Via Daily Mail:

As for Jane, she was constantly being arrested for trespassing on army bases. By mid-1970, she was nearly broke, having spent thousands financing her trips and her many causes. ‘It’s sort of relaxing to be poor,’ she told friends.

It was chiefly to replenish her coffers that she agreed to star as the call girl Bree Daniels in the 1971 film Klute, which won her an Oscar. She also started sleeping with her co-star Donald Sutherland, who fell madly in love with her.

Together, they took a political vaudeville show called FTA — slang for ‘f*** the army’ — across the country. By then, both were under surveillance, so they often talked in code.

FBI agents opened her post, tapped her phone and even planted a false story that she wanted to kill the President. Her FBI files later extended to 22,000 pages.

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Quotes from actress Zoe Saldana from an interview in the Daily Mail:

“Deep down, some people are enjoying the fact that the most powerful nation on Earth is struggling a little – and then they deny that’s racist! And that frightens me. I’ve witnessed racism all my life. And of course there’s racism and discrimination in Hollywood. You go for a part and they say, ‘Oh, we really liked her, she’s amazing, but we wanted to go with something more traditional.’ As if I’m not a traditional American! I feel sorry for people like that. They need to educate themselves. Mostly you move on and say, ‘Well, I wasn’t meant to work with you or be around someone like you…’ Other times you might say, ‘You’re ignorant, you’re a racist. That’s it. I’m out of here!’ …

“We’ll definitely have a woman President in my lifetime.I just hope she’ll be a good leader. Some Republicans say, ‘Oh, you voted for Obama because he’s black.’ And that’s so offensive and condescending. I voted for him because he represents the things I believe in. And when it comes to a woman standing for President, I won’t campaign for her just because she’s a woman; I’ll campaign for her if I believe she’d b a good leader. Women have to stand up for what’s rightfully ours: equality. We don’t hate men – I certainly don’t – it’s just about getting respect.”

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This is something I’ve been writing about since I took to these here Internets in 2004 — and not gleefully. I love movies and I really love movie stars, and to watch the film industry devolve over the past decade into a CGI, shaky-cammed, high-concept, fanboy wet dream-a-thon has been more than a little heartbreaking. People used to argue with me about the death of the movie star. But not so much today. Now we’re just arguing over why.

In an interesting but flawed piece of analysis, The Daily Mail makes some key points and, I think, gets some things wrong:

Various reasons have been suggested to explain this new and — from the stars’ point of view — deeply worrying phenomenon.

Some say that blockbusting actors and actresses are simply pricing themselves out of the market. Depp, possibly the highest-paid actor in movies today, earns around £12 million a picture.

In his time, Cruise has done even better. With gross points — a percentage of everything taken at the box office — he pocketed nearly£50 million from Mission Impossible 2 in 2000.

But that was 11 years ago, when Cruise was in his heyday and the audience demographic was different. Then, the average age of cinemagoers fell roughly between 12 and 25.

Since then there’s been a considerable change. Today, the mass of cinema audiences is aged between 15 and 18 — and that’s what poses such a threat to the existence of big movie stars.

Kids of that age are not interested in veterans like Hanks (55), Cruise (49) or even Depp (48), except when he plays Jack Sparrow in the frankly juvenile Pirates Of The Caribbean series. Watching old men like them on screen would be like watching their fathers cavorting about.

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What do a Hall of Fame football coach and broadcaster, an overnight British vocal sensation, and several hundred thousand American taxpayers have in common?  Quite a bit, as it turned out last week.  Not because any of them had anything to do with each other specifically.  Rather, it is what each of them represents individually and the disdain they draw from their misdirected critics.

After 30 years in the TV broadcast booth, John Madden announced his retirement from professionally commenting on a game he once professionally coached.  Even a casual or non-fan can review Madden’s resume and appreciate his accomplishments and lifetime commitment to the game of football.  He was a high school and college stand-out player.   Though his professional career as a player was cut short due to injury, Madden spent nearly 20 years as a college and professional coach before spending the next three decades on all four major television networks.  If you’re doing the math, that’s over 50 years of football for the 73 year old.  He won a Super Bowl and never had a losing season as a head coach.  Not to mention the endorsement deals and the multi-million dollar football video game franchise bearing his name. (more…)