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2019 Q3 TV DISCUSSION


RIPPA

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12 hours ago, Elsalvajeloco said:

I'm surprised they decided not to do the Hurricane Katrina season.

However, I think it's funny that Paramount went to that well when they first launched with the David Koresh Waco saga only to come up completely empty in terms of awards for their awards bait. Now watch FX turn around and do one on Heaven's Gate (the cult, not the Michael Cimino one that sunk United Artists) in the near future.

I'd be way more interested in a behind the scenes series on box office bombs like Heaven's Gate, The Cotton Club, 1941, Hudson Hawk and Cutthroat Island.

 

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It doesn't sound odd to anyone that a show called American Crime Story thinks the assassination of Gianni Versace is in any way more important or interesting than that of Bobby Kennedy? Never mind JFK. The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa?

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2 hours ago, happjack said:

I'd be way more interested in a behind the scenes series on box office bombs like Heaven's Gate, The Cotton Club, 1941, Hudson Hawk and Cutthroat Island.

 

Well, that's what the Bette vs. Joan and Fosse/Verdon miniseries are for. Old Hollywood is never not going to be covered.

1 hour ago, AxB said:

It doesn't sound odd to anyone that a show called American Crime Story thinks the assassination of Gianni Versace is in any way more important or interesting than that of Bobby Kennedy? Never mind JFK. The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa?

Not even counting The Irishman, Hoffa has been covered a bunch of times. Bobby Kennedy and/or his assassination has been depicted a few times through cinema, the small screen, and documentaries. Had Chappaquiddick not just came out two years ago (I thought it was good despite some of the flack it received), the Ted Kennedy/Mary Jo Kopechne story would be ACS fodder more than JFK or RFK. Not that you can't have overlap because Trust and All the Money in the World came out right around the same time just like Showtime series with Russell Crowe playing Roger Ailes and the Jay Roach Fox News movie are coming out within a year of each other. But again, I doubt they're going for stories that have been retold over and over again especially anything involving the Kennedy family. If people are Clinton'd out, then I am Kennedy'd out as well. After his brief depiction on Boardwalk Empire, I would like to see the beginnings of Joe Kennedy Sr. than his children at this point. Chappaquiddick kinda piqued my interest about Joe Sr. just based on Bruce Dern's cameo as (essentially) deathbed Joe Kennedy Sr., which was probably the best part of the film.

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10 hours ago, Niners Fan in CT said:

How about American Crime Story:  Ted Bundy.   He's had a couple docs recently,  it's always an interesting story..  They'd be able to do some serial killer shit,  detective work and of course there would be plenty of bits of courtroom drama. 

Considering Netflix did the show with Zac Effron as sexy Bundy - I would say it was already covered 

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16 minutes ago, RIPPA said:

Considering Netflix did the show with Zac Effron as sexy Bundy - I would say it was already covered 

Speaking of Efron, the film Parkland was 100% Zac Efron's character desperately and futilely operating on JFK in the absolutely saddest way ever and Paul Giamatti watching actual footage of the Zapruder film. The film Jackie is all about the events leading up to JFK's funeral basically with Natalie Portman walking around being splattered with blood. The Woody Harrelson LBJ film starts with him being sworn in on the plane IIRC as well. I think we've covered the final moments of JFK in every tragedy porn way possible. That's why it's refreshing to see JFK's early time as diplomat in the Ken Burns Vietnam PBS miniseries or his speeches about space exploration in Chasing the Moon that came out last month. 

Edited by Elsalvajeloco
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Hasn't the OJ Simpson trial been extensively covered for the last 20+ years though? Wasn't Clinton/Lewinsky? Or is it just in terms of dramatic recreation rather than documentaries and newspaper opinion pieces?

Also, where's the crime in Clinton Lewinsky? It was a scandal, sure. It was a controversy. But I don't remember anyone going to jail over it. It's not actually illegal to have sex with a woman other than your wife and then deny it, is it? I mean, it's not nice. It's not polite. But you don't serve hard time for it. People just think you're more of a dickhead than they did previously.

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Also, what about Watergate? A crime so significant that all subsequent crimes and naughtinesses have had the word Gate added to the end of them for nearly half a century. If there's one crime story that defines America, is it not Watergate?

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3 minutes ago, AxB said:

Also, what about Watergate? A crime so significant that all subsequent crimes and naughtinesses have had the word Gate added to the end of them for nearly half a century. If there's one crime story that defines America, is it not Watergate?

I feel like people are good with All the President's Men covering it

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7 minutes ago, AxB said:

Hasn't the OJ Simpson trial been extensively covered for the last 20+ years though? Wasn't Clinton/Lewinsky? Or is it just in terms of dramatic recreation rather than documentaries and newspaper opinion pieces?

Well the OJ resurgence was due to the 20th anniversary thus why both American Crime Story: The People vs. OJ (Fiction) AND OJ: Made in America (Documentary) came out a few years ago.

So I think regarding Clinton/Lewinsky - it is ACS trying to latch on to things that play up a large 90s sentimentality again instead of looking at topics from say the 60s and 70s.

Plus - sex sells

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18 minutes ago, AxB said:

Hasn't the OJ Simpson trial been extensively covered for the last 20+ years though? Wasn't Clinton/Lewinsky? Or is it just in terms of dramatic recreation rather than documentaries and newspaper opinion pieces?

Other than made for TV movies that came out at the time of those events, both of those things hadn't been covered with major projects for film or TV surprisingly until recently.

18 minutes ago, AxB said:

Also, where's the crime in Clinton Lewinsky? It was a scandal, sure. It was a controversy. But I don't remember anyone going to jail over it. It's not actually illegal to have sex with a woman other than your wife and then deny it, is it? I mean, it's not nice. It's not polite. But you don't serve hard time for it. People just think you're more of a dickhead than they did previously.

The whole Bill Clinton getting impeached was a major deal. It was literally on TV 24/7 over here when it happened. The impeachment is the "crime" part.

14 minutes ago, AxB said:

Also, what about Watergate? A crime so significant that all subsequent crimes and naughtinesses have had the word Gate added to the end of them for nearly half a century. If there's one crime story that defines America, is it not Watergate?

Watergate has been covered so much that Hollywood has stopped giving a shit about Watergate. Peter Landesman directed both Parkland about the attempt to save JFK and also the Mark Felt film about Watergate. The combined box office haul for those two movies is under 3 million dollars USD.

Edited by Elsalvajeloco
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But just the one movie about Malcolm X (that never gets shown on telly, despite being an award winning classic) and that's all we need to hear about him?

Which Assassination is more important - Versace or MLK? 

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10 minutes ago, Raziel said:

Just wait another 10-15 years...

We already got The Post in response to this bunch. Can it get any lazier than that?

I have no interest in any of this stuff from the last 60 years that's been done to death. Bundy, JFK, RFK and the lot. No thanks.

Want to make rage porn centered on major political events? Give me a mini-series on the 1876 presidential election.

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13 minutes ago, AxB said:

But just the one movie about Malcolm X (that never gets shown on telly, despite being an award winning classic) and that's all we need to hear about him?

Since the Spike Lee movie, Malcolm X has been covered a bunch since then in different ways. The Ali movie with Mario Van Peebles as Malcolm showed that assassination in the most brutal way possible. Good lord. Plus, there isn't too many ways to cover Malcolm X in drama that wouldn't be done better through documentary. Denzel bodied that role to the point where anyone who plays Malcolm is automatically 2nd at best. He is Malcolm X.

13 minutes ago, AxB said:

Which Assassination is more important - Versace or MLK? 

I don't think anyone is arguing about whose assassination is more important, but most of the iconic watershed moments in American history have been covered to death (no pun intended). 

Edited by Elsalvajeloco
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Versace was as much about that psycho Cunanen(sp?) as it was about Versace. His serial killing spree had to be told backwards too, because his origin story with his father was fucked up enough that you might have had sympathy for him if not for all the other episodes seeing all the crimes he committed.

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10 minutes ago, West Newbury Bad Boy said:

We already got The Post in response to this bunch. Can it get any lazier than that?

I have no interest in any of this stuff from the last 60 years that's been done to death. Bundy, JFK, RFK and the lot. No thanks.

Want to make rage porn centered on major political events? Give me a mini-series on the 1876 presidential election.

BINGO

I suggest everyone track down and watch the Reconstruction documentary that PBS aired recently. I'm not the biggest Skip Gates fan, but he did amazing work with that. I can't lie.

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Going back to the COINTELPRO thing, the only new angle you can do for MLK is something tangentially related to a person like Bayard Rustin being an informant. The problem is when you look at something like the film Selma, the purpose of the film seems to be to jam every civil rights icon they can with little to no character development or no room for complexity. They had fucking Mahalia Jackson in there for what purpose I dunno. These people need their own movie or TV show instead of being the civil rights version of a Raw reunion episode. I mean I disagree with the casting of Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton (I would switch it where Lakeith Stanfield is Hampton and if Kaluuya has to be in it, he can play the rat informant William O'Neal), but a project about Fred Hampton makes more sense than another MLK project and specifically centered around his assassination.

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1 hour ago, AxB said:

Also, where's the crime in Clinton Lewinsky? It was a scandal, sure. It was a controversy. But I don't remember anyone going to jail over it. It's not actually illegal to have sex with a woman other than your wife and then deny it, is it? I mean, it's not nice. It's not polite. But you don't serve hard time for it. People just think you're more of a dickhead than they did previously.

Clinton lying under oath. He got impeached and his law license suspended.

 

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I wonder if, at any point in the show, someone will say "If my wife was like Hillary I'd probably cheat on her too?". I'm thinking... probably not.

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4 hours ago, AxB said:

It doesn't sound odd to anyone that a show called American Crime Story thinks the assassination of Gianni Versace is in any way more important or interesting than that of Bobby Kennedy? Never mind JFK. The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa?

The Versace season was a flex by Ryan Murphy.  He wanted to tell the Cunanan story, and he had the clout at the time, and the venue with ACS, to get it made, so he did.  It was important to him.

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The Bobby Kennedy one could be interesting based on how they do it.  There are at least as many if not more questionable things about that assassination than the JFK assassination.  

Has there been a deep dive into the Iran-Contra Affair?  It implicates two different presidents, and I have a feeling that a good portion of the population doesn't understand how deep that corruption went.

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10 minutes ago, supremebve said:

The Bobby Kennedy one could be interesting based on how they do it.  There are at least as many if not more questionable things about that assassination than the JFK assassination.  

Has there been a deep dive into the Iran-Contra Affair?  It implicates two different presidents, and I have a feeling that a good portion of the population doesn't understand how deep that corruption went.

The film Kill the Messenger (another Peter Landesman project with him writing the screenplay) with Jeremy Renner, Michael K. Williams, and Barry Pepper, but they went out of their way not to promote it. Good film though.

Edited by Elsalvajeloco
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Wow, I didn't know it underwent such bullshit: 

Quote

Several weeks after the Kill the Messenger premiere, the significant lack of advertising for the film and its rapid retraction from theaters led to the creation of a petition to re-release the film in theaters on November 24, 2014 through Change.org, entitled "Focus Features: Support Gary Webb and Re-Release Kill the Messenger in Theaters." [12]

This petition was also spurred on after Focus Features failed to attend a private screening for the film hosted by the Writers Guild of America in mid-November, despite positive reviews for the film. Through the petition and direct appeals to Focus Features, attention was drawn to the fact that the film distribution company aired more national television commercials for Kill the Messenger six weeks after the premiere date than they did before the film was released in theaters, and almost exclusively outside of primetime hours and off of major broadcasting companies.[13]

As a result of this marketing campaign, the highest domestic television coverage for Kill the Messenger occurred when it had been retracted from all but 18 theaters in the United States and three weeks before its theatrical run was ended.[12][13] Attention was also drawn to the large discrepancy in the amount of television advertising that Focus Features gave to each of its fall releases, specifically between Kill the Messenger, which was given a total of 448 national advertisements, to Theory of Everything, which was nationally aired 3,046 times and largely on major television networks (i.e., ABC, NBC, CBS, MTV).[13][14]

The petition picked up a strong momentum through social media, accruing over 2,000 signatures in less than two weeks. [15][16][17] The weekend of December 5, Focus Featuresexpanded Kill the Messenger to 19 additional theaters, for a sum of 27 theaters overall.[12]

On December 11, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment announced the DVD release date for Kill the Messenger, several days before the petition reached 2,500 signatures.[18]

In early February, Kill the Messenger was leaked online, and was reportedly among the top ten films with the most unauthorized downloads for several weeks.[19]

Pretty sure I saw it on DVD. I still need to read Dark Alliance someday. RIP Gary Webb

As far as Iran-Contra on TV Snowfall has had a fictionalized hand in it.

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