Life and Death and Life
Obviously, I don’t scribble these commentaries as often as I once did. (They were once weekly before they became weakly.) Maybe in the 23(!) years since I began penning them, I managed to say everything I had to say about films, entertainment and related matters. Or maybe I just realized that I didn’t have that much to say in the first place, but hey, that never stopped anybody else.
Anyway, I amuse myself every week by highlighting a past commentary on my main page (I’m up to the year 2010 in the current iteration) to see how prescient it turned out to be or (more likely often) how embarrassing.
Sometimes topics that I focused on repeatedly, if not interminably, need some updating. Recently, there has been interesting and, in fact, exciting developments in some of my pet areas. Unfortunately, none of them has to do with Dark Shadows, which is probably the single topic about which I have written most passionately. As far as I know, writer/producer Mark B. Perry is still out there shopping around his pilot script for a reboot of the series in the tradition of the Star Trek franchise. The last I heard, he was aiming at streaming services like Netflix.
But let’s get down to the real news…
THE EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL IS ALIVE! Seven months ago I was here lamenting the demise of the 75-year-old Scottish film fest. After reminiscing about the one time I attended that marvelous event, I concluded with a story about the Missus and myself emerging, after a noisy night, from a hostel off the Royal Mile to spy a “passed-out young Scotsman lying prone amid all the debris, bare legs splayed from under his kilt.” I added solemnly, “As that inebriated laddie surely did (however many hours later), let us hope that the Edinburgh Film Festival will someday soon rouse and then rise once again.”
Well, that wish has come true. In March The Guardian reported the festival would return later this year in “a scaled-down form.” It continued, “The festival announced that it had joined with the Edinburgh international festival, the large-scale summer event renowned for its theatre, comedy and musical performances, to present a ‘compact selection of films’ in ‘a hand-picked programme’ designed to ‘celebrate the work of exceptional local and global film-makers.’”
The festival got a £400,000 grant from Screen Scotland and installed a new program director, Kate Taylor, who has previously worked with the London Film Festival. The Edinburgh fest will be held in August, and the opening film will be Johnny Barrington’s Silent Roar, described as “a teenage tale of surfing, sex and hellfire.” It was filmed on Scotland’s Western Isles and stars Louis McCartney and Ella Lily Hyland.
Still unclear is the fate of the festival’s revered Filmhouse cinema, a former church on the city’s Lothian Road. It has apparently been purchased by pub operators Caledonian Heritable, and their plans for it are unknown.
THE HOLLYWOOD FOREIGN PRESS ASSOCIATION IS DEAD! That’s right, that organization behind the Golden Globes, which I rant about every year, is history. Last week The New York Times reported that the organization “died on Monday after a series of scandals. It was 80.”
Let’s not get too excited, though. This does not mean the end of the Golden Globes. In fact, the more we read about it, the more it looks like some sleight-of-hand. A holding company called Eldridge Industries and owned by billionaire investor Todd Boehly joined with Dick Clark Productions to buy the foreign press association’s Golden Globe assets, and the proceeds are going to a new nonprofit called the Golden Globe Foundation.
Members of the HFPA, a bunch of freelance journalists, numbering fewer than 100, who are all so well known that I bet you cannot name a single one of them, will become employees of the new foundation. Hmmm. They “will earn $75,000 annually for five years, with duties that include watching films and television shows and voting for the awards…” Hey, how do I get in on that gig? Have I lived abroad long enough to qualify as “foreign press”?
What else will they do for their salary? They will be “producing promotional materials, including writing articles for a Golden Globes website,” says the Times. “It was unclear if the members could continue freelancing (mostly celebrity interviews) for publications overseas.”
So not that much is really changing. The 81st Golden Globes telecast is scheduled for January 7.
The Times, which has done as much as anybody to hype these awards, notes without irony, “The foreign press association had long been viewed as unserious and slippery. In the late 1960s, the Federal Communications Commission had the Globes temporarily booted from the airwaves, saying it ‘misled the public as to how the winners were determined.’”
The HFPA was basically in bed with Harvey Weinstein, which resulted in his Miramax always getting an inordinate number of nominations and trophies. So what actually eventually brought the HFPA down? In 2021 The Los Angeles Times undertook an investigation and learned that it had no Black members.
BABYLON 5 IS ALIVE! Yes, really. In a form. Last week creator/showrunner/writer J. Michael Straczynski announced (actually repeated the Warner Bros announcement) that there will be an entirely brand new movie spin-off from the greatest science fiction TV show of all time, Babylon 5. It’s called Babylon 5: The Road Home and will be out in 4K UHD, digital download and Blu-Ray on August 15. There is currently trailer for it on YouTube.
What’s the catch? Why is the universe being so nice to us (he asked suspiciously)? Well, it’s an animated feature. I’ve never been particularly attracted to superhero animations like the Spider-Man and Batman ones, although I understand they are very well done and quite popular. I’ll definitely put my bias aside, though, for this occasion. We’ve been waiting a long time for new visual literature in the B5 universe—16 years since Babylon 5: The Lost Tales.
For us fans who go back all the way to the beginning of this epic, a new movie is incredibly exciting. Yes, some fans are divided between “after all this time leave it alone and don’t ruin it” and “yes, yes, yes, give me more.” I’m definitely on the “give me more” side. Yes, the five seasons of the series was a beautifully self-contained story that ended monumentally and definitively, but there is still plenty of space in the annals for more adventures to be inserted.
The movie will be sweet and bitter. The sweet is the (voice) participation of original actors, including Bruce Boxleitner (John Sheridan), Peter Jurasik (Londo Mollari), Bill Mumy (Lennier) and Patricia Tallman (Lyta Alexander). Especially rewarding will be the inclusion of both Claudia Christian (Susan Ivanova) and Tracy Scoggins (Elizabeth Lochley), one of whom replaced the other in the final season due to a contract dispute.
The bitter, of course, will be the absence of way too many actors. While it’s sad to think of Michael Garibaldi (Jerry Doyle), Dr. Franklin (Richard Biggs), G’Kar (Andreas Katsulas), Delenn (Mira Furlan), Jeffrey Sinclair (Michael O’Hare) and Zathras (Tim Choate) being voiced by other actors, I’m sure their replacements will do a fine job and should be appreciated for helping to keep those characters alive. Even for overly sentimental purists, it’s different when it’s a voice performance and not a live physical one.
Another positive B5 note: there is a book coming that every die-hard fan (and maybe even casual ones) will want. It’s the product of a lot of blood, sweat and love from a writer named Jason Davis, whose c.v. includes being a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting and being the author of The Babylon 5 Encyclopedia and Writing The X‑Files. He has also “edited and published more books by Harlan Ellison than anyone else” and has become a de factor keeper of Ellison’s literary legacy. Financed by 933 backers on Kickstarter, he has been laboring away on the most comprehensive and detailed accounting of the creation and execution of the B5 series and all its various offshoots that you will ever see.
It’s been a while in the writing, but it is definitely the wait.
-S.L., 19 June 2023
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