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TOLDJA! – Web Series ‘Stupid Idiots’ Now has a Genuine TV Deal

Stupid Idiots (not the people, dammit, the show!)

Just a couple of weeks ago TVWriter™ gave the web series Stupid Idiots a review that included the following:

So how damning is it if I say that the two leads in this very funny web series aren’t merely perfect recreations of people I know but in true fact are perfect recreations of, well, of me, dammit? Me!

If that isn’t a rave, what is it? In other words, we knew this show was going to take off, but even the smartest, bravest, and boldest of TVWriter™ minions never imagined that before the end of the month Stupid Idiots would have a genuine, supercool, real big-time development deal with the likes of Paramount TV and Anonymous Content?

According to Deadline:

In a competitive situation, Paramount Television and Anonymous Content have acquired rights to Stupid Idiots, a comedy web series written, directed by and starring Stephanie Koenig, to develop as a TV series. Koenig (PopTV’s Swedish Dicks) is set to write the adaptation and star in the potential TV series, described as a (trying-to-get-out-of-the-) workplace comedy about two underachievers who consistently fail upwards. Koenig and Brian Jordan Alvarez star in the web version, which launched earlier this year.

We love it when something we love gets even bigger love. We keep saying this and we’ll say it again: Web series are the perfect proving ground for new talent. There isn’t a better place in the Biz to hone your craft and prove your project’s appeal. Go forth, young dreamers, and conquer!

Oh, and while you’re at it, take a look at Stupid Idiots HERE

Oh, and in case you missed it in the headline: “TOLDJA!”

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Cartoon: ‘Hope’

Why Grant Snider rulez:

Ahh…!

More of Grant Snider’s sensitive perception HERE

Buy his wonderful new book HERE

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L.A. Area Classic TV Fans – Herbie J Pilato is Signing Books in Valencia Saturday

by munchman

Speaking of classic TV – What? We weren’t? Well we should’ve been because TVWriter™’s very own Herbie J Pilato, the dood of doods of whom yer friendly neighborhood munchausen now speaketh, is the absolute King of Classic TV – way, way, way back in the day, a star you’ve probably never heard of by the name of Bob Cummings, starred in a popular and, for that era, long running sitcom called Love That Bob.

Why is the munching man bringing this up at this place and time? For two resounding reasons:

1) To impress Herbie J with my very own super knowledge of his specialty, most of which was obtained from, oh yeah, him.

2) Because the opening of Love That Bob always had Mr. Cummings, who played a horny photographer, looking directly at the viewer and snapping a picture as he said: “Hold it! I think you’re gonna like this picture!” And we think that Herbie J’s fans and friends are going to absolutely love this pic…and the event it describes even more:

Seeya this Saturday at Barnes & Noble!

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John Ostrander: Woo Who!

by John Ostrander

Last week TV fandom was set on its ear by the announcement of the newest person to play the Doctor on BBC’s venerable sci/fi TV show, Doctor Who. (If you don’t already know, the Doctor is a time-traveling alien with the ability to regenerate himself into an entirely new body and persona when his current body is on the point of dying.) There have been 12 such regenerations so far; Jodie Whittaker will be the 13th and the first woman to play the part. Joanna Lumley was a female Doctor for a sketch some years back – written by Steven Moffet, no less – but that is not considered canon.

Predictably, there has been some negative fan reaction, although the bulk that I have seen has been overwhelmingly positive. This kind of change often provokes this kind of reaction. When it was announced that the captain on the next Star Trek series coming out (Star Trek: Discovery) was going to be a woman, there was similar booing and hooing.

I can sort of understand. Fans can be conservative; they want what they like to be the same but different only not too different. There have been times when, as a fan, I was somewhat resistant to change. A prime complaint has been that young boys are losing a role model and there aren’t that many heroes who depend on their wits and smarts rather than their fists. Even one of the actors who played an earlier Doctor, Peter Davison, has voiced this objection. However, my feeling is that these young boys have 12 other incarnations to use as a role model. Young girls have been expected to use the male Doctor as a role model; giving them one who looks like them after fifty years of the show being broadcast doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable.

My late wife, Kim Yale, was a huge Doctor Who fan (as am I) and she used to dress as Tom Baker’s Doctor to cosplay at conventions before cosplay was a big thing. She would have been over the moon about this. My partner, Mary Mitchell, certainly is and has pointed out that having the 13th Doctor be a female is very appropriate since 13 is a “female number” as there are 13 moon cycles in a year.

To me, what ultimately matters is what character do they create and how good are the stories that they tell. When you’ve worked for a long time on a given project, as a writer you look for ways to shake things up and make them fresh. On my book GrimJack, I once killed off the main character and then brought him back and later on, replaced him with an entirely different incarnation (yes, I was a big Doctor Who fan at the time and, yes, that influenced the change a lot). I intended to keep doing that from time to time. And one of the later incarnations I had planned was a female GrimJack. That probably would have incited some comment as well. We just never got to it.

So I’m very pleased with the selection of the new Doctor and hopefully the stories that will come of it. I hope the new showrunner will explore the change and what it means.

One last interesting note: I read that Ms. Whittaker will be paid the same salary as the actor who preceded her, Peter Capaldi. No wage disparity in the time vortex.

Way to go, Beeb.

John Ostrander is one of LB’s favorite writers in any medium. Don’t forget to read his most excellent blog at ComicMix, where this piece first appeared. You can learn more about John and his masterworks HERE

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Indie Video: ‘The Trouble with Transporters’

by TVWriter™

Breathes there a soul so dead that s/he has never watched any version of Star Trek on any media and thought, “Waitaminnit! The transporter thingie can’t really work like that…can it?”

Hell, even Our Beloved Leader, LB, once pitched an episode about transporter problems to the producers of Star Trek: Voyager way back in the day.

But this TVWriter™ minion is pretty darn sure that nobody’s ever analyzed the transporter situation as well – and as entertainingly – as the folks who’ve brought us this:

by CGP Grey

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The Hudsonian Welcomes SPIDER-MAN (‘s) HOMECOMING

Now this is a villain! Much better than in the comics.

by Joshua Hudson

(This article contains spoilers!)

So I’m totally just now getting around to reviewing Spider-Man: Homecoming. It’s been a crazy last couple of weeks. But the good news is that most everyone has seen it by now so, yeah, all the spoilers ahead shouldn’t bother you, right?

As far as I’m concerned, Homecoming was absolutely fantastic. I’ve seen it a couple of times, and the comedy holds up beautifully. Sure, we’ve seen every kind of incarnation with Spider-Man already – he’s been in high school and in college and his Uncle Ben died and had a profound effect on his life – but the writers still found a way to make this different.

They skipped over the origin story (thank GOD!) and just focused on Peter as a sophomore in high school, learning how to be a hero. What Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films did was gloss over a lot of this. Parker was done with high school before the midpoint of Raimi’s first movie, and all we saw was a series of shots of him learning how to be a hero.

Just because you have superpowers doesn’t mean you’re going to know how to use them right out of the gate. From beginning to end, Homecoming showed that as great as Peter was, he was flawed as a hero – as a teenaged hero. But that was okay because he was still having fun and enjoyed helping people, which pulled us as the audience along for the ride.

After watching all of the trailers and seeing a heavy dose of Tony Stark, I was happy to see he had only a few scenes in the movie. They were just enough for us to know Parker is firmly a part of the MCU as a whole, but, yeah, essentially they replaced Uncle Ben with Stark. As a fanboy, this irked me, but it worked for this film and I wasn’t totally upset because we’ve already seen the Uncle Ben thing play out anyway.

This time around we get Parker looking at Stark as a father figure and learning how to be a hero. And Aunt May definitely makes her presence known as played by Marisa Tomei. I’ve heard of a deleted scene which I thought would’ve been great, but without knowing where it fitted in, I’m not sure how I would’ve felt seeing it. In a nutshell, the scene shows May doing something heroic in front of Peter, which could’ve easily served as fuel to his heroic fire.

Michael Keaton as The Vulture was arguably one of the better villains in the MCU, right up there with Loki in my opinion. In terms of previous Spider-Man only film villains, I’d rank him second behind Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock. What makes both so great is their relationship with Parker. Vulture’s connection is shown late (and even I didn’t see that coming), but his attitude throughout the film really made you feel for him. The Vulture wasn’t someone that wanted to be a bad guy. Circumstances dictated it, and he had a family to look after. That’s the type of baddie that plays really well.

The fight scenes were done well. I’ve heard some of my friends say there wasn’t enough. I disagree. It’s easy for a director or storyteller to want to put a lot of action into a script simply because it’s an action movie. But this is also a coming of age story for Parker. The writing here gave us action that moved Parker’s journey along, and the final scene was an exclamation point on his ascension to respected hero. Could the action have been better shot and edited? Yes, but I’ve never seen a film where that couldn’t be said.

Parker’s high school classmates were great. Some longtime fans may be mad about casting choices because in the comics, everyone is white and there’s no ethnicity. Did you know that in today’s New York City over 60% of the population is black, brown, or Asian?

This film added diversity to just about EVERYONE. Liz is half Black, Ned looks hispanic, Flash IS Hispanic. I don’t think it took away from any of their comic book origins. Personality-wise, Flash was still a bully, just not a football jock bully, so I was okay with it. And if they ever decide to make him Venom, that’ll be really interesting. My only beef was with Zendaya’s character, Michelle because…

!!!SPOILER!!!

At the very end, it’s revealed that Michell’s “friends” call her M.J. This was a complete cop out by the writers (there seem to be about a dozen of them so forgive me for not naming them here) and director Jon Watts. Michelle Jones, or whatever her last name is, is NOT the M.J. we all know and love. If you wanted ditch the red haired Anglo girl look, fine. But why not at least keep Mary Jane’s name? Nothing against Zendaya. I thought she was great actually. I just felt that as a comic book fan, I’d kind of been  insulted

The introduction of Aaron Davis (The Ultimate Universe Prowler), Mac Gargon (The Scorpion), Herman Schultz (The Shocker) and Mason (The Tinkerer) all fitted well in the story. Each villain served a purpose. This as a case where “too many villains” worked because Spidey didn’t have to fight them all. And that’s okay. What we have now is a great set-up for future Spider-Man movies, and I’m curious to see their next move.

Bottomline: Go see Spider-Man Homecoming. It’s terrific, and a much needed refresher on the MCU as a whole. As long as Sony doesn’t screw up their side of the Spider-Man mythos (Black & Silver featuring Black Cat and Silver Sable, Venom, et al), I think there’s a lot of potential here for great stories.

Joshua Hudson is a producer, writer, and actor. Find out more about him at Hudsonian Productions. Thanks, Josh!

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Herbie J Pilato Remembers Martin Landau

Martin Landau & his missus, Barbara Bain, with some other guys you may recall

by Herbie J Pilato

The consummate actor and the consummate professional, terms seemingly created for actor Martin Landau, who passed away on July 15, 2017 at age 89 after a brief hospitalization at the UCLA Medical Center.

With a refined manner and eloquent style and speech, the multi-award-winning and nominated Landau brought significant realism to each of his roles for television, film and the stage.  Landau ignited his acting career in the 1950s, after he worked as a cartoonist for the New York Daily News.

The theatrically-trained actor was best known to TV viewers for three years as the lead master-of-disguise spy Rollin Hand on the original Mission:Impossible weekly espionage show (CBS, 1966-1973), in which he teamed with his then wife Barbara Bain (wed from 1957 to 1993).

Accepted into the prestigious Lee Strasberg Actors Studio from among two thousand applicants (with classmates such as Steve McQueen and James Dean), Landau premiered on Broadway in Middle of the Night in 1957, and was later Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s first choice before Leonard Nimoy to play Mr. Spock on that classic series (NBC, 1966-1969).

In the ultimate irony, Nimoy later replaced Landau on Mission, when he and Bain exited that series in the spring of 1969.

He and Bain later re-partnered for the syndicated, UK-produced sci-fi seriesSpace:1999 (1975-1977) on which he portrayed Commander John Koenig.  “I’m very proud of Space:1999,” he once said.  “It’s success paved the way for other shows to follow.”

Emmy-nominated three times for each of the consecutive years he appeared on Mission, Landau won the Golden Globe in 1968 for the same leading dramatic role, and in 1994 collected the Academy Award for his Best-Supporting Actor performance as Bela Logasi in the feature film, Ed Wood.

Before, during and after his most famous performances, Landau (born June 28, 1928 in Brooklyn) made hundreds of small-screen, motion picture and live-theatre performances.  His TV guest-spots are the stuff of legends, everything from the ground-breaking initial Goldbergs series (of 1953), to The Untouchables, Bonanza, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, I Spy, Checkmate, and countless more.

Besides Ed Wood, Landau’s cinematic prowess remains evident in movies like Tucker(1988), Crimes and Misdemeanors in 1989, both for which he was Oscar-nominated, as well as The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and Alfred Hitchock’s North by Northwest (1959), in which he made his feature film debut, among others.

Landau in more recent years appeared in drama TV shows such as Without A Trace(CBS, 2004 and 2005), and the comedy Entourage (HBO, 2007), earning an Emmy nomination for each of these.

According to his good friend, television writer and historian Frankie Montiforte, Landau “abhorred ignorance.  He believed it was your job to know absolutely everything you were talking about and in great detail, whether it was about acting, journalism, or politics.  And if you didn’t know it, he schooled you on it.  He was always the teacher.”

Of his work as an actor, Landau himself once said, “Everyone can walk and talk.  But your job is to make magic.”  Another time, he said, “Everything that has happened to me is of value.”

It’s that kind of integrity and nobility that will forever remain Martin Landau’s legacy.

Herbie J Pilato is the Founder and Executive Director of The Classic TV Preservation Society, and the author of several classic TV companion books.  He is practically a founding father of TVWriter™ and is a Contributing Editor Emeritus. This article first appeared at Emmys.Com. Learn more about Herbie J Pilato HERE.