Falling Star
Arnold is beatable. From the LA Weekly:
Arnold Schwarzenegger could well be a one-term governor. Unbelievable as that seemed at the beginning of the year, which the action superstar entered as arguably the most popular governor in California history, it may end up that way.
[…]
A telling scene came last week at a strange little event at the Capitol. Billed as a “Thank You, Arnold” rally, heavily promoted with blast e-mails, robocalls and talk radio, it was a complete bust. A mere 100 supporters turned up to see the strange duo of Hollywood libertine Tom Arnold (the comedian who was Schwarzenegger’s sidekick in True Lies) and abstemious conservative 2003 gubernatorial candidate Tom McClintock.
Read the whole article for the litany of problems the Governator is facing as his “reform” agenda is resisted by pretty much everybody.
Unsurprisingly, I think that Warren Beatty understands the problem:
“This is an Arnold picture,” says Oscar-winner Beatty. “Superman walks in the room, and shit happens. That can be pretty spectacular. As long as all the characters follow the script. But this isn’t a movie.”
This is another example of the folly of voting for superficial politics. Schwarzenneger is alleged to be a pretty smart guy. I think it was Hollywood hype. He’s a hard worker who parlayed his body into a successful Hollywood career. (Many women have done the same before him, and none of them have been called geniuses for doing it.) If he really believed that he could do something like destroy California’s public employee pension plan purely by dint of his celebrity — a little fallacy that seems to common among big shot Republicans these days — then he’s stupid.
Hollywood is full of delusional people who think that they are geniuses. The worst offenders aren’t even stars like Arnold who can, at least, prove that they can make a movie profitable merely by their presence in it more often than not. The movie executives, who are the only organizational role models Arnold has ever had, are the real offenders.
Nikki Finke has this fascinating little window into the Hollywood boardroom:
Hypocrisy, thy name is EW’s parent company, Time Warner. Chairman and CEO Dick Parsons gave himself a perk that’s a monument to ego: a 5,000-square-foot, 21st-floor, marble-and-rare-wood dream suite (a supposed $25 mil to build out) inside the swankiest and priciest NYC office space, the new Time Warner Center. Parsons and the other heads of the Mammoth Media conglomerates feeding America its infotainment — Disney, Sony, Viacom, General Electric and News Corp. — may gag on celebrity greed, but they never stop indulging their own corporate gluttony.
Wanna hurl? Look at the latest shareholders-be-damned headlines this week about Viacom — owner of Paramount, CBS, MTV, VH1, and Infinity radio — disclosing that it gave its top three moguls a 58 percent pay increase even though the company’s stock price fell 18 percent in 2004. A Viacom spokesman noted that the bonuses for all executives were tied to operating income, not share price.
It’s not just the arrogance of rich, old Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone claiming he cuts costs at every corner while at the same time lining his own pockets at the expense of investors that’s so nauseating. It’s also the profligacy of a public company shameless enough to reimburse Les Moonves, who lives in Los Angeles but also has a New York apartment, $105,000 for the period he stayed in New York at his apartment instead of at a hotel, or Tom Freston, who is based in New York but also has a residence in Los Angeles, $43,100 for the time he spent staying at his L.A. home instead of a hotel.
Years ago, in another life, I used to receive Christmas baskets from Sumner Redstone. Instead of muffins or popcorn, however, he sent Omaha steaks. He was a cheapskate in every other way, but he did know his perks.
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