Author: matt

From Done Deal:
Title: Untitled Washington-Williams and Thurmond Story
Log line: A reporter goes on 25-year quest to prove that a woman is the daughter of Senator Strom Thurmond and a young black housekeeper who worked in the Thurman family home. The housekeeper was sixteen and Strom was twenty two when the young woman became pregnant. The senator financially supported the young woman but hid that he was her father.
Writer: Horton Foote
Agent: n/a
Buyer: Peter Newman and Greg Johnson
Price: n/a
Genre: Drama
Logged: 12/19/03
More: Optioned life rights from Washington Post reporter Marilyn Thompson who broke her story. Also, the producers optioned the rights to the book Ol’ Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond written by Thompson and Jack Bass. Peter Newman and Greg Johnson to produce. Newman and Johnson are hoping to gain the rights of Essie Mae Washington-Williams as well. Thompson was repped by Gail Ross Literary Agency. Jack Bass was repped by Goldfarb & Associates.

President Bush at the Wright Brothers National Memorial (bottom); Cary Grant in North by Northwest (top)

A friend writes: Radosh has some great fun at David Denby’s expense over at his own site today. I’d like to add that based on the excerpt, Denby’s forthcoming book American Sucker seems to be the saddest bit of self-exploitation of one’s sex life by a New Yorker writer since Elizabeth Wurtzel welcomed us all to her Prozac Nation (population: 1). But then I remembered Lillian Ross’ book, which I was sure was called Put It In Here, But Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and The New Yorker, which a visit to Amazon quickly corrected.
Earlier thoughts on David Denby from low culture.

Piggybacking on Gawker‘s list of words for the New York Media Elite to drop from their vocabularies in 2004 (‘Memo from Gawker’s Ombudsman’), I’d like to add the following:
Henceforth, the term schadenfreude is to be replaced with sauerkraut, which, in addition to being easier to spell, means just about the same thing.
Irony is to be replaced with relish, which is a less ubiquitous word by far.
Similarly, Ubiquitous is to be replaced with mustard, for obvious reasons.
And finally, twee is to be replaced with katsup while erstwhile is to be replaced with ketchup.
We thank you in advance for your understanding and compliance.

This season’s most covetable coffee table book/load-bearing portable wall, GOAT may be too expensive for most readers (and too big for most homes), but you can enjoy its beautifully-designed Flash-intensive Web site. Less a promotional site than a well-curated mini Ali museum, it’s definitely worth a visit, if only for the spare, stirring intro. The excerpts and videos are great, too.
You don’t have to be a boxing fan or one of Muhammad Ali’s many intellectual courtiers to recognize that the man is a cultural and political icon, the likes of which we will never see again in our lifetimes. (Full Disclosure: I met Muhammad Ali at an airport when I was 6 years-old and still consider him among my best friends. I also wrote my thesis on him.)
Alas, I will not be buying the $3,000, 75-pound Taschen book. Not now; not ever. Man, that stings—like a bee, it does.

Professor Colin Pillinger (right), lead scientist for Britain’s Beagle 2 Spacecraft Project, Fresh Guy™ supreme.
[Fresh Guy™ is the universally-recognized intellectual property of How Fresh Is This Guy? and its partners. Used in good faith without permission. Each day’s a gift.]

Having trouble deciding whether to go see Lord of the Rings: Return of the King or Mona Lisa Smile this weekend? If artist Luis Royo had his way, you could see both at the same time.
Royo is just one of the amazing artists in this gallery of celebrities re-imagined as fantasy/sci-fi heros. All the A-listers are here: George Clooney, Courtney Cox, Isabella Rossellini, and Will Smith all come in for the rippling pecs-swords-and-dragons-treatment.
It’s pretty great. Of course, once Pat Kingsley gets wind of this, she’ll probably complain that Jodie Foster, for example can be drawn from much more flattering angles.
My favorite? Steven Spielberg.

Ask any farmer what to do with a litter of kittens you don’t want and he’ll tell you to snuff ’em out right away. You can’t be sentimental: you don’t need all those mewling, hungry mouths around the barn, and you sure as hell don’t want another generation of strays spraying up the place and picking fights.
The same can be said for Web sites: some are best put down in their first weeks. Take Agora Magazine, a downy newborn culture and politics magazine—not a blog, never call Agora a blog—so young, its eyes aren’t even open yet.
But it’s claws are already out and it’s more than ready to scrap.
Started by Sam Munson the nephew of second generation neo-Con ne’er-do-well John “Norman’s Son” Podhoretz, whose New York Post columns are the second funniest read in the paper after Garfield, Agora takes a cranky Nabokov quote at the top of its page as its mission statement:

Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks

It’s all pretty much downhill from there.