Sirius I Ain’t

So, in April I got a used car. I’ll skip the details except to say this: It’s a 2017 model and like a lot of more modern cars it came with a free trial of Sirius XM, the satellite radio service. I’ve never been interested in Sirius and when I saw the handouts in the folder with the manual, I threw them away. I was driving for a couple of weeks when I saw an email that said somehow, without my knowing, the free trial had been activated. So I have been checking in every couple days.

 

It’s a great alternative to terrestrial radio. I live in L.A., which is a major market for radio and the choices still suck. On-air radio somehow reached the point where they market-researched themselves to death. They’re giving it away and I’m still not taking. So Sirius, with its lack of commercials and it’s weird narrowcasting (there is a channel devoted entirely to Canadian Stand-Up Comedy, for example) is a refreshing change from that. The only problem is, so is internet radio.  Since I can play my phone through Bluetooth, Sirius can’t compete with the sheer wild-west programming of the internet. PLUS everything I like is already free.

 

Sirius knows this. They want to charge $22 a month for their service but they can’t compete on generic product alone. However, they have a few arrows in their quiver and the battering ram is, of course, Howard Stern. Somehow he was the biggest thing on the air and when it came time to renew his contract, he could see that radio was plunging into the abyss and he sold franchise to Sirus. He’s exclusive there. You want Howard, you gotta pay for satellite. It’s a good deal for everyone – Stern is making bigger money than radio could afford and he’s a koi fish swimming with sea monkeys.

 

In the whole free trial period I haven’t once even ventured near any of the several Howard Stern channels. Didn’t like him in the nineties, don’t now. Not my cup o' tea.

 

So the trial is ending tomorrow. There ARE things I like and will miss. The Beatles station is fun sometimes, and the Big Band music. And since I also won’t pay for cable, the 24 hour news networks have audio feeds. Believe me, most of the time you don’t miss the visuals. But I don’t feel like any of this stuff is worth paying MONEY for. I just thought it was cool to enjoy while it was free.

 

They’ve been sending me daily emails reminding me the trial is almost up. Also, I’ve had three sales calls but each time there was a technical problem and they lost the signal and cut off. It sounds like I’m toying with them but I swear it was real phone trouble. I guess maybe the sales rep was driving under a bridge at the time.

 

I noticed from the emails that I could renew at full price. But on the same page they are also offering a $5 a month plan for a year (and then it goes up to full price) which tempted me a little bit. Then I thought, nah, I could use that money for something else. And THEN, last night I saw a deal… extend the trial for another three months for two dollars. I went for it.

 

Part of me says just give it up, but I’m only out two dollars and I have this sneaking feeling if I hold out long enough, they’ll let me renew in November for another two dollars. And if not I will just walk away and listen to Old Time Radio Detective show channel on the internet.

 

The moral, I guess, is if you have an antipathy to Howard Stern you are more powerful than you think.

Brush With Greatness: A Short Memoir

This true story happened in the early-to-mid-nineties, and that's important to know because the context explains a lot. Something else that you should know is I've loved bad movies almost all my life. One more thing to know is this was so important to my development that I'm astonished I haven't told this story already, but I just did a search through the archives and somehow, only now can it be told.

So, back in the nineties I used to keep a journal. It was mostly an emotional steam valve, not for anyone's consumption. But now and then I'd read a passage and think, this is good stuff! I can't publish it, of course, because it's very personal and it would ruin my life and the lives of those around me. But the idea nagged at me nonetheless. And there was a point where I realized that MS Word could export HTML without much trouble, and Apple provided we with a a little web publishing space for free. So I started publishing PARTS of my journal. I wasn't advertising it or anything. It was the web equivalent of an old couch on the sidewalk. If you happen to be in the neighborhood and you need a couch, take it away.

So, given that any post about people I knew was off-limits, I mostly published complaining about things. Maybe that would mean bad traffic or airline food to a normal man. I mostly weighed in on TV and movies.

Okay, so going all the way back to my first movie theater job, I had been stunned by TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS, an early 3D effort by Cannon Pictures. It was awful. It starred Tony Anthony (an Italian with a much longer real name) but I noticed that it also starred, and was written by, a man named Gene Quintano. And throughout the ensuing decade, that name stuck with me and I watched for it, and every time he came up he was associated with a movie that I thought was terrible. (Most of them were also from Cannon Pictures, and almost everything they ever did was terrible.) But by the time I started this online journal, so-called because no one had coined "blog" yet, I was a kind of expert. A Quintanologist.

Gene's Acting Debut, COMIN' AT YA

And one day I did a whole entry about how much I hated all those movies. Having gotten it out of my system, I moved on to saying nice things about Twin Peaks or something.

Then, a week later, the weird part.

I got this unsolicited email from Gene Quintano.

My first thought was OMG GENE QUINTANO IS WRITING TO ME HE'S FAMOUS HE'S A WORKING SCREENWRITER THIS IS GREAT THIS IS GREAT and that faded as I read the email and realized that he was furious with me and I had made his kid cry because the kid didn't understand why anybody would hate his daddy.

And I wrote back, respectfully and explained that I was devastated that I had caused that trouble and had no idea that he would ever see it (also that he would care about my opinion but I kept that part to myself) and I'd do anything I could to make it right. He replied! If I could write an email to his kid and explain that I didn't hate Gene, that might help. So I did. I composed a short note in which I said that Gene Quintano himself was surely a wonderful guy and I just didn't care for the movies he was associated with.

That smoothed it over, kinda. Quintano wrote back a week later and pointed out that he was only the screenwriter and he didn't make the final decisions and his drafts were much better than the movies wound up being. I suggested he direct more. He did eventually helm 4 films, Including Honeymoon Academy and National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon. You be the judge.

What's the takeaway from this? It seems like a really early example of the internet's power to magnify a grievance. I think Mr Q and I were both sucker-punched by this, which is why it became such a thing. I was a nobody pretending to be a real film critic and not realizing that I had the reach of one, as long as you were an artist Googling yourself. Eventually all "real" film critics lost their clout to this phenomenon.

Anyway, maybe I'll issue another apology to Gene Quintano every 20 years or so until one of us is dead. If it's any consolation he's made a LOT more money in this business than I have, and rightly so.

Oh, and don't get me started on Lorenzo Semple Jr.