The Jeff Booth Show Internet Radio with Pictures
Show Transcripts April 19th, 2009 You can contact us at: (818) 613-9248 |
The National Organization for Marriage has gotten a huge amount of publicity over their allegedly 1.5 million dollar commercial designed to show how gay marriage destroys and threatens heterosexual marriage. They even sent a thank-you letter to Stephen Colbert for the parody of their commercial he did on his show. The problem they seem blindingly unaware of is although they are getting their message out, everyone is simply making fun of it. The old adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity- not so true for them. So to help them out, I have created an audition for the next commercial the National Organization for Marriage plans to do, with some suggestions on how to improve the script. Hope they like it.
And last Thursday I spent at the 25th anniversary XRCO Awards show. This is the annual awards put on by the X-Rated critics Organization, and I know what you are thinking. Yes, there really is such an organization, yes there really are professional X-rated critics, and yes to whatever else you were thinking.
Being an x-rated critic is a tough job. I used to do it. Trying to find new ways to describe three positions and a cum shot can be constantly challenging. There is a real art to it. You are constantly going back and forth between the thesaurus and the urban dictionary.
The show was hosted by Jessica Drake and Kayden Ross, and there was the usual collection of adult stars you see at events like this. I saw Evan Stone for the first time with his new short hair, his long locks cut away for his portrayal of Captain Kirk in the upcoming Star trek parody. But he was wearing a red shirt at the event, and I always thought the red shirts always got it in the end, although Stone has certainly given it in the end. We were talking and he was going on about his three page acceptance speech and about his mother who never understood him. He did actually win for his work in Pirates II, but I guess he decided to drop a few pages.
I was there to do interviews, and you’ll hear the one I did with Sasha Brand on this week’s show. So I’m getting setup to interview people, I pop out the free tin you always get from adult events filled with mints, and inside is nothing but condoms. Not even the mint flavored kind.
This show has award categories we didn’t have when I used to stage manage mainstream awards shows. Three is the Superslut catgory, because just being a slut doesn’t cut it. A new one to me was the Cream Dream category- still not sure what that what was. You’ve got MILF of the year, unsungswordman, orgasmic oralist- I’m assuming as opposed to the unorgasmic oralist- although they did not have a separate category for that. And Will Ryder has been so successful directing porn parodies of television shows that they split out a Best Comedy Parody category from the general Best Comedy category, just so someone else would have a shot at winning.
It was fun evening- but that generally happens when you spend it in a large room filled with intoxicated porn stars. There are much worse ways to spend a Thursday Night in Hollywood.
Entertainment
The sad news is the unexpected and very premature death of adult icon Marilyn Chambers. I did not know her well, but we did get to spend an evening with her sharing a table in a club, and both Kris and I liked her a lot and enjoyed her company. Her stry is well-known, but we’ll recap it here. Looking for acting work, she responded to an ad looking for actresses for a new movie. It was by the Mitchell Brothers, it was X-Rated, and when she auditioned they knew they had a new star. What they did not know is that her picture would be selected for use on the Ivory Snow box, which would provide tremendous publicity for her first starring role in Behind the Green Door. Yes, she was the first adult star to become famous for her box. She went from a small part in Streisand’s The Owl and the Pussycat in 1970 to being listed in the top ten of adult stars of all time. Along with The Devil in Miss Jones and Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door pushed sex movies into mainstream consciousness. She then appeared in The Resurrection of Eve in 1973 and Inside Marilyn Chambers in 1975, a far cry from the huge number of films a year today’s adult stars do. She did manage to negotiate a little something fairly unheard- she got a percentage of the take. That turned out to be a very smart move, since Behind the Green Door was very successful. She retired from adult films in 1976 and pursued mainstream horror films and she did a Las Vegas show. She came back to adult with the very successful Insatiable in 1980- the first of her films I ever saw. She continued to do both horror and independent films as well as adult work. She died at 56, of what appears to be natural causes.
The gay community lost a porn icon as well. His name was Jack Wrangler, and starting in the 1970’s he made over 80 adult films. His 1970's Eyes of a Stranger was one of the first hard core gay movies commercially released in the U.S. He went on to become a musical theatre performer, and married cabaret singer Margaret Whiting, famous for her hit “I love a man with a beard.” Despite also having done a number of straight porn films, Wrangler never identified as bisexual and always referred to himself as gay. He died at 62 of lung disease.
The trailer for this July's Sacha Baron Cohen film "Bruno" is out, featuring his gay Austrian fashion reporter character. It is a lot like Borat but with more nudity, dildos and maybe a bit gayer. The current version has an NC-17 rating but he is contractually obligated to release an R-rated movie- about the only thing we can be sure will be left uncut are some of the nude European men featured in the film.
This is just a bizarre story. A 50 year old British woman has had extensive plastic surgery to make her look like her 20 something daughter. They now look almost like twins, except the 50 year old actually looks more like her daughter’s younger sister. That just makes the whole mother daughter fantasy thing really confusing.
Wow, online retailer Amazon sure got itself embroiled in controversy. Over the Easter weekend, the sales rankings for gay related books disappeared. Without sales rankings, books are much more difficult to find on the site. Anything even remotely gay seemed to disappear- from gay romantic fiction and Brokeback Mountain to The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students. Well, not all gay books disappeared. Search for homosexuality and the first entry is A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality. The anti-gay books seemed unaffected. A number of sex positive educational books also disappeared from sales rankings. After a firestorm of protest, Amazon blamed it on a glitch. That may be true, since it is possible that some outside anti-gay group may have gamed their system. A hacker is now claiming credit for it. Some 60,000 titles were affected, but as to the hacker’s claims, Amazon would only say that the deranking was the result of "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error by Amazon.”Amazon is known as a gay friendly employer, so it seems unlikely that this was the result of any intentional act on their part. The rankings have been restored, Amazon has vowed to make sure this does not happen in the future, and Amazon is fabulous once again.
And in Who is Getting Naked Now, its "Top Chef" host Padma Lakshmi, E! Chelsea Lately talk show host Chelsea Handler and "Dollhouse" star Eliza Dushku. And they are all naked in the same place- the May issue of Allure, the Nude Issue. It will be on newsstands next week, but I have seen the photos and they are quite alluring. With this month’s issue featuring Cindy Crawford wearing nothing but lather, seems like Allure magazine is the place to go for celebrity skin. I doubt Maxim saw that one coming.
A Good Friday service from the Vatican was interrupted on a Philadelphia cable network by a 30 second spot for Girls Gone Wild. Only on person complained, though. The station admitted that it was just a dumb mistake and completely inappropriate. They were supposed to have run the Nuns Gone Wild ad.
Jeff’s Audition
This is addressed directly to the National Organization for Marriage. I’m Jeff Booth. I used to be an actor, but based on seeing your last commercial, I am pretty sure my now somewhat rusty skills are more than adequate to the task of acting in your next commercial. I am talking about the anti-gay ad you are running eight times per day in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and California. These are the ones rumored to being funded by the Mormon Church- and high-level Mormons are on your board..
I also saw the audition tapes of actors pretending to be real people that somehow got leaked and spread on YouTube. And they were embarrassing, so I understand your having them pulled from YouTube. Of course, you might have been better off just denying they were legitimate and claiming they were fakes, rather than getting them pulled because you claimed the copyright on them. You might have have stuck with some plausible deniability. They were hysterically bad, but I have to admit that part of the problem was the writing of your commercial. And sure, maybe if you had used real people rather than actors claiming that they were real people who gay marriage was hurting, it might have given the whole thing more credibility. As it is, you have created what has become one of the most parodied commercials ever. Did you see the one on Youtube where they redid your commercial with everyone wearing swastikas and Klansmen standing in the background? Or the one where they use dopler gaydar to battle the storm? Very funny.
Anyway, consider this my audition, and I think what I can bring to the table is not just better line readings, but better lines. Let me start with my reading directly from your original script.
There is a storm gathering. The clouds are dark, and the winds are strong. And I am afraid. Some who advocate for same sex marriage have taken the issues far beyond same sex couples. They want to bring the issue into my life. My freedom will be taken away.
Okay, I have some problems so far. This whole storm metaphor. The winds are strong thing. I don’t think in an anti-gay commercial you should have any references at all to blowing.
And bringing the issue into my life is too passive. Let’s be more specific. I suggest this “By their very existence, gay couples force the image of them humping each other with butt sex over and over into my mind- and I just can’t get it out. I just can’t stop thinking about it. I don’t understand why I am so obsessed with this image. Make it stop!” And how is my freedom taken away? We need to be more specific. How about “My freedom to enjoy the knowledge that there is a group I can openly hate and deny basic rights to will be taken away.” Right to the point.
Back to the script. This is where actors pretend to be real people whom gay marriage has harmed.
“I’m a California doctor who must choose between my faith and my job.”
This refers to California law that simply says you can not discriminate in who you provide services to. You can’t just decide you won’t offer services to blacks, or gays. I just don’t think we can get people on board for allowing doctors to discriminate without a good reason. Maybe we could try this.
Then there is:
“I’m part of a NJ church group punished by the government because we can’t support same-sex marriage.”
This is based on a church that owned commercial property that was made tax exempt as long as they were willing to rent it out as a public facility without discrimination. They had to rent it to Jews, Muslims, Gays, whoever. That was the deal. They decided not to rent it to gays. The punishment for breaking the deal is that if they were going to discriminate and not run it as a public facility, they’d have to pay taxes like any business owner.
So maybe we could turn this into a tax protest. “I’m part of a NJ church group punished by the government because we can’t support same-sex marriage. Gays are forcing us to pay taxes- which would already be too high if we actually paid any taxes, so in protest, we plan to teabag the gays.”
Finally-
“I’m a Massachusetts parent helplessly watching public schools teach my son that gay marriage is OK.”
Technically, by law, In Massachusetts gay marriage is ok. And legal. There is just no way kids are not going to find out about this. They have the Internet. The schools aren’t the problem. It’s the whole state. How about this:
“I’m a Massachusetts parent helplessly watching as my entire state refuses to help me teach my kids to hate and discriminate against gays.” See, that pits a poor mom against the entire state- a whole David and Goliath thing.
Then the commercial continues:
But some who advocate for same sex marriage have not been content with same sex couples living as they wish. Those advocates want to change the way I live. I will have no choice.
This is weak. You need to add some clear-cut and terrifying examples.
Out of weight heterosexual men will be shamed into going to the gym just to compete. All men will be forced to prowl gay bars and men’s restrooms out of desperation because gay marriage will turn all women into lesbians, thus literally destroying heterosexual marriage.
Finally, we need to do something about your ending.
A storm is coming. But we have hope. A rainbow coalition of people of every creed and color are coming together in love to protect marriage. Join Us.
Okay, people, a rainbow coalition? Have you seen the gay flag? It’s a rainbow. Lose the rainbow thing. Just say- A coalition of people of every creed and color except gay people, progressives, and most people under 30 who don’t get the whole hate the gays thing, are coming together in love to share their hatred of gay marriage and gays. Join us.
A few simple fixes and my acting talent and I think you could have a much better commercial. Plus, I could help you avoid embarrassing mistakes like calling your campaign Two Million for Marriage and then creating a logo you plastered over everything consisting of 2M4M. Since you are oblivious to much of what is going on in the 21st century, that is a personals ad abbreviation for two men seeking a third man for a threesome- clearly not the kind of coalition and coming together you were thinking of.
And you wouldn’t even have to pay me. You could just donate my payment and residuals to the Human Rights Coalition. You know, the folks who got a hold of your audition tapes and helped you spread the message. So call me. I’ll be waiting.
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