We Change Your Channel - FUCK HOLLYWOOD

BadTV Goes to CNN!

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:12:12 CDT

First, Mz. Black's crazy footage Strange Faces gets onto the Tonight Show with Jay Leno (see below). Can we get any more mainstream than that?

Below is a piece from Blue's "My Secret Nicaragua," telling his reaction and thoughts to seeing himself and Mz. Black involved with the daily news braying out of CNN every half hour:

The night I come back I find myself filming a scene involving my BadTV partner Sandie Black and the poet Roland Verity and a bowling ball. I am reluctant, pregnant with my own plans and poetry, and I get yelled at and challenged and then concentrate long enough to get out of the shoot. In the Bank of America two days later I am making a deposit and I hear the poet's voice. I look at the plasma display, and CNN has picked up our parody of Hillary throwing bowling balls at Obama, played by the poet Verity, and I am laughing at this incongruent moment, because I hate CNN and the plasma pollution in the lobby every time I go to the bank. My footage will decorate the trash on CNN for the next 12 hours, and it feels good to swim up into the mainstream this way except that every time I see the footage, I think:

This is the principal problem with living in the United States; you are always screeched to buy, pushed to purchase, fooled into spending.

I clench my teeth in airports when I see the baggage carts locked into a dispenser, available for a dollar to cart your bags 100 yards to the exit. I bought a compact flash card, not even half the size of a credit card, and it came in formidable plastic packaging the size of a book; we had a piece on the Tonight Show a few weeks ago, and I told the producer Leno should be given four products from Best Buy or Circuit City and try to open them with scissors or a sledgehammer. That would be dark comedy.

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Anyway, you can see the CNN clip, where Sandie as Hillary and Varity as Obama appear about halfway through. Hilarious. BadTV is f------ with society!

To see Sandie Black's clip used by CNN, click on the image above, and wait until you're about 45 seconds into the piece, when Mz. Black shows up, acting away, spoofing Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.

My Secret Nicaragua

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:05:52 CDT

I have an idea, broiled out of the user charges at the airport and Virgin Mobile's stupid texts: I am going to buy a hotel on the beach, I tell Suleyka, and buy all the eggs for four bucks a dozen, build a hatchery like the hatcheries I've filmed in Mexico, and make a tiny theatre and a tiny library and a place where the gringos can come and do photoshop and poetry and fix their websites and make a book, all in a week of vacation for twenty bucks a night, and before dinner they can walk down to the waves with a margarita in one hand and a baby turtle in the other, and this way the turtle gets into the water without being eaten by gulls or dogs and maybe 15 years from now the baby turtle will come back to this shore and bury treasure into the sand, and you know what the best part of my plan is, Suleyka? She is thinking maybe this is performance art where the audience participates: "You're going to pay for the college educations of the young girls who operate the hatchery?" Wow. That wasn't the best part of my plan, but it is now. But why girls? "Boys don't lay eggs." Yes, yes, of course. I was going to say the best part of my plan was the name of the hotel: Even tourists from England can pronounce and understand "Hotel Tortuga." But I like the girls in University on the hotel profits, for too many reasons to admit here, and this becomes the cornerstone of my plan, hatching itself into my life.

-- From Blue's book, "My Secret Nicaragua"

Jay Leno comes calling

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 09:33:54 CDT

If you filled up with gas in the Los Angeles area lately, you might have had the surreal experience of being greeted by BadTV's Sandie Black, right there on the vids at the pumps. How she gets in these situations, we do not know, but they are incredible. The best of these encounters was shown on the Tonight Show, and they led off with Sandie's Strange Faces vid: here's a clip from the actual Leno show, starring Mz. Black.

If you want to see the whole Strange Faces clip, now at 55,800 views, be forewarned that it is not your family's regular entertainment. But here's the whole clip.

No more icebergs!

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:58:17 CDT

They're meeting in Switzerland and Washington, the scientists, about the doom of the north pole icecap. Gone in your lifetime. Utterly, completely, finito.

We had a chance to catch up with one of the world's leading oceanographers this last week, and he confirmed what has been reported in the news recently: There will be no more ice in the Arctic summer by the year 2013.

Five years from now.

You can read a little of the interview, in the usual inscrutable Seanie Blue treatment: Dangerous Circumstances.

Scratching Montana

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 05:38:25 CST

BadTV went to the Big Sky state in late October, and experienced a wild time in pursuit of photographers (found two) and grizzlies (one). A video is brewing, of course, since we shot a lot of amazing stuff, and since it was the first time in months that Black & Blue actually collaborated in person, in situ, on a project for BadTV. Notoriously opposites in entertainment tastes, Black & Blue could agree that Montana was a worthy subject to combine strengths and concentrate. The article below is the first result from the trip: a a fantasy dialogue with a model from Montana informed of the lurking toxins beneath the state's delicate beauty. Click on the banner to see more of this photo essay in JPG Magazine by Blue:

A second version with different photos and captions can be seen at Everywhere Magazine.

Our New Noises

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 05:21:43 CST

Miz Black branches out every day it seems, dragging innocent bystanders into her world as surely as a mongoose collects marbles. Her latest stunt is a channel to celebrate the study of noises, in which she delivers a hilarious mimicking of one of our favorite youtubers, the massive hotforwords' Marina. Check out Sandie's first vid, a dead ringer for Marina's own Youtube intro. Next, we hope to make a viddy directly with giant wordologist herself, maybe in her native land, walking her native street, explaining the origin of the words she grew up with. Damn, that's a good idea. We have to write her an e-mail . . .

SANDIE BLACK ROLLS OUT

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 21:00:04 CDT

In the course of a week, Sandie gets on the front page of the business section of the Washington Post (viddying other Youtube revelers at the D.C. gathering), then gets the talent scouts at the Tonight Show to ask permission to use her Strange Faces vid for some sort of experiment in Hollywood, then sees director Rob Parrish put up her hilarious role as a blood-sucking vamp (with writer Virginia Vitzthum as the main dish), and then she shoots and edits a hilarious new Britney Spears spoof (coming soon!), before putting up tonight her Mozart piano skills in a preview of the utoob madness at Atlanta this weekend.

Whew.

And how much of this comes from the purchase of a piano? Sandie was a prodigy on the keys, but gave the sport up 23 years ago until Blue harangued into spending $800 on a Yamaha. "It has to have 88 keys!" screeched Sandie for three weeks, but now the piano is here, centrally installed at the offices of BadTV. Everything revolves around the piano now, as Sandie rediscovers reflexes and unlocks synapses fro half a lifetime away.

lalaland apocalypse

Tue, 18 Sep 2007 20:45:14 CDT

How many people lost their jobs this week over the Emmys? Second lowest viewership ever. Is it the Internet? Is it outdoor sports? What drives people away from prime-time TV? The fools in Hollywood cannot believe -- will not believe -- that the reason is simply atrocious programming. Who gives two shits about the Emmys? The ratings say 13.1 million people watched, the second-lowest amount since 1993. Great. We love to see it. Oscars, Country Music Awards, Granmys -- all of them walking dinosaurs.

machina ex amor

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 01:23:16 CDT

A spark between minds creates the machinery of lovers and their fuel, jealousy. How do we make this affair different from its surroundings, and yet magnetic enough to change everyone who sees us and feels compelled to fall as we do, comets, burning out, erasing all hope in tomorrow?

Elvis Goes to Ely

Tue, 4 Sep 2007 06:53:33 CDT

Sandie Black gets a call from a friend in a casino in the desert. Can Sandra show up in 24 hours with an Elvis outfit to be the witness at a wedding? Sandie wonders if she is supposed to bring a shotgun. She flies out today, and BadTV gets its third helping of Vegas.

Seanie Bue loads up the Badmobile and drives north to a polar bear in distress -- ravaged by cage madness -- and intends to look for wolves for three days in Ely, Minnesota. The boundary waters are home photo supremo Jim Brandenburg, and blue may call him to see if he wants to be on Utoob.

And a new vid goes up, of the live performance of "Watch My Sting" from the Black Hole Buddha's legendary single performance ten years ago. Written by Blue & Peter Fox, due out sometime this century.

Circus at Dawn (shot by Blue in Vegas, March 2007)