Thirtysomething

Thirtysomething

The Legacy of Thirtysomething It’s been over 20 years since Thirtysomething went on the air and 18 years since it departed and now finally the first season will be released on DVD today. What I find so interesting about the show is how far reaching into TV and films — but mostly TV — that the participants of the show have had on our lives.

In the LA Times, Marshall Herskovitz said that their goal was to make movies and they thought that the show would be something that they did for a little while until they could get their movies made. Hershkovitz and his co-creator Ed Zwick are both incredibly creative men and the show proved to be a training ground for an entire generation of creative people. (Many of the cast members were able to direct episodes) They created two other amazing series, My So-Called Life and Once and Again that were thoroughly underappreciated. (It still makes me angry when I think about it.) They’ve also done some great movies The female writers on the show included Winnie Holzman who co- created My So-Called Life. She also wrote the book for the musical Wicked which is still playing to sold out audiences on Broadway.

But looking at the cast the men and the women shows exactly where women and men stand in the TV business creatively. I’m not saying the women of Thirtysomething haven’t had incredible careers. They have. Patricia Wettig has continued to act and is so good as Holly of Brothers and Sisters. Melanie Mayron still also acts but she is more well known now as a director having worked on shows including: Dawson’s Creek, Tell Me You Love Me, In Treatment among many others. Mel Harris has also been acting over the years but has not had another breakout series. Polly Draper has a huge hit with the creation of the show The Naked Brothers Band which she writes and directs and produces.

Texting While Driving PSA

Texting While Driving PSA

The new public service announcement warning teens of the perils of texting while driving is violent, bloody and graphic. Even in a world with increasingly tough and graphic public service announcements on TV about the dangers of such activities as smoking, a recent PSA originating out of Gwent, Wales, breaks new boundaries in the explicit level of its bloody details.

Two teen girls giggle over a text message they are sending while driving along a country road. Distracted, the driver smashes head-on into another car, and while the bloodied girls exchange dazed glances, a third car careens into the passenger side. The driver finds her friend lying dead next to her. Then the camera switches to another smashed vehicle and shows a young child inside, asking why her parents are not waking up.

Produced by the Gwent Police Department, the PSA sends out a horrible visual to illustrate the dangers of texting while driving. But it currently isn’t being aired on U.S. television. For Americans to even view the ad on YouTube, they must assert they are at least 18.

Warning from Wales

A South Wales community of 550,000 that many Americans have never even heard of seems an unlikely place for discussion of the dangers of texting-and-driving to be raised, but a visionary Gwent police department was up to the task. Police locked arms with filmmaker Peter Watkins-Hughes to produce the PSA, titled “COW — The Film That Will Stop You Texting and Driving,” named after the character Cassie Cowan, who unleashes the lethal chain of events by texting behind the wheel.

Avi Ben Stella Car Crash

Avi Ben Stella Car Crash

Avi Ben Stella HoaxAvi Ben StellaAvi Ben Stella SnopesAvi Ben Stella Accident-We know that man on moon is the America’s one of the most iconic images.Though, it sparked a heated debate over whether the moon landing was staged or not, and all it happened by 40 years ago. An astronaut in a giant white suit stands next to an American flag on the moon’s surface: one of America’s — and MTV’s — most iconic images. Photos and footage of Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon 40 years ago changed the way people all around the world looked at space.

Part of that disbelief was of course fueled by a general feeling that something as amazing as a man walking on the moon was the stuff of science fiction. There were also rumors that the whole thing was filmed on a Hollywood set. These factors led to a memorable scene in the James Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever” in which Agent 007 drives a moon buggy off a model set where something that looks suspiciously like the moon landing is being filmed. Though brief and in many ways informed by pre-existing suspicions, it is believed that this scene contributed to the Apollo moon hoax theory that continued to flourish. The conspiracy inspired the 1978 release of “Capricorn One,” a Peter Hyams film about a hoax Mars landing segment that ends with the lie being publicly exposed.

In the past decade, the moon conspiracy theory has made a marked comeback in American pop culture. The Robin Williams comedy “RV” claimed the title vehicle was parked in the camp where NASA faked the moon landing. In “National Treasure: The Book of Secrets,” the answer to the Apollo hoax was allegedly answered inside the Book of Secrets (now only Nicholas Cage knows the truth). Even “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” that long lost Brendan Fraser comedy from 2003, got in on the action when Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck find a tape labeled “Moon Landing Dress Rehearsal” in Area 51.