend a scene having a long, laugh-free conversation, or if, God forbid, no one’s sarcastic for 30 seconds, you’ll inspire the wrath of internet commenters just looking to laugh. Do that for a couple episodes, and suddenly you’re a comedy-drama…or at least you’re going to be saddled with that designation on your Wikipedia page. Your perception as a funny comedy is gone, and there goes a lot of your audience with it.

In a sense, that’s a completely understandable reaction. When sitting down to watch TV, not everyone’s looking to be challenged or concerned with serialized character development. A lot of people watch comedies because they want to laugh, period. You’re in a bad mood because your had a tough day in the coal mines or whatever, and you don’t want to see your happy-go-lucky TV friends go all contemplative and dark on you. There’s nothing wrong with that. But that shouldn’t necessarily be grounds to dismiss or avoid a show either. Because they look and move (and, to be fair, are sometimes marketed) like dramas, as soon as something is slapped with the “comedy-drama” label, comedy fans tend to run screaming, when really they are often missing out on some of the best comedy around.

This goes double for shows that operate outside of the normal comedy community, where Paul Rudd or Kumail Nanjiani could be waiting right around the corner with a wink and a cameo. For instance, I always remembered Gilmore Girls being funny, but recently rewatching it since it arrived on Netflix, I was struck by just how funny it is, how rapid-fire its wit and dialogue are, how it tosses off as many odd pop-culture references as MST3K or Community in their respective primes.

And while it’s long been acclaimed as one of the best shows of the 2000s — even showing up on TIME’s Greatest Shows Ever list a few years back — it’s rarely brought up in the context of great comedies. But when it arrived in 2000, what else were most people going to think? It was a series airing on the same channel as 7th Heaven and competing with Friends in the same timeslot. So most comedy fans weren’t flocking to see it then, and it’s still largely thought of as a cutesy drama by the uninitiated. In actuality, though, it was frequently hilarious on top of intelligent and moving, enough so to attract guest and recurring spots from future comedy stars like Nick Offerman, Jane Lynch, Nasim Pedrad, Danny Pudi, Adam Brody, Seth MacFarlane, Max Greenfield and more.

Same goes with Slings & Arrows, the Canadian show about a flagging Shakespeare festival, and that one had an even bigger comic pedigree behind it, starring and co-created by Kids In The Hall and SNL veteran Mark McKinney. Now, it’s understandable that most Americans haven’t seen this show. It only ran on Sundance Channel in the mid-2000s, which may as well have been C-SPAN 2 in 1937. But every time I explain the show to hardened Kids In The Hall fans, I’m usually met with indifference at best, even when the show was fully streamable on Netflix and Amazon (it isn’t right now, but it goes back and forth).

Yeah, the phrase “about a Shakespearean theater” isn’t exactly nectar to a lot of people, and the series does concern itself with Big Themes of mortality and the search for meaning. (Case in point: my sister tried to get me to watch it for a long time, and it took years for it to take. But what happened as soon as I started? I was instantly hooked.) Yet while Slings & Arrows can be complex and deeply sad, it’s also a wickedly funny satire and loving tribute to artists of any stripe, and Paul Gross’ mad genius theater director Geoffrey Tennant is one of television’s great comic creations of the last decade.

Really, Freaks And Geeks is one of the few hour-long comedy-dramas I can think of that has wide acceptance as a standard in the comedy community, and that has a lot to do with the careers its cast and crew went on to have. Because while, sure, NBC didn’t give it the chance it should have, it’s also true that it was cancelled in part because Paul Feig and Judd Apatow refused to tidy up its more tragic and troubling elements, so no one watched it. Now, of course, people can’t believe it was ever cancelled. Who knows what other great comedies you or I are missing right now because they’re a little more subdued and require a bit more effort on our part?

I’m not putting myself above anyone here. I also have a ton of trouble beginning comedy-dramas I’ve read about because it’s so much easier to zip through an episode of a half-hour sitcom, even the really smart, dense ones, than a more languid, hour-long one. Certainly, if you’re looking to laugh, some comedy-dramas like Orange Is The New Black or Transparent are far more drama than comedy, but not all of them are — far from it — and plenty of them are rewarding in different ways than a traditional sitcom.

With any luck, some day we won’t need the comedy-drama label. We’ll learn that when we hear the word “comedy,” we can expect there might be lulls in the comebacks and punchlines, and that clever, light-speed absurdism can sit comfortably beside something more grounded and sobering. Till then, if you think comedies should only occupy themselves with being funny, that’s fine and all, but you’re selling yourself short, and you’re selling comedy short.

Chris Kopcow is a pop culture writer and sketch comedy guy based out of Boston. He recently started linking to his Twitter out of compulsive need.

http://splitsider.com/2014/10/is-the-future-of-comedy-the-comedydrama-hybrid/

Shakira Partners With Fisher Price for Web Series, Line of Baby Toys

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 Ellen

10/24/2014 by The Associated Press

She co-developed six products, including a bouncer that plays music, alphabet blocks and a musical soccer ball — an ode to her soccer-playing boyfriend Gerard Pique

Shakira is partnering with Fisher-Price to launch a line of baby toys as well as a Web series for moms.

The Mattel, Inc.-owned company announced Friday that the First Steps collection of toys and baby gear would be available in November. Shakira co-developed six products, including a bouncer that plays music, alphabet blocks and a musical soccer ball, an ode to her soccer-playing boyfriend Gerard Pique, who plays for FC Barcelona.

All of the proceeds will benefit her Barefoot Foundation, which provides education and nutrition to children in impoverished areas of her native Colombia. Pre-order on Amazon for the products begins Monday.

Geoff Walker, executive vice president of the Fisher-Price Global Brands Team, said in an interview Thursday that Shakira contacted the company about collaborating. The Grammy-winning singer, who is pregnant and is the mother of 21-month-old Milan, is the first celebrity Fisher-Price has partnered with.

“She brings in both authenticity and emotion, and I think that’s why this is such an exciting moment,” Walker said.

With her foundation, one of Shakira’s main initiatives has been early childhood development, which attracted Fisher-Price to the global star, Walker said.

“I saw how important developmental milestones are and how toys can help babies reach them — including with my own son,” Shakira said in a statement. “I wanted to design a line of toys that stimulated development in the crucial early stages of life, the stages in which learning can be achieved through supervised play, fostering the development of psychological, social and motor skills.”

The 12-part Web series debuts Monday and targets millennials. Some of the episodes, three to five minutes long, will feature her son.

Shakira is one of the most popular celebrities on social media. She is the first person to reach 100 million likes on Facebook.

Walker said as a result of the collaboration, Fisher-Price would be open to more celebrity partnerships.

“It’s about finding an authentic mom that is relevant to the millennial crowd,” he said.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shakira-partners-fisher-price-web-743641

The Counter Counterculture

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 Ellen

2/12/1995 The New York Times By James Atlas

IT WAS COCKTAIL HOUR ON THE OPENING DAY of the new, Republican-dominated Congress, and the long, chandelier-lighted parlor of David Brock’s town house in Georgetown was filling up with exuberant young conservatives fresh from events on the Hill. Brock is a 32-year-old journalist who has taken the 60’s counterculture credo that the personal is political and given it a whole new meaning — describing Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” and interviewing Arkansas state troopers about Bill Clinton’s sex life. He’d invited to his place perhaps two dozen men and women in their 20’s and 30’s and early 40’s who, like him, made their living trying to tear down the liberal establishment, or what remains of it.

There were editors from The American Spectator — the country’s most raucous journal of conservative opinion. It was in The Spectator that Brock published his savaging of Hill (later expanded into a best-selling book) and his “troopergate” allegations about the President. To judge by his elegant French-cuffed shirt, let alone the town house, his association with The Spectator hadn’t hurt him.

In the center of the parlor, radiating the charged aura of the face-famous, stood P. J. O’Rourke, the Hunter Thompson of the right, drawing on a lethal-looking cigarillo; his withering dispatches in Rolling Stone, the biweekly that helped define the 60’s counterculture, have made him something of a 90’s frat-house hero. (I’d seen him on “Charlie Rose” the week before, making fun of starving Africans.) O’Rourke was deep in conversation with Andrew Ferguson, another conservative funny man. Ferguson had published a “memo” on The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page a week after the election briefing reporters — which to his mind means members of the liberal, Beltway-bunkered opinion elite — on the curious new species known as “Republicans,” who attend church not for chamber music concerts but for “services” and who drive “old cars, pickup trucks and vans,” not Volvos. The article was called “Those Who Don’t Get It.”

Brock pointed out for me some of the others who, to the strains of Smashing Pumpkins and 10,000 Maniacs, were drinking and laughing and comparing Newt sightings. It may have been a more sedate affair than the Election Night bash Brock threw — “I thought the windows were going to blow out when Rostenkowski conceded,” he said — but it was anything but staid. I had been prepared to encounter the kind of conservatives Norman Mailer memorably described as “people who went to their piano lessons when they were kids,” but it wasn’t that kind of crowd. They were bright. They’d had radical and unpopular ideas and had stuck to them. And now they were carrying on like winners. America!

I was struck by the number of women on hand. There was Cathy Young, a 32-year-old columnist for The Detroit News who had come armed with brochures advertising the Women’s Freedom Network, a conservative lobbying group formed in 1993 to seek “alternatives to both extremist ideological feminism and anti-feminist traditionalism.” Later on I would meet Danielle Crittenden, the editor of The Women’s Quarterly, a new Washington-based periodical edited for and by conservative-minded women; she was with her husband, David Frum — a former Wall Street Journal editorial writer and the author of “Dead Right,” which accuses the Reagan and Bush Administrations of not delivering on their promises to reduce the size of the Federal Government. Eager to get the word out about her new journal, Crittenden had sent me the first two issues, featuring articles like “Violence Against Taxpayers: Why the new $ 1.5 billion Violence Against Women Act won’t protect women from violent crime, but will subject them to an assault of ‘abuse experts,'” by Betsy Hart, a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service who was also at the party.

Another of Brock’s guests that night was David Brooks, features editor of The Journal’s editorial page — the bulletin board of the New Right. A week after last November’s election, Brooks had published on the page a short essay of his own titled “Meet the New Establishment,” in which he heralded the ascent of a “new generation” of 30- and 40-something conservative opinion-makers: journalists, columnists, policy intellectuals and assorted other media and political types. The cultural revolution Brooks described had flickered alongside the electoral one that put Newt Gingrich in the Speaker’s chair.

And who were the members of this New Establishment? Prominent among its ranks is William Kristol, the Republican strategist whose memo, faxed out to Republicans on Capitol Hill, launched the assault on President Clinton’s health care plan. Then there is Lisa Schiffren, the former speech writer for Dan Quayle, who turned a sitcom character, Murphy Brown, into a weapon in the right’s attack on single motherhood. Myron Magnet of New York’s influential conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, is a member, too; his 1993 book, “The Dream and the Nightmare,” a detailed critique of the welfare system, earned him a fan letter from Gingrich and helped make welfare reform a Republican priority. The notion of political correctness, now a staple of radio talk shows and the news weeklies, was first defined and ridiculed by the cultural critics Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza, both of whom are key players of the New Establishment. D’Souza’s next book, on the politics of race, will — like so many conservative books these days, including “The Bell Curve” — be published by Adam Bellow, editorial director of the Free Press, this establishment’s most important house. Then there are the people who publicize these books and the ideas they promote — people like Brooks and Brock and James Golden, a producer of “Rush Limbaugh” who also has his own nationally syndicated radio show. These young men and women are, in effect, a new conservative opinion elite, a counter-counterculture.

“There’s a parallel universe and it’s to every outward appearance exactly the same as yours,” Lisa Schiffren told me recently. (By “yours” she meant “liberal.”) “We went to the same schools, live in the same places, wear the same clothes. But to the left, it’s as if we’re from the twilight zone. People don’t see the difference between me and Phyllis Schlafly. They believe that anyone who’s pro-life must be rigid, repressed and neurotic about the sex they’re probably not getting.”

John Podhoretz, the son of Norman and the TV critic for The New York Post, made somewhat the same point. Podhoretz, who wrote for the arch-conservative Washington Times before a stint at the Bush White House, said: “We speak liberal as well as our own tongue. Why don’t you speak conservative?” It’s a common counter-countercultural theme: You liberals know something is happening, but you don’t know what it is.

What’s new about these New Conservatives? What distinguishes them from the liberal, New York Review of Books-reading intelligentsia they resent with such a passion? After all, they do look just like the liberal elite. They live mostly along the Eastern Seaboard, in Washington and New York and Boston. They attended the right schools. (Dartmouth and Yale predominate on their C.V.’s.) They are hip to a pop culture many liberals think of as something wholly their own. Yet they embrace a set of values common among America’s wealthiest individuals and corporations — lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government — and a lot of them have made it financially, at least compared with their left-liberal brethren. Corporate money flows into their think tanks, and Wall Street welcomes their speeches with applause and handsome fees. They do not drive old cars and pickup trucks.

An elite, then — but one, unlike its liberal counterpart, that claims to be in accord with the country, the world out there, the Heartland. It’s not what Lionel Trilling called the Adversary Culture; it’s the culture that belongs. “My views of Clinton are the majority view,” maintains David Brock, who keeps a bumper sticker on a table in his front hall: “President Gore — Don’t Pardon Hillary.” The American Spectator, he reminded me, has a circulation of 340,000, three times that of the usually liberal New Republic. “We’re saying what the American people are thinking.”

But there is another youngish conservative faction that wasn’t represented at Brock’s place that night — one that also claims to speak for the majority of Americans, but not from Manhattan or Georgetown. These other young conservatives did not attend Ivy League schools, but do worry about school texts that consider Darwin’s theory of evolution scientific. These conservatives are not up on popular culture; they think it’s evil. They wouldn’t feel comfortable at a party like Brock’s — wouldn’t like the smoking and drinking, the soundtrack from “Pulp Fiction.” And it is probably fair to say that they would not feel comfortable in a room with so many professional women, with so many Jews, or with Brock himself, who is openly gay.

It is surely one of the accomplishments of the younger conservative elite to have brought together the older, mostly Catholic, William F. Buckley strand of intellectual conservatism and the relatively newer, mostly Jewish neo-conservative strand. However, the counter-counterculture doesn’t count in its crowd people like Ralph Reed, the 33-year-old executive director of the 1.5-million-member Christian Coalition, founded by Pat Robertson. Michael Lind, a onetime member in good standing of the counter-counterculture — he was a research assistant for Buckley and later went on to become executive editor of the neo-con journal The National Interest — has recently defected, largely because, he has written, his compatriots have chosen to remain complacently silent about what he calls “the uncouth fire-and-brimstone Protestant evangelicals” — a constituency, he maintains, that has big problems with Jews, women, homosexuals and most anyone who isn’t one of them. The new opinion elite, Lind argues, is more comfortable continuing to bash liberals and continuing to enjoy its access to Republican power than it is challenging and criticizing its evangelical brethren.

Reed, for his part, is not so circumspect. He has declared, “What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time and one state at a time.” Reed presumably means Georgetown too.

AT LUNCH ONE AFTERNOON LAST FALL IN THE top-floor dining room of the American Enterprise Institute, Washington’s largest conservative think tank, William Kristol was in a convivial mood. He excels at what used to be called table talk. ” ‘What do you think of the health care bill, Sir?'” he says in a jocund voice, imitating Dr. Johnson. ” ‘An abomination, I say.'”

His father, Irving Kristol, a fellow of the institute, was also having lunch in the dining room that day. The Kristols, the Podhoretzes: conservatism can seem like a family affair — or a nepotistic one, depending on your outlook. (I’ve heard the younger ones referred to as mini-cons.) Kristol the elder has elegant wood-paneled offices at A.E.I., five floors above the more Spartan surroundings of his son’s boutique think tank, the Project for the Republican Future. At one point during our meal, Kristol the elder came over to our table, dragging on a cigarette. “What’s the name of our Jew from the West Coast?” he asked his son. (Answer: Dennis Prager, described to me as “a not-so-right-wing Rush Limbaugh” who has a popular call-in show in Los Angeles.)

Irving Kristol, the founding father of neo-conservatism, is often identified in the press today simply as the father of William. At 42, Kristol the younger has become perhaps the most powerful member of the counter-counterculture — the fellow who tells the Republicans “what to think up in Washington,” to quote President Clinton. Kristol’s square-jawed visage is ubiquitous these days — you see it on CNN, “Nightline,” “Meet the Press.” His blunt, often brutal faxes are invoked daily by pundits across the land. Terry Eastland, a former top official in Reagan’s Justice Department and now the editor of Forbes Media Critic, claims he’s “the most-quoted non-Congressman there is.”

“All serious revolutions are revolutions of ideas,” Kristol wrote some years back, beginning a review of Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” in The Wall Street Journal. Certainly Kristol’s own ideas have been taken seriously. “He’s had a great impact on the Republican Party, and he’s one of the people who can shape it,” says William Bennett.

As if it weren’t enough to have Irving Kristol for a father, William also has a distinguished mother, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. (“Great DNA there,” says Bennett, a family friend.) In the 50’s and 60’s, the Kristols’ Upper West Side home was a salon for New York intellectuals — liberal intellectuals, because liberals, as Lionel Trilling noted at the time, were the only intellectuals there were. In those days, Trilling himself was welcome at the Kristols’. At 15, Bill, as he is known, came in to greet the guests at one of his parents’ dinner parties and got into an argument with Trilling himself. (He can’t remember what it was about.)

Kristol arrived at Harvard in 1970, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War. His father had turned right by then, and so had he. Kristol wore a Spiro T. Agnew sweatshirt to classes and declared himself for Nixon on a campus where Dick Gregory got more votes in a straw poll. “Already he was giving it to the left,” recalls Harvey Mansfield, Kristol’s government professor

“It was always just more fun to be in a minority than in a majority,” Kristol recalls of those years. “I was able to rebel against my generation instead of against my parents.” He wasn’t completely an intellectual loner in Cambridge, but pretty close. “There was a sort of circle of neo-conservative slash Straussian slash just nonleft, you might say, intellectual types,” he told me. (“Straussian,” a key term in the New Conservative vocabulary, refers to Leo Strauss, the legendary celebrator of the ancient Greeks who reigned over the University of Chicago’s department of political science and found a keen adherent in Allan Bloom.) When I asked Kristol who belonged to this circle (I, too, was a Harvard undergrad around that time, and never laid eyes on a conservative), he mentioned Mansfield, Samuel Huntington and James Q. Wilson, professors all. Later on, when he was doing graduate work at Harvard, he became friends with Francis Fukuyama, a fellow grad student and anti-leftist who would go on to write the best-selling eulogy to the cold war, “The End of History.”

Kristol got his Ph.D. in political philosophy and wrote scholarly articles with titles like “The Heavenly City of Post-Constitutional Theory” for the University of Chicago Law Review and The Public Interest (edited by his father). But there was something dutiful about Kristol’s pursuit of the academic life, as he sees it now. “It was pretty clear that, for me, a less ethereal life would be more satisfying,” he told me.

After two years at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard — a frequent stepping-stone to Washington — Kristol teamed up with William Bennett, then Secretary of Education. How he got there is instructive. In the summer of 1984, he traveled down to Washington to research an article on how Reaganites were grappling with the Government bureaucracy that candidate Reagan had vowed to dismantle. The result was an article in Policy Review, still another conservative journal, called “Can-Do Government: Three Reagan Appointees Who Made a Difference.” One of the three was Bennett, whose aggressive budget-trimming as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the first Reagan Administration Kristol lauded as a model of how to limit government. (That Irving Kristol had recommended Bennett for the N.E.H. post could have been lost on no one in this network.) Three months later, Bennett called and offered him a job.

Kristol quickly made a name for himself as a political operative at the Education Department. “We were proud to be called Fort Reagan,” recalls Bennett. “We were the only place that was keeping the Tablet” — which for Bennett meant delivering impassioned campus speeches (with a lot of input from Kristol) in defense of the core curriculum. “Bill was good at the cultural stuff.”

Kristol left the Department of Education in 1988 to manage the campaign of his Harvard roommate Alan Keyes, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican Senate seat in Maryland. A few months later, he got a call “out of the blue” from a friend of Dan Quayle’s: Would he be interested in a job as the Vice President’s domestic adviser? Kristol turned it down. “I couldn’t see sitting quietly and taking notes without having a hand in shaping opinion,” he says. It was only when Quayle himself called and made it clear that he intended to have “an activist Vice Presidency,” and that he wanted Kristol to be part of it, that he changed his mind. “I thought it would be interesting and a challenge.” He defends Quayle as “a bright man and really a fine person” with “good political judgment.”

Going to work for Quayle wasn’t a popular decision among Kristol’s friends or his family. “I must say, I was rather dubious about that,” his mother admitted to me, hastening to add that “it was a clear case of ideas — Bill thought he could get his ideas across.”

Strategically, it wasn’t a bad move; it got Kristol noticed. To the media he became known as “Dan Quayle’s brain” (not in itself a remarkable achievement, notes George Will, who likens being called the smartest person in the Bush White House to being called “the tallest building in Topeka”). It was clearly Kristol who was behind Quayle’s assault on the “cultural elite.” For Kristol, it was a war on his own kind. To attack it was to attack what Kristol once described as “the typical New York-Jewish view of the world, that people who weren’t from New York and Jewish were unfortunate: they ate Wonder Bread and mayonnaise and had boring existences.”

It wasn’t just ideas that Kristol purveyed. He’d also become an adept political practitioner — a pro at what he likes to call “the baseball side of politics, the wins and losses, the vote counts.” In “All’s Fair,” Mary Matalin, the Bush strategist, recounts “a stroke of Kristol Machiavellian genius”: after rumors arose in ’92 that Quayle might be dumped from the ticket, Kristol leaked word that Bush was sticking with the Vice President; when a reporter put the question directly to Bush, he felt it was bad manners to do anything but affirm his support. (According to Kristol, who denies Matalin’s account, Quayle raised the issue at a meeting with Bush, and Bush “told him he was O.K.”)

The moment it became clear that Bush was going to lose no matter who was on the ticket, Kristol began to distance himself from the White House. Two months before the election, he came up with this masterpiece of equivocation: “I’m much less sure that we deserve to win than that the country doesn’t deserve for the Democrats to win.” Now he says, “I thought the underlying dynamics were terrible for us. I expected us to lose.”

Kristol established the Project for the Republican Future after he left the White House with money from what Kristol described as “Wall Street types, basically.” The budget for last year was $ 1.3 million — a comfortable but hardly lavish sum. The project operates with a seat-of-the-pants informality; its offices at A.E.I. feel more like an Ivy League history department than a Washington think tank. But there’s nothing academic about Kristol’s memos, which he faxes out to politicians and key opinion-makers at the rate of several a week. Kristol’s memos have a distinct edge — brassy is the word George Will applies. A little more than a year ago, at a time when Senator Bob Dole was affirming the notion of a “health care crisis,” Kristol was drafting a memo entitled “Defeating President Clinton’s Health Care Proposal.” Clinton’s plan was just another step in the direction of big government, Kristol argued; most Americans were happy with the coverage they had. There was no health care crisis. In little more than a month, Dole, a careful reader of Kristol’s memos, was saying, “My view is that I think there isn’t a health care crisis.” It was the beginning of the end for Clinton’s plan.

Kristol hasn’t let up on Clinton. Shortly after he helped defeat the health care bill, he accused Clinton of “posturing” on welfare. And within hours of the President’s State of the Union Message, Kristol issued a sarcastic memo deriding it as “the most conservative major address ever delivered by a 20th-century Democratic president.” (“You half expected Mr. Clinton to denounce affirmative action, the Clean Air Act, and radical feminism too… .”) He also found time to turn up on “Charlie Rose” that night to provide instant negative spin.

Kristol, like the rest of the counter-counterculture, is by temperament a radical — someone who likes to be against. “I don’t apologize for the fact that most of our work has been in opposition,” he told me. “In politics as in life generally, a lot of what one does is oppose bad ideas.” Opposition is “worthwhile for its own sake, good for the country,” he said, sounding just like a 60’s radical.

When asked what he’s for, Kristol grows vague. “It’s a historic moment when all kinds of things need to be worked out,” he says. “The single thing one could do now is pull kids out of failing schools and put them in successful schools” — he’s an advocate of school choice.

What about the anti-feminist rhetoric I kept hearing on the right?

“Feminism is a very difficult issue,” he replied. “I’m not willing to abandon all the progress on equal rights for women, and I never said we should. But where we go from here is a big question. The fact that feminism has had certain good consequences doesn’t absolve one of the responsibility for pointing out that it’s had certain bad consequences. Politically, everyone is happy with equal treatment under the law, there’s no big dispute about that. There’s some dispute around the margins … women and the military, stuff like that.”

But what are his priorities? What’s the one big thing to be done?

“Our agenda now is to think about how to revitalize public institutions, how to strengthen the institutions of civic society — shaping the culture as opposed to reforming the politics.”

For all his talk of “ideas,” Kristol is essentially a strategist, a tactician. Most of his friends predict he’ll end up back in government. “My guess is that Bill will be the chief of staff for the next Republican President or chairman of the Republican Party,” Terry Eastland says. The real priority for Kristol, those who know him told me, is deciding whom he’ll support in ’96. “He’s in a pickle on Quayle,” says a friend. “He wants to give him sound advice, but he’s afraid Quayle’s gonna get beat up. He’s not going to do anything disloyal.”

Not disloyal, perhaps, but definitely politic. I happened to be in Kristol’s office on the day he was preparing to fax out a memo responding to the Republicans’ Contract With America, which had been unveiled that afternoon. And what did Kristol think of the contract? “We’re pretending to like it,” he’d said offhandedly as we headed to lunch.

MEMBERS OF THE Counter-Counterculture gathered for dinner one night last month at Citronelle, a chic bistro in the Latham Hotel in Georgetown. The surroundings were refined; the talk was rightish Beltway. Daniel Wattenberg, son of the conservative columnist Ben Wattenberg, revealed that he was working on a “First 100 Days” documentary for PBS, “while it’s still there” — eliciting whoops. “Get the man an N.E.H. grant,” someone shouted down the table. (Public television and the National Endowment for the Humanities have been among the first declared targets of the Republicans’ cutting frenzy.)

Over Chilean sea bass, those around the table reminisced with evangelical fervor about their conservative origins, recounting their political conversions or awakenings. It was Jay Lefkowitz, director of Cabinet affairs in the Bush White House, who introduced the notion of the “defining moment” — a moment of nearly religious intensity when one’s conservative affiliation, one’s conservative soul, suddenly stood revealed. He told of being a student at Columbia Law School in the mid-80’s and going to an interview for a summer associate job at a white shoe law firm. A black classmate of his “who had even better grades than I did” also interviewed with the firm. Upon comparing notes of their interviews, it emerged that his classmate had been asked to supply a transcript not only of his law-school grades but of his undergraduate record. The firm wanted to be sure he hadn’t got to Columbia Law simply because he was black. To Lefkowitz’s mind, here was the true and cruel legacy of affirmative action. “What made this moment so defining for me,” said Lefkowitz, “was that my friend needed to verify himself, to prove his merit and show that he had the grades, that he hadn’t got in to law school on the basis of race” — an assumption Lefkowitz considered “profoundly racist.”

David Brock also claims a defining moment: the son of a marketing executive (“a Pat Buchanan conservative”) in the New Jersey suburbs, Brock had gone to Berkeley “for all the reasons one would go there” — drugs, sex, rock-and-roll — and seen conservative speakers like Caspar Weinberger and Jeane Kirkpatrick shouted down. It wasn’t long before Brock himself got shouted down. As an editor for The Daily Californian, the Berkeley campus paper, he wrote a signed column endorsing the Granada invasion, “controversial in Berkeley but not in many other places” — apparently his father’s Buchananite tendencies had taken hold more than his son realized. The column created a furor; petitions demanding Brock’s ouster were circulated, editorials written. “I thought it was McCarthyism of the left,” said Brock. “I thought it was extremely intolerant.”

After graduation, Brock joined “the minority culture,” as young conservatives like to identify their cohort. He sent his clips to John Podhoretz, who was then editing Insight, the Sunday magazine of The Washington Times, and Podhoretz gave him a job. He did a stint at the Heritage Foundation and wrote his piece about Anita Hill for The Spectator; Erwin Glikes, then president and publisher of the Free Press, read it and signed him up to do a book. “The Real Anita Hill,” edited by Glikes’s protege, Adam Bellow, was on the best-seller list for 14 weeks.

Those at the Citronelle dinner were young conservatives. But they were old enough to be concerned about their stodgy image.

“We have to prove to the American people that we’re fair, that we believe in equality, that we’re not the elite,” Jay Lefkowitz said.

“I grew up in a liberal household and was taught that conservatives were dumber, not nice,” said Jennifer Grossman, communications director of Michael Huffington’s failed Senate campaign in California.

To the counter-counterculture, the divide between liberals and conservatives is no laughing matter. They talk about “our point of view,” “our people” — except that for them, the beleaguered and persecuted minority is on the right. “We’re still competing on their terms, sending our kids to Harvard, Yale and Princeton,” Grossman complained. She was also angry that Clinton failed to bestow any Kennedy Center Honors upon conservatives.

When it came right down to it, what really seemed to irritate Grossman and her cronies was not the state of the nation but their exclusion from what they call the loop. Over and over I heard this note of grievance against “the majority culture,” “the condottieri of liberalism,” “the compassion crowd.” Toward the end of dinner, John Podhoretz began a long peroration about his father, Norman, the editor of Commentary and one of the pioneers of neo-conservatism. “My father, one of the most eminent intellectuals of his time, is retiring,” Podhoretz, a stout, prematurely balding man, tieless and perspiring, said in a wounded tone. “Where are the honors due an old general? When the prizes are given out, when intellectual eminence is conferred, there is only silence. He has to give his own honorary dinner.”

Others around the table were obsessed with reviews. There was a conspiracy to “silence” conservative books. Look at Brock’s book, attacked in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, whose own book, “Strange Justice,” was highly critical of Clarence Thomas; look at the liberal assault on Richard Bernstein’s recent polemic on multiculturalism, “Dictatorship of Virtue” — a book by one of The Times’s own reporters! — Louis Menand in The New York Review of Books, Leon Wieseltier and Nicholas Lemann in The Times, Sean Wilentz, a Princeton history professor, in The New Republic: could a more liberal lineup be devised?

“You think we’re nuts, don’t you?” muttered Laura Ingraham, a former clerk for Clarence Thomas and now an attorney at the Washington offices of the power firm of Skadden, Arps. Ingraham, who is also a frequent guest on CNN, had had it with a particularly long-winded argument over some review in The New Republic. It could have been worse. They could have been the dweebs and nerds that liberals imagine young conservatives to be. But no one seemed to be going home from Citronelle, even though it was after 11; a number of the guests were on their way to a Capitol Hill party at the home of Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and an adviser to the new Speaker of the House. I found myself careering through the streets of downtown Washington with Brock in Ingraham’s military-green Land Rover at 60 miles an hour looking for an open bar while the music of Buckwheat Zydeco blasted over the stereo.

As we sat in the bar of the Tabard Inn knocking back big glasses of Sambuca (“Should we all sing ‘Kumbaya’?” suggested Ingraham), she entertained us with stories of her adventures in El Salvador during the mid-80’s. What was she doing there? I asked. “Subjugating third-world nations,” she said with a dry laugh.

NEWT GINGRICH’S headline-making book deal — $ 4

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/02/12/magazine/the-counter-counterculture.html?emc=eta1&src=pm&pagewanted=1

Why We Need More Gay Sex On Television

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 Ellen

10/22/2014 Daily Dot | By S.E. Smith

From television dramas like Castle to comedies like The Mindy Project, sex scenes are ubiquitous; two heterosexual characters fall upon each other in a frenzy of unstoppable attraction, tearing their clothes off, tumbling into bed, and filling the screen with a series of escalating moans. (On more family-friendly networks, the music swells and the scene politely fades to black.)

What you won’t see on television, however, is queer sex, with a vanishingly few number of exceptions.

One such: The undeniably hot scenes cropping up on the latest Shonda Rhimes-produced hit, How to Get Away with Murder. Key character Connor (Jack Falahee) hasn’t just been having The Gay Sex; he’s been having it all over the screen to collect evidence (meanwhile, the pilot included quite the racy cunnilingus scene, illustrating that the show is an equal opportunity sex-fest).

Likewise, on Rhimes’ Grey’s Anatomy, Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) and Callie (Sara Ramirez) frequently have explicit sex—there is no discreet fade to black, or oblique reference to lesbian sexuality—and, in fact, their sex life after Callie’s amputation proved to be an important storyline. Meanwhile, on Scandal, Cyrus Beene (Jeff Perry) has been involved in a number of relationships, all of which have specifically included sex on screen. The common thread here is one woman, who seems to be dominating Hollywood more by the second.

Rhimes doesn’t just have a passion for making people have sex in her shows, but specifically a passion for making sure that everyone has sex in her shows. And not everyone is a fan, as evidenced by a recent tweet complaining about the sex on How to Get Away with Murder:

. @Dabdelhakiem There are no GAY scenes. There are scenes with people in them.

— shonda rhimes (@shondarhimes) October 19, 2014

Her series of responses were a sharp rebuke to the idea that “gay sex” should be handled differently on television (notably, the network didn’t complain about the scenes or storylines at all), and instead categorized queer sexuality as what it is: people who happen to be having sex. Further, she added, “If you are suddenly discovering that Shondaland shows have scenes involving people who are gay, you are LATE TO THE PARTY.”

It’s telling that even a fairly staid network like ABC is perfectly capable of handling gay sexuality, but apparently its audiences are not. However, media reception has roundly supportive of the show’s “gay sex stampede.” Vanity Fair called How to Get Away with Murder “the most progressive show on television,” and the magazine’s Richard Lawson said, “It’s doing something pretty remarkable, something that feels big and important and noteworthy, in the coolest and most casual of ways.” Chris Harnick of E! further argued that it’s “changing television” by treating its gay character as “as anything but a token.” Harnick said, “The show is unapologetic about depicting his sex scenes—and why should they be? It’s 2014.”

At The Daily Beast, Kevin Fallon speaks to the fact that the gay characters on Rhimes’ shows are neither saints nor stereotypes, but flawed and real human beings, with a focus on who they are as people and characters, not on their gayness.

Cyrus is not perfect. In fact, he might even be evil. And like all of the characters on Scandal, his imperfect devilishness is colored by the actor’s sympathetic and humanizing performance. There doesn’t even seem to be any handwringing about whether to have Cyrus complicit in Scandal’s more uncouth machinations. The groundbreaking thing about Shondaland is that its gay characters are finally allowed to have all the uncouth fun all the straight characters have been having on TV for years.

Furthermore, he adds, Shonda was doing it first:

Grey’s Anatomy’s Callie (Sara Ramirez) and Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) are monumental because they were lesbian characters in what was, at the time, the most popular show on television (yes, Grey’s is still on and still popular, but it used to be a phenomenon); that was five years ago when things were actually quite different in terms of gay visibility in the media; and they actually got married on the show, before same-sex legalization was a national movement.

He also observed that the sex scenes between gay characters aren’t quiet, subdued, or stilted, but hot: exactly what heterosexual viewers have come to expect from the handling of their own sexuality. There’s a reason that shows like Murder are developing such a loyal and committed following, and it’s not necessarily the absurd storylines, soapy plots, and the like. Rhimes’ characters are wet and messy in more ways than one, and that provides quite an appeal for viewers who are tired of seeing queer sexuality referenced only obliquely, if at all, with gay characters more like roommates with romantic pretensions than people who actually have sex with each other (and like it).

Shonda Rhimes’ tendency to be ahead of the curve when it comes to the depiction of minorities is a marked reason why she’s such a popular and beloved producer and creator. Rhimes doesn’t just make TV. She makes television; she develops the kinds of shows and ideas that other producers, showrunners, and writers race to imitate. As a creator, she wields tremendous cultural and political influence and has become a tastemaker, something that puts her in a position few women in Hollywood, let alone black women, enjoy.

What’s important about the frank look at human sexuality on Shonda Rhimes’ shows isn’t just that she integrates gay characters seamlessly into her casts, but that she shifts them out of the commonly desexualized narratives assigned to queer people in television, as Fallon notes.

To be queer on television is typically to be desexualized, to avoid scaring the heterosexual horses. Gay characters may exchange chaste pecks on the cheek or hold hands, and shows may reference their relationships, but that’s about where they stop. Rarely do viewers see flirting or the draw of attraction, let alone the kind of making out and active sex that they might come to expect from heterosexual characters. If television is to be believed, gay people never have sex, and indeed rarely touch each other at all; though they may climb into bed together sometimes, that’s purely because of practicality, not because they’re sexually attracted to each other and would like to act on that attraction.

The inclusion of gay characters on television shows is frequently heralded as a progressive move—at last, a gay character! Yet, gay characters in recent years haven’t necessarily represented the full spectrum of the gay experience, and they certainly haven’t been, well, gay. Kurt Blaine (Chris Colfer), for example, was a flagship gay character, but he didn’t seem to spend very much time actually making out or having sex with boys—even in high school, gay teens are just as active as their heterosexual counterparts.

On a show that was refreshingly comfortable with showing disabled sexuality, it’s telling that Kurt wasn’t allowed the full scope of his own sexual identity. When he lost his virginity, it was barely a blip on the screen. As Queerty’s Brody Brown noted, “We’re supposed to accept that the boys have ditched their purity rings based on tasteful shots of interlocking hands and smiling faces.”

On shows like Modern Family, The Fosters, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, we never actually see gay sex, though it is implied, with the shows cashing in on their progressive cred as representations of gay people. It takes grittier programming like House of Cards to show gay sexuality, and even then, it doesn’t compare to the heterosexual scenes, many of which are quite explicit. Gay people, it turns out, just don’t really like to have sex, apparently.

Turning to television to reflect images of themselves, heterosexuals have lots of examples, but queer viewers have vanishingly few. For them, television provides glimpses and hints of what happens behind closed doors, but the primary presentation of queerness is of a tight, contained package that includes a limited number of roles and stereotypes, all carefully calculated to cause the least offense. A no-holds-barred take on gay sexuality is, apparently, too much for most producers, but Rhimes doesn’t have that inhibition, any more than her gay characters do.

What’s bothering people about the sex scenes on How to Get Away with Murder isn’t so much that gay characters are present, or even the superficial knowledge that gay people have sex: It’s the front and center positioning of that sex as something that’s actually happening. The complaints echo the admonitions to not “act gay” in public, whatever that means, and the perils that await queer people in the real world if they openly express their sexuality, even in the most minor of ways.

If television viewers can’t handle gay people having sex on TV, perhaps it’s no wonder that they clutch their pearls at the sight of two men holding hands on the street, or two women kissing at a bus stop, when they wouldn’t think twice about a heterosexual couple doing the same thing.

http://www.dailydot.com/opinion/gay-sex-television-shonda-rhimes/

Sandy Grushow Reveals How Australian Web Series ‘Weatherman’ Landed at Fox

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 Ellen

10/22/2014 The Wrap By Jethro Nededog

Former Fox chief tells TheWrap how a call from the CEO for “kickstarter for TV” and an email to co-chairman Dana Walden cinched the deal

Phase 2 Media CEO Sandy Grushow took a crowdfunded Australian web series in need of $73,000 and got it a script order at Fox.

Grushow discovered the web series on crowdfunding site Mobcaster.

“The CEO of Mobcaster got in touch with me, described his company as Kickstarter for TV series,” Grushow told TheWrap. “He asked if I would look at this pilot that these two Australian kids had posted on Mobcaster in an effort to raise $73,000 so they could shoot six more episodes.”

He continued, “I said to the CEO, ‘You realize that $73,000 is craft services money.’ So, I went back to my hotel room, watched it and thought it was hilarious. I was blown away.”

The former chairman of the Fox Television Entertainment Group went to the show’s creators, Timothy Nash and Lucas Crandles, and asked what they really wanted. They told him, “We want to leave this provincial country of ours and come to Hollywood to make sitcoms.”

So, Grushow sent co-chairman and CEO of Fox Television Group, Dana Walden, an email “on a lark” and asked if she would watch “Weatherman.”

“Frankly I didn’t imagine I’d hear back from her,” Grushow said. “To her credit, within an hour I got an email saying, ‘This is really funny. I’m sending it to [creative affairs president Jonathan Davis].’”

On Wednesday, the broadcast network told TheWrap it had given a script order plus penalty to the single camera comedy described as an office place comedy based on the Australian web series. At the center of the show is weatherman Tony Turpinson, the most insecure man on television.

Wellesley Wild (“Family Guy,” “Ted 2”) is set to executive produce and write the project with 20th Century Fox Television under Wild’s overall deal with the studio.

Watch the original pilot for the web series, “Weatherman,” below:

VIDEO

http://www.thewrap.com/fox-buys-weatherman-remake-from-sandy-grushow-ted-writer-wellesley-wild/