Culture Vultures: Everybody's Talking at Me
Steyn, Mark
CULTURE VULTURES by MARK STEYN Everybody's Talking at Me So there we were at Paramount Studios in Hollywood for a conference—Tom (Magnum) Selleck and Pat (Wheel of Fortune) Sajak and David (Kung...
...The ad attack and the more general observations about American culture's bog of depravity got more press, but, personally, I found the flat Pat joke more telling...
...I put in a good word for Alan Keyes, whom I'd vaguely understood to be some sort of ambassador...
...Several congressmen claimed that the new digital 'phone-delivered cable systems would bring more TV stations and, therefore, more "choice...
...David Dreier gave a speech about welfare mothers, which presumably his research assistant had handed him in error...
...Buchanan, to his credit, has actually seen Deliverance, even if he has a hazy grasp of which character you're supposed to identify with...
...At the conference, Enoch's equivalent was Die Hard director John McTiernan, a panelist in the sex'n'violence debate who declined to express any opinion and only said twelve words during the whole day...
...44 May 19 96 The American Spectator Estrich, who, on the last occasion we'd met, I'd vaguely understood to have something to do with Michael Dukakis...
...The next week, there she was with her own highly-paid column in the Mail on Sunday...
...It occurred to me, looking around the Paramount Theatre, that there was a third group there, and that we were the dominant ones: commentators...
...He paused, for comedy is all in the timing...
...Now, apparently, Susan has her own show on talk radio...
...But, increasingly, it became clear that the invited politicians, so keen to legislate all the ugliness out of American pop culture, don't get to the movies that often...
...Bob Dole's speeches only make sense if read as a kind of pre-emptive "Nightline" analysis of himself, with Bob playing both Ted and Cokie: "People say where's the real Bob Dole...
...I have conclusive evidence that Pat Buchanan is...
...Well, we had a hunky leading man, Tom Selleck, and a glamorous European MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...Don't get me wrong...
...The conference was billed as "Images of Ourselves: A Dialogue Between Washington and Hollywood...
...0 nce, on the BBC's political discussion program "Question Time," the former Conservative and then—Ulster Unionist MP Enoch Powell responded to a question by saying simply: "I have no opinion on the subject...
...Over lunch, we discussed the presidential candidates: there was Pat Buchanan, who hosts commentative TV and radio shows...
...What's more pathetic than a commentator who comments on a magazine which comments on a TV star who comments on a movie...
...I The American Spectator • May 1996 45...
...When the host retorted that he'd been booked on the show because he was jolly well supposed to have opinions, Powell refined his answer: "I am not qualified to speak on this subject, and therefore any opinion I might express would be worthless...
...I've learned my lesson...
...in Britain, the BBC's Pride and Prejudice was watched by io million viewers out of a potential 5o million...
...and General Charles Gates Dawes, vice president under Coolidge, composed "It's All in the Game," a hit for Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, and a British Number One for Cliff Richard in the sixties...
...That went better with a Washington audience...
...Jimmie Davis, governor of Louisiana, wrote "You Are My Sunshine...
...The silence was deafening...
...Talk-show hosts are already reduced to interviewing other talk-show hosts (David Brinkley hosts Rush Limbaugh, David Letterman hosts Conan O'Brian), CBS commentators are reduced to commenting on other CBS commentators commenting on other CBS commentators (Bob Schieffer on Bernard Goldberg on Eric Engberg...
...Commentary is the upscale equivalent of welfare, and Phil Gramm's comment that it's time for more Americans to get off the wagon and join the ever dwindling number pulling it applies just as much...
...On my panel, there was Susan A Hollywood-Washington "dialogue...
...Letterman has between 6 and 7 million viewers out of a potential audience of25o million...
...You've got to get out there and live life...
...You can only do so much commentating on life...
...The audience resented his non-participation, but I like to think that, slumped in his chestnut leather jacket, he was making his own elliptical protest against the rampant commentary in our society...
...Still, I don't think we'll see again the likes of General Dawes or even Congressman Bono — that's to say, politicians who've actually done something, even if it's only write a pop song...
...Rep...
...Then other magazines run stories saying Dave's passé, but that doesn't alter the basic trajectory: a magazine which not many people read is profiling a TV host not many people watch who interviews stars of films not many people go to see...
...The reason is all the fawneramas like "Entertainment Tonight," "Regis and Kathie Lee," and "George and Alana...
...And on he went to his prepared remarks, attacking recent commercials for Burger King and Chevrolet...
...As Tom Bethell noted in this magazine's March issue, one of the biggest obstacles to the decentralization of politics is our highly centralized TV networks...
...True, that's about five words more than the average Die Hard script, but at least in Die Hard he'd have trashed the room and blown us all away...
...Dawes or Sonny Bono politicians who've actually done something, even if it's only write a pop song...
...but it should be obvious that most of the new TV networks — CNBC, say, or America's Talking—can't44 I don't think we'll see again the likes of Gen...
...in other words, what mattered was not the Bosnian war, but the coverage of the Bosnian war...
...Instead, Long explained how "Cheers" had stolen a joke from "Taxi," which had stolen it from "The Dick Van Dyke Show," which had stolen it from the 1940's radio hit "Duffy's Tavern...
...Hmm," muttered Bennett...
...But no matter how small it is in fact, a hit movie seems bigger than that...
...In Dayton, he explained that the Bosnian peace accord would "put an end to what we've had to watch on our TV screens every night...
...This ignorance of popular culture flies in the face of a venerable political tradition: long before our conference co-host Sonny Bono, Congressman Sol Bloom, chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, wrote "You Are The Honeysuckle, I Am The Bee," the big song of 1902...
...And what, you scoff, does that make me...
...But it turns out that, like Susan, he now hosts his own show on talk radio...
...President Clinton certainly understands the trend...
...Indeed, as the day wore on, I had the nagging suspicion that I was the only participant without a show on talk radio—which kinda depressed me if only because, unlike Susan, I've been a professional broadcaster since I was 17...
...siren, Arianna Huffington...
...Yet somehow Pride and Prejudice is seen as "elitist" and Letterman as "populist," so magazines like Esquire make him "Man of the Year" under the headline, "It's Dave's world—We only live in it...
...By this stage, I was beginning to feel pleasantly self-satisfied...
...But somehow the day never quite turned into When Ari Met Selleck...
...and Bob Dole, who has no commentative experience but, in a cunning postmodern way, is campaigning as an auto-commentator on his own candidacy...
...She's right, I thought—and I quit my shows and my highly paid column in the Mail on Sunday...
...1) afford to make any proper shows but only to hire hosts who sit around commenting...
...and Steve Forbes, who publishes a commentative magazine...
...Nobody has big hits anymore, but a lot of us can manage big commentary...
...Well, you're gonna see the real Bob Dole from now on," etc...
...And the unspoken template for the day was that of a romantic comedy: Washington and Hollywood, two apparently unsuited sweethearts who continually protest their mutual detestation, would in the final reel fall into each other's arms in belated understanding of their shared responsibility...
...The song has certainly outlasted any of Dawes's other writings, such as The Banking System of the United States and Its Relation to the Money and Business of the United States (1894...
...I've never met anyone in my small New England town who's ever seen David Letterman's show on CBS, but they've all heard about it...
...I saw Natural Born Killers a couple of weeks after it opened in New York, and by then it wasn't playing anywhere except a scuzzy fleapit downtown...
...Alexander, Bennett had been asked whether Pat (Deliverance) Buchanan was an extremist...
...As the commentator Stanley Crouch likes to say, if one million people see a movie twice, you'll have a massive mega-hit and 249 million Americans aren't even involved...
...The other day, it seems, at a press conference for Lamar (Lamar...
...The program ground to a halt...
...National Review's John O'Sullivan, a bona fide movie buff, explained that what he objected to in recent films like Dave and The American President was not so much their political leanings but their complete failure to understand the whole culture of Washington...
...Dialogue" was in short supply, and both the Hollywood men and the Beltway boys seemed mainly to be talking to themselves —like a remake of Sleepless in Seattle in which Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan go to the same singles bar but decide to ignore each other...
...Well, all I can say is that a few years ago, when I had a zillion weekly columns and shows in Britain, I woke up one day riddled with self-doubt...
...I suggested instead that they're part of the same problem: the imposition of a remote centralized homogenized culture on every region in the country...
...Most of what Hollywood does is worthless anti-social trash,but that's not the whole story...
...A friend of mine, a very talented singer, songwriter, and actress, said: "You know your problem...
...Thus the panel, "TV Programming: How Decisions Are Made," featured, on the one hand, Edgar (ABC Wide World of Sports) Scherick and Rob (Cheers) Long and, on the other, Senator Sam Nunn and a couple of congressmen...
...I think they were meant to be discussing why prime-time standards appeared to be declining...
...Keynote speaker William (Drug Czar) Bennett strode to the podium, cast his eye over the room, and decided to start with a joke...
...Washington and Hollywood's behavioral similarities far outweigh any apparent political differences...
...CULTURE VULTURES by MARK STEYN Everybody's Talking at Me So there we were at Paramount Studios in Hollywood for a conference—Tom (Magnum) Selleck and Pat (Wheel of Fortune) Sajak and David (Kung Fu) Carradine and yours (Me) truly...
...Yes," he replied...
...Alas, there are now so many of us commentating that there's hardly anyone left (with the exception of a few gung-ho genital-severing Serb irregulars in the eastern provinces of Bosnia) to do anything for the rest of us to comment on...
...Earlier I had been called upon as the first speaker on the first panel of the day, an unexpected and unsought honor since, asked to take sides in a "dialogue between Washington and Hollywood," I'd plump for neither of the above...
...There were only five others in the theater: one couple who walked out after ten minutes, and three serial killers who wanted to get out of the rain...
...a journalist...
...After that, I quit worrying about Oliver Stone...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 5
