2006-09-27 - 11:30 p.m.
Across my desk has just arrived an invitation to attend a play starring that brilliant thespian Mister Jeff Stryker, a master of stagecraft and an all around king of the theater. “A Night With Jeff Stryker” appears to be a one man show about the man’s adventures in the world of adult entertainment – and, given that Mister Stryker was, in his day, the first gay porn superstar, one supposes that he must have a clever tale to tell. And, of course, nudity is promised as part of the show.
But, wait: Isn’t Jeff Stryker about sixty now? Who on earth would go to a show to see him naked? That’s crazy. I mean, do you expect me to shell out thirty bucks to see Mister Stryker’s false teeth fall out as he tries to eat an apple? Are we supposed to get all hot and bothered by the fact that he hobbles onto the stage, with his walker, wearing nothing but his pair of Depends, which tucked half-dangly into his baggy blue Speedos?
Now, believe me, no one enjoys porn more than I do, but there is truly a time to hang things up. There is a moment in which one must simply stop and retire. I don’t care if you are a ghoulish gerontophile, such as the young men who seem to be into types like me, you do not want and need to see Mister Jeff Stryker, age 65, trotting around the stage, his grey pubic hair wafting about and his wooden leg clumping around the stage like a judge’s gavel. He is an Alter Kocher. No, let me correct myself: He is an Alter Cocker. It is high time that he did what all good aging gay men should do: He should move to Vermont or Maine and open a bed and breakfast, with rooms full of potpourri and a small dining room in which chicken breast on cous cous is served nightly.
The show is reportedly produced by Bruce Vilanch, who might be one of the only people whom I’d like to see naked even less than the wizened Jeff Stryker. And I expect it shall run for months and months, though why is anyone’s guess.
The most horrible case of retired porn star acting I ever saw was this show starring the retired porn star Ryan Idol, who appeared in this silly play at the Tiffany Theater. The play was essentially just one long gay Little Annie Fanny joke, with boys shedding their jeans and shirts at every conceivable plot twist. However, this show was ultimately salvaged by the fact that the rest of the cast consisted of several downright hot men, and this completely obfuscated the fact that Ryan Idol, paunchy and syphillitic, his face covered with shattered arteries and his eyes rheumy, looked more like Ned Beatty or Dom DeLuise than the former king of porn. I do not know how long that play ran for – I think it lasted for forever and a day.
Meanwhile, I have been watching, with slack-jawed amazement, this new TV series from Aaron Sorkin, the writer-producer who created THE WEST WING. Have you seen the show I’m talking about? It’s called STUDIO SIXTY ON THE SUNSET STRIP. And, my goodness, it’s just foul. I mean, it is just revolting -- vile, pretentious, self indulgent, self congratulatory crap-o-vision of a type whose politics and sensibility will inevitably make it a one season wonder, if the rest of the country has anything to do with it. I mean, it is deplorable.
If you are reading this many millennia from now, as a result of the world’s coming to an end, with this document being the only object from which you can learn about mankind in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, let me fill you in. I know that it is hard for you to imagine, given that you live in an amazing futuristic era and are able to merely think things into existence, but folks used to sit around at night and watch bad TV, when they could be frolicking in the woods or out performing Good Works.
Now, it will seem absurd to you, oh wondrous reader in the future, that anyone would waste a minute on something as odious as TV when they can live inside a Multi-Dimensional Virtual Reality Telenovella Matrix, but really TV was, for the time before they invented Transdimensional-Pocket Pool, the great pastime of our nation. And for some reason, there was this thing called “must see TV” – and a show like STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP was an example of this.
Now, if you close your eyes, STUDIO 60 sounds almost exactly like the WEST WING. Its dialogue has the same rhythms and cadences and pacing. Yet, WEST WING was actually a product of its era – and when we talk “era” I am talking the Clinton Era when folks were more forgiving of Hollywood exponents of liberal philosophy. Oddly enough, WEST WING is a show that is already as dated as last year’s headlines. Endless sanctimonious debates on the nature of the educational system or crop rotation waivers? Come on. We live in a terrorist state now and our political debates need a bit more bite than the wimpiness of Sorkinian patter.
But STUDIO 60 has this exact same tone of “debate the world’s importance” as the WEST WING, but fixes it almost bizarrely in the environs of some studio where they make a Saturday Night Live-like TV show. It’s almost freaky. It’s like the characters unintentionally equate the idea of putting on a mediocre TV show to running the country. Actually, that’s probably not the most botched metaphor – but it still plays as smarmy and self important when you see it on the tube. And the smugness! Really, the show is almost unendurable.
And the funniest thing is that it is a piece of fiction written by the ultimate Hollywood insider, hauntingly desperate to convince us that, yes, Insiders are good people, better qualified for their jobs than you are. But the writing has a total incomprehension of anyone who isn’t a fabulously successful star: There is a whole “Marie Antoinette”-like quality to the characters, who seem intended to be sympathetic, even as they are revolting and self indulgent and smug, smug, smug.
It somehow makes me grate my teeth when I keep hearing characters in a script saying again and again how funny they are – when what they’re saying is about as funny as the most mundane hackery possible. There’s an underlying meanness to the show that I find distasteful. With its presentation of bloated establishment types like Matthew Perry, who looks like a corpse that has been bobbing on the ocean for a week, and the suggestion of the notion that they are somehow more talented than folks who are younger and more edgy, the show is subtly anti-young and anti-progress.
In the pilot episode, I counted no more than three jokes poking fun of Internet comics as being crazy and talentless, for instance. To me, that suggests someone is feeling a little threatened, no? And, yet, the first episode ended with a stale parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I am a model of a modern English admiral” which had its thunder stolen about two months ago by a similar, but far funnier gag on a LONELYGIRL15 video that you can still catch on Youtube.com.
I predict that STUDIO 60 is not going to be a success because it is so totally against the current zeitgeist: People don’t want to be lectured and whined to by superficially philosophical Hollywood types. Hollywood tales also don’t play well out of state – and this is the most egregious sort of Hollywood tale. It’s meant to make you like folks who are self absorbed, believe nothing, and are heartlessly greedy, passing these qualities off as being great humanitarians. However, the characters consist of nothing but flaws, unconvincingly softened by ticks and emotional asides.
Meanwhile, I have also been watching this new season of SURVIVOR, and I have to tell you that I am finding the experience decidedly uncomfortable. Whose idea was it to divvy up the cast members into ethnic groups? I don’t quite understand the message the producers are trying to tell us. Are we supposed to learn something different about ourselves by watching how various ethnicities comport themselves on the desert island? If so, it is detestably obvious that the show is hewing to such dismal stereotypes I’m surprised the NAACP, Mecha, and the Asian Defamation League (if there is such an organization) isn’t picketing the studio each and every week.
But the thing I am not seeing addressed is this: Yes, the characters on the show are behaving like the most detestable racial stereotypes possible. The white characters are idiotic, pampered frat kids who spend all days cuddling and making out on the beach. The Latino characters are worker bees, building not only a cottage for themselves to live in, but opening a pandetoria on the beach for the passing Maori fishermen to stop in for guava juice. The Asians, meanwhile, have cunningly won all the puzzles and are scheming to manipulate their way across the sea back to Hong Kong. As for the blacks, ah well, I hope you will not take offense if I say to you that on this series, they are lazy and stupid. Sometimes they sit on the beach making little jokes, like Steppin Fetchit. Other times they dance about and sing rap songs. They lost their first challenge because they couldn’t figure out how to untie a rope.
You see, it is all calculated to delight the Gaede Family, if not the rest of America. Because anyone who watches the show and thinks, “jeez, that is what the ethnicities are really like!” is totally deranged. The actual bigots of the series are the people who did the casting. Why would anyone be surprised if a show’s characters behave like racial stereotypes if they are cast BECAUSE they are racial stereotypes? It’s disgusting. You can easily imagine the casting sessions.
“Well, Mister African American Man, we can’t cast you because you are not stupid and lazy enough to join the black tribe. And Miss Asian American, well, you are not cunning and wily enough to join the Asian tribe.” I must confess that I am rather curious to see whether the show is going to turn these expectations on their heads – but I don’t have much hope. It’s like a throwback to the 50s, it really is.
