Chicks Pick Pix in Nabes and Sticks

Parody of an old Variety headline* which I'll translate for you. Girls choose which movie to see on a date night in neighborhood theaters and small towns. Past tense, of course. All 8,000 screens in America are dark. Film production has ceased, no new product. The world's longest running animation series, in Japan, has gone off the air. Australia's "Neighbours" soap opera, in production 40 years until the corona virus shutdown, might restart with social distancing (no hugging and kissing? everybody in masks?)

Chicks pick pix at home, too. Mom decides which programs the kids are allowed to watch on Netflix or Hulu or Disney. Husbands and boyfriends don't get a vote, unless pro sports are reinvented without cheering fans in the stadium. Current proposals are to use canned music, last year's crowd sound, and pre-recorded cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms for college teams, if colleges decide to reopen with social distancing in classrooms, dining halls, and locker rooms. Coaches are scratching their collective heads how to socially distance contact sports, unless they get a safe, effective CDC approved covid-19 vaccine.

Ahem. After 40 years of research, there's no HIV vaccine, and flu shots are only 40% effective. Let's talk about something else. "Chicks pick pix in nabes and sticks," Adele counsels in the final pages of Chiseltown, warning the film's director that some audience response cards at a Fresno preview screening complained that the star (his ex-wife) was too sexy. Typical Wolf, can't write a novel without erotic excess. The director's home life is decidedly nuts, married to identical twin starlets half his age. I hope you realize that Hollywood is like that and always was. Tinsel Town tolerates unconventional bedfellows and indulges a strange argot.

(* the real Variety headline said: Chick Flix Click In Nabes and Sticks, reporting success of romantic comedies at single screen venues)

Great fun to write Chiseltown, the story of a movie, from first phone call to last. If you're in show business, it might be slightly annoying, 128 pages of satire, screwballs, and skillfulness that results in a low-budget feature film that actually sounds pretty good. I wrote it with love for ordinary boys and girls who devote their lives to filmmaking, always a dice roll, always a team effort, long days and nights with grim obstacles to overcome by creative people who risk their reputations, bonded by the magic of comedy and drama and comradeship.