KC Confidential

What goes around comes around…

Seems like only yesterday theaters proclaimed in newspaper directory ads that certain movies showing in their multiplexes would be presented in the “revolutionary new” digital format.

(We still HAD newspaper movie ads back then.)

It was definitely an expensive transformation process for the industry.

Then before we knew it just about every major theater complex—with the assistance of the Hollywood studios—had converted to digital to the estimated tune of $100,000.- per auditorium.

A benefit for the distributors?

Which eliminated the lab costs of striking 35mm film prints, n expense which could run between $1,200.- and $1,600.- PER.

Savings to exhibitors included the cost of shipping these film prints as well as building them up and eventually tearing down the movies again in their projection booths.

The big plus for moviegoers, of course, was–and continues to be—a pristine screen presentation. No scratches, dirt,  bad splices or out of frames scenes to suffer through.

In other words the superb visual quality of “AVENGERS: ENDGAME” you saw on opening night will look and play exactly alike for weeks to come on that same screen. Continue reading →

Before…

The painfully long slide of Lawrence Journal World took a giant leap last weekend…

From appearances, the 108 year -old newspaper of record for Lawrence – proud home of the University of Kansas and its Jayhawk sports teams – is hanging by a thread.

Over the past weekend its remaining die hard survivors suffered the indignity of an embarrassing move from the Journal World‘s proud, high profile home in downtown Lawrence to a cheesy, nondescript strip center just off Interstate 70.

No longer will its reporters and interns freely roam the heart of the city by foot as it has for decades. Instead they’ll have to drive for miles from an industrial area near the city’s outskirts and play parking meter poker with shoppers and KU students.

It’s been a downhill trajectory for the Journal World since hiring me briefly to write a weekly column in 2012 until it was unloaded three years ago by publisher Dolph Simons, Jr.

Most halfway high profile writers and editors have quietly gone for dirt naps or fled to faraway cities like Boston. Continue reading →

Local media jock sniffers gave the Chiefs a slap on the hand when they drafted Tyreek Hill…

After which they spent the better part of past two seasons pretending everything was fine and dandy – that Hill was a changed man – and celebrating his spectacular on field accomplishments.

Unfortunately that’s not how things tend to go with women beaters and domestic abusers

“In discussing why abusers abuse , it’s clear that a lot of the causal factors behind these behaviors are learned attitudes and feelings of entitlement and privilege — which can be extremely difficult to truly change,” according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “Because of this, there’s a very low percentage of abusers who truly do change their ways.”

Got that, a “very low percentage” change their lowdown ways.

Even when they happen to be National Football League superstars. Continue reading →

The Mueller Report will move no needles in either Democrat or Republican silos…

Places where long standing biases are life sustaining sustenance.

Case in point, approximately 30% of the country thinks anti-Trump Dem Adam Schiff is Diogenes and disgraced MSNBC anchor Brian Williams the last honest man in America.

Another 30% think House Republican (and pro Trump guy) Devin Nunes should be canonized in the ruins of Notre Dame…right after fired FBI head James Comey and twin CNN flaks – former CIA head John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper are burned at the stake.

There’s just no convincing anyone on the far left or right that ANYTHING has changed.

The far lefters still believe Trump and Putin are BFF’s forever. Continue reading →

‘DUMBO’—what can I tell you?

It’s a beautifully staged and photographed (i.e. filmed) LIVE-Action, family fantasy movie that should please audiences of ALL ages. Parents and/or grandparents taking the kids to see it will enjoy it as well.

Imagine that.

Because it’s got heart and soul.

Disney’s well oiled revival machine didn’t skimp on anything here.

It’s all up there on the big screen.

In all fairness I must admit to never having seen the original animated ‘DUMBO’ which Disney first released some 78 years ago in 1941. So my expectations were obviously in pretty low gear.

But the Mouse-House’s business plan of re-imagining  almost all of the studio’s classic animated hits into new live action adventures should propel ‘DUMBO’ to fly high this weekend at the box office.

The storyline really hasn’t changed that much. It is still basically about a young elephant born with giant-sized ears that enable him to fly and help save a struggling circus in the process, eventually landing at the glitzy Dreamland Amusement Park. (Disneyworld, anyone?)

There is of course, much more to the dramatic story setting under the big top. Continue reading →

Time flies when you’re having fun…

Reading the novels of Anthony Trollope, an English writer of the 19th century, one is struck by how different society is nowadays from his era. 

It’s actually not that remote in time from our own.

Let me explain.

As a small child in 1957, I remember visiting my great-grandmother in an old folks’ home.

Born in 1862, she was already an adult when Trollope died so she may have read his books as a contemporary author, especially since his books were so popular in the U.S.

Despite the overlap of this single lifetime, despite all the recognizable institutions which are outwardly the same; i.e. the business world, the realm of the professions, the two party political system, schools and universities, churches, charities, etc., to read Trollope is to enter a lost world.

It is familiar as far as its outward trappings go, but the mindset of those who lived then would be bewildering to most of us nowadays.

Though human nature has not changed how people want to be perceived, how they judge themselves has.

For example, what has been dismissed as Victorian prudery or hypocrisy is simply a very real understanding of how one’s reputation could be compromised with terrible consequences. Thus people might not always behave but at least they tried to be discrete, i.e. they didn’t flaunt bad behavior.

You don’t have to go back to the 1880’s when Trollope died, however, to be struck by the contrast between how people felt they should lead their lives, then and now.

This realization of radical change in society can be found in a much more compressed time frame, i.e. in a single generation.  

I recently watched two Hollywood movies on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), both reflective of the times they were made. Even though they were only 30 years apart, they seem as remote from each other as if they were from different countries in different centuries. 

The first was 1935’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” based on Charles Dickens’s masterpiece about the French Revolution. Set during the Terror, when “The Committee of Public Safety.” decreed who would live or die depending on  class background (Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, call your office!), it starred two British acting greats in the roles of their lifetimes. Continue reading →

Sports media types can be so superficial and pretentious…

Especially those of the print persuasion.

The Sam Mellinger‘s of the sportswriting world don’t write fawning tributes and dole out miniscule wrist slaps to their sports heroes because they grew up dreaming of being investigative  journalists, a la Woodward and Berstein.

The aforementioned who are so full of themselves and nerdish these days that nobody could possibly visualize them as the once-glam actors Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman who played them in the movie All the President’s Men.

Nope, it’s all about jock sniffing and the Bejamins for Sam and Joe Posnanski.

Oh, they’re talented wordsmiths alright.

They just don’t have much to say that about stuff that actually really much matters.

Take Mellinger’s column in the Kansas City Star about troubled Chiefs star Tyreek Hill.

Pretty much everyone in KC (who thought with their big heads as opposed to their little ones) knew the way Hill beat the tar out of the mother of his yet-to-be-born son, that he was a ne’er-do-well of the first order.

Yet the Chiefs swooped him up a couple years later and he went on to become of the team and league’s top stars.

So, dutifully Mellinger wrote at the time about what a bad dude Hill had been, but quickly changed his tune to celebrating Hill’s on-field successes and – given no high profile incidents or convictions – how Hill had turned his life around.

You know, out of sight, out of mind.

Trouble is, really bad dudes tend to remain really bad dudes. Continue reading →