E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

My oh my, so many of my worst fears coming together in Paris, in a profoundly forgettable week (if only it were so easy). So now the same pundits who've spent years ridiculing and otherwise lampooning the French (Fox News and Sarah Palin come to mind, with their 'Freedom Fries' jibes, and G.W. Bush, who just couldn't help himself and insisted "the French don't even have a word for 'entrepreneur'".) So now they've somehow, incredibly done something I very much doubt our trillion dollar Homeland Security apparatus could have done, and caught two escaped mass murderers in one day. That they died in a hail of gunfire was perhaps fitting, given their Charlie victims were unarmed and never had a chance. How sad, however, that this all revolves around the apparently incompatible issues of free speech versus freedom of religion; tainted by the notion very present here in the U.S.A. as well, that when you are a True Believer, all others are suspect...

I know it's hard to believe, but Hollywood once made good films. Even great ones. The one that the blowhards in North Korea apparently blew their tops over would not have qualified as either, but that, it seems, is about as good as it gets any more in that self-absorbed town that still fancies itself as the entertainment capital of the world. What Hollywood still has--Sony Studios or no--is an archive, a repertoire if you will, of great films, from over the last century. And believe it or not, as I witnessed first hand and played my own small part in making it happen, it was those films that carried out the real revolution in China: the post-Maoist, post-Communist revolution that made the people (if not yet the government) of China want to join the rest of the world--really for the first time in it's 7,000 year history. It wasn't intentional--far from it. And Hollywood moguls still fret about how the Chinese 'stole' all their movies. But the point they miss is t...

With all due respect to the FBI, The New York Times , and President Obama, there is more to this picture than meets the eye, and more to this story than we've been given. In my previous posts I've defended China and dismissed North Korea. As to the latter, I am forced to retreat from my dismissal of their involvement, but not surrender.  if it was NK after all, it was a blanket hack and they released everything, since they wouldn't know one person from another (apart from major stars) and certainly would not have grasped the jargon. In which case it was the media who picked and chose which emails to release, and explain who was who. And I very much doubt the Chinese were involved. There are North Koreans in China, and they could have orchestrated this, but the Chinese have no motivation to help NK commit a major international crime like this. Helping a bad nephew because he's your nephew is not motive enough. Somebody, I still think, played into Kim's hands who ...

I stand by my prior position, that no one in North Korea has the sophistication to pull off that successful cyber attack on Sony Pictures and cancellation of their Christmas release "The Interview." (On a separate matter, why exactly, was Christmas Day chosen to release a movie about a political assassination anyway? Not that North Korea would care). They either had an insider, or someone capable of straddling both worlds (the Communist Far East and 'decadent' West) simultaneously. That would be the Chinese. I know this because I spent 30 months there teaching American English and using Hollywood movies as a basic teaching tool. So, could one of my students have done this? I hate to think so, but yes, in theory that would be possible. My students were smart, sophisticated, eager to communicate with and learn about the West (not just the U.S. but also Europe and Latin America) and most certainly had the skills. But someone beholden to Kim Jong Un? I don't think...

One has to wonder: how could such a good company go so bad? No, wait. I was thinking of the old SONY. The one that made all those great electronics. The New SONY is in the movie business, and to call a film studio a good company is an oxymoron. I should know, I've worked for several of them, and in order to be at the business end of that business one has to be morally immune. That said, all the finger pointing is going so far afield as to be ludicrous. I'm talking about North Korea. The notion that North Korea is somehow behind the hacking of SONY Pictures is about as rational as the notion that North Korea invented the Peace Corps. To back up a little, I spent 30 months working inside North Korea's only friend and sponsor on the planet: the People's Republic of China, which really ought to know better by now. North Korea to the Chinese is like a really bad nephew who, on account of a common uncle or grandpa still skulking around, must still be regarded as 'fa...

Whether or not the Reader accepts the premise that William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, was not what he seemed (i.e. a writer/poet and man of letters) or my own premise that he was in fact the inventor of Hollywood (i.e. the first celebrity producer) William Shakespeare was not a fool or a foil, as depicted in the film Anonymous : he was anything but. I see him not only as a forerunner to Cecil B. de Mille and Louis B. Mayer, but also a forerunner to the Vampire Capitalist and Wall Street corporate greedmeister as depicted in the movie Wall Street by Michael Douglas. Shakespeare had a lot of business savvy, was denounced for being greedy just like Gordon Gekko, was accused of piracy and plagiarism just like Dan Brown and Steven Spielberg, hoarded grain to drive up prices during a famine just like Monsanto, owned a theater company (i.e.studio) just like Goldwyn (well, a partner, anyway, with my own ancestor John Underwood among others), and fostered a bastard son who became England...

Pet Peeve: Hollywood producers have long had the habit of shooting location footage in their back yard and calling it Rome. Or Alaska. Or Seattle. Or New Jersey, where I happened to grow up. What these people seem obliviously, vaingloriously, utterly incapable of grasping, or even imagining, is that the rest of the world, or for that matter the rest of the country, does not in the slightest resemble those brown, burned out hills and valleys that surround Los Angeles, and resemble nothing so much as, well, Los Angeles. This past week I was watching two of my favorite shows, and they are favorites no more, because I have become so weary of having burnt brown stains smeared across my screen and being asked to believe it is Seattle, or Princeton, or Niagara Falls. Do these people in Hollywood actually imagine that nobody outside of Los Angeles County (or for that matter, inside of Los Angeles County) ever goes outside, opens their eyes, and looks around? That we won't notice the Hollyw...

Back in my carefree New York days from the late Sixties to mid-disco, I got to know Nick Dunne in an environment with which he had far more comfort and self-confidence than I. Or so I thought. He was from a more privileged background than I, certainly: an upper class upbringing in a home in which his elder brother (like my own) was already an accomplished author, and his grandfather was what I would later call "Old Money" (the original title of my first book). He had this in common with the Kennedys as well, ironically, given they would become his prime targets later on. The setting where we first met and got to know one another was in the Hamptons, at the home of then Park Avenue ingenue Gillian Fuller (actually Gillian's mother's 'dog house,' as she called it at the time). But what we had in common was a well-hidden sense of not belonging--not just there in Southhampton, but anywhere. I was there shooting a short "art" film that winter weekend in 1...

I was raised in a Quaker family, and grew up protesting nuclear weapons in Times Square back in the Fifties (remember 'Ban the Bomb'? That was me, a naive six year old, holding one of those signs). When I graduated from Syracuse University in 1968, the war in Vietnam was raging, and so was my generation. We truly believed we could change the world, bring peace and prosperity and justice to all, and—well, you know how all that turned out. Two decades later, after working so hard to change the world with so little success, I finally concluded that presenting the “truth” as I saw it didn't always work, if ever. Sometimes, I was beginning to realize, good storytelling may be a better way to reach people than on-the-nose reality. Or even gently presented reality laced with humor, the way the late great Art Buchwald mastered this skill with his political satires. Having taken my best shot at doing good without much success, I decided to try my hand at doing well, or at least mak...