Filed under: Casting, Fandom

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Political Lunch creators Rob Millis and Will Coghlin today at SXSW demoed a new tool for makers of content looking to distribute video under a micropayment system during a panel called “Beyond Advertising: Can Online Video Finally Pay?” Dubbed Dynamo, the new fully embeddable player features an extremely simple sign-up process that allows audiences to make direct payments to producers using PayPal, thus allowing producers to embed video on their own sites and directly profit from it.

Millis and Coghlin, who in September told us they were ending Political Lunch to focus on developing Dynamo, opened the discussion with an exhaustive comparison of the options currently available to independent producers hoping to monetize their content — including making deals with advertisers directly, partnering with indie film distributors like Indie Flix, and working with bigger dogs like Amazon VOD and the YouTube rental system.

The problems with those systems, according to the pair, include the challenges of finding the right advertisers to partner with content, overly complicated contracts that greatly favor the distributor and take a long time to set up, and a lack of transparency when it comes to the actual amount of payment. A major issue was said to be the fact that when a creator signs up to distribute their content via YouTube, there’s no disclosure of the percentage of sales you’ll actually get; the contract only specifies “a portion.” Millis theorized at one point that the reason for this might be that “YouTube is giving a better deal to the bigger guys [aka Hollywood studios] — you’re subsidizing that.”

Meanwhile, during the hour-long panel, Coghlin filmed a short video, uploaded it to Dynamo, embedded it on a Blogger blog and demonstrated the payment process.

People who already know that they might be interested can sign up for the beta version by emailing beta@dynamoplayer.com, but if you want more detail first, tomorrow I’ll be getting an up-close look from Millis and Coghlin. So stay tuned!

Bigelow's prize makes little difference to Hollywood's basic sexist approach towards women

A woman winning the Oscar for best directing is one of those cultural milestones that would pass better unremarked. Sadly, it didn't.

"The moment has come!" chirruped Barbra Streisand, emoting harder than any of the actresses who were nominated that night. "It's Kathryn Bigelow!"

Newspapers and magazines hurried to trumpet this historic landmark; I would have kept it quiet.

The best-director Oscar going female might have been a moment worth celebrating if it had happened in 1974. But this is 2010. These were the 82nd annual academy awards. How embarrassing.

It's hardly an indicator of social change. The rest of society has altered so radically since 1929 that it's no more than a random piece of pub-quiz trivia (for heaven's sake, elsewhere in America they have a female secretary of state and a mixed-race president), while Hollywood hasn't changed at all. Oscar or no Oscar, the crowd's main interest in Kathryn Bigelow was how marvellous she looks for 58.

The film industry's idea of a great feminist breakthrough is to applaud the tits of women over 40 as well as under it. All week, the press has gurgled about the great bodies of the Oscar-cougars: photo spreads of Pfeiffer, Bullock and Streep, above text that essentially says, both incredulously and smugly: "You'd still do 'em, wouldn't you?"

Even James McAvoy, introducing the nomination of Helen Mirren for best actress, focused his speech entirely on how "hot" he finds her. He must have imagined that this demonstrated a revolutionary political correctness because she's old enough to be his mother. No: it's just the usual reductionist nonsense, broadened upwards.

The other "feminist celebration" of Bigelow seems to be that she beat her ex-husband James Cameron to the award. I say it's embarrassing that she ever married him in the first place. Look at their two films. The Hurt Locker versus Dances With Smurfs. How could that marriage ever have worked?

But that's fine. That's Hollywood. A sparkly veneer of dismissive lust and gossip is what we expect and enjoy. Their mistake was drawing attention to how deep it runs. Why remind the world that it took 82 years for 50% of the human race to throw up someone who could make the best film, or be credited for it? That's just highlighting a matter of social awkwardness, like announcing you've farted. Better to let it out as quietly as possible, and hope nobody notices.

When the chips are down

Sorry not to write a column last week. I was in Berlin; I planned to write from there if anything noteworthy happened, but it didn't. I saw the Brandenburg gate, ate bratwurst, played a poker tournament, got knocked out by Boris Becker, left the tournament, six masked gunmen went in and stole a million dollars, that was it. So I took the week off.

Yes. That's how bad a journalist I am. If it weren't for the sideline in poker, I don't think I'd eat.

It was only when I got home to find a hundred kindly enquiries on Twitter and a dozen interview requests from various departments of the BBC, that I thought: "Oh. That armed heist on the €3m celebrity poker tournament seems to have been reported as news."

Don't get me wrong, I had thought it was quite interesting. We haven't had an armed raid on a poker tournament for about five years now. It's six years since I saw those gunmen at the cash game in Holland. The game has become terribly respectable. Poker friends were ringing after the heist to say: "Isn't this retro? Been ages since I saw an Uzi."

Those still at the tournament sounded fine, saying how calm they'd felt. Unruffled bloggers filmed the raid on their digicams; some players recognised the robbers and arrests have already begun. All the prize winners got paid. Nobody got hurt. They were posting jokes online within half an hour. The tournament resumed less than two hours later.

One heroic Finnish player had been about to lose a huge pot when the gunmen came in. He declared that this did not constitute a serious interruption and insisted on paying his opponent anyway. The Finn ended up coming second in the tournament, winning €600,000 – that's karma.

Boris Becker missed the raid; he got knocked out just after I did. But he would have coped. I've loved Boris ever since I saw him at a poker tournament in Nassau, a vision of perfect physical fitness, with a doughnut in one hand and a cigarette in the other. That's my kind of sportsman.

None of this will make any difference to the success of the European Poker Tour. I will be at the final in Monte Carlo this April, and so will hundreds of others. You might think that's because poker players are more fatalistic – or greedier – than other people. You might think it's because guns are, historically, part of the Wild West poker picture. But I think it's because everyone can always cope with everything. Human nature is naturally stoic, unhysterical, with a sense of perspective on coincidence. Most people think: "Shit happens. If you're there: unlucky. But I'll carry on assuming I won't be."

A few weeks ago, I wrote about armed police on city streets and escalated ID-checking as a "response to terrorist threat", which I believe goes against most people's desire not to have their way of life compromised by fear of theoretical disaster. A reader sent me a quote from Benjamin Franklin which came back into my mind, proudly, as I watched players start signing up for the next leg of the European Poker Tour, in San Remo just a few weeks from now: "He who values security above liberty deserves neither."

www.victoriacoren.com

• Kathryn Bigelow
• James Cameron
• Oscars

We all have film sequences that stick in our minds. Some are shared by many – such as the shower scene from Psycho – others are particular to us. Here our film critic and a panel of leading movie-makers reveal their favourites. What are yours?

Who will ever forget the first time they saw the 45-second shower-room murder in Hitchcock's Psycho? I remember 1959 and 1961 as the years when my first two children were born. But the first thing that comes to mind about the year in between was seeing Psycho, which I'd been looking forward to since a radio programme I'd produced the previous October, when Hitchcock had enticingly described Psycho as "my first real horror film". Entering the Plaza, Lower Regent Street, the day the film opened, I passed the cardboard cut-out of Hitchcock in the foyer, from which a tape recording of the Master's familiar Leytonstone undertaker's voice warned us what would happen if we gave away the ending.

Half an hour into the movie, when Janet Leigh stared out at us from the floor, a man sitting in front of me staggered into the aisle and vomited: testimony to the sensitive stomachs of the time, or (as several other people I know witnessed a similar incident at the Plaza that week) evidence that Paramount's publicity department had hired a method actor for the film's opening run?

Such indelibly iconic moments have been part of moviegoing since the Lumière brothers' first public screening of a dozen short scenes in December 1895. One of them had the audience recoiling from a train entering a station, another had them chuckling when a cheeky boy tricked a gardener into spraying himself with a hosepipe. People judge a movie by the strength of its story and overall impact, but ultimately what they remember are individual moments and sequences. This perhaps reflects the very nature of film, which is a rapid succession of still pictures that provide an illusion of motion. And until the coming of cassettes and DVDs, few of us were able to see a picture over and over again or re-view a sequence. So we had to replay it in our minds, and naturally we'd often get it wrong. Which is how "Play it again, Sam" entered the language instead of: "Play it, Sam, play 'As Time Goes By'."

James Stewart seems to have been thinking of this approach to cinema when he talked to Peter Bogdanovich about his craft: "What you're doing is... you're giving people little... little, tiny pieces of time... that they never forget." This is echoed by Walker Percy in his 1961 novel The Moviegoer. Some people, his narrator says, "treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise", but "what I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man". Likewise Jean-Dominique Bauby, the paralysed French writer, describes in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly how he'd lie in the hospital recreating favourite scenes from Touch of Evil, Stagecoach, Moonfleet and Pierrot le fou. Canny film-makers have cottoned on to the idea, like James Cameron, who says: "You try to create one or more emotional, epiphanous moments within a film."

These moments come in many forms – simple, complex, lyrical, violent, gentle, witty, romantic, revelatory – and, if they stick, become as real as any other memory. They can range from the split-second close-up of the suave spy's missing half-finger in Hitchcock's The 39 Steps to the protracted pursuit of Cary Grant by the crop-dusting plane in North by Northwest, from the in-your-face eye-slicing in Buñuel's first silent movie, the avant-garde Un Chien Andalou, to the puzzling sequence of the Chinese businessman's mysterious box in the same director's mainstream success Belle de Jour 40 years later. Like your favourite jokes, your cherished movie moments reveal something about you and, if shared, they can be the beginning of a beautiful friendship, especially if one of them is the final sequence in Casablanca that features that line.

My own favourites? The Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin. The love at first sight between John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man, the lust at first sight between Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. The children running through the woods to see a train in Pather Panchali and finding grandmother dead on the way back. The cruelly comic soccer match in Loach's Kes. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie making love in a Venetian hotel in Don't Look Now. The slow-motion mayhem let loose in The Wild Bunch after William Holden says: "If they move, kill 'em!" Perhaps my single favourite moment comes in Citizen Kane, where Kane's now elderly friend Bernstein tells the reporter about an epiphanic memory of seeing a girl in a white dress on the New Jersey ferry in 1896. "I'll bet a month hasn't gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl." It's a moment about remembering a moment, and the actor Everett Sloane makes it so vivid we think we've seen that girl ourselves.

Chosen by Ryan Fleck, the American indie film director, writer, editor and cinematographer, best known for co-writing and co-directing with partner Anna Boden Half Nelson and Sugar correct(out now on DVD).

The villain's on the elevated subway. You think he's going to get away because a person on foot can't keep up with the subway... But Gene Hackman jumps in a car and starts chasing the subway, riding underneath it, going at 80mph, swerving in and out of traffic. I first saw this scene on video when I was 18 or 19, in college. I loved it.

In action scenes nowadays you can chalk everything up to some kind of computer effect. Audiences no longer really believe that what they're seeing exists anymore. When The French Connection was made that notion didn't really occur to people. What you saw was usually really happening in front of the lens. It was raw. I did a little bit of research about how they shot the scene. Phenomenal. Basically they just did it. There was no security blocking off other traffic, just Hackman in a car with a camera mounted on the front. They went crazy, lost their minds, and went for it.

It was the kind of thing that you just would never get away with these days. I'm editing a movie right now that has a teenager walking on the Brooklyn Bridge, considering suicide. He steps out on to a ledge, over traffic... It never even occurred to put the actual kid out on the ledge, on a bridge, over traffic because we knew there was no way authorities would let us do that. So there's camera trickery. Back in the 70s we'd have just thrown a child out over the ledge, seen what happened, and shot it.

Chosen by Ken Loach, writer/director of the influential docudrama Cathy Come Home, and director of nearly 30 films including Kes, Riff-Raff, My Name is Joe and Looking for Eric. He won the 2006 Palme d'Or at Cannes for The Wind that Shakes the Barley.

This scene always cheers you up. Jeanne Moreau and the two guys on their bicycles in the sun in France, the music that goes with it... Partly it evokes what you imagine to be the perfect French vacation but also it's a very fine bit of film-making.

When you're in the business and have been in the business a long time, you tend to dismember about 99% of films as you're watching. The time when you used to watch a film just for enjoyment is difficult to recapture. But just occasionally a film will transcend that. The sense of enjoyment with this trio on their bicycles is perennial. It's completely evocative of that carefree young moment, the age when people are carefree. And then of course, for these three, it will all be ruined by the war.

The song that was composed for the film – "Le tourbillon" – became very famous. I'd sing it for you if I wasn't surrounded by colleagues who would take the piss. I think film music that tells you what to think is cheap – the film should do that without that prompting. But in Jules et Jim it is music in relation to the images, the music has an independent existence and there's a relationship between the two.

It is not something subterranean, there to steer you through every second and push you into feelings that the pictures don't generate themselves.

Chosen by Beeban Kidron, who came to international attention directing the BBC's adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in 1990. She has since directed several feature films including Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.

Every single line in this scene is quotable. It's the most beautifully written thing, from an era of cinema very closely knitted to the theatre, when the words were supposed to evoke things rather than just be things for people to say while the pictures were going on. That's something that's very often lost 60 years later.

Margo, played by Bette Davis, is a great Broadway actress at the pinnacle of her power: brilliant, sophisticated, bitchy. Her assistant Eve, meanwhile, played by Anne Baxter, is simpering, beautiful and very, very ambitious. Eve is trying to replace Margo, trying to get her next part on Broadway and take her lover, Bill. This is the scene where Margo finally loses her rag, having waited upstairs for Bill to throw him a party before discovering that he's been downstairs with Eve for 20 minutes.

The scene sums up the central themes of the film, to do with Margo's insecurity about age and about the way that Eve is eating into her life. This is referred to in the dialogue all the time: Margo finds Eve and Bill talking and immediately asks if she can join in – "Or isn't it a story for grown-ups?" Bette Davis, despite being so powerful, gives a phenomenal performance of insecurity. That is very, very rarely drawn in the cinema.

The question of ageing and of being replaced by the younger, more beautiful woman is something we can still understand today.

Chosen by Nick Park, Oscar-winning animator and writer/director of the Wallace and Gromit films.

As a boy I was into monsters, heroes going off on adventures – and stop-motion animation. I saw trailers for this film and it seemed to be everything I wanted. I remember being at a school fair, just before Christmas, and being desperate to get home to watch it.

The scene that stood out the most, that I found both horrifying and enthralling, was the skeleton fight at the end. The heroes are all live action and the monsters are all done with stop-frame animation. It was a terrific technical feat – I think there were eight animated skeletons or more, cut together quite seamlessly with the live action. The whole choreography of it was amazing. But the story, too, really caught my imagination. These skeletons were planted like seeds, by a wizard chap spreading dragons teeth, and then dead soldiers grow up to fight the Argonauts. So exciting.

At around the same time I saw Ray Harryhausen, the animator, explain on television how he had done the skeletons. I immediately went and built my own models with wire and foam – I think I was planning to film something with my friends, live action, cut together with a sea monster made out of a coat hanger and nylon tights.

Disney films didn't make me want to go home and do it myself because it was shrouded in mystery and technique. But when I saw the skeletons in Harryhausen's film I wanted immediately to do it myself, because you got a sense of how it might be done.

Chosen by Stephen Poliakoff. After starting out as a playwright, Poliakoff turned to writing and directing television dramas including Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and the award-winning The Lost Prince. His feature films include Hidden City and most recently Glorious 39.

Still, after 40 years, people are arguing about the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey. What the ending means to the film. The computer taking over, the menacing computer howl, the foetus – it has passed into cinema folklore. Science fiction was not a genre that attracted me much, and it was very unsexy in the 1960s. But Kubrick's film was the most original I had ever seen. It came at me for the first time, completely alone, in a cinema on a summer afternoon in 1968. I was 15, and it made an extraordinary impression on me. There was a lot more mainstream "auteur cinema" than there is now, Hollywood studios producing personal films. Nevertheless Kubrick stood alone, a titanic figure that obsessively made films, under great secrecy, and with nobody interfering.

I had never seen such a bold use of cinema, and certainly never such an incredibly obscure ending. To have spent all that time and money and to have the daring – some would say foolhardy daring, but nevertheless a magnificent daring – to end the film on such an elusive and obscure note, I found it amazing as a 15-year-old that anybody should have the balls to do that. It excited me and changed my whole view of what you could do as a writer, whatever medium you were attempting – Kubrick's aspiration to be original. Now it's been much imitated but 2001 was extraordinarily ahead of its time, and has continued to survive and influence generations.

Chosen by Stephen Woolley, the award-winning producer best known for his collaborations with director Neil Jordan including Interview with the Vampire and The Crying Game. Recent projects include How To Lose Friends and Alienate People and the forthcoming Made in Dagenham. In 2005 he made his directorial debut with Stoned.

I remember seeing Taxi Driver for the first time in Paris in the 70s. The taxi gliding across New York's wet streets, smoke coming out of the subways, it was all incredibly delicious. It had this thundery Bernard Herrmann score, and when Robert De Niro did his "are you talking to me?" sequence in front of the mirror you suddenly sensed the degree of anger there. It was all bottled up until he explodes with this bravura performance. It's very clever, very economical, everything concentrated on his eyes.

Sequences like this are not only successful because they are so beautifully created but also because they often come at a point in a film where you begin to realise where it's going, you think, "oh my god, I know what this is about". Here you become aware that not only is Travis Bickle schizophrenic but he's aware of his own schizophrenia. He's like a genie in a bottle and you're waiting for him to let the genie out – which he does brilliantly in that horrific sequence later on where he shoots Harvey Keitel's character and saves Jodie Foster's.

The scene was improvised but De Niro had tried out a version of it in an earlier film he made with Brian De Palma, I think it's called Hi Mom! I didn't see it until years after watching Taxi Driver and I remember thinking "I can't believe it – the thing he does in Taxi Driver!"

Chosen by Edgar Wright, who co-created Channel 4's Spaced, and has collaborated with comedian Simon Pegg on hit films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. His latest directing project, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, is out later this year.

I always describe Carrie as the Grease of horror movies: it resonates with all ages because everybody remembers their awkward teenage phase and can watch it and say – I was the bully or the victim or the person who did nothing. It explores how apocalyptic your rage can be as a teenager. Carrie's not a killer, she's a girl who has been bullied and through a terrible confluence of events ends up burning the school down.

It's also unusual for a horror film. It doesn't have someone being killed every 20 minutes and then a climax – it builds to one huge climax at the prom. School bullies have fixed the prom so that Carrie White will win and they can humiliate her by tipping a bucket of pig's blood over her in front of the whole school. The scene and the excruciating build-up to it is one of the greatest set pieces of all time, full of suspense, with a monumental payoff.

A crane shot sets up the sequence so you know where everyone is positioned and that the bucket of blood is above Carrie and Tommy's heads. Once the plot is set in motion Pino Donaggio's score takes over. The resulting sequence is pure opera.

I first saw Carrie on VHS with my brother's friend when I was about 12. I obsessively read about horror movies and was dying to see it. I've watched it so many times since. De Palma planned the sequence for months and battled the studio over the time spent on filming it. But it was worth the blood, sweat and tears. It still leaves audiences speechless.

Chosen by Claire Denis, who made her directorial debut in 1988 with Chocolat. Subsequent films include Good Work and 35 Shots of Rum. Her latest, White Material, is out in the summer.

We don't have courtyards in France like they do in New York, where Hitchcock's film is set, but we have street buildings that are set very close to each other. From where I stand in my kitchen or my bedroom I can watch neighbours' windows very easily. I'm intrigued by voyeurism, about what is behind windows, and often in my films I stage a scene as if I was peeping in from outside.

The situation Hitchcock establishes in the opening scene of Rear Window is the ultimate voyeuristic situation. The character played by James Stewart has broken his leg, has nothing to do but linger behind his window and watch. He is passive but eager to find something – to be a witness of something, or to give his imagination something to chew on. As a spectator in a cinema theatre, you are a sort of prisoner in a chair, like he is.

• Alfred Hitchcock
• Bette Davis
• Stanley Kubrick
• Martin Scorsese
• Robert De Niro

Ex-Infinity Ward heads now represented by Creative Artists Agency originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Ex-Infinity Ward heads now represented by Creative Artists Agency originally appeared on Joystiq on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

D'après The Hollywood Reporter, George Lucas serait en train de préparer un projet top secret de film en images de synthèse dans son Ranch Skywalker.

Días atrás os explicamos que Charlie Sheen había guardado temporalmente su traje de Charlie Harper debido a una serie de problemas con el alcohol y las drogas. Ahora hemos sabido que el protagonista de ‘Dos hombres y medio’ volverá a los platós de la CBS el próximo martes. Han sido tres semanas de rehabilitación en un centro de desintoxicación en el que fue internado el pasado 23 de febrero. Y el lunes tendrá que ver al juez por un caso de violencia doméstica que tuvo lugar en Navidad, así que la agenda del actor está rebosante estos días.

Al final habrán sido tres semanas de ausencia, pero sólo 15 días de parón forzoso en el rodaje. Afortunadamente para los seguidores que pueda atesorar la sitcom más seguida en Estados Unidos, la rehabilitación de Sheen ha coincidido con una semana de descanso programado por el estudio, de manera que el ritmo de rodaje aparentemente no se verá demasiado alterado.

Todo y con eso, Charlie Sheen podría llegar a tener problemas laborales. El efecto acumulativo de sus problemas personales mezclado con el sueldo que percibe, cifrado en 900.000 dólares por capítulo, podría girarse en su contra fácilmente. Y en un caso como este, en el que el protagonista de una serie familiar tiene problemas tan poco aptos para toda la familia, los directivos de la CBS, debidamente asesorados por el departamento legal de la empresa, podrían llegar a entender que el actor está perjudicando la serie, lo que podría suponer la rescisión del contrato del actor.

Todo dependerá de cómo reaccione la audiencia ante este nuevo episodio en la agitada vida del protagonista de ‘Dos hombres y medio’. Si le continúan dando su apoyo en cada emisión, quizá los responsables de la cadena hagan la vista gorda. Si no, Charlie Sheen puede llegar a tener un problema más para añadir a su ya extensa lista de descalabros personales.

Vía | The Hollywood Reporter
En ¡Vaya Tele! | ‘Dos hombres y medio’, ¿problemas en el paraíso?

Filed under: Fan Rant

Continue reading I Don't Buy the Attention-Span Excuse for Quick Editing

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Hooray for Hollywood! — the big winner this week in our roundup of the top 10 Twitter trends. From the Oscars to Alice in Wonderland (and of course, Justin Bieber), celebrity — whether be it music or film — dominated the Twitterverse.

The latest data, which comes from our friends at What the Trend, gives us a snapshot of what topics dominated Twitter. Given the topical nature of the list, hashtag memes and games have been excluded.

Tween-favorite Justin Bieber lost his spot at #1 to the Big Show — AKA the Oscars. The 82nd Academy Awards dominated Twitter on Sunday night and was the most discussed topic of the week as a whole. Don’t feel bad for Bieber though: he’s still number two on the list.

Now, who’s hot who not/Tell me who rock who sell out in the stores. Well, that would be B.I.G P-O, P-P-A, also know as the Notorious B.I.G. The legendary Brooklyn rapper, who was murdered 13 years ago this week, was #5 on this week’s list of trends. More than a decade after his tragic death, Biggie continues to be a larger than life figure.

Music continues to be a big topic of discussion on Twitter, with artists like Lady Gaga, Bieber and the Jonas Brothers all appearing on the list. We expect to see Lady Gaga next week too, given the camp-infused epic music video for “Telephone” that was released at the end of the week.

Looking forward, we predict Justin Bieber, the iPad and Twilight: Eclipse to all appear on the chart next week.

You can check past Twitter trends in our Top Twitter Topics section as well as read more about this past week’s trends on What The Trend.

Tags: top twitter trends, twitter, What The Trend

Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Casting

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Continuing from last week's look at some of the B-list pulp heroes who transitioned to the comics... and a couple who didn't.

*

I really shouldn't refer to The Phantom Detective as a B-lister. He was the was one of the earliest pulp-hero headliners to get his own book -- Feburary 1933, shortly after the Shadow and a month before Doc Savage.

And the Phantom's adventures also had the third-largest run after the Shadow and Doc, racking up a hundred and seventy stories between his 1933 debut and the final adventure published in 1953.

So who was the Phantom? (He was only ever referred to as "The Phantom Detective" on the cover -- in-story it was always shortened to just "the Phantom.")

The Phantom was Richard Curtis Van Loan, a rich playboy idler who was orphaned at an early age. He knocked around for a while enjoying his inheritance until World War One (or just "the Great War," as they called it in 1933) when he became a pilot and downed a lot of German planes. The "danger and excitement of testing himself against death" proved addictive for Richard, and upon his return to the States, he found the playboy lifestyle to be dull and meaningless. On a dare from his friend newspaper mogul Frank Havens, Richard took on a case the police had been unable to solve and, naturally, solved it.

Usually rich playboys turn to fighting crime out of revenge. The Phantom Detective did it on a bet.

That was it. Richard van Loan had found his calling. He would fight crime. Dressed in a black dinner jacket and a silk domino mask, the Phantom quickly became the court of last resort for law enforcement all over the world, with only his pal Frank Havens knowing his true identity.

Basically, it was Batman without the angst. Publisher Frank Havens even summons Van Loan with a flashing red light from the top of the newspaper offices when the police need to consult the Phantom, and yeah, I think that predated the Bat-Signal.

The Phantom Detective is actually the longest-running of all the pulp heroes. Both the Shadow and Doc Savage had more adventures, but in terms of actual years published, the Phantom has them beat.

Weird to see that mid-50s style on a hero pulp cover.

He hung in there until 1953, four years after 1949 (the year the Shadow was canceled, and thus when the classic hero pulps are usually pronounced dead by most fans.)

The Phantom also had a moderately successful run as a backup strip in Thrilling Comics, though I don't believe he ever got the cover. Unlike many of the other pulps that were translated to comics, he made it across virtually intact.

About the only real change was that the four-color version of Van Loan tended to operate in his tux-and-domino mask outfit more often than in the pulps, where generally the Phantom was operating undercover in one disguise or another.

And of course, it was only natural that in the mid-60s a paperback publisher would venture a trial balloon reprint program.

But like many other publishers discovered, apparently Bantam's success with Doc Savage was a one-time deal and the series sputtered out after just a few entries. These paperbacks are actually harder to track down than the original pulps.

I think the reason the Phantom Detective hasn't ever been successfully relaunched, unlike the various other hero pulps that have been revived from time to time, is partly because the whole idea of the wealthy gentleman adventurer is something that's very much of its time -- you can't really update that concept the way you can a scientific superman or a shadowy figure of vengeance. In fact, it's not just pulps and comics -- that whole Richard Hannay/Lord Peter Wimsey/Bulldog Drummond school of upper-crust suspense fiction got shut down right around the same time the Phantom Detective did, in the early to mid-1950s. Or, rather, it got split into two genres -- the hardboiled private-eye archetype absorbed some of it, and the rest got incorporated into the James Bond gentleman-spy thing. (Do I spend way too much time thinking about this sort of thing? Yeah, probably.)

The other reason the Phantom Detective relaunches never got that much traction is because, really, there's not much going on there. Unlike Walter Gibson's Shadow or Lester Dent's Doc Savage, the Phantom wasn't the product of one authorial voice. The first year, the stories were by "G. Wayman Jones," a pen name for D.L. Champion. After that the house name changed to "Robert Wallace," a pseudonym that was kind of a catch-all for a host of authors, notably Ed Burkholder, Henry Kuttner, and Norman Daniels. Dozens of guys worked on The Phantom Detective over the course of its twenty-year history, so the editors tended to keep it a simple, accessible property for any new writers to come in and take over.

The net result is that the run of 170 Phantom Detective adventures are wildly uneven, especially in the first ten years. Most of the stories tend to be plot-driven adventure with a puzzle or a gimmick -- there's very few character bits going on in the stories at all. Generally, Richard van Loan is dedicated, brilliant, athletic, etc., and occasionally he pines for Frank's daughter Muriel Havens, whom he loves but could never ask to share his life of danger. And that's about it.

Nevertheless, the later Phantom Detective stories are quite good and even the early ones are fun to read once in a while. So it's nice that High Adventure has the character in its rotation of regulars, which is where i discovered him.

There's also a history of the Phantom Detective available through Altus Press, The Phantom Detective Companion.

Or you could just pick up some of the High Adventure back issues. Quite a few are on sale for $3.00 each at the moment -- cheaper than many comics -- and you'll find the Phantom Detective reprinted in #68, #74, #91, and #108.

*

Another High Adventure regular that I've been enjoying reading about is the Green Lama.

In the beginning, the Green Lama's pulp career was not terribly distinguished -- or all that long, for that matter. He appeared in fourteen issues of Double Detective, from April 1940 to March of 1943. The stories were all written by Kendell Foster Crossen, under the pen name of "Richard Foster," and I think they're a lot of fun.

The Green Lama was actually a wealthy New York idler named Jethro Dumont. During his college years, Dumont had traveled to Tibet in search of enlightenment, and during his ten years there eventually became a Buddhist priest. His studies led him to learn many mystical secrets that granted him near-superhuman abilities-- it's all about breath control!-- and he also learned to create the illusion of even more supernatural abilities by the clever use of certain radioactive salts. Armed with this knowledge and the desire to better humanity, Jethro Dumont returned to New York and assumed the crimefighting persona of.... the Green Lama!

The idea was to duplicate the Shadow's successful formula as much as possible without committing actual plagiarism: Young WASP socialite-type journeys to the mysterious East and learns a lot of cool stuff which he then uses to fight crime on the mean streets of New York. The trouble was that a mysterious black-clad avenger with two blazing .45s and a fearsome laugh is a lot scarier than a soft-spoken priest in a green bathrobe, and so the Green Lama's pulp series fizzled after a couple of years. Double Detective got a new headliner and that was that.

The interesting thing about young Jethro and his green-robed alter ego, though, is that he actually did a lot better everywhere other than in the original pulp magazines.

For a B-lister, this guy gets around.

He appeared in Prize Comics for 27 issues, almost double the number of his pulp appearances.

Then the Green Lama got his own comic title and that lasted for eight issues.

There was even a radio show and a fan club.

Yes, it was once possible to be a CARD-CARRYING fan of the Green Lama.

Like most of the pulp heroes that jumped to comics in the 1940s, Jethro Dumont got a power upgrade. In the comics, he merely had to utter the mystical chant "Om Mani Padme Hum!" and he would be transformed into the Green Lama, gifted with the power of flight and invulnerability, along with the other mystic powers he had in his pulp adventures.

(I'm pretty sure they skipped the bits with the radioactive salt.)

The strip was drawn by the great Mac Raboy, who also did Captain Marvel Junior for Fawcett. So as silly as the stories often got, at least the strip always looked good.

But when the early 1940s superhero boom in comics faded, the Green Lama faded with it. Just another forgotten Golden Ager for the archives.

Except, for some reason, no one forgets the Green Lama for long. People keep trying to revive the concept. Partly, of course, this is due to the magic words "Public Domain."

But there are quite a few old characters from the 1940s that are available now on that basis, yet somehow it's Jethro Dumont and his green Buddhist robes that keep catching the imagination of new writers and artists. AC tried it briefly...

And Dynamite Entertainment has included the Green Lama as one of the headliners in their Project Superpowers series by Krueger and Ross.

I haven't really been interested in any of the comics revivals, though there's also a new prose anthology that came out last year from Altus Press that sounds kind of cool.

And there are some lovely archive editions of the original Green Lama strips from the 40s available from Dark Horse as well.

There are a whole lot of other archive edition hardcovers ahead of this one on my list, but damn, that looks like a nice book.

Not bad for a B-lister.

But really what I enjoy the most are the original prose adventures from the 40s, the ones by Kendell Crossen. Of those original fourteen, six have shown up in High Adventure so far, and I imagine that there are more to come.

*

The Shadow wasn't the only success story that pulp publishers were anxious to duplicate. Editors were on the prowl for the next Doc Savage, too.

Even the editors of the "Spicy" line of pulps from Culture Publications wanted in on some of that hero-pulp money.

They looked a lot more lurid than they were... but shopkeepers still hid them under the counter.

The Spicys were a slightly naughtier brand of pulp, with more lurid plots and leeringly perverted villains. As a general rule shopkeepers kept them under the counter, though the truth of the matter was that, as Charles Beaumont wryly observed, despite all the torn dresses, creamy bosoms and licking of lips on display, there was really nothing in the "Spicy" line of pulps that disproved the theory that babies are brought by the stork.

Nevertheless, someone there had the bright idea of taking the basic Doc Savage idea and giving it the 'spicy' treatment, and that gave us Jim Anthony, Super-Detective.

Jim was a lot like Doc but with added nudity and sadism.... and less sensitivity. Jim Anthony was described as "half Irish, half Indian, and all-American". He inherited great wealth, though it's not clear from whom since his grandfather Mephito was a stereotypical Indian Chief whose dialogue was largely confined to comments like "Ugh. Bad medicine for grandson."

Like Doc Savage, but, y'know, nakeder.

Jim was not only a gifted athlete, but could even see in the dark and had a "sixth sense." He excelled in the sciences, both real ones like physics and psychiatry, and made-up ones like psychic electro-chemistry. He owned businesses around the country, including the Waldorf-Anthony Hotel in New York, were he maintained a penthouse apartment and secret laboratory. There was also the Tepee, his hidden mansion in the Catskills Mountains, and the Pueblo in the southwest, a hotel/resort built at an oasis.

Like Doc, Jim Anthony also had a few aides -- along with his grandfather, there was also his chauffeur and pilot Tom Gentry, his British butler Dawkins, and his incredibly hot fiancee Delores. Delores often ended up with her dress in tatters, as was traditional in the Spicys. However, not to be outdone, Jim did most of his crimefighting stripped down to yellow swim trunks. No explanation was given other than that it was his "preferred working uniform." Seriously.

There were only twenty-five or so Jim Anthony adventures published, and after the first ten the "international man of action" angle was scrapped in favor of a more hard-boiled, Mike Hammer vibe. All of the stories appeared under the house byline "John Grange," but the shirtless super-sleuth was actually created by Victor Rousseau. Later, most of the stories were written by Culture Publications go-to guy Robert Leslie Bellem, the man that also gave us Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective.

Jim never made it to comics, for obvious reasons. But he's in the High Adventure rotation, and Altus Press -- again! -- has published a new collection of prose stories that looks kind of cool.

Jim Anthony's time in comics may have come, though. I can see him headlining a Vertigo series, or something from Wildstorm, maybe. It could work.

*

I was going to talk a little about the Black Bat, but Brian really covered it all a couple of years ago in this Legends Revealed entry.

REMINDER! My students and I are going to be at the Emerald City Comic-Con all weekend, at M-19 and M-20 in Artist's Alley. Come say hello, and maybe kick in a dollar or two for the AfterSchool Art Program if you feel so inclined. We'd sure appreciate it.

Millions flock to Thailand each year, but you can still find quiet, unspoilt beaches on which to do absolutely nothing, as Laura Barton discovers, while Gemma Bowes finds an island escape in the heart of touristy Phang Nga

It's not that I don't like other people – indeed I would go so far as to lay claim to a rich and varied social life. It's just that, as I have grown older, I have found that I increasingly like spending holidays in a place where I can guarantee that I won't have to talk to anyone. Not splendid isolation exactly, no far-flung mountain huts or Buddhist retreats, rather something we might class as "minimal interaction": no small-talk by the pool, late-night karaoke or group safari outings, thank you very much.

For this, I blame the holidays of my childhood: invariably two weeks in a remote cottage in Anglesey. There were long walks, damsons to pick, fields of cows and sheep to admire and occasional trips to the beach but, crucially, also plenty of time to read, eat, sleep and row about in the creek at the bottom of the garden. I would holiday there still, were it not for the flat grey skies and the viciously cold Irish Sea. For the past few years I have been trying to find somewhere that, while warmer than north Wales in August, is still just as quiet and still and lovely.

And so it may puzzle you to learn that I recently took a holiday to Thailand. Some 14 million people flock here each year, drawn by the natural beauty and myriad delights: elephant rides and jungle adventures, temples, beaches, romantic idylls and, of course, phenomenal food. As I stood on the streets of Bangkok, breathing in the canteen smells and the diesel smoke, listening to the calls of the market vendors selling everything from Viagra to coconut water, and wind-up toy dogs to neatly-threaded garlands of flowers, I began to fear that visiting Thailand to escape the world might have been a giant mistake.

But Bangkok was not my ultimate destination. Two hundred miles east of this giddying street, near the Cambodian border, lies the small island of Koh Kood, home to rainforest, coconut and rubber plantations, sleepy fishing villages, and fewer than 2,000 people.

Koh Kood's great advantage is its relative remoteness. Getting there requires an internal flight or train journey from Bangkok, followed by an hour's boat ride from the mainland. This sounds more of an expedition than it actually is. It's about an hour from Bangkok to the small airport at Trat, with its manicured lawns and string of topiary elephants along the runway. The car ride to the ferry port took me through lush green countryside, past villages and temples and fruit stalls. And there are, I thought to myself as I watched the land disappear and the surf ride up behind our speedboat, surely worse ways to spend an hour than sailing the clear blue waters of the Gulf of Thailand, especially if you care to use the time for a bit of dolphin-spotting.

Accommodation on Koh Kood is varied. There are homestays and budget hotels, as well as a handful of luxury resorts, but even these promote a barefoot, relaxed approach. There are no landlines, little internet access, and few cars. Electricity is minimal – homes and hotels rely on generators or solar power. All is slow, warm tranquillity.

I disembarked at the jetty of Away, a quietly luxurious resort with a cluster of bungalows overlooking a bay. There's plenty of warm and graceful hospitality here, as well as a spa and one of Koh Kood's best diving centres, but no one jostles you into a hike or a snorkelling excursion.

Mostly this makes for a fine place to do nothing; slow and calm and unruffled, you can feel Koh Kood subtly working its way into your bones. On an average day here I did little beyond loll about in the hammocks and deckchairs along the boardwalk, beneath the palm trees, and strategically positioned on the jetty to take in the sunset. I took a kayak across the clear blue sea to a small golden curve of beach; I took a quiet boat ride over to it the next bay. I swam, I slept, I read some Per Petterson, and amid the cool rooms and quiet corners, I felt my mind gently unwinding.

Most evenings, when the sun was low but the air was still heavy and damp, I strolled into the nearby village, for dinner or a beer. The road is a dusty strip, tan-coloured and warm underfoot, and at night the jungle grows inky black, full of twitching, chirruping, wild sounds – the calls of birds and frogs and monkeys. The restaurants here are simple but fantastic, and after even a short walk through the thick evening air you are pleased to find a cold bottle of Chang beer and a bowl of yellow curry.

A short jeep drive from Away, Shantaa is an undeniable step up in luxury. The 10 private villas sit on a hillside, amid lush gardens, with a simple stylish bedroom, a balcony and an open-air bathroom, home to exotic flowers, passing geckos and, to my great excitement, even the occasional iguana. There is a village nearby where you could venture for dinner, but it would be hard to leave the resort's restaurant. Family-owned and staffed by students, it is one of the island's best. The menu offers traditional Thai dishes plus some twists, such as raw sea bass salad with peanut sauce, and mango parfait with coconut ice cream.

I can think of few places I have enjoyed staying more. Flinging open the doors of my villa to lie in bed and watch the sun rise over the palms each morning, I would cross over the wooden pier to walk along the long stretch of soft, pale sand. Afternoons would be spent swimming in the warm turquoise sea, sipping limeade at the beachside cafe, and taking an open-air Thai massage, all feet and breath and tiger balm, to the sound of birdsong and the steady hush of the waves.

For a treat I spent my last night at Soneva Kiri, which was a bit of a trip from the sublime to the ridiculous. Imagine an uber-swanky Center Parcs, an enclosed resort amid acres of forest and organic vegetable gardens, where guests fly in by private plane, and spend their days in a kind of ludicrous Hollywood luxury; where you have your own personal valet, and everyone hums about on golf buggies and retro bicycles, shuttling between the spa and the library and the giant inflatable cinema screen (available for private hire, should the mood strike you).

I can think of few places less like the remote Welsh cottage of my childhood holidays, and even if you can't afford to stay there, the resort's Benz's restaurant is worth seeking out, for an exquisite, Thai feast, from leaf-wrapped mieng kam to sweet tapioca in coconut milk and perfectly ripe mango and dragonfruit, served as you watch the sun dip below the water and the fireflies begin to blink.

Later, as I took a midnight swim beneath a clear sky and a full moon, I thought how finally, after all this time, I had found an island every bit as quiet and still and lovely as a rainy Anglesey in August.

• Thailand
• Beach holidays
• Asia
• Hotels

Execs Downplay Web Video Threat; Cablevision, Rovi and Disney execs dismissed cord cutting fears at the 2010 Media Summit in New York. (Light Reading)

Pick Your Favorite Rev3 Shows & Create a Personalized Feed; Revision3 viewers can now generate personalized RSS feeds, combining new episodes from shows like Diggnation and Film Riot to one single feed. (Revision3 Blog)

Disney and Starz Entertainment Extend Pay TV Output Agreement; Disney will continue to supply Starz with theatrical releases from Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Disney-Pixar, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures and Marvel Entertainment through 2015. (press release)

Recognizing Courage, Securing Online Freedom; Google celebrates Reporters Without Borders’ World Day Against Cyber Censorship on YouTube. (Official Google Blog)

Revenge of the Cable Guys; Business Week devotes this week’s cover story to cable’s fight against cord cutting and over-the-top competition. (Business Week)

Comedy Time Teams with American Greetings for E-Card Line; studio focused on short-form comedic content for mobile devices aims to bring some fun to St. Patrick’s Day and other e-card-worthy occasions. (emailed release)

La MPAA indique que les recette du box office dans le monde ont progressé pour la cinquième année consécutive, avec un chiffre d'affaires qui a augmenté de près d'un tiers depuis 2005.

Hearst has about 70 apps under its LMK banner in the iTunes App Store right now and it just plans to keep adding more and more. Most of the LMK apps sell for about $1.99, while a handful cost $0.99 per download. The LMK initials stand for “Let Me Know” and are devoted to news and photos about a single Hollywood stars and sports teams and figures, as well as hobbies and general topics like cupcakes and Barbie dolls. The apps run the gamut from Lady Gaga to Metallica to Tiger Woods to the NY Yankees and feature photos and news updates.

Back in the fall, Hearst Entertainment EVP George Kliavkoff and LMK head Michael Gutkowski unveiled their plans for the LMK.com aggregation site, which were predicated upon the idea that SEO tactics will get searchers to visit the special topic sites, while the constant flow of updates would drive return visits. As it expands the LMK strategy to mobile, Kliavkoff tells the WSJ that he believes users obsessed with their favorite stars or teams will be willing to pay to get these automated updates on their phones.

Tournages > Fin d’un long feuilleton ayant agité Hollywood depuis quelques mois : Le reboot de "La Planète des singes" sera finalement réalisé par un certain Rupert Wyatt.

>> Lire tout l'article | sur AlloCiné - le Vendredi 12 Mars 2010