They Got Pics

The Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released pictures of Epstein and his clients.

Not Brian Epstein with the Beatles, and Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and Cilla Black.  Jeffrey Epstein with some of the most powerful and/or revered men in the world.

Among the chaps in Epstein's company are, clockwise from top right, Bill Gates, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (whom King Charles III demoted by rescinding his royal titles), Alan Dershowitz, Woody Allen (not really surprising, given Allen's own scandals involving girls and young women, but still saddening), Richard Branson, a guy who looks like Richard Benjamin (but isn't, because if Richard Benjamin had had anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, his wife Paula Prentiss would have left him by now), and Epstein himself.

Oh yeah, and pictures of Bill Clinton too.

And of course, pictures of one Donald J. Trump.

The Epstein estate honored subpoenas by the House Democrats to produce such material related to the ongoing investigation into the late financier and pedophile.  Unlike Trump, Epstein's survivors and lawyers actually obey the law.  Out of 95,000 pictures provided to the House Democrats, they released 19.

Isn't nineteen thousand pictures a lot go through, you might ask?   Yes.  But they didn't released nineteen thousand pictures.  They released nineteen pictures.

Clearly, the Democrats don't want to flood the zone, as it were, to embarrass Trump or anyone else caught up in the Epstein scandal.  They want to release photos bit by bit, to make Trump in particular sweat as much as possible.  They need the as-yet unreleased pictures as leverage to get the Epstein files released.

In the meantime, they can laugh at the reaction one picture is likely getting - that of Steve Bannon (yeah, him too!) talking with Woody Allen.  What could be more embarrassing to the maestro of MAGA than to be seen talking with the one American filmmaker who has taken his cinematic cues from the French - and, artistically speaking, has much more in common with Jean Renoir than John Ford? 

No Release

Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, CNN was showing two six-part documentaries on Sunday nights - one about the British royal family, the other about presidential elections in U.S history. The final two one-hour episodes of both series were to be aired on the last two Sundays of March, but they were pre-empted - indefinitely- by coverage of the pandemic.  And not always for live coverage - in some cases, they've been pre-empted in favor of repeats of earlier reports on the virus.  

This, of course, has irked viewers following the two documentaries, who have demanded that CNN air the remaining episodes to give them a break from 24/7 coronavirus coverage.  CNN, which apparently finds 22/7 coronavirus coverage for just two Sundays to be a dereliction of duty on its part, still hasn't aired them.  It hasn't even put the two remaining episodes on any on-demand television services, as some viewers have suggested, and no explanation as to when they will be aired is forthcoming.  

We're just going to have to face facts and concede that the two remaining episodes of these documentaries will likely never be aired.  And this wouldn't be the first time CNN has pre-empted a documentary indefinitely.  A planned documentary from CNN reporter Bill Weir about Trump's use of Twitter kept getting pre-empted by breaking news - much of which was made by Trump himself  - to the point where CNN never bothered to air it.  (I managed to see it surreptitiously on YouTube, and I honestly don't know it got on there, nor do I remember what YouTube channel I found it on.)  

And there are several other TV series, movies, books, and records that have remained unreleased never to be experienced by the general public.  The list of finished movies never released theatrically or even direct-to-video could rival the Dead Sea Scrolls or a Tolstoy novel for length,  and this article lists a few of them.   

More recent are the cases of John Bolton (above) and Woody Allen.  Bolton, you will recall, was preparing a book that was going to blow the lid off the inner workings of the Trump White House, particularly regarding the effort by Trump to entrap Joe Biden and his son in a possible scandal in Ukraine.  The book, which Bolton promoted with teases of unfulfilled promises of testimony in the Trump impeachment trial, was due for release this past March 17, but government vetting for classified information delayed its publication.  By the middle of March, the coronavirus pandemic was in full swing and the impeachment trial was all but forgotten.  Now with a scheduled May release, Bolton's book, "The Room Where It Happened," may not happen at all.

Woody Allen's planned memoir has even less of a chance of getting out.  The publishing company that was about to put it out suddenly realized that Allen was an unredeemed child molester and that no one wanted to have anything to do with him, and so it unceremoniously dropped the book from its roster.  And, if I may also point out, A Rainy Day In New York, likely to be his final film, remains in a vault somewhere with no hope of getting even token direct-to-video release.

Maybe Bolton and Allen can start a two-man book club to discuss their respective works.  They can call the club "The Old Schmucks."

And then there was Reagan aide Michael Deaver's planned diet book "The Deaver Diet," intended for release in early 1983 - at a time of domestic-program budget cuts and 10 percent unemployment - which was also never published.

And then, on the flip side, there's the sad story of former Beatles assistant Mal Evans, who was just about done with his memoir about working for the band.  He mailed it out just before he was killed in a shootout with the police while living in Los Angeles with his girlfriend of the time, having been in a despondent, intoxicated state and holding what turned out to be an air rifle while making threats to his girlfriend and his editor.  The manuscript for his Beatles memoir, meanwhile, somehow got lost in the mail, never to be recovered. :-(

No, some works of television, cinema and literature are fated never to see the light of day, and so don't be surprised if CNN forgets about the remaining two episodes of its aforementioned documentary by the time this pandemic is over. 

But hey, at least be thankful that "The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus" was finally aired 28 years after it was filmed.

Oscar Observations

Chris Matthews joked this past Friday that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was going to cause Republicans to go ballistic by giving Oscars to a French movie and a movie about black people. Well, as it turned out, the latter film - The Help - got only one major award, a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Octavia Spencer. Otherwise, The Help (about black domestic workers in the 1960s South) was ignored by academy members who obviously confused it with an old Beatles movie and wondered why the heck they were voting on it.  :-D  But The Artist - a silent black-and-white movie from France about a Hollywood matinee idol of the 1920s done in by the advent of talking pictures - cleaned up by winning five Oscars: Best Score, Best Costume Design, Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius), and the big one, Best Picture.

My mother wondered how a non-American film could even be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar when there's a separate category for foreign movies. It's because The Artist got a relatively wide release, and also, the foreign film category is for the best foreign language film. The Artist, as a silent film, had no language. Besides, British movies (as you might have guessed) are treated by the Academy as if they were domestic films, so why not give the same deference to a French movie with no language barrier to worry about? The Academy's award in the foreign language movie category, while generally ignored by the American right, still gave them something to fume over; the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar went to A Separation, an Iranian film. And Woody Allen's script for his own Midnight In Paris won the Best Screenplay award - another insult to the sensitivities of conservatives. Because what annoys the right more than honoring a New York Jewish intellectual Francophile who married his ex-girlfriend's adopted Asian daughter? How about Christopher Plummer winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing a gay man who comes out of the closet late in life in Beginners?

Oh well, Meryl Streep got the Best Actress Oscar for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, so conservatives could take heart in the fact that she won for playing their favorite world figure who isn't Pope John Paul II.

Overall, the Oscars mostly honored movies that were not among the biggest box office successes of 2011 - the top grossing movies of the past year were, as they have usually been for the past thirty years, artistically lightweight blockbusters. Some people have wondered if the Oscars are relevant anymore, confusing relevance with credibility. The Academy Awards are not supposed to honor commercial success; they're supposed to honor artistic achievement. (Not that they always do.)  But the decline in box office business in a trade dominated by adolescent fare - commercially speaking, 2011 was the worst year for movies since 1995 - suggests that more serious movies may soon be, well, taken more seriously by studios and that the blockbuster era George Lucas always gets unfairly blamed for initiating (blaming him for the Transformers movies is like blaming the Beatles for Herman's Hermits) may be coming to a close.

Then again, maybe fewer people are going to the movies because of bedbugs in the theaters. I'll explain later.