The House of Swain

(Happily) Lost in The Twilight Zone

Written by Big Ross, CC2K Staff Writer

An ordinary-looking door set in a frame free-standing of any wall appears in front of a backdrop of stars and blackness.  “You unlock this door with the key of imagination.  Beyond it is another dimension.  A dimension of sound.  A dimension of sight.  A dimension of the mind.”  The door opens and you appear to travel through it.  A series of images appears at each description of this new dimension: a shattering window, a disembodied eyeball, Einstein’s famous equation.  “You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas.  You’ve just crossed over into The Twilight Zone.” Man, they just don’t make openings to television shows like that anymore.  And really, they don’t make shows like The Twilight Zone anymore.  It’s not for lack of trying.  Whether intended or not (and despite structural differences), there are shows on air today that capture the same feel and tone of The Twilight Zone.  Shows like Heroes and especially Lost have the same air of mystery and touch of the fantastic and the same altering of perceptions with twists and surprises that was such a staple of Zone.  One thing that Zone’s spiritual contemporaries lack (through no fault of their own) is the key element that has lent to Zone’s iconic status: its place in history.  Zone premiered in the late 1950s, the time of the Second Red Scare, McCarthyism, humanity’s first attempts at space exploration, the burgeoning of the Cold War and nuclear expansion, as well as the early years of the Civil Rights movement.  This was the calm before the storm of the 60s, and Freedom of Speech was not so readily enjoyed by those with dissenting views.  Rod Serling and his fellow writers created the fictional world of the Twilight Zone not only to entertain, but also to share their social and moral commentary with the American people in a way that would be ignored and written off as harmless fantasy by those in power.  I think it is this more than anything else that has seen the attempted resurgence of Zone, first in the late 80s and more recently in 2002, fail.  This mixture created a kind of magic that simply can’t be recaptured, but it can still be enjoyed today.  I’d like to share my top 5 personal favorite episodes from The Twilight Zone, in no particular order:

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I originally posted this as a blog on XFANZ.com

A columnist for the Yale Daily News website recently wrote an article attacking adult entertainment. Normally, I wouldn't take the time to respond to every article like this, but in this case, I was disheartened to find such a narrow-minded essay in the student newspaper of a prominent and stereotypically liberal university. Click here to read Chase Olivarius-McAllister's article, Free speech aside, porn is pernicious.

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Finished? Here's my response:

The existence of pornography is more than a mere side-effect of our country's far-reaching respect for free speech. I submit that pornography is a necessary part of a healthy society, but before I get to that, let me address where I think Olivarius-McAllister is right on the money:

"But pornography is not recreational. Experience testifies that pornography is educational[.]"

I would amend this sentence to read, "Pornography can be educational." We learn the difference between fantasy and reality as children, an it's incumbent upon us to retain that skill as adults -- not only for ourselves, but for our kids.

To be sure, porn can very well give people unreasonable expectations about sex -- but it doesn't have to, and Olivarius-McAllister is wrong to assume that it must.

Furthermore, Olivarius-McAllister baldly asserts that anal sex, bondage play and bisexual sex "are not naturally occurring, but learned from pornography." In making this unsupported claim, she not only discounts the value of sexual experimentation, but reveals a startling streak of puritanical morality that can be summed up in the sentence that she intimates: "Anal sex isn't natural."

But let's address another area where Olivarius-McAllister skirts closer to accuracy. She argues that "In terms of content, pornography eroticizes the passivity, subjugation and humiliation of women. Its consumers learn that women want to be penetrated, to be dominated, that women’s orgasms are fraudulent. And mainstream pornography encompasses brutal power dynamics."

Olivarius-McAllister stumbles into good, old-fashioned conflation with great speed. She obviously set out to find the most hideous content she could find, and then baldly asserted that it stood for the whole of the adult entertainment industry. It doesn't, and dozens of respectable companies in the San Fernando Valley would jump to assure Olivarius-McAllister that the ugly strains of misogyny and abuse that run through the outskirts of the industry don't speak for them.

And that's what Olivarius-McAllister is missing out on. The adult industry is engaged in an ongoing, energetic dialogue about how to improve itself and its image. Olivarius-McAllister would do well to seek out this dialogue at XBIZ.com, XFANZ.com, BPAV.org, ASACP.org and AVN.com.

But Olivarius-McAllister also deals with the plight of women in the industry:

"The women who star in it are abused, poor, transient and unprotected by a union."

"Not only is the business poorly paid and often cruel, the work is dangerous."

Olivarius-McAllister then straps on her rhetorical blinders and cites the 1986 Meese Commission on pornography -- the Reagan administration's non-scientific hatchet job against the industry that cherry-picked evidence and witnesses who would resoundingly assure the red-state public that porn was a menace -- and rebut Lyndon Johnson's Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which found no link between porn and violence of any kind.

The Meese commission was so much of a Salem-show-trial that its own text conceded that "Finding a link between aggressive behavior towards women and sexual violence, whether lawful or unlawful, requires assumptions not found exclusively in the experimental evidence. We see no reason, however, not to make these assumptions ... that are plainly justified by our own common sense."

Linda Lovelace is a tragic figure, and she's not alone, but to claim that she represents the experience of all women who work in porn is not only wrong, but it ignores the exploitation that happens in all branches of the entertainment industry, from music to movies.

Women in the adult industry represent a wide variety of experiences. There are business women, there are legitimate sex addicts, there are women who get in and out because they need to make ends meet -- and there are women who come from unstable backgrounds and wind up in porn for the wrong reasons (among many other kinds of women).

We should fight exploitation, not a form of expression.

Olivarius-McAllister also cites the experience of Lara Roxx, who "contracted HIV in 2004 while filming a scene with two male actors. This industry makes profits from sexually violent images, but fails to protect its actors from life-threatening diseases."

Olivarius-McAllister makes two loathsome mistakes here. First, in the wake of her earlier puritanical outburst, she manages to tacitly blame Roxx for "contracting" HIV, instead of blaming the idiotic men she was working with for giving her the disease.

But more important, I would invite Olivarius-McAllister to visit AIM-MED.org, the health clinic in Los Angeles that assiduously tests adult performers for STDs, including HIV. No one in the adult industry works without a current AIM test, which can detect HIV as soon as two weeks after infection. All working performers in L.A. get tested once a month, minimum. When the industry had an HIV outbreak back in 2004, AIM was able to virtually halt production to stop the spread of the disease.

The adult industry is as serious about protecting its performers as it is proud of AIM for what it does.

Finally, Olivarius-McAllister fails to see the world around her. In nations where pornography is readily available, the sex crime rate has dropped, most dramatically in post-WWII Japan.

Over the last 30 years or so, when the "corrupting" influence of porn has been spreading everywhere, we've been seeing the same trend. Here are some numbers, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Justice.

To be sure, the simple juxtaposition of these facts doesn't confirm causality, and as a man, I can't imagine that rape and sexual assault are default settings only offset by the existence of porn.

No, I argue that sexual liberation and freedom of speech go hand-in-hand with the presence, availability and embracement of adult entertainment. Not all of it is pretty to look at, but Olivarius-McAllister needs to consider the possibility that a lot of men and women find porn to be goofy, harmless cartoony fun -- and some of them might even learn something from it.

Shame on the Yale Daily News for running this kind of hatchet job unopposed and unsubstantiated.

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So that's my response. Agree? Disagree? Think I'm a fucking idiot? Click below to visit a forum thread responding to this article.

I know this might seem an odd title, especially since I haven't written here at all in a while. (Whatever. Fuck off.) However, I know that I HAVE written about dreams on this site in the past, and in one memorable case, that entry led (and is leading) to a screenplay written with some asshole whose name I can't remember.

But the fact is, I'm fascinating by dreams. But NOT in the way you think.

There's an interesting paradox that exists within all of us that we all consider our dreams utterly fascinating, while inexorably, everyone else finds them boring as shit. This is almost always true (and it makes sense: dreams come from your subconscious, reformatting your own thoughts, observations and relationships into an utterly personal Michael Bay movie. A dream is your own personal Armageddon. However, because of everything I've just stated, those images and connections are a choppy blur, hopelessly lost on everyone in the world who is not you. Therefore, your dreams as a narrated story are just like...well, Armageddon.)

Now, having said this...if you know the person WELL enough, you can learn an awful lot about them by how and what they dream.

Bob, as stated before, has a fascinating dream quirk: there are moments of crystal clarity, which make perfect sense in the world of his dream (though not in the real world, naturally), and feel as though they were written by a team of Hollywood fixers.

The best example, to my memory, was when a Little Person turned to him in a dream, and said "Curse Billy Barty, the rubric by which all midget actors must be measured!" (Bob can correct me if the detail is wrong here). This is just such an interesting moment. One has NO idea what had past through Bob's mind to make that moment come up, and the use of the word Rubric (I don't even know if I've SPELLED it correctly) shows an uber-literate mind at the helm. Well done!

My wife surprises me from time to time. Now, by and large, she just dreams vaguely menacing scenarios that TERRIFY her during the night, but reveal themselves to be trifles when she wakes up (okay, by 3pm or so). Thus, she will sometime wake up moaning or sobbing, and when I wake her to find what was wrong, she might say "I dreamed I had to kiss this other man. It was AWFUL!" or some other such thing.

The other night however, she apparently dreamed that armagedon was nigh (the real one this time), and we all had to flee oru homes for our lives. She found herself in the bedroom with a suitcase, trying to decide what to pack. She described her thought process in detail, right down to how much of each type of clothing, how much and what jewelry, what medicines to take (except for Robitussin, which she had heard on the news a few days ago doesn't really work), and lastly, what pictures of whom. It was, in all truthfulness, a fascinating exercise on thinking rationally in an utterly irrational situation. I immediately saw the potential for writing a scene like this in a movie one day.

Now we come to me.

I too fall into the trap of becoming fascinated with my dreams, but I think I take it a step further. I will say that I tend to dream in large, sweeping plotlines, and I sometimes wake up truly interested in the story that my subconscious was weaving. I FEEL that what I've created is worthy of re-telling, even as sleep gives way to wakefulness and the plot holes become clear. So, I tend to keep thinking on the dream after I've woken up, to see if those discrepencies can be ironed out, or if it should be ultimately discarded. Quite literally, I day dream.

As an example, take this dream from last week:

My father invents a machine that can reach into the future and take things back (I easily got this from Philip K. Dick's short story Paycheck). He takes a newspaper and brings it back to find an article discussing my accidental death. We are very sad, and though we entertain the thought of trying to fight it, we conclude based on scientific (and science fiction) thought that there is no way to reverse an event like that, once you know about it in advance.

So, my father finishes up another invention that allows people to travel to other dimensions (in this case, meaning alternate universes). Our plan is to find ANOTHER me to take my place, and NOT tell him about the accident, so maybe he can be nudged into reversing the effect. We dig through the other universes, and using both technologies, we find another me, from another universe, who is also slated to die, though we don't know why (I guess we stumble on a funeral announcement, or something). We decide that he's the perfect me, since that me doesn't know how this me is going to die, and vice versa. Thus, we might be able to save both mes. We also notice, by comparing the newspapers from multiple dimensions, that the comic strips in all of them are all exactly the same, without exception.

So we go on this mission, find the other me, and convince him to do what we ask. He and my father disappear back to MY world, where hopefully that me can be saved. I am left on this world, knowing that something awful might befall me at any moment. Luckily, I survive. However, I guess my father isn't alive in this new universe, so I am essentially cast out alone (let's say that the me from this universe was a loner, or something.) So while I attempt to re-immerse myself in an entirely new life as me, I start to write a comic strip, and I guess my father, in his universe, does the same thing. In this way, I am able to communicate with my father, even from across universes.

End of dream.

Let me also state, for the record, that the comic strip in question was "Funky Winkerbean." I woke up thinking that this might be a real strip, and when I looked it up, indeed it was. the odd thing is that I have never in my life, even once, read that strip.

The other thing to note is that, while I dreamed that dream a week ago, it is still evolving in my mind. Even as I typed it, I tweaked it to make it a better STORY.

What does this say about me?

C

Top Gun...a film that will for better or worse remain iconic of the 80s. How did the producer of it sculpt such a seminal creation? Here's on reminiscence...

"It was clear to [co-writer] Proser that Simpson's involvement with cocaine had already reached severe levels. During his first three-week writing assignment, he said, Simpson never once came to the Paramount offices in Hollywood. He refused to take meetings. He refused, in fact, to leave his house. According to Proser and several other sources, Simpson believed the mafia had ordered a hit on him. He was barricaded inside his Cherokee Avenue house and would not come out. One afternoon Proser demanded a visit. He found a surveillance camera posted over the wall separating the driveway from the street, a second surveillance camera over the driveway and parking area, and a third surveillance camera over the front door of the house. Inside were monitors where Simpson could watch anyone approaching the house. Also inside was an "armory" of weapons, and evidence of considerable drug use. Proser found Simpson, dressed all in black, in his study, surrounded by walls of audio equipment, also covered all in black. "He was coked out of his mind," Prose said. "His eyes were like fucking BBs--little pinpoints. Simpson wasn't making much sense. At one point he ran excitedly from the room and returned with a piece of paper. "Check this out," he told Proser. The piece of paper was an uncahsed check for $2 million, for his services on "Flashdance." Later that day, Simpson showed Proser his "pack of cards," as Proser put it. It was a stack of Polaroid photographs, each depicting a naked woman, each taken in Simpson's Paramount office. "He didn't say much about them," Proser remembered. "It was just like, 'Do you think I can get these girls to take their clothes off if they think they can get a part in my movie?' And of course he could."

More on Simpson. You know the fantasy life everyone has in their head where they gain unlimited power and lose all their social graces? This guy lived that life. An American hero.

"Simpson would subsequently exact a peculiar revenge upon the high school classmates who did not take him seriously as a teenager. For his twentieth high school reunion, Simpson flew to Anchorage , hired a helicopter and landed on the football field where the event was being held. He stepped off the chopper, resplendent in a white linen suit and escorted by two Penthouse "Pets" he had hired to accompany him. He walked through the spellbound crowd, just once, greeting old friends, giving everyone eyeful of what he had become, and then walked back to the helicopter and flew away."

Part 2 of the wildly popular exceprting of "High Concept: don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess." Even I was taken aback by the volume of responses in the feedback comments. This excerpt details the first meeting a reporter from the Hollywood Reporter had with Simpson in 1981:

Simpson emerged presently from a back room. He asked the reporter, "What time is it?" The reporter told him it was four'o'clock.

"Four o'clock," Simpson repeated. "You know what I like to do at four'o'clock? I like to pour myself a big drink, lay out a few lines and abuse a screenwriter. Take a seat."

The reporter watched as Simpson poured four fingers of Macallan Scoth from a glass-cut decanter, cut six lines of cocaine onto a glass-covered side table and serially snorted them into his nose. He took a deep glug of Scotch and dialed the telephone. For the next twenty minutes the reporter listened as Simpson harangued the unfortunate, unidentified screenwriter. "You're the stupidest son of a bitch in Hollywood, you asshole," Simpson shouted between gulps of Scotch. "You're a talentless piece of shit. No one respects you. Everyone knows you're an idiot. You have no fucking future in this business." When he had exhausted his wrath, Simpson hung up the phone and said to the reporter, "So, let's talk about my slate of movies."

I am now reading "High Concept: Don Simpson and the Culture of Hollywood Excess," a how-to manual I hope to use someday. Simpson was Jerry Bruckheimer's producing partner until he dropped dead of drug use right before The Rock came out. This is gonna be good. Here are some choice excerpts from the beginning of the book:

"As autopsy reports and pharmaceutical records would later reveal, Simpson through the summer of 1995, the summer before his death, was on a regimen that included multiple daily injections of Toradol, for pain; Librium, to control his mood swings; Atvian, every six hours, for agitation; Valium, every six hours, for anxiety; Depakote, every six hours, to counter "acute mania"; Thorazine, every four hours, for anxiety; Cogentin, for agitation; Vistaril, every six hours, for anxiety; and Iorzaepam, every six hours, also for anxiety. He was also taking, in pill and tablet form, additional doses of Valium, plus the pain relievers Vicodin, diphenoxylate, diphenhydramine and Colanadine, plus the medications lithium carbonate, nystatin, Harcan, haloperidol, Promethazine, Benztropine, Unisom, Atarax, Compazine, Xanax, Desyrel, Tigan and pehobarbital (Simpson's pharmaceutical records for July 1995 show billings of $12,902--from one pharmacy, through on psychiatrist, at a time when Simpson was using at least eight pharmacies and several doctors, teceiving medications using the aliases Dan Gordon, Dan Wilson, Don Wilson, and Dawn Wilson, in addition to his own name. A law enforcement source who investigated Simpson's pharmaceutical records estimated his monthly prescription medication expenses at more than $60,000. One ten-day period in August 1995 shows Simpson's pharmacy expenses at $38,600.) Police and coroners' documents also show that Simpson was experimenting with prescription doses of morphine, Seconal and gamma hydroxybutyrate, or GHB. These medications were being ingested, autopsy reports would show, in addition to large quantities of alcohol and cocaine....

More ominously, Simpson was using heroin."

Awesome.

A couple of observations:

1. I don't know if I necessarily agree that using heroin is more ominous than the rest of that.

2. I bet LA autopsy doctors were all angling with each other to do the Simpson autopsy, which they had to know would make their autopsy careers.

3. With his $60,000-a-month pharmaceutical drug habit, clearly Don, Dan, and Dawn Simpson all died of a broken heart that he didn't live in a country with universal health care.