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..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

You gotta love the chutzpah, if nothing else, of the American capitalist.

Almost nothing happens anymore – from the naming of a stadium, to the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch – without a dollar amount being attached to it. By the time most kids turn 12, they know more about marketing than they ever will about the Bill of Rights. As the father of a teenage daughter and post-teen son, I’m encouraged by the fact that they grew up with an intuitive awareness of product placement and junket-generated quotes in movie ads, as well as a healthy skepticism toward celebrity endorsements and a basic understanding of the symbiotic relationship between the entertainment industry and the media. Very little gets past kids these days, unless they open the door to it.

This sophistication manifests itself in some truly bizarre ways.

Last week, I was standing in the checkout line at Blockbuster, behind a couple of girls who couldn’t be older than 16. They were killing time by paging through Us, or one of a dozen other magazines devoted to the worship of celebrity, and critiquing the cosmetic surgery performed on the stars therein. It was when these youngsters nonchalantly dropped the name of Jenna Jameson -- in a way that suggested the porn star was on the same artistic plane of, say, Drew Barrymore – that a vein in my forehead really starting throbbing.

My sense of shock and dismay was short-lived, however. By the time I hit the parking lot, I was chuckling to myself over this surprise encounter with reality. In a very real sense, Jameson – who has been profiled on E! and is a regular guest on radio shows -- is the Marilyn Monroe of their day. In fact, she generally looks less like a porno queen than Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears.

In their generally blasé attitude toward enhanced body parts and other adult pleasures, these precocious teens displayed many of the same symptoms of Terminal Hipness that afflict people twice their age. But, then, what well-read teenager doesn’t know more about the inner workings of contemporary Hollywood than they do about the war in the Mideast? This conversation was overheard, after all, during a week when the affairs of Michael Jackson – a relic of the ‘80s, if there ever was one – dominated the news shows and headlines, while the deadly bombings in Turkey barely produced a ripple of concern in the media.

Now that we’re in the final lap of the 2003 movie campaign, and the 2004 awards season is about to begin, the annual World Series of Hype is about to begin in earnest. That’s the bad news; the good news is that, thanks to the Motion Picture Academy, it will end a month sooner than it has in the past.

In Hollywood, the nominations have always been about box-office, and, for the last quarter-century, sales of videocassettes and DVDs. For increasing numbers of fans and media outlets, sorting the winners from the losers no longer is as important as commenting on what one wears on the red carpet … or takes home in the goody basket (goody bags are reserved for parties).

Relatively few of the civilians in the audience will have seen the nominated films, so any debate over their merits would be ill-informed, at best. I've found that the one thing most fans are obsessed with is, “Do the stars get to keep the dresses, jewelry and shoes they were on the red carpet?” Sensing this, the academy has gone out of its way to help the media shill for every designer represented on the runway. Otherwise, why give choice locations on the carpet to reporters whose primary reason for being there is to ask, “Who designed your gown?”

And, despite every claim to the contrary, last year’s mini-revolt -- resulting from the confluence of a war and the Academy Awards – had little effect on the stars’ commitment to their designers-of-choice. The red carpet may have been rolled up, but the fashion parade went on as planned. The quickest way to die in Hollywood is to get between a star and a camera, when she’s dressed to impress.

For me, the Silly Season began in earnest two weeks ago, when I briefly – very briefly – watched Katie Couric chat with Tom Cruise, while riding through the hills together on bicycles, on their way to a catered picnic. Tom looked terrific, of course, while Katie tried to pretend she wasn’t sweating.

In some quarters, I suppose, this was seen as some kind of marketing coup. For my money, though, it was merely sucker bait. Almost everything worth knowing about Cruise, and most of the other stars of big holiday pictures, has been common knowledge for years. The rest is un-confirmable rumor, and Katie wasn’t about to touch that kind of stuff … otherwise, she might not be allowed to go kangaroo hunting with Russell Crowe someday or accompany Catherine Zeta-Jones as she files her next lawsuit.

But, Katie’s not alone. The media’s willingness to use and be used has reached epidemic proportions.

The television networks, of course, have long treated their newsmagazines like brothels, where the price of the service is measured by the stature of the customer, and will continue to do so (wow, Lawrence Taylor cried on 60 Minutes). Meanwhile, very few magazines will be able to resist the temptation of putting celebrities on their covers, in lieu of newsmakers and professional models. Newspapers will act as if they’re above the fray by occasionally asking how it is that most of a year’s best movies and actors are routinely snubbed by Oscar nominators, but they, too, will fall in line once the limousines start arriving at the Kodak Theater.

Then, there’s this business about screeners and piracy. While the issue has been widely debated in newspapers and on the Internet, I can’t remember seeing any coverage of it on television. Not sexy enough, too complicated, who cares, anyway? … Take your pick.

Monday morning, though, on The View, the ladies were plugging Consumer Reports’ survey of the season’s best consumer-electronics products. The magazine rarely toots the horns of the products it lauds, so the show’s producers found a representative of Best Buy to comment on some of the items on display. Duh. Ralph Nader probably was unavailable.

When the camera got to Panasonic’s top-rated DVD recorder, the ladies let the rep get away with the party-line blurb, “It allows consumers to record their home movies on discs.”

Yeah, sure, it does. But, these appliances also provide a golden opportunity for consumers to take pay-per-view and other pre-recorded films and record them onto blank discs. The free exchange of these discs (which ostensibly also can be recorded onto a computer’s hard drive and, thus, shared) will, if Jack Valenti is to be believed, threaten the livelihoods of thousands of workers in the movie factories of Hollywood. The word, “piracy,” was never mentioned, however.

Retailers and manufacturers are trained to toe the company line, especially when it comes to such exotic uses for their products as watching porn and breaking copyright laws. In the same way that no one in the car-stereo business will publicly admit how easy it is to re-wire an in-dash DVD player, so the driver can watch a movie or music video while the car is in motion, a sales rep for Best Buy (or any other retailer) couldn’t be expected to point out the most likely use of a DVD recorder on The View.

One would think, though, that a veteran reporter such as Meredith Viera might have brought up the subject, at least. Alas, no.

When broadband technology finally advances to the point where ships of piracy can freely navigate the Internet – and movies can be digitally transferred from one computer to another with ease – it won’t be the manufacturers of such enabling equipment that are prosecuted by the feds. Following the example set by the recording industry, the only people the MPAA is likely to nail are teenagers exchanging R-rated Farrelley Brothers movies.

Thirteen-year-olds in handcuffs look great on 11 o’clock news, just like superstars who are caught shoplifting and driving under the influence.

- by Gary Dretzka

December 3, 2003