JAMES GARNER’S DAUGHTER OPENS TRIBUTE SITE TO HER AWESOME FATHER

The Mighty James Garner’s daughter, Gigi Garner (a successful talent manager in her own right), has opened a tribute website to her father. She seems to be updating it fairly regularly with a number of terrific family photos and excerpts from Garners’ new memoir “The Garner Files,” which I loved and reviewed here.

Please check the site out.

Anyone who’s been reading me for any amount of time (or who has seen my Twitter wallpaper), knows of my all-consuming affection for all things James Garner, most especially “The Rockford Files.” You can imagine how much this tweet meant to me.

Tell me how it gets any better than that. You can’t, because it doesn’t.

The only bad news is that if this photo on Ms. Garner’s site displays the actor’s real signature, that means I got robbed on Ebay.

Cue my well-rehearsed of-course-I-got-swindled-again Rockford face.

FINALLY: AN HONEST ASSESSMENT OF HOLLYWOOD’S BOX OFFICE BLUES

With all of Hollywood and most of their sycophant entertainment media blaming box office and DVD woes on everything but bad product, this is the rare break from that absurd narrative:

(more…)

Actors dream of landing that one signature role that can make their careers and pad their retirement accounts, but that brand of fame often comes with an asterisk.

Try being Bob Denver and walking into an audition.

“Hey, Gilligan!” “Where’s Thurston Howell, heh heh.”

Kelsey Grammer may have found the role to make us forget, if for a moment, his superlative work as the stuffy, cerebral Dr. Frasier Crane on both ‘Cheers’ and his eponymous sitcom.

Grammer’s new series ‘Boss,’ debuting at 10 p.m. tonight on Starz, is getting the kind of reviews the actor’s mother might pen. The latest rave comes courtesy of Politico,

(more…)

THR:

The drama, which seems to have the “it” factor from the opening credits, has the potential to be a game-changer for the pay TV network, THR TV critic Tim Goodman writes.

—–

You can look back at the history of any number of storied cable channels and pick the series that truly set them on the right course — the series that made them players. For HBO, it was The Sopranos; for Showtime, it was Dexter; for FX, it was The Shield; and for AMC, it was Mad Men.

Other series might have received as much critical acclaim, and still others would get higher ratings. But those were game-changers. And now Starz has its channel-defining series in Boss, a wholly impressive new drama that comes out of the gate with gravitas, swagger, originality and intrigue. It’s the kind of series that truly puts Starz on the map (and if it makes two or three others, it will be a highly competitive three-way race in the pay cable field).

Boss is full of revelations. It stars Kelsey Grammer in a stunning, eye-opening dramatic turn as Tom Kane, the ruthless mayor of Chicago — a modern King Lear with a crushing secret. The last time an actor known for sitcoms took the television world completely by surprise was Bryan Cranston, and he went on to win three consecutive Emmys for best actor and turn Breaking Bad into a show everybody talked about and fawned over.

(more…)

The Washington Times is wrong. Hollywood wasn’t AWOL in the War on Terror. In fact, just the opposite is true. Hollywood summoned every ounce of financial and star power at their disposal to fight this war.

Unfortunately, they chose to fight for the other side.

If our history is written by honest brokers, this generation of Hollywoodists will be remembered as those who openly enabled evil and spent hundreds of millions of dollars making bombs for the enemy — box office bombs. Over a dozen of them, specifically engineered with equal parts lies and hate and propaganda to undermine morale at home and on the battlefield in the hopes that we would lose this war.

Never forget the crime committed in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon on that terrible day.  And never forget  how Hollywood turned on your country.

There were some exceptions, however, and chief among them was Joel Surnow, the co-creator of “24.” Each week, for eight seasons, he gave this country a hero who openly loved America, did what was necessary to protect her, and who was willing to pay a terrible price for it. ”24″ also delivered the goods. Cathartic, exciting and righteous without being self-righteous, the addictive adventures of Jack Bauer became an oasis in a cesspool of Hollywood product delivering the exact opposite message.

(more…)

Join Andrew Breitbart and Melanie Morgan for Troopathon 2011, today from 4pm to Midnight EDT!

Troopathon brings together famous celebrities from radio, television, the movie, musicians, journalists, and more to create a one-of-a-kind event with one purpose – to support our troops on the front lines in the war on terror and honor their service and sacrifice for our nation.  Guests include: Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, Mark Levin, Kelsey Grammer, Former President George H.W. Bush, Gary Sinise, Dennis Miller, Former Ambassador John Bolton, Greg Gutfeld and many more!

Click here to send your care package or call 866-866-6372.

In the aftermath of the elite Naval Special Warfare Development Group’s successful raid to take out Osama Bin Laden last week, I feel privileged to be covering the only film festival in the world to feature films about the military. The Washington D.C. based G. I. Film Festival runs from today through Sunday, May 16 at both the U.S. Navy Memorial at 701 Pennsylvania Ave and the nearby Canadian Embassy. In five short years this outstanding collection of films about the American military experience has became the quality venue for films portraying our troops in a positive light. The festival features everything from combat intense dramas, to personal stories of military families, feature documentaries and shorts to historical epics. This year’s Wounded Warrior night film is the exciting medieval themed epic Ironclad about the brutal aftermath of the signing of the Magna Carta. Through the generosity of corporate sponsors, wounded service men from Walter Reed Army Hospital and Bethesda Naval Hospital will be hosted by the festival for that evening.

Various Hollywood professionals who support the military like actors Robert Duvall Jeremy Renner, Kelsey Grammer, Rick Schroeder, Glenn Close and JAG’s Karri Turner, as well as directors and producers like Ron Maxwell and Lou Reda, are often in attendance. CSI: New York and Forrest Gump’s Lieutenant Dan,  Academy Award-nominated Gary Sinise, will host a reception for Congressional members who have served, or who are currently serving in the U.S. Military. With veterans on both he and his wife’s side of their families, Sinise has been an active supporter of the festival since its inception, as he has of so many other pro-military causes. This year actor William Devane will premiere the drama Flag of My Father at the festival’s Hollywood Patriots Night and a salute to International Warriors will host military films from several other countries.

Last year at I wrote a piece for Big Hollywood highly critical of box-office and morale-killing Hollywood military films like The Green Zone that have dominated movie screens. Well, the G.I. Film Festival has been out front in the battle for positive depictions of the military since it started back in 2007. Festival creators, husband and wife Brandon Millett and Major Laura Law-Millett, first created the festival to combat the continuing inaccurate and negative stereotypes that Hollywood has so often fostered about the United States Armed Forces. In an interview with the Washington Post during the launch of the first G.I. Film Festival, Major Law offered up that, “In movie after movie all you see then was soldiers raping and killing. We want to show something more positive.”

Her husband Brandon emphasized that, “We wanted to do something to focus public attention on the courage and selflessness of the American soldiers.”

(more…)

What annoys liberals more than anything else?  Free Speech and intellectual honesty are probably high on the list of things that give them intestinal cramps.  Considering what I have seen of the anti-war rallies and the folks who proudly wear the ACORN shirt while signing up homeless people to vote three or four times (in the same election), I would also say that soap is probably high on their enemies list as well.  All of that aside, what they really seem to hate is when people who don’t share their worldview invade what they perceive as their turf.  The RightNetwork has crossed the imaginary line in the entertainment sand and sent the left into a rage-filled attempt to abort this infant network before it can really establish itself and slap the  Hollywood elite around the way that Fox News does to MSNBC and CNN on a daily basis.  

Before we get into their outward expressions of anger and disdain, along with the associated hypocrisy and contradictions, we need to understand why they are so mad.  In the world of the left, domination of the airwaves is not a battle of ratings but rather an ideological jihad they are attempting to perpetrate.  That is why they get so unhinged whenever something that would get a smile out of Charlton Heston tries to take hold in the media.   Liberals lost the radio war so badly that they now want the government to legislate a victory for them by making the free market of political thought on the AM dial illegal.  That is what the “the Fairness Doctrine” is all about.  Also, most of the “Hopey/Changey” crowd is either apoplectic about losing the cable media war to Fox News  or are still in the same sort of denial about it that keeps Britney Spears thinking that she is a dominant force in the music industry.

While being forced into whatever the media equivalent of “tapping out” is on these two fronts, they are violently opposing the RightNetwork; a cable channel aimed at the vast audience of people who have come to the conclusion that Hollywood hates them.  The visceral reaction to the RightNetwork by the left tells us everything we need to know about them, their feelings about free speech in the marketplace of ideas, and what they think about the viewing audience in general.   (more…)

The mainstream media is doomed. I understood that as soon as I understood the power the Internet gave to everyone to gather, disseminate and analyze information. While there are a few remaining honest and talented MSMers doing the excellent work of informing the American people, there just aren’t enough to salvage what has become an institution as evil and corrupted as the mafia. Essentially, the MSM is doomed because the Internet tore away the curtain and exposed the self-important wizard as not needing special J-school sauce to do what he does.  Brains, determination and a keyboard will do just fine thank you very much. The same, however, cannot be said for the making of movies and scripted television programs.

In all the years I’ve been writing about Hollywood, I have never written one of those Hollywood Is Doomed pieces. For those of us legitimately frustrated with an industry driven less by profits and more by an insidious need to marginalize who we are and undermine our country, such a statement would be nothing more than wishful thinking. We may loathe Hollywood but the market will always be there because we will always love being told stories through the magic of the motion picture. Furthermore, the institution presently making movies is nowhere near as easy to replace as the mainstream news media.

Telling a compelling story through a medium that uses most every art form known to man – performance, music, design, writing, photography – requires an enormous amount of skill and training, not to mention that certain something — like a Major Leaguer capable of hitting .275 — very few people are born with.

So this is not a Hollywood Is Doomed piece. But I have to say – and this is not altogether bad news — that as things stands today, Hollywood has cornered itself into much more trouble than I ever expected them to. I’m no insider, number cruncher, or professional analyst, but from my perspective what I am seeing is an industry vulnerable to revolution – an industry as out of touch and unwilling to admit it as the studio system of the 1960s. (more…)

Awhile back my wife and I were thinking about selling our California ranch and moving to Texas. We had made a film about the border, called… Border. 

Texans and the rest of America seemed to dig the film. Hollywood? Not so much. 

After sixteen states on the promo tour, countless packed theatres, great reviews and two screenings for Congress, I had yet another audience member grab my arm and ask “When is Hollywood going to make more films like this? Can you tell them to make movies that we want to see?” 

—–

“Ma’am,” I would explain, “If Hollywood wanted to make more films like Border, right now I would be in the middle of a three picture studio deal instead of on a bus tour of the South Eastern United States. I’m sorry but I don’t have an answer for you. “ She was a very nice lady. I hated to disappoint her. 

So last fall I’m kicking back in the barn, flipping through the ranch real estate section of Farm and Ranch magazine when the phone rings. It’s Kip Perry, co-owner of Echo Entertainment. Echo had been around for 23 years. They had cut their teeth on movie trailers for Disney and sports shows for ESPN. They had done a few TV series, and now Kip wanted to take me out to lunch. 

Lunch was good. Small, but good. We went to a very trendy Hollywood European style restaurant where everybody has the option to sit with strangers and get their food on a board. I loved the spread. It was tasty, cute and very petite. Just as Kip was about to go into his pitch, I had to stop him: “Dude, I’m sorry. This food tastes great, and looks even better, but I’m still hungry. I need to order another lunch.”  (more…)

The new ABC sitcom Hank is rather short on big laughs, but it’s well-stocked with good ideas and sound values. The big question is, will ABC give it a chance?

Hank is the first of two family-oriented comedies ABC is running back-to-back on Wednesday nights beginning at 8 p.m., with each show featuring a big former sitcom star.

Most TV sitcoms, and that goes double for ABC, are largely about what the great filmmaker and satirist Preston Sturges referred to as Topic A. That is because Americans presumably have nothing else on their minds–other than being murdered or having to go to the hospital, the subject matter of most TV dramas.

Hank bucks that restriction, attempting to mine humor from family relationships, romantic love, and social conditions–which used to be the central subjects of Anglo-American comedy before the relaxing and eventual discarding of social and cultural restrictions on discussions of sex freed Hollywood to parade its inner sex maniac with impunity and in fact great financial success. (more…)

The smart new sitcom The Middle presents a positive but realistic view of Middle America’s pursuit of the American Dream. 

Set in the fictional small town of Orson, Indiana, The Middle (8:30 EDT) follows Hank in ABC’s new Wednesday night lineup and like the Kelsey Grammer program, it features a big sitcom star, Patricia Heaton, in a lead role. Also like Hank, The Middle takes a comic but sympathetic look at Middle America, described by central character Frankie Heck (Heaton) as “One of those places you fly over on your way from Somewhere to Somewhere Else but you wouldn’t live here.”

The writing of the pilot episode is particularly strong, and it even uses a couple of symbols to very good effect: a jet flying overhead, and Frankie’s new drivers license with its grossly unattractive photo documenting how badly life has been beating her down. Heaton’s willingness to make herself look silly and physically unattractive is used to great effect in the pilot episode and shows great sense on her part and that of the show’s producers.  (more…)

To Hollywood

Logan is trying to understand, but he is only four. His father’s plane went down in Iraq on Memorial Day of 2008. When asked about his dad, he puts his hand on his heart and says, “My daddy is a hero.” He goes to get his toy tool kit. He is going to fix the plane so that daddy can come home. Logan loves to hear the stories from the small group of Combat Controllers that knew his dad. Soon, a book will be out for him. The book is called “Letters for Logan.” It will tell the story of the soldier and the man. Logan is too young to understand the anger, bitterness, poor timing and judgment of Hollywood, California. Logan is not alone. On the plane that carried five good men to heaven that day, six children lost their dads. There are over 700 children of fallen Spec Ops Warriors to date.

The soldier is my son, Capt. Derek Argel. In the sixth grade, he made a decision that to serve God, Country and family was a privilege and not a right. He understood that the gifts he had been given in athletic and intellectual abilities were to be shared with his country. Less than 300 men did his job, worldwide. They were the elite of the elite.

At that time, he decided he would become the best officer and Special Ops Warrior he could for the freedoms and gifts this country gave him. He was the best son a mother could ask for. He was everyone’s best friend. Most felt he would become a General, then run for President. (more…)

The horrifying news that Susan Sarandon will make her Broadway debut this Spring (because Broadway isn’t left ENOUGH?) has gotten me to thinking… Instead of Ms. Sarandon, and Rosie O’Donnell and Alec Baldwin & Jessica Lange (in the SAME play, no less) why can’t a Broadway season contain actors who are not so excruciatingly annoying?  I’m not even saying actors who are center/right in their politics — but how about actors who just focus on acting and, when off-camera, acting with class?

Here’s my wish-list for that season, in a perfect world…

(more…)