E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

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 ...

What is it about belief, that compels us mere mortals to reject all reason, logic or common sense, let alone science, in pursuit of that which we cannot have, and yet must? Religion, of course, has served to fill this gap in people's lives, and role in their hearts and minds for thousands of years. Religion is a proven provider of sustenance to a certain kind of addiction that seems to afflict most, if not all humans. It is potentially beneficial, of course, as was the probable intent of the prophets and originators in terms of its more positive messages. And of course, like chemical addictions, it is also potentially destructive, and has in fact taken the lives of millions over time, as it continues to do so even today. Music and art also provide an escape into an alternate state, like religion, and to some (including yours truly) it is a better outlet. When I go to a top-level performance of a Beethoven symphony, or a Bach or Mozart sonata or a Rachmaninoff piano concerto, it...

In the winter of 2004 an old friend paid me a visit to my then-home in St. Petersburg, Florida, and made me an offer that, while I didn't refuse, took me four months to accept. It was an offer to come to China and teach for a year at a public university in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, of the People's Republic of China. For those of you who are not of the Boomer generation, you may not recall a movie, based on a book, that was a mega-hit thriller in the 1960s: The Manchurian Candidate . Manchuria was a nation in and of itself prior to the British occupation, consisting of today's three northernmost (and eastern-most) provinces of China, of which Heilongjiang is the largest and northernmost of the three, the capital city of which is Harbin (pop. 7,000,000). The Manchu were the native race of this region, who had their own language, and also their own emperor who, not satisfied with their confinement to the north decided to expand southwards. This decision, by the future Q...

"Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor." Matthew 13:57 I find myself facing a fascinating, if not frustrating conundrum. How can it be that my long-languishing mystery-thriller about the Shakespeare authorship (writing as John Underwood) has been published in six different languages variously titled The Shakespeare Chronicles, A Thief for All Time , and A Tiger's Heart and yet not in my own native language or country? Salmon Rushdie comes to mind, of course, as well as Solzhenitsyn. And for that matter Copernicus, Giordano Bruno and Galileo weren't exactly rock stars in Rome either. But now, it seems, I am. Well, not quite a rock star, but pretty close. I now have a bestseller in Italy, a book that has been rejected for nearly a decade in my home country. So what's up with that? Just as the Shakespeare academics always dismiss those who doubt the Bard's credentials (or, actually, lack thereof) as cranks or merely uninformed, so h...

Years ago when I worked in Hollywood, naïve enough to imagine changing the world (or at least the film industry, if only a mere fleck of a change) I was given a screenwriter's dream opportunity: work as a name director's--better yet, a living legendary name director's--house writer. (House as in 'in-house'). I'd been kicking around the 'Hood for a few years, mostly getting by writing animation (see Gene Ayres on IMDB) when a tennis pal of mine, from an L.A. citywide singles-tennis dating club called, cleverly 'Tennis Match', gave me an introduction to a client of his. My buddy, whose name was one of my all time favorites—Christopher Street-- was a dead-ringer for Michael Caine's younger brother, and looking back, knowing both of them were orphans, it was probably true. Anyway, Chris was the kind of entrepreneur who is very successful serving the byways and back alleys of the 'Wood, in his case running a window-washing operation. He was, like ...