Thanks all—and Nemo, I like the way you think. If “Movieline” were to offer a six-figure salary, though, it would include the numbers after the decimal points.
Water, how does one MAKE those gray lines? I’m not Stephen Hawking, you know! As far as editing the above column, they would have:
• Eliminated any pre-1990 reference (“Duchess of Windsor—who’s she? Let’s change it to Reese Witherspoon.”)
• Cut for length (“It’s too long, let’s just take out the punchlines.”)
• Cuted it up (“Oh, let’s throw in some words like ‘da bomb’ and mention Freddie Prinze Jr. somewhere, he’s SO dreamy.”)
• Added their thumbprints (“I heard this great joke at an Adam Sandler movie, let’s put it in there!”).
. . . Now with no regular outlet for my bitchiness, you will see my posts adjust accordingly . . .
Thanks, Eve. Personally I can’t understand how you could do an entire column on paper lace without mentioning their 1974 hit single “The Night Chicago Died”. But rest assured that if I ever become the publisher of a major magazine, my first decision will be to hire you to write all movie reviews. That way, I’ll be able to devote more of my own time to auditioning the centerfold models.
You use a vB tag that normally would end a quote:
[[sup][/sup]/quote] <- like that (using secret magic way of keeping tag from being used)
I’m just going to hope you were exaggerating about the editorial changes that would be made, as the thought of a real magazine actually doing that is rather depressing.
Oh-ho-ho, Water, I WISH I were exaggerating! “Cosmo,” for instance, was well-known (under their previous editor) for complete re-writes. I did a couple of pieces for them that wound up reading like they’d been written by eight-year-olds at a slumber party. I hear things are better under the new “Cosmo” regime, though.
“Movieline” (since Ed left) has been horribly rewriting and censoring my stuff, which is why I finally had to resign: I just couldn’t have my byline on that crap anymore. I’d E my editor and she’d reply, “Well, we didn’t get the joke, so we changed it,” or, “it was running long, so we took a few lines out” [like, umm, the PUNCH LINE].
There ARE good magazine editors out there. But they are a precious and dwindling quantity.
Nemo—Damn! I’d forgotten about Paper Lace! Now I have that song running through my head . . .
I have been getting increasingly disgusted with Movieline (I’m a subscriber, it USED to be fabulously mean and funny, it’s become terribly bland and dull). they keep taking all the juicy stuff out. Where are the great Joe Queenan articles? I can’t remember any “Bad Movies we Love” lately…they are stripping it of all the stuff that made it great.
I guess they need to be boring to have access to celebrities? What a shame.
But I LOVE your column, and I will register my disgust! (I was thinking of doing it anyway for the reasons stated above).
P.S. some actual examples from “Movieline” I just remembered:
• I referred to myself as “your gentle correspondent” in one column. The editor, never having heard that phrase, changed it to “your gentile correspondent.” I had to throw Yiddish phrases into my column for MONTHS after that.
• I referred once to “bubble dancer Sally Rand.” Instead of calling me to check, they just figured I’d left a word out and changed it to “bubble-headed dancer Sally Rand.” I had to call all my friends to explain that no, I hadn’t suddenly gone mad.
• My editor once called me to ask “who is this ‘Betty Grable’ you refer to in your column?” then cut it, because “no one will have ever heard of her!”
I’m starting to wonder why the hell I stayed with them for eight years . . .
“Bubble-headed dancer” indeed! WHERE’S MY FLAMETHROWER?
I sense a potential sitcom pilot here.
The brave, witty (always witty) defenders of good writing at a magazine that’s been taken over and its editors replaced by no-talent hacks who (fortunately), in the sitcom tradition, are too dumb to know when the writers are insulting them. Lots of acerbic, Algonquinesque dialog around the break room table., occasionally interrupted by an editor passing through and making an inane utterance along the lines of the ones Eve has been mentioning.
Best of all, because it’s set in a sitcom fantasyland, the writers can win the arguments!
Unfortunately, Chef, it would be committee-written and produced in L.A., which means it would wind up being about as Algonquinesqe as “The King of Queens.”