From: Jorge Amaro (email suppressed)
Date: Mon Aug 03 2009 - 02:53:33 PDT
I confess I had to check, if Foxnews was a legit news channel, it was
so unreal I thought it was a joke.
2009/8/3 Nicky Hamlyn <email suppressed>:
> What's remarkable from the (far from perfect) UK perspective is that both
> the BBC and national Independent channels would have invited a
> representative from the NEA and/or the San Francisco Cinematheque to
> respond. This is a requirement that's written into the BBC's constitution,
> and if they have been unable to find someone to respond they always announce
> the fact.
> Nicky Hamlyn.
>
>
> On 3 Aug 2009, at 02:19, Chuck Kleinhans wrote:
>
> I've written on Thundercrack, so I was delighted to find all this attention
> directed to it. I've hunted around on the web for more info.
> The Fox News team must have taken the clip segments they ran from the
> trailer which appears on a website that promises to sell a fully restored
> DVD of the film (in the near future):
> http://www.thundercrackthefilm.com/
>
> Apparently there is a pirate version which circulates which is significantly
> shorter than the original, and which shows scratches and burns out the
> highlights.
>
> There is a pretty complete summary of the film's narrative on Wikipedia
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundercrack!
>
> If you look at the Fox clip, it's worth it to also click on their
> "automatically generated transcript" which includes such howlers as:
>
> That 25000 dollars of taxpayer money went to the San Francisco cinema
> attack.
>
> Other than the usual demagoguery, what's fascinating (to me) in the Fox and
> other sources is the constant transmutation of the story and it's wild
> inaccuracies. In the "Perverts Put Out" segment that Scott Stark originally
> flagged, the news reader (one Megyn Kelly, which somehow in this context
> makes me think she's her own gynecologist) claims that the NEA is "getting a
> rather big slice of the pie" of the 787,000,000,000 stimulus package. But,
> the House member being interviewed says that the NEA got $15,000,000 in the
> stimulus package. That makes the "big slice" 0.0019%. So much for
> accuracy. Part of the problem here may be Fox confusing the entire NEA
> annual budget with the 15 million in the stimulus package, but even the
> whole NEA budget for FY 2009 is only 155 million, which brings sit up to
> 0.0196% of the TARP stimulus package.
>
> One downstream recapitulation of the report made the stimulus package 787
> trillion, not billion. And lots of the reports mistakenly think that
> Frameline, the distributor which showed the film at a festival that took
> place in several venues, is a movie theatre, and they don't seem to know
> what the SF Cinematheque (sorry, Cinema Attack) is. They also seem to not
> grasp the fact that the film was made in 1975 and is not being funded by the
> NEA.
>
> But also delicious in the whole thing is the alarm that Thundercrack sets
> off because it shows "sex with animals." Of course if they'd seen the film
> (or even the trailer) they would realize that George Kuchar plays a circus
> truck driver guy who is in love with a female gorilla he transports, which
> is very obviously someone in a gorilla costume, not a live animal. Fox News
> marionette Greta Van Sustern is particularly clueless on this matter.
>
> Probably the biggest lie the Fox team tells is that they couldn't present
> most of the images or any of the audio on air (actually on cable). The
> trailer, available on the DVD website, is 3:35 minutes long. I'd say only
> about 15 seconds of that couldn't be shown, and that's just for bare breast
> nudity and one brief shot of a bare ass. (You actually can show both on
> regular broadcast with a digital blur.) But any extended part of the
> trailer would make it perfectly obvious that it is a campy parody of film
> genres. And the audio (George Kuchar's voice over and comic over-inflated
> sensationalizing of the film) could be presented, but it would reveal that
> the whole thing is a send-up of extreme proportions. Given that Me-GYN is a
> lawyer according to the Fox News website, apparently (1) she never saw the
> trailer even though she discusses it, or (2) she missed the law school
> classes on broadcast and cable law, or (3) she thinks lying is OK if you can
> goose the ratings and score points on the Obama administration. She says
> she can't show most of the trailer on TV, but she can show a fair amount of
> cleavage in talking about it. (To be fair, not as much as most female
> detectives on network and cable crime shows such as CSI are expected to
> display, but rather more than her "official" Fox News website pix which are
> coded as lawyer/business/professional/corporate.)
>
> And a note to Fred Camper: I don't think Scott Stark needed to add
> editorializing to his posting the link to the Fox News clip. Since you
> don't have cable and don't watch Fox, Fred, you're probably not aware of it
> (no fault there), but lots of folks are aware of Fox foolishness because it
> frequently is quoted for sarcastic purposes on The Daily Show (on Comedy
> Central channel) and Countdown with Keith Obermann and The Rachel Maddow
> Show (both MSNBC). When I'm browsing TV, I usually take a look at Fox News
> to see what the latest stupidity is (like Glenn Beck saying Obama is a
> racist or anything by Bill O'Reilly). But hey, Bill O'Reilly once called me
> a "pinhead" on his show because I declined to appear on it to talk about
> teaching a college course on pornography. For anyone with a modicum of
> intellect and/or middle to left leanings, Fox News is an endless joke.
>
> Maybe all this attention to the film will accelerate production of the new
> DVD. It's an ill wind....
>
> My article that discusses Thundercrack:
>
> “Taking Out the Trash: Camp and the Politics of Irony,” The Politics and
> Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (NY and London: Routledge, 1994) 182-201.
>
> CHUCK KLEINHANS
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________ For info
> on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
> __________________________________________________________________ For info
> on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.