There is No Trivia at WEJB/NSU! Please Give Your Support

I come across this word all the time: “Trivia.” At WEJB/NSU and in the Stix household, we call it “knowledge,” whether it’s the knowledge of police chiefs falsifying crime stats, or studio moguls falsifying movie profits.

Several days ago, I read a news story about the court case 21st Century Fox had just lost, in which a federal judge ruled that it must pay a combined $179 million in compensatory and punitive damages to the producers and stars of the long-running Fox TV series, Bones.

Fox had engaged in all sorts of complicated scams, in order to cheat the Bones people on their royalties.

Hollywood has a grand criminal history of cheating even the biggest stars.

The late, great James Garner, one of the biggest stars in TV history (Maverick, The Rockford Files), walked away from at least one hit series, based on his conviction that the producers were cheating him. He also successfully sued to get his due.

During the 1950s, the biggest movie stars, led by Jimmy Stewart, hit on the idea of getting “points”—percentages of their films’ profits. The studios countered with creative bookkeeping (“the people of the two books”) that made all of the profits from even the biggest hits disappear, such that there were no points left.

In the late 1970s, the late Cliff Robertson courageously blew the whistle on such practices, and was blacklisted for a time, as retaliation. Robertson’s real-life heroism provided the backstory to his role as Uncle Ben in Spider-Man (2002). When Uncle Ben told Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility,” that wasn’t just a cartoon character talking, that was Cliff Robertson! Tears came to my eyes.

I have no doubt that Robertson was cast in the role, as an homage to his heroic past, even if only a tiny sliver of the audience would get it.

(Similarly, in the third season of the Vietnam War drama, China Beach, 1989-1990, when the veterans came home, but had flashbacks to their years “in country,” series composer John Rubenstein added “Wilma’s Theme” from Hugo Friedhofer’s score to The Best Years of Our Lives from 1946, the greatest coming home movie of them all, as an alternate theme. Again, only a tiny sliver of the audience would have gotten the allusion to BYOL, much else all the other layers of meaning: Rubenstein, et al., were saying that the war years had been the best years of the characters’ lives, with all that came later inferior.

The theme was a double homage—both to BYOL, and to Aaron Copland, who had originally composed it as an up-tempo theme on town life in his masterpiece 1938 ballet score, Billy the Kid. Friedhofer had adapted the Copland theme as an homage to the composer, but slowed it down to express the romantic longings of the girl next door, who was in danger of losing her beloved fiancé, Homer, who could not cope with having lost his hands in a Japanese attack on his ship.

Some artists do these things for some of their audience. At least, they used to.)


Eventually, movie actors had to learn to take their points off the gross. So much for sentiment.

Even the greatest star of them all, John Wayne, got cheated on a regular basis by the studio chiefs whom he made indescribably rich.

Wayne made a series of pictures for Warner Bothers mogul Jack Warner, all of which were hits, and on all of which Warner cheated Wayne, as he did everyone. Wayne was a very smart man, but he never could figure out how Warners did it. Neither could anyone else.

Which brings me to my favorite Hollywood quotation.

As Scott Eyman tells it in his epic, 2014 biography, John Wayne: The Life and the Legend,

“The general feeling of being had was probably why Wayne turned down an overture from Jack Warner at the end of 1956 to buy out [Wayne’s production company] Batjac. Years later, Wayne and his son Michael were at the studio for a meeting, when they ran into Jack Warner. “You really oughta bring Batjac back to Warner Bros., Duke, Warner said. “You should be here, where you can be fucked by friends.”

None of the above is trivia in my book. What about yours?

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Sincerely,

Nicholas Stix