Patrick Stoner welcomes your questions about movies and the people who make them. Send your questions to pstoner@whyy.org. Here's the current question and answer:
Q: What are your fellow critics like when you get together?A: Look and learn.
Perhaps the quickest way to give you a feeling for the kind of humor critics share is to reprint the unofficial but beloved newsletter of the American and Canadian movie reviewers who attend national film press junkets. What follows is a small piece of THE CHOWDER, a monthly tongue-in-cheek production by John Corcoran, the film critic for KCAL-TV in Los Angeles. Some of it will be "inside humor," but it's worth it to get a sense of the junkets -- a truly unique phenomenon in the media. I intentionally chose an issue in which I am NOT one of John's satiric targets:
ABOUT THE CHOWDER: The Chowder is the partly unofficial, mostly satirical, and totally uncalled for publication of the Traveling Broadcasters Junket Honors and Chowder Society (TBJHACS--pronounced like it's spelled, only the first three letters are silent.) THE CHOWDER
April 1997 | Vol. 1 No. 3
The Traveling Broadcasters
Junket Honors and Chowder Society
Editor: John Corcoran (KCAL-TV)
The oldest such organization in the free world, TBJHACS proudly represents the interests of the 43,000 men and women who selflessly travel the country interviewing celebrities for the broadcast, narrowcast, online and semaphor industry. The opinions contained herein are soly those of Co-Founding Grand Poobah and Chowder Editor John Corcoran, unless otherwise attributed.
THE ACADEMY AWARDS: All top winners junketed their movies. 'Nuff said.
GREEN-EYED PRESS: The Los Angeles Times, in a front page investigative piece March 24, blew the lid off the practice of some TV junketeers allegedly giving out inflated movie quotes that run in ads. The Chowder feels the article earned Four Stars, was "Hands down the feel-good piece of the Year," was "far and away the best story I've seen." "I laughed, I cried, I recommended it for the Pulitzer." We hereby nominate it's authors, James Bates and Jen Pollack Bianco, for the Chowder's Print Journalist(s) of the Year Award. Write them for copies, your editor is too damn busy.
HIPNESS ALERT:A recent junket was held at the ultra-Hip L'Mondrian Hotel in Hollywood. Herewith a report from the trenches.
L'Mondrian is a place so Hip that whatever's "In" in the rest of the world is already "Out" there, and if you're Hip enough to be there, by the time you leave you may not be Hip enough to return.
It's so Hollywood Now, so politico-fashionably, beautiful-peoplely UberHip, the car jockeys wear white T-shirts under double-breasted, earthtone tan suits, each made from the wool of virgin free-range all-natural hypo-allergenic, 100% uncloned New Zealand non-neutered sheep. L'Mondrian is so Hip guests must sometimes show their room key to get inwhen the incredibly Hip Skybar is open.
One Junketeer, returning from an adult beverage or two at the nearby unHip watering hole, "Al's Bar and Auto Parts", was asked to show his room key. He stated that were he required to produce said room key, he would feel obliged to demonstrate proper usage thereof, utilizing an orifice on the person of the asker not originally designed for such purpose.
He was waved through.
Some junketeers, with rare exception a down-to-earth, unHip, heartland-oriented, meat and double-Chivas kind of crowd, expressed less than total enthusiasm for the environs.
According to another junketeer, his room contained a list of charges that would apply if the guest absconded with certain objects as "souvenirs." The objects included pencils, vintage magazines in the room, even artwork on the wall.
The Junketeer was so incensed at the implied accusation he stole the list.
"No Publicists Were Injured in the Preparation of this Newsletter."
Past questions and answers.
