Oh, the places we go, the people we see …
When Oatman met Coulter. You may have seen some of the debate surrounding director Michael Oatman’s casting a white actor as Martin Luther King Jr. in a production at Kent State University. But Oatman can handle the heat. After all, he’s wrangled with commentator Ann Coulter on national television.
It was back in 1999 that Bill Maher and his ABC show Politically Incorrect came to Cleveland in search of a “citizen panelist” — a regular person to join celebrities on the show in discussing current events. During the auditions, which I attended, Oatman made it through by talking about his anger at the nation’s Founding Fathers who were slaveowners. At one point he said they “make me puke,” which Maher himself called “good stuff for our show.”
A few weeks later Oatman was on the air along with Coulter, Markie Post and David Cross. He was still discussing the Founding Fathers and in the process so flustered Coulter that she dropped a “you people” on the African-American Oatman.
“You people?” Oatman shot back. “You didn’t just whip out ‘you people,’ did you?”
“I’m not saying ‘you people’-‘black people,’ so don’t pull that on me,” said Coulter. Oatman, clearly savoring the debate, asked if she meant “overweight people.”
A Tad Difficult. When I saw that political operative Tad Devine is now a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, I remembered watching Devine’s visit to Canton in 2004 for a live telecast of Paula Zahn Now.
Devine was working for John Kerry’s presidential campaign and debated Tucker Eskew from George W. Bush’s in front of voters in the Stark County Courthouse and millions watching at home.
If those millions were patient, that is. Storms were blamed for technical problems that knocked the show off the air twice.
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and this [storm knocking a show off] has never happened,” said Zahn, a former Canton resident who brought her mother, Betty, to the telecast.
Once the show started, it consisted of back-and-forth about an array of issues, sometimes at length. As I said at the time, neither Eskew nor Devine seemed too concerned about Zahn’s request that they keep their answers short — even though she asked for it both on and off the air.
A Lofton endeavor. One of my favorite ballpark memories is of being in Cleveland when Kenny Lofton returned to the Indians in 2007. Although his best days were past, and this would be his last season as a player, the crowd roared its welcome that night, and Lofton responded with three hits.
These days Lofton’s efforts include FilmPool Inc., a production company he owns with Brenton Early. Its new film, My First Miracle, will get a special screening in Cleveland in December.
My First Miracle is a drama about Angelica (Katya Martin), a 17-year-old girl battling a form of cancer called Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS). “Lacking health insurance and searching for a bone marrow transplant, Angelica’s life is very challenging,” says one synopsis but “faith, hope and prayer” show how God works in mysterious ways.
The movie will be shown at 7 p.m. Dec. 3 in Atlas Cinemas Lakeshore 7 in Euclid, and a limited number of tickets are available to the public for a $15 donation at www.clevelandfilm.com/about/events. A portion of the proceeds from the screening will be donated to MetroHealth’s Cancer Care Family Community Room. The movie will have a limited run at Lakeshore 7 beginning Dec. 4.
Books and movies. I recently saw The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2, the final screen adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ books. The movie effectively captures the bleakness in the book, and contains some fine performances, but it stretches out the narrative of a book that would have been better served by a single movie.
Of course, the practice of turning books into movies is a long-standing one, and Walt Hickey of fivethirtyeight.com used Mockingjay as an excuse for a statistical analysis of how well books do compared to their movie versions, based on reviews and online ratings.
Although the analysis is very wonky (which is what some of us love about fivethirtyeight.com), it does conclude that movies including Addicted and Vampire Academy disappointed readers, while other works were better liked as movies.
Top of the latter list: Up in the Air, the George Clooney-Anna Kendrick movie based on the novel of the same name by Akron’s own Walter Kirn. Even though they were very different, I liked both the book and the movie. But in Hickey’s analysis, the book was “a middlingly received novel — 2.9 out of 5 stars on Goodreads — but a very well-received George Clooney movie, with 83 out of 100 on Metacritic.”
Rich Heldenfels writes about popular culture for the Beacon Journal, Ohio.com, Facebook, Twitter and the HeldenFiles Online blog. You can contact him at 330-996-3582 or rheldenfels@thebeaconjournal.com.