"Movieline" Screws Me Over One Last Time . . .

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In order to screw me out of my last two paychecks, “Movieline” pulled my last two “Bottom Shelf” columns and yanked me outta the masthead (I just got the December issue). So, would those of you who have enjoyed my column for the past eight years please do me a huge favor and write to “Movieline” at 10537 Santa Monica Boulevard, #250, Los Angeles, CA 90025, and make your opinion known? Of course, if you think my writing sucks and you’re glad to see the last of me, you may tell them that, too.

By the way, this is the column that WOULD have run in this issue:

Have you been dissatisfied with your dining experiences of late? Jaded with Le Cirque? Has Tengo lost its thrill? Well, the answer to your culinary malaise just might be in the enchantingly titled “Doilies Make the Difference!” An intriguing glimpse behind the curtains of restaurant management, this video packs many eye-opening shocks in its brief ten minutes.

Our avuncular host, Ezra Eidelberger, wants us to know that, as food service professionals, we are “not just selling food.” No, we are selling ambiance, and nothing says “ambiance” like paper lace doilies scattered under and over every possible surface! I may take a quick breath here to note that using the words “paper” and “lace” in the same sentence is the sort of thing that used to send the Duchess of Windsor to bed with a sick headache.

But Ezra barges right along, telling us how doilies “add elegance to any place setting.” They can sucker you into buying dessert, which is the most profitable item on the menu (“people buy with their eyes,” Ezra says, pegging us as the spineless dessert suckers he knows we are). Why, most people would buy a phlegmball if it were set off by an enticing doily!

But wait! Doilies are veritable Swiss Army Knives of versatility! They provide a safe barrier between food and surfaces which have been improperly cleaned, thereby absolving you from ever wiping those sneeze-marks off the platter. They prevent slippage, so banana cream pies will not fly off the trays into the faces of society dowagers. And they save money–we learn that one restaurant saved $5765.76 per year when using those paper schmatas instead of real linen (so if your bill ever comes to exactly $5765.76, you’ll know why).

And there are ever so many doilies to choose from: grease-resistant doilies for cakes! Heart-shaped ones for Valentine’s Day! Silver doilies for 25th wedding anniversaries! No doubt wooden ones for 5th anniversaries! Doilies for take-out, for boardroom meetings, for hotel bathrooms and to place under roadkill on the Parkway! Yes, anything looks better when plunked atop a doily!

“But Eve,” I hear you whine, “We’re not restaurant professionals, why should WE care about doilies?” Well, first off, you may not be a restaurant professional NOW, but who knows what tomorrow may bring? And that’s a very short-sighted attitude, I might add. Why, Doilies Can Make the Difference in our everyday life, if you only apply them correctly! Slip one under your cat’s litter box, and it becomes Hermosa Beach! Does your boyfriend look like Howdy Doody’s less attractive brother? Sit him on a doily and—presto!—he’s NBC news hunk John Siegenthaler!

So next time you’re dining at 21 with the Maharajah of Cooch Behar and your Chicken Kiev arrives sans doily, you know what to do—rip off your lobster bib and bellow to the nearest waiter, “Hay! Where the hell’s my goddam doily? I been t’rown outta better dives than this!” Somewhere, Ezra Eidelberger and I will be beaming our approval.

2

What bastards! I hope they get a lot of pissed off mail.

Zette

3

I know the lost money sucks, but weren’t you worried about the damage that would be done to your reputation as an au courant bon vivant if those last couple of columns did run? At least you don’t have to suffer through reading another defanged, debased, denatured column that once was yours.

And that doily article was some damn funny stuff.

4

Thank you, Zette and Chef—and yes, the above Doily article would have been rendered 100% humor-free by the so-called editing staff. I’m just ticked-off that they were so peremptory about killing my last two two paychecks and just tossing me out of the masthead without a word, after eight years. I should have left in '98 when Ed Margulies, who started the magazine (and wrote “Bad Movies We Love”) left. The woman who’s taken it over has turned it into “Teen Entertainment Weekly.”

5

Eve:

Sorry to hear about it. May you find another perch.

  • CalMeacham
6

Eve, this may not be the case, but I’ll ask anyway. Did Movieline have first publishing rights on your material? If so, did you just violate it by publishing here?

Sorry to hear about your situation, if we could only send this down to the pit, I’d have a few “rectifying” situations.

7

Wow. They let that go? I’m sorry, but these people obviously have no common sense, at all, whatsoever.

Eve, thank you for that. I’ve never really read movieline, and therefore never got to see a sample of your writing, but that was great. Thanks for sharing it on the SDMB, since the editors at Movieline seem like they wouldn’t know good writing if it poked them in the eye.

8

Anybody that can work in references to the Duchess of Windsor and Howdy Doody plus use the word schmata in a sentence is too good for Movieline anyway. Scape 'em off, Eve.

9

I pride myself on tossing as many weird pop-culture references as I can into my column (jesus—can you imagine Dennis Miller and I going out on a date?!).

No, I’m safe, Ender—they never sent me the contract on those last two pieces.

I see 71 people have viewed this thread, which is more people than read “Movieline” anyway!

10

You know, anyone can mock the doily-conscious for an cheap and easy laugh. But those of us who daily use Rowland’s Macassar Oil as a hair-dressing find that there’s nothing like a well-worked doily to protect the arms and head-rests of our valued family furniture.

Scoff if you must. But you’ll be scrubbing my hair-oil out of your sofas and ottomans after I come over to your house.

(Read the first paragraph out loud in a Ray Goulding voice, and the second in a Bob Elliott voice.)

(My Movieline letter is already on the way.)

11

Uke:

Don’t confuse an antimacassar with a doily. 'Taint the same.

12

(Ray Goulding secretary voice)

“Mr. Ballou, it’s another call from that CalMeacham fellow…he wants to point out that Einderbinder fly paper is NOT a name he can trust for over four generations, that the Monongahela Cast-Iron Ingot Company does NOT sell ingots retail to the consumer, and that the McBeeBee Twins are NOT in fact related.”

13

Sonofabitch . . . “Movieline” musta engineered my ouster so Ukulele Ike could take over my column!

Surrounded by assassins!

14

What do you call a piece of cloth, made up of positrons and the like, used for covering the backs and arms of furniture on an island off the SE coast of Africa?

Why, a Madagascar antimatter antimacassar, of course.

15

I discovered Movieline in 1993, the year I had my second child and was struggling with a magazine addiction (you don’t have the attention span for books when you’ve got babies and toddlers hanging on you). I loved the magazine and kept my subscription up even after my brain cells recovered from the mommy hormones and I was able to go back to reading more substantial things. It was funny, it was informative - it was a good read. I let the subscription lapse sometime last year because I’d noticed the quality of the magazine had sharply declined and it just wasn’t interesting anymore. Now I know that wasn’t just my imagination.

I hope you’ll let us know where we can find your writing in the future, and I’ll get to work on that letter to the editor.

16

Thanks, dear. “Movieline” was the brainchild of Ed Margulies, who was a very funny writer and a very good editor (a nice guy, too). He left because of illness about two years ago and died last year, and the magazine really should have died with him, rather than degenerating into what it has.

I haven’t been able to place a column with any other magazines (it’s VERY difficult). I may try some online mags, or I may decide just to concentrate on my books.

Lemme know what your letters say—heaven knows “Movieline” will never publish them or send them on to me!

17

Hey Movieline! You know that money I usually shell out for your rag every month? Well, I just got to read the main reason why for free, so…maybe we’ll see ya in December…

[sub]…or maybe not.[/sub]
…something like that, Eve?

Keep rockin’ darlin’!!!

18

Filthy bastards. I remember the column you did on the video about cows. When I found out who you were, I went back and found the only copy of Movieline that I owned, found your name above the cows column, and thought “Holy shit, that’s her? Cool!” Have I told this story before? Don’t care. I am already composing my hate mail in my mind:

SIR:
I am very “put-out,” as the young people say…

Oh, they’ll feel the full brunt of my disapproval.

19

I’m tempted to start my letter like this:

However, I feel for maximum effectiveness, I’m not going to mention this board or acknowledge any acquaintance with Eve. In my opinion, if we all write in and say “Yo bitch. Why you dissing our homey Eve?” Movieline will just say “Eve sure has a lot of psychotic friends. Toss these.” If on the other hand, Movieline receives a few hundred letters complaining about the absence of The Bottom Shelf from their December issue and asking for an explanation, they’ll realize how many devoted fans Eve has. The publisher will fire Campbell, hire Eve to be the new editor of Movieline with a six figure salary and a personal assistant who looks like Brandon Fraser, and Eve will give us all free lifetime subscriptions in gratitude.

But the important thing is write, dammit, write. This is a holy jihad against the forces of darkness, so the least you can do is spring for a postage stamp.

20

Not that it matters at this point, but I figured I’d point out to Eve the trick of using a close quote vb tag to set off blocks of text.

[/quote]

See? Nice horizontal rule.

Now, wouldn’t this sort of thing be useful for quoting an article (within copyright laws, of course) that makes up the main body of a post? Just thought I’d point it out.

Oh, and the doilly article was great. No offense, though, it could use some editing to polish it off. Not to cut anything, really, but it did seem to lack an entirely finished quality. From what you say, the editors there wouldn’t have left it at that, though. If articles like that aren’t satisfying the readers, I’d say that the problem would be more likely bowdlerization by the editors than any fault of the writer.