Showing posts with label election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label election. Show all posts
Friday, May 11, 2012
Fresno Bee Racism Sexism CD 16 Election
Fresno Bee article is racist and sexist.
In listing Dr Loraine Goodwin as a candidate for CD 16, it mentions she is a physician. But they
fail to mention her years of work in women's health and preventive medicine.
Dr Goodwin also has a law degree from San Joaquin College of Law and she works as a legal
arbitrator and mediator. She also sits on the California Air Hearing Board, Central Region and
the IRWMG where she acts to protect valley air and water. Dr Goodwin also sits on the
Madera behavioral health board, which provides help to the poor, homeless and addicted. She
also sat on the Madera American Disabilities Act Advisory Board which initiated ADA
requirements to remove barriers for disabled.
Dr Goodwin comes from a Fresno farm family that has farmed for generations. She
understands farming needs and wants to encourage young farmers.
If you believe in education, you can believe in Dr Goodwin. As a member of the Madera Unified
School Board, she started the "Farm-to-school Program which gives fruits and vegetables to
kids and pays farmers over $500,000 a year - Goodwin has proven she can bring money into
the central valley, keep staff working and finances sound.
Dr Goodwin stands up for women, children, disabled, seniors, families and students. We must
act to reduce racism in the central valley. It is a hard fight...it keeps coming back. Join the
GOODWIN TEAM.
Don't trust what you read in the Fresno Bee.
Thursday, May 03, 2012
One View - Amazon Studio a Bad Idea
The Morning Read: Why Amazon Studios is a very bad idea for writers
PLUS ELI ROTH'S DOING RIGHT BY HORROR AND TALKING 'STAR WARS' WITH KIDS
Barton Fink is a good example of of what happens to screenwriters in Hollywood, and he got off easy.
Credit: 20th Century Fox
Welcome to The Morning Read.
Let's kick off today's column with a bit of a public service announcement. Have you read about the Amazon Studios announcement? Basically, Amazon decided to get involved in the production of content, and they've created a brand-new program that is part contest, part development fund, and all garbage.
I've gotten several e-mails from people asking me my take on this, several of which were from very excited writers looking at this as a way to finally get around the "no manager or agent" conundrum. And I empathize with any writer out there with a script who can't get people to read it. I get what is attractive about the idea of a brand-new way of getting around the system, but this is not it. Have you read theDevelopment Agreement or the Contest Terms and Procedures? They are fascinating and revealing and completely insane.
I'll put it this way: if you upload your script or your movie to their contest, you are essentially kissing it goodbye forever. Line after line of the legalese on these pages just confounds me. "You agree to be automatically entered into any future contests for which your work is eligible. The specific contest rules for future contests will be posted on this page when they are announced." And considering one of the rules of this contest grants Amazon Studios a free 18-month option on your work the moment you upload it, the idea that they can enter you in a contest later and tell you the rules after they do so seems positively batty. The "development agreement" is a contract you're signing, not an entry form for a contest, and in it, you grant them a free option on your work for a year and a half, and if they do end up producing your work, there's a set fee. Period. That's all it is. A set rate. The same no matter what the project is, and no matter what happens with it. That is, simply put, immoral.
Beyond that, once your script is uploaded to Amazon, anyone can revise it. Try to wrap your head around that. Anyone can revise your screenplay. They can do anything they want to it. And if that revision ends up being what gets made, that person becomes part of that set price I mentioned earlier. It's a mind-boggling proposition, and runs completely counter-intuitive to the idea of giving writers a platform for their work. The thought of some random person having the legal right to revise my screenplays makes me sick to my stomach, and I seriously believe that the people who created the Amazon Studios idea are either very stupid or very evil. It is an idea designed to exploit and strip-mine creativity, and it sounds to me like someone's idea of a social media experiment gone wildly wrong. There's nothing about this that sounds to me like it will result in good filmmaking. The entire notion of a "test movie" is bizarre, especially when you're talking about having people shoot entire feature films as tests. That side of the contest is so much weirder than the screenplay side that I can't even really understand it.
Look, collaboration is one of the key components of filmmaking. I absolutely believe that. But I also believe that you have to be able to pick your own collaborators based on their history, your history, common artistic goals, respect, and much more. "Crowdsourcing" is a big buzzword right now, and under the right conditions, I can see how useful that is. But for filmmaking? This is poison. This is very bad thing. To me, this smacks of the sort of "let's suck someone's blood" mentality that marks the very worst of Los Angeles.
I've spent the last few years entangled in a business arrangement with a producer who I will simply refer to here as "The Gimp." At the very beginning of our relationship, The Gimp talked a good game. He promised easy access to production funds. He spun fanciful stories of lands where tax incentives just fell of the trees, ready to be picked up and spent by any filmmaker who just happened along. He told tales of the cast that was eager and ready to go, and he even went down the road of hiring a director and making premature announcements. All of it was what I wanted to hear. All of it sounded great.
But the truth about The Gimp is that he is all talk. Those production funds always managed to stay a week or two away from escrow. The tax incentives only seemed to be opportune in states without soundstages. Or film crews. And that cast that was promised seemed to vanish into thin air when push came to shove. And not just once. Not just twice. It was a cycle, a pattern, a twisted game of self-affirmation that The Gimp was playing at my expense. And because of the option The Gimp had on the material, there was nothing we could do to reclaim it from him. At that point, it's a waiting game, but at least we'd been paid for the option, which is the way it should work.
In the end, the worst part is the feeling that The Gimp never cared at all about the story we were trying to tell. Instead, what we offered was a film that could be made at a price just low enough that it would justify a padded budget that could be pocketed, an easy way out of potential bankruptcy, and until he actually made it, there were other ways to make money on our work, ways that had nothing to do with actually telling our story. I've got stories stretching back twenty years about people indulging their own ego and greed at the expense of writers who genuinely just want to tell a story.
Amazon Studios throws a ton of numbers at you up front, and it claims to be about giving power to the people, but it smells to me like one more case of the writer being the bottom of the pile. Seriously… I implore you… if you believe your work is of any value whatsoever, don't fall for this. I'm curious to see if other writers or advocates for writers weigh in on this one. For now, John August is the only one I've seen jump in, and he makes the point with elegance as usual.
The worst part of saying all that is I know how defensive some people will get, because they will want to believe that this is the short cut they've been looking for. The truth is that there are no short cuts at all. You've got to work to get your ideas in front of people, no matter who you are, and the business is getting more competitive as it contracts and changes. There is nothing more important than a well-executed good idea, and if you're looking for something to give you hope, then why not look at the example of "Clown"?
Remember that? A few weeks ago, I ran a piece about "Alma," the animated film that Guillermo Del Toro is helping to turn into a feature based on an acclaimed short done as a personal side project by Rodrigo Blaas. In that piece, I also included a YouTube trailer for a fake movie called "Clown." One of the things that was really ballsy about the "Clown" trailer was the way they threw on the title "A Film by Eli Roth," even though they had no connection to him. Well, now it looks like they do. Roth is producing the film, with Jon Watts and Christopher D. Ford, who made the short, directing and writing the film together. I have to say, I loved the "Clown" trailer, and I'm excited to see the film, and I love the way the film got in front of Eli, and then made the jump from joke to reality.
There's another film Eli also just helped set up that sounds great, the new one from Nicolas Lopez, a Chilean filmmaker whose earlier films "Promedio Rojo" and "Santos" both showed huge personality and promise. The notion of Lopez taking his personal observations about the February earthquake in Chile and what happened afterwards and turning that into a horror film is exciting because this isn't something born from somebody watching old movies and just regurgitation someone else's ideas. This is personal, and those are often the best films.
That's why I find that whole Amazon Studios thing so unsettling, and the way the media is just swallowing it without digesting it or analyzing it or looking at how it treats the people it professes to help is disturbing. When you're telling a story, it's not just about putting events in a certain order or creating some clever gag or sequence. It's about voice and perspective and tone, and it seems unlikely you'll get that from something anyone can alter at whim. Explore alternatives, but be smart about it. There are always new ways in, new ways to get attention for a good project. Put your faith in yourself and your idea, not some horseshit Amazon Studios Ponzi scheme that will just use you as oil in their machin
e
Let's kick off today's column with a bit of a public service announcement. Have you read about the Amazon Studios announcement? Basically, Amazon decided to get involved in the production of content, and they've created a brand-new program that is part contest, part development fund, and all garbage.
I've gotten several e-mails from people asking me my take on this, several of which were from very excited writers looking at this as a way to finally get around the "no manager or agent" conundrum. And I empathize with any writer out there with a script who can't get people to read it. I get what is attractive about the idea of a brand-new way of getting around the system, but this is not it. Have you read theDevelopment Agreement or the Contest Terms and Procedures? They are fascinating and revealing and completely insane.
I'll put it this way: if you upload your script or your movie to their contest, you are essentially kissing it goodbye forever. Line after line of the legalese on these pages just confounds me. "You agree to be automatically entered into any future contests for which your work is eligible. The specific contest rules for future contests will be posted on this page when they are announced." And considering one of the rules of this contest grants Amazon Studios a free 18-month option on your work the moment you upload it, the idea that they can enter you in a contest later and tell you the rules after they do so seems positively batty. The "development agreement" is a contract you're signing, not an entry form for a contest, and in it, you grant them a free option on your work for a year and a half, and if they do end up producing your work, there's a set fee. Period. That's all it is. A set rate. The same no matter what the project is, and no matter what happens with it. That is, simply put, immoral.
Beyond that, once your script is uploaded to Amazon, anyone can revise it. Try to wrap your head around that. Anyone can revise your screenplay. They can do anything they want to it. And if that revision ends up being what gets made, that person becomes part of that set price I mentioned earlier. It's a mind-boggling proposition, and runs completely counter-intuitive to the idea of giving writers a platform for their work. The thought of some random person having the legal right to revise my screenplays makes me sick to my stomach, and I seriously believe that the people who created the Amazon Studios idea are either very stupid or very evil. It is an idea designed to exploit and strip-mine creativity, and it sounds to me like someone's idea of a social media experiment gone wildly wrong. There's nothing about this that sounds to me like it will result in good filmmaking. The entire notion of a "test movie" is bizarre, especially when you're talking about having people shoot entire feature films as tests. That side of the contest is so much weirder than the screenplay side that I can't even really understand it.
Look, collaboration is one of the key components of filmmaking. I absolutely believe that. But I also believe that you have to be able to pick your own collaborators based on their history, your history, common artistic goals, respect, and much more. "Crowdsourcing" is a big buzzword right now, and under the right conditions, I can see how useful that is. But for filmmaking? This is poison. This is very bad thing. To me, this smacks of the sort of "let's suck someone's blood" mentality that marks the very worst of Los Angeles.
I've spent the last few years entangled in a business arrangement with a producer who I will simply refer to here as "The Gimp." At the very beginning of our relationship, The Gimp talked a good game. He promised easy access to production funds. He spun fanciful stories of lands where tax incentives just fell of the trees, ready to be picked up and spent by any filmmaker who just happened along. He told tales of the cast that was eager and ready to go, and he even went down the road of hiring a director and making premature announcements. All of it was what I wanted to hear. All of it sounded great.
But the truth about The Gimp is that he is all talk. Those production funds always managed to stay a week or two away from escrow. The tax incentives only seemed to be opportune in states without soundstages. Or film crews. And that cast that was promised seemed to vanish into thin air when push came to shove. And not just once. Not just twice. It was a cycle, a pattern, a twisted game of self-affirmation that The Gimp was playing at my expense. And because of the option The Gimp had on the material, there was nothing we could do to reclaim it from him. At that point, it's a waiting game, but at least we'd been paid for the option, which is the way it should work.
In the end, the worst part is the feeling that The Gimp never cared at all about the story we were trying to tell. Instead, what we offered was a film that could be made at a price just low enough that it would justify a padded budget that could be pocketed, an easy way out of potential bankruptcy, and until he actually made it, there were other ways to make money on our work, ways that had nothing to do with actually telling our story. I've got stories stretching back twenty years about people indulging their own ego and greed at the expense of writers who genuinely just want to tell a story.
Amazon Studios throws a ton of numbers at you up front, and it claims to be about giving power to the people, but it smells to me like one more case of the writer being the bottom of the pile. Seriously… I implore you… if you believe your work is of any value whatsoever, don't fall for this. I'm curious to see if other writers or advocates for writers weigh in on this one. For now, John August is the only one I've seen jump in, and he makes the point with elegance as usual.
The worst part of saying all that is I know how defensive some people will get, because they will want to believe that this is the short cut they've been looking for. The truth is that there are no short cuts at all. You've got to work to get your ideas in front of people, no matter who you are, and the business is getting more competitive as it contracts and changes. There is nothing more important than a well-executed good idea, and if you're looking for something to give you hope, then why not look at the example of "Clown"?
Remember that? A few weeks ago, I ran a piece about "Alma," the animated film that Guillermo Del Toro is helping to turn into a feature based on an acclaimed short done as a personal side project by Rodrigo Blaas. In that piece, I also included a YouTube trailer for a fake movie called "Clown." One of the things that was really ballsy about the "Clown" trailer was the way they threw on the title "A Film by Eli Roth," even though they had no connection to him. Well, now it looks like they do. Roth is producing the film, with Jon Watts and Christopher D. Ford, who made the short, directing and writing the film together. I have to say, I loved the "Clown" trailer, and I'm excited to see the film, and I love the way the film got in front of Eli, and then made the jump from joke to reality.
There's another film Eli also just helped set up that sounds great, the new one from Nicolas Lopez, a Chilean filmmaker whose earlier films "Promedio Rojo" and "Santos" both showed huge personality and promise. The notion of Lopez taking his personal observations about the February earthquake in Chile and what happened afterwards and turning that into a horror film is exciting because this isn't something born from somebody watching old movies and just regurgitation someone else's ideas. This is personal, and those are often the best films.
That's why I find that whole Amazon Studios thing so unsettling, and the way the media is just swallowing it without digesting it or analyzing it or looking at how it treats the people it professes to help is disturbing. When you're telling a story, it's not just about putting events in a certain order or creating some clever gag or sequence. It's about voice and perspective and tone, and it seems unlikely you'll get that from something anyone can alter at whim. Explore alternatives, but be smart about it. There are always new ways in, new ways to get attention for a good project. Put your faith in yourself and your idea, not some horseshit Amazon Studios Ponzi scheme that will just use you as oil in their machin
e
Monday, November 28, 2011
Democrats need to win in 2012
Democrat Barney Frank has announced he will not seek re-election to Congress in 2012. At age 71, his exit is mainly due to a huge number of new constituents being placed into his district after the realignment process. So far, 17 Democrats have announced they will not seek re-election. Only six Republicans have announced they are retiring. Democrats faced an uphill battle in 2012, needing to gain 25 additional seats to win a majority in the house. With the retirements, Democrats must work even harder to get enough House seats to influence legislation and, possibly, win a House majority.
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Madera redistricting complete
Madera is faced with 3 redistricting plans which will affect future city elections and who will represent you. The public comment period has expired. An ordinance will be introduced on October 5th and will be adopted by the city council on the 19th. On the 31st all will be complete. A copy of the districts can be picked up from city hall at 200 West Fourth Street or you can contact city hall via internet.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Congress adjourns for week with no help to citizens
Congress is unable to function and will lead our country into further disaster.The dysfunction and political division has made Congress a place for grandstanding and hot rhetoric, but at the cost of national unemployment and no confidence in the economy. Politicians can't even decide if the federal government should give FEMA money to help citizens who are victims of national disasters. Republicans say they will vote to fund FEMA, if the money comes from current programs that help US children and the poor.
I think most Americans want to help people who suffer from natural disasters. The stagnation in Congress is hurting us all - a different type of national disaster. Republicans had hoped they could force Senate Democrats to accept a partisan budget cut on the threat that disaster victims would otherwise be deprived of assistance for days or even weeks.
We in the valley must assuredly work to get Denham out of the valley as a representative. We will never get a reduction in the deficit via the congressional super-committee with this group in office - that means cuts in Medicare, social security, medicaid, etc.. We must vote the obstructionist Republicans out in 2012, so we can move forward.
Then, after spending billions of dollars fighting whether to fund FEMA or fighting to suspend clean air and water regulations and spend billions on studies to see if clean air improves health, the Congress adjourns for a week-long vacation.
This Congress takes too much time arguing and needs to spend more time in DC in session working and attempting to come to some needed agreements.
Americans are suffering, but congressmen are deaf to the cries.
I think most Americans want to help people who suffer from natural disasters. The stagnation in Congress is hurting us all - a different type of national disaster. Republicans had hoped they could force Senate Democrats to accept a partisan budget cut on the threat that disaster victims would otherwise be deprived of assistance for days or even weeks.
We in the valley must assuredly work to get Denham out of the valley as a representative. We will never get a reduction in the deficit via the congressional super-committee with this group in office - that means cuts in Medicare, social security, medicaid, etc.. We must vote the obstructionist Republicans out in 2012, so we can move forward.
Then, after spending billions of dollars fighting whether to fund FEMA or fighting to suspend clean air and water regulations and spend billions on studies to see if clean air improves health, the Congress adjourns for a week-long vacation.
This Congress takes too much time arguing and needs to spend more time in DC in session working and attempting to come to some needed agreements.
Americans are suffering, but congressmen are deaf to the cries.
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