If Hollywood has its way and the check clears, Julian Assange, the international man of mystery currently enjoying Ecuadorian hospitality whilst planning his birthday party inside that country’s embassy, will be the subject of a biopic fraught with cyber espionage and condomless sex. According to the Wall Street Journal, HBO Films, DreamWorks Studios, Universal Pictures and Annapurna Pictures are all frothing and panting to bring Assange’s story to a megaplex or cable box near you.
There are a lot of loose ends though–not the least of which being who would play the pale and lanky leader of WikiLeaks; Tim Robbins, even though he’s a bit older than Assange, possesses plenty of boyish charm and height–dangling plots points like Bradley Manning who is in prison and on trial; what happens with the Syrians cables; Assange’s potential extradition to Sweden…
Here’s a solution: A musical! As Spiderman Turn Off the Dark proves, stage plays are constantly evolving. As the Assange/WikiLeaks story unfolds, the libretto could be adjusted; and it’s a sure Tony Award winner, and once things are resolved in real life, the film would be ready to go. Along with Assange’s all singing, all dancing grandstanding and honeypot sampling, Bradley Manning’s character would be onstage throughout as the tragic counterpoint and moral compass, first at a computer screen, then behind bars, always present, a contrast to Assange’s hubris.
Plus there would have to be a Greek chorus of Anonymous in EFG masks performing catchy numbers like “Low Orbit Ion Cannon,” and “DDoS Us All” while Loooong Cat and Nyan Cat dance. It’s all a hummable, teachable-moment multi-media extravaganza! And Neil Patrick Harris would be SUPER in the starring role! Or maybe Zac Efron. Think Clay Aiken for the touring company.
If any Broadway producers are interested, you know where to find me…
The EFG Greek/geek chorus can get serious at times, while Manning’s character is the musical’s moral compass.
Just because you’re the President of the United States doesn’t mean you can just order a movie made based on your favorite book. Even if you’re pitching one of your biggest donors who also happens to be one of the biggest producers in Hollywood. Oscar-winning producer Harvey Weinstein revealed
The President sent me a book the other day and said ‘Why don’t you make this into a movie?’ I can’t tell you [what it was]. It was a spy novel.
Weinstein passed:
I sent him an email back saying he was the most overqualified book scout I’ve ever had.
Someone/s with a Twitter account @HWLeaks and using the Anonymous motto
We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect Us
has leaked a heap load of stuff onto various sites, servers and pastebins. The booty includes the script for Rock of Ages starring Tom Cruise
Not as good as the play
sniffed a source who had downloaded the script from one site.
Also leaked, names and numbers of agents, celebs and more. But get ‘em while they’re hot. As one #HWLeaks follower tweeted:
@HWLeaks we need more # leaks. Old #s are dropping quick. Needing the lulz!
Celebrities whose phone numbers have been posted include Ashley Tisdale and David Spade, who have stopped answering their phone and/or changed their numbers quickly.
UPDATE: Keep in mind that Anonymous is an idea, a self-described label. Anyone can do an action and bring back the spoils of hacking under the flag/handle Anonymous. The Anonymous responsible for #OpBART is/are not necessarily composed of the same people who pulled off #OpPayback and/or Chanology.
With enough tinfoil it is possible to speculate that @HWLeaks is a false flag designed to discredit the work of some Anonymous in #OpBART and other areas. One video posted on YouTube with an HWLeak tag used the phrase
Jew-controlled media
something incongruous with the WikiLeaks/Chanology/OpBART rhetoric. The voices and graphics on the @HWLeaks videos do not correspond with other Anonymous videos, but then again, anyone can be Anonymous.
However, it is illegal to creepy-crawl into someone’s computer or phone, and to post copyrighted material on line.
Tonight a friend and I headed out for the premier of Electric Daisy Carnival Experience, August 22nd’s FDL Movie Night subject, directed by Kevin Kerslake. EDCE documents the huge two day rave–featuring world renowned acts and DJs like Swedish House Mafia, Groove Armada, Kaskade and Moby, plus art installations and carnival rides–which, up until this year, had been held in Los Angeles.
Traffic was barely moving when suddenly five cop cars sped past us and we saw helicopters spinning overhead. We could see Hollywood Blvd was shut down at Highland Avenue. Stuck on the road, with no news stations on the radio (wtf? it’s all talk radio now in LA, sucks when you need up to the minute information and there was nothing on Google news or Facebook yet either), we rolled down the window and asked a traffic officer what was going on. He said
Bomb threat
Needless to say, we didn’t tweet that or post that to Facebook without confirmation! Thankfully it wasn’t anything that awful (kind of irresponsible for him to tell us that, btw). But it was a full-on tactical alert.We parked and ducking under the police tape, worked our way through the crowds.
The officers holding riot batons would not let us near Graumann’s Chinese Theater and wouldn’t tell us what was going on.
Even when I identified myself as a member of the press to the officer in charge–though maybe my long red dress, fishnet hose and army boots may have lacked fourth estate authority, but hey I was going to a film premier–the only information I got was:
There are thousands of people here, this is an emergency.
Oh, and no, we couldn’t go see the movie.
So we did the only logical thing; we went to Musso & Frank for a snack, on the way overhearing a pair of passersby discussing
Did you see that dude who lit the cop car on fire?
At Musso’s we ran into some would-be EDCE attendees also displaced by the LAPD who had seen what went down. Over salads and drinks, they told us their story.
DJ Kasakade drove his flatbed truck down Hollywood Blvd. to the theater, and a crowd followed him. The police came, but by then there were several hundred people–thanks to Twitter–who had shown up for Kaskade’s appearance dancing, plus tourists and locals. Some were kind of upset that there was no rave/show, some were just cranky, period. And they got angrier when more and more police showed up in response to the crowd not dispersing when ordered to.
At the film’s afterparty EDCE director Kevin Kerslake told me that about 600 people out of an expected 1000 were able to get into the theater (they must have gotten there very early; we were aiming at 7:10 for a 7:30 arrival/8pm showtime). Kerslake said that
it was crazy, they set cop cars on fire!
The Los Angeles Times and Variety report that the police said rocks and bottles were thrown, and that two police cars were set on fire.
This video shows kids jumping an police cruisers and shots fired, beginning around 3:00
Our dinner companions did not see the action around the cop cars, though they did see the police fire projectiles at
Tonight’s premiere of the ‘Electric Daisy Carnival Experience’ film was designed to highlight one of the largest and most prestigious electronic music festivals in the world. Unfortunately, a small group chose to disrupt the film’s premiere due to their mistaken belief that a ‘block party’ with a popular artist was going to occur.
I want to make clear that while this film showcased an Insomniac event, Insomniac had nothing to do with the supposed ‘block party,’ which was not a part of the premiere. The crowd issues that arose were a result of individuals responding to social media information which mistakenly led them to believe they could see artists perform…Insomniac strongly believes in personal responsibility and hopes that anyone who didn’t comply with police orders is held accountable.
The LAPD arrested two people after detaining dozens. Joyfully, the planned after-party at a nearby club went off without a hitch, with Kaskade spinning and dozen of elaborately costumed dancers performing.
A 2011 LA Times investigation revealed an official at the Coliseum had worked as a paid consultant for the company, planning the medical and emergency services, with the approval of by then-Commission General Manager Patrick Lynch. Lynch resigned in the wake of the Times disclosures, and while the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and the state Fair Political Practices Commission began investigating the employee, Todd DeStefano, who denied any wrong doing.
The Internets. Both of them. This meme may become a reality…
We will support a free and open Internet.
That’s what Barack Obama told the United Nations. But then why is there a bill before the Senate Judiciary Committee that would allow the Attorney General to block certain Internet domain names from ISPs?
The bill S. 3804, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA), introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) would create two blacklists of Internet sites “dedicated to infringing activity,” which is defined very broadly as any site where counterfeit goods or copyrighted material are “central to the activity of the Internet site.”
Heck, that could be eBay–I’ve seen some pretty bogus Marc Jacobs Stam bags on there, as well as faux Max Studio, BCBG and Betsey Johnston dresses. And certainly YouTube could be considered such a site, though they do pull any video which is flagged with a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) infringement notice. Flickr.com and other photo storage sites allow people to upload their photoshopped images, as of course does the monster shoop site ICanHazcheeseburger.com
Anyway, one of the blacklists can be added to by the courts, the second by the Attorney General. According to Demand Progress:
Internet service providers (everyone from Comcast to PayPal to Google AdSense) would be required to block any domains on the first list. They would also receive immunity (and presumably the government’s gratitude) for blocking domains on the second list.
Associated Press text material shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium. Neither these AP materials nor any portion thereof may be stored in a computer except for personal and non-commercial use.
a mighty big piece of living lumber was felled by unknown means, according to the AP
rather than
a tree fell in the forest
because that is “rewritten”?
So technically if you did blog about it, under COICA your site could be blacklisted by servers and basically disappear because you “violated” copyright by reporting news to which you didn’t have direct access. Unless you paid the AP. So news becomes proprietary information. And that means control of information and possibly no freedom of the press since unlimited access would be truncated.
Nowadays, copyright infringement is handled with lawyer letters, threats of lawsuits and actual court trials, where there is a burden of proof. Should this pass, the lights would go off on sites deemed violators. Demand Progress says:
This bill would bypass that whole system by forcing Internet service providers to block access to sites that are otherwise up. People in other countries could still get to them, but Internet users in the US would be blocked.
Blocked from entire domain names. Sort of like how the governments of Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere block undesirable sites. Granted, because of copyright and licensing laws, when I was in Ireland, I couldn’t watch clips from The View on ABC.com; when in Turkey, I was unable to listen to Coast to Coast on KFI640.com, so I wonder how many blocked sites would actually still be visible. And plus there are ways around that. Demand Progress claims that
if this law passes Internet traffic will be reconfigured to route around it. Companies will move their US servers and domain names overseas, Internet users will route their traffic through other countries (just like Chinese citizens have to do now!), and software will have to be reconfigured to no longer trust answers from American servers.
Demand Progress is concerned that this bill is the start of a slippery slope and that with a little prodding from Teh Gubbermints all sorts of sites could end up being banned, not only news, blogs, politics, and entertainment, but porn and gambling, which is really what fueled the series of interconnected tubes.
Manifest Equality–a huge free show featuring hundreds of visual artists in support of equal rights for the LGBT community–opens today March 3 in Los Angeles and runs through March 7.
The show’s manifesto is simple:
We believe in full and equal rights for all Americans with no exceptions. Throughout history artists have lent their creative expression to the ideas and issues that shape life in our communities, our country and our world. The MANIFESTEQUALITY Gallery gathers together a diverse array of hundreds of the nation’s most talented visual artists under one roof to celebrate that role and join with our gay (LGBT) friends, family members and co-workers to demand full and equal rights for all Americans.
Artists include Gary Baseman, Robbie Conal, Shepard Fairey, actor Josh Leonard, director Jesse Dylan, Harvey Pekar, Cathy Bleck, Ron English and hundreds more. Actor Jason Lee was spotted buying a photo, and many other pieces were sporting red “sold” dots before the night was over.
Last night’s preview featured Shepard Fairey and Daisy O’Dell DJing and a set by Emily Wells, plus inspirational speeches from Cleve Jones and Rick Jacobs from the Courage Campaign.
The show is staged in a vacant store on Vine Street in Hollywood that was an eyesore, and which has now been resurrected on both the inside and outside into a vibrant and colorful location, expressing the power of art to transform. Transformation is a function of art, and Manifest Equality expresses that goal with thoughtfulness, care and wit, providing artists and viewers the opportunity to explore their concepts of equality and civil rights.
The show was conceived by Yosi Sergant, Apple Via and Jennifer Gross and put together by volunteers in a matter of weeks, an impressive and exciting task that overall succeeds in its vision and execution.
Makeup artist Roxanna Floyd is claiming Queen Latifah owes her $700,000 for unpaid work for 2005 to 2007 helping to develop, produce and market the Queen Collection, Latifah’s line of cosmetics for CoverGirl. And stylist Susan Moses alleges she is owed $300,000. In 2005 Moses advised Latifah in her role as a lingerie spokesmodel.
Along with with using myspace and Twitter to accuse Austin-based designer Dawn Simorangkir of being a prostitute and drug addict and calling Simorangkir (who is married to Billy Idol guitarist Mark Younger-Smith)
a nasty lying hosebag thief
Love allegedly refused to pay for the work Simorangkir did in designing a clothing line for her last year. Before the designer filed suit, Love wrote on her myspace blogs that
we had a dal i gave her a VAST amount of money clothes id been collecting for 8 years and 40,000$ is that not a vast amont of momey? the clothes are insured for 340,00 but are mo wortgh 500,000 some were as i said a formr ziegfeld girls and some were a silent film stars,
According to Love, Simorangkir was seen walking out of
the chateau…with two massive army bags full of things
after she had
been paid a massive amount of money and is in ossesion of prcless noyions dresses and fabrics changedthe "rules" she now wants 1750 per item! she bogged she made me fifty dresses,
Meanwhile, the Fremantle North America, the production company behind American Idol, is being accused running a sweatshop by three former production staff, who say they were forced to work 20 hour days, seven days a week without required breaks, and that
Fremantle and several related companies, including American Idol Productions, Blue Orbit Productions, Kickoff Productions and Little Pond Television, of trying to disguise violations of federal labor law by paying employees for a 12-hour day and a 60-hour week.
Way to keep your overhead down and your facade up.
