Blonde man joke

Dear Lord, I pray for Wisdom to understand my man; Love to forgive him; and Patience for his moods. Because, Lord, if I pray for Strength, I'll beat him to death. AMEN.

Jerry Weintraub was important to many for good reason. R.I.P.

I wish I loved people as much as Jerry Weintraub.

Then Billy Crystal would do shtick about me, George Clooney would imitate me, Matt Damon would tell personal stories about me and Paul Anka would personalize the lyrics of "My Way" for me.

It's a long way to the top if you wanna rock and roll. And that's where Jerry began. Oh, he had traction before that, most famously with his wife Jane Morgan, but Elvis made him a legend. Led Zeppelin too. He promoted both and managed John Denver and ended up in the movie business and then died prematurely and what is left?

An incredible amount of good will.

People loved Jerry. He called Gerry Parsky every day at 6 AM and told him it was his friend on the line. Never mentioned his name. That's when you know someone, when no introduction is necessary. And we're all looking for someone we can count on in this world, who will be there for us, who will make things right...and I heard that story told over and over about Jerry tonight.

I'll be honest, I almost didn't go. How many people would I know? Irving and...

Well, Jerry Greenberg was there. And Joe Smith. And a lot of people you see on the screen who I recognized but wouldn't dare speak to. That's what happens when you're in between fame and famine... You don't speak with anyone you're not introduced to.

And I was introduced to the guy who owns Il Piccolino. He was so sad, he's having a hard time carrying on without the man with his own dish on the menu.

And Jeff Wald. Remember Helen Reddy's husband? He was intense and didn't want to know me but not only did his countenance befit the legend, I could tell why Helen had been successful...we all need an advocate.

A manager, an agent, we need someone to believe in us or we're not gonna make it.

And there's a very thin layer at the tippity-top, those who can get anybody on the phone and make everything happen, like Jerry Weintraub.

"What do you want?"

Household names were constantly asked that. He'd deliver your heart's desire. And you believed him.

Kind of like Matt Damon. They were out playing golf, Jerry, Matt and Matt's dad. And Matt's father was ribbing his son about failing to graduate from college. Jerry asked Matt where he went. I thought this was a set-up for a put-down, the uneducated like to piss on the Ivys. Instead, Jerry said he could arrange a diploma, if that's what Matt wanted. If not Harvard, how about Princeton?

Yes, Jerry had a sense of humor.

After all, he was Jewish. We Jews have been persecuted for 5,000 years. We deflect it, cope via jokes, throw our hands in the air and say WTF. You just laugh and carry on.

And keep talking.

That's another Jewish trait. Jews can hold up their end of a conversation. You may not want to hear what they have to say, but boy do they have material.

So if you come from little and have the gift of gab you can make it all the way to the top.

Jerry was George Bush's consigliere. The first. The one with credibility. Jane read a long missive from the ex-Pres. Who said much, but marveled that Jerry could deliver so many famous names, ones the Pres. had no pull with. Bush wanted that doctor from "E.R." to fly to a devastated town and Jerry got Clooney on the plane. Jerry delivered first run movies, whatever the Pres. wanted, he just had to decide.

And then there was that great story about the Presidential party, at Blue Heaven, Jerry's abode. Barbara Bush was seated at a table with Warren Beatty and a coterie of other famous Hollywood men. Jerry put his hands on Warren's shoulders and insisted he not work his magic on Barbara, that he keep his sword sheathed. Cracked Billy Crystal up.

Who completely cracked us up.

Billy was never cool, never hip. Had two moments of transcendent greatness, with "When Harry Met Sally" and "City Slickers," but thereafter was so busy playing nice that we couldn't believe him.

But we believed Billy Crystal tonight. It was like the Oscars, but he was playing to a room that got the jokes. Instead of playing to tens of millions, Billy was doing his act for a few hundred, and he killed. The best story was about going to the Lakers game, sitting on the floor during Showtime (and if you don't know what I'm talking about...you'll never survive in Hollywood). Billy saw Kirk Douglas approaching and Jerry told him there would be trouble, because Billy had taken his seat. Kirk complained. Billy was star-struck and tongue-tied. Jerry told Kirk that Billy was hotter and deserved the seat. And that settled that.

Fleet on his feet. Quick with a comeback. Some people are born with it.

Like the ability to get along.

Unlike me.

My social anxiety kicks in, I don't think I belong, I'm afraid of saying something dumb or something not at all. I get so uptight I don't go or I leave.

But I'm a secondary player here. I'm not Barry Diller or Les Moonves or Terry Semel. I'm not even Super Dave Osborne. But I know Paul Anka. He closed the show. Am I really gonna leave without talking to him?

So I wander to the front, evade the household names, I don't want to look like a looky-loo in search of his brush with greatness, and I introduce myself to Paul and he says...

I KNOW WHO YOU ARE!

And he insisted we take a picture and he started telling me about his latest venture, a hologram production, and I'm asking his connection to Jerry and he went all the way back to Irvin Feld.

The circus guy? From Ringling Brothers?

Yup, that's the guy. He ruled the arena circuit before Jerry. Paul started out with Irvin, doing one nighters. And they stayed together.

Loyalty. It's about all you've got in show business. Because you've got to count on someone to get the job done.

And it is show BUSINESS! Sure, talent is necessary, but it's not the only thing that gets you to the top, it's rarely even the most important thing! There's perseverance, and the ability to get along with people, and your team. Spearheaded by the one person who can always get it done.

Like Jerry Weintraub.

The king of relationships.

The king of favors.

There's no one he couldn't get on the phone, nothing he wouldn't do. And sure, he got paid, but he let the light shine upon others, and he gave back, the list of charities he supported was endless.

A man's man.

A citizen of the world. Filled with insight, which allowed him to triumph.

It's not what you know so much as how you put it all together.

Not that Jerry lacked information. It's amazing how the giants work the e-mail and phone for bits of gossip.

But it's not just gossip, it's people. Their fantasies and flaws. Figure out people and you can rule the world.

Jerry figured out everybody he came in contact with. And either they were a friend or a foe. You're either with me or against me. It's a jungle out there, I'll treat you right, but I expect to be treated right in return.

Jerry Weintraub treated so many people right, delivered so much, that a who's who of the entertainment business showed up to pay fealty, to watch Steven Soderbergh's movie, to listen to stories told by those who run the culture.

But the truth is Jerry ran the culture, he pulled the strings, the public barely knew him and soon he will be forgotten.

But not by those he propped up, put forward, presented, gave advice to.

Those people know that without Jerry there is no entertainment business.

Do what you do to the best of your ability. Try not to be someone you're not. Put one foot in front of another, unafraid to play the game.

And then if you're lucky someone like Jerry will notice.

Jerry noticed me.

And I still feel the halo upon me.

4 motivations of man by Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) endures as one of humanity's most lucid and luminous minds – an oracle of timeless wisdom on everything from what "the good life" really means to why "fruitful monotony" is essential for happiness to love, sex, and our moral superstitions. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for "his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought." On December 11 of that year, 78-year-old Russell took the podium in Stockholm to receive the grand accolade.

Later included in Nobel Writers on Writing (public library) – which also gave us Pearl S. Buck, the youngest woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, on art, writing, and the nature of creativity – his acceptance speech is one of the finest packets of human thought ever delivered from a stage.

Russell begins by considering the central motive driving human behavior:

All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.

[...]

Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.

Illustration by Alice and Martin Provensen from Homer for Young Readers, 1965

Russell points to four such infinite desires – acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power – and examines them in order:

Acquisitiveness – the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods – is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries. I once befriended two little girls from Estonia, who had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived in my family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent his adult life in a similar manner.

[...]

However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you.

In 1938, Henry Miller also articulated this fundamental driver in his brilliant meditation on how money became a human fixation. Decades later, modern psychologists would term this notion "the hedonic treadmill." But for Russell, this elemental driver is eclipsed by an even stronger one – our propensity for rivalry:

The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation.

Rivalry, he argues, is in turn upstaged by human narcissism. In a sentiment doubly poignant in the context of today's social media, he observes:

Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying "Look at me." "Look at me" is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame.

[...]

It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of vanity throughout the range of human life, from the child of three to the potentate at whose frown the world trembles.

Illustration by Maurice Sendak for Nutcracker by E.T.A. Hoffmann

But the most potent of the four impulses, Russell argues, is the love of power:

Love of power is closely akin to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing. What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power... Many people prefer glory to power, but on the whole these people have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer power to glory... Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.

[...]

Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates.

Anyone who has ever agonized in the hands of a petty bureaucrat – something Hannah Arendt unforgettably censured as a special kind of violence – can attest to the veracity of this sentiment. Russell adds:

In any autocratic regime, the holders of power become increasingly tyrannical with experience of the delights that power can afford. Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure.

Illustration by Alice and Martin Provensen from Homer for Young Readers, 1965

But Russell, a thinker of exceptional sensitivity to nuance and to the dualities of which life is woven, cautions against dismissing the love of power as a wholesale negative driver – from the impulse to dominate the unknown, he points out, spring such desirables as the pursuit of knowledge and all scientific progress. He considers its fruitful manifestations:

It would be a complete mistake to decry love of power altogether as a motive. Whether you will be led by this motive to actions which are useful, or to actions which are pernicious, depends upon the social system, and upon your capacities. If your capacities are theoretical or technical, you will contribute to knowledge or technique, and, as a rule, your activity will be useful. If you are a politician you may be actuated by love of power, but as a rule this motive will join itself on to the desire to see some state of affairs realized which, for some reason, you prefer to the status quo.

Russell then turns to a set of secondary motives. Echoing his enduring ideas on the interplay of boredom and excitement in human life, he begins with the notion of love of excitement:

Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes thought, in examining the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be, experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings.

Illustration by Olimpia Zagnoli for Mister Horizontal & Miss Verticalby Noémie Révah

He argues that this intoxicating love of excitement is only amplified by the sedentary nature of modern life, which has fractured the natural bond between body and mind. A century after Thoreau made his exquisite case against the sedentary lifestyle, Russell writes:

Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor. I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day. This cure for bellicosity is, however, impracticable, and if the human race is to survive – a thing which is, perhaps, undesirable – other means must be found for securing an innocent outlet for the unused physical energy that produces love of excitement... I have never heard of a war that proceeded from dance halls.

[...]

Civilized life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting... I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters. More seriously, pains should be taken to provide constructive outlets for the love of excitement. Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.

Complement Nobel Writers on Writing with more excellent Nobel Prize acceptance speeches – William Faulkner on the artist as a booster of the human heart, Ernest Hemingway on writing and solitude, Alice Munro on the secret to telling a great story, and Saul Bellow on how literature ennobles the human spirit – then revisit Russell on immortality and why science is the key to democracy.

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very interesting and informative about voice actors and video games

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Go to the profile of Wil WheatonWil WheatonFollow
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Wil Wheaton3 days ago10 min read
Christopher Parker and 282 others recommended

This is why I support a SAG-AFTRA strike authorization for video games — and it isn’t about money.

I’m getting yelled at by people on Twitter because I support my union (SAG-AFTRA)’s efforts to negotiate a better contract for voice performers like myself who perform in video games.

The most frequent complaint goes something like this: “actors work for maybe a few days at most on a game, and they want residual payments?! Programmers and others who work on those same games spend literally years of their lives on them, and they don’t get residuals! Actors are greedy jerks!”

I can’t speak to the fairness or unfairness of residuals or lack of residuals for programmers, artists, composers, and others who game developers and publishers, because that’s not my job, and I don’t know what, precisely, their contracts are. I certainly don’t believe that there is some sort of feud or lack of shared interest between us (the actors) and them, and I fully support all the people who work on games — especially the huge blockbuster games that pull in profits that are in line with the biggest blockbuster movies — getting the very best contract, with the best compensation and best working conditions that they possibly can.

But I did not give my union authorization to call a strike on my behalf because of this issue. I voted to authorize a strike because our employers in the games industry refuse to negotiate with us at all about some very, very important issues surrounding our working conditions.

Let me share some excerpts from an email I got from SAG-AFTRA recently (emphasis mine):

You may have heard that billion-dollar companies like Activision, Warner Bros., Disney and Rockstar Games are against sharing any of their record-setting profits with the performers who help make their games awesome. But…
DID YOU KNOW… Our employers have rejected every proposal that we’ve put on the table? That includes the community’s proposals to reduce vocally stressful sessions to two hours, […]

This, right here, is reason enough to strike, as far as I am concerned. I fully realize that for anyone who doesn’t work as a voice actor it sounds insane to care about vocally stressful sessions. I realize that when you hear that actors want to reduce those sessions to two hours or less, it can easily create an impression that actors are lazy and entitled, and don’t want to work as hard as other people do.

Listen, if you truly feel that way, I hope you’ll do something to give you some perspective on what this actually means. I really want to help everyone understand what we do when we use our voices to bring video game characters to life, and why the expectations (I believe they are demands) from our employers are unreasonable.

Okay? Let’s get started. Since you probably don’t have a video game script at hand, we’re going to simulate it. I want you to grab your favorite book, and I want you to read, out loud, twenty pages from it. Really put your heart and soul into the dialog, and bring it to life. I need to feel emotion, and I need to be invested in the characters. Now, go do it again, but just slightly different this time, because we’re going to need options. Okay, you’re doing great. You’ve been at it for about two hours now (if you average around six minutes a page, like I do), so take a ten minute break. Drink some hot tea with lemon and honey in it, and then go read it one last time.

So you’re about three hours into it — that’s it! Just three hours! Five hours less than an average (union-negotiated) workday! Your sinuses are feeling a little raw, because you’ve pushed a lot of sound and moisture out of your body. You probably feel some emotional fatigue, because you’ve been putting a lot of emotion into your work. But you’re a professional, so you don’t complain. In fact, you’re grateful for the job, because if you’re lucky you’ll get to do this maybe twice a month. And, honestly, this is still better than coal mining, right? Right.

Okay. Still with me? Good. You can eat lunch now, if you want. You probably go for something with a lot of salt in it, because it soothes your vocal chords. I’m a big fan of the chicken soup, though sometimes I’ll have a burrito, because #burritowatch.

Lunch is over. You’ve been at work for about 4 and a half or five hours at this point. You’re going to go read another ten pages from your book, but I’m only going to ask you to do it once, because you’re probably in the zone by now and you are nailing most things on the first take.

It’s time for the call outs, and then you’re done for the day. Maybe you’re done for the whole job! Awesome. Here’s what you’re going to do: you’re going to make a spreadsheet, with 40 rows on it. In each row, you’re going to put a line of dialog that you’re going to do three times in a row before you move on to the next line. This spreadsheet will have a few columns, with the dialog in the first column, and some direction in the second column. There’s a third column, usually, but that’s got information in it that’s not relevant to our job as actors, so ignore it.

I’ve made you a sample of a few lines from a military game I made up, to help you get started:

You’re going to do each of those three times, sometimes four times. You’re also going to do this for three more hours. Don’t worry, you can take a couple of short breaks — and you’ll need them — to drink some more of that tea you’re getting sick of.

If you’ve done this as I asked, it’s now six or seven hours after you started. Don’t talk at all for the rest of the day, and don’t make any plans to go audition for any other voice work for the rest of the week, because your voice is wrecked. Don’t go to any kind of day job that requires you to talk with anyone, either, because you’re not going to be able to do that. Oh, and over years and years of this, it’s going to build up into serious and permanent damage … and then you’re not going to be able to work with your voice anymore.

The fact that our employers won’t even talk with us about this growing problem, that affects the ability of all voice performers to take care of themselves, is reason enough to go on strike until they will.

But there’s more. Our employers also refuse:

[…] to hire stunt safety coordinators to protect actors’ well-being in the PCap volume, to share with us and/or our representatives the actual name of the games we work on, and to outline the nature of the work we’ll be doing?

Working in PCap (Performance Capture, or Motion Capture) is amazing, and that technology has allowed some of the most incredible works of video game art in history to be created. The Last of Us, Grand Theft Auto V, Heavy Rain, Uncharted 4, are just a few of the titles that have been brought to life by talented performers using their voices and their movements to create a realism that was unheard of fifteen years ago. It can be dangerous work, especially when there are fights involved, so when we work in live action film or television, there is always a trained, qualified, professional stunt coordinator on set to ensure that nothing goes wrong and nobody gets hurt. The performers who work in those scenes should be afforded the same protection we get when we’re on a traditional film or television set.

And I totally get the desire for studios to protect their upcoming releases by using codenames for various projects when we audition, but asking — in this case expecting — us to go into something with absolutely zero knowledge about the project, or what we’ll be expected to do if we are cast, is completely unreasonable. Maybe someone has a moral objection to the content of a game, and they’d like to know what it is before they commit to it. Maybe they get to see three pages of the script (usually just single lines with no context) and they wouldn’t take the job if they found out the part was just one scene, followed by sixty pages of call outs, being delivered by several different characters. Or maybe they just aren’t into the project when they find out what it is. The point is, expecting actors — or anyone — to commit to a job without knowing exactly what it entails just defies common sense. We have got to be able to figure out a compromise that fairly and equitably addresses everyone’s concerns. You know, a negotiation.

But it gets worse, because these people, who have refused to address a single proposal from SAG-AFTRA, have some ideas of their own that they apparently expect us to just accept without question:

Our employers want to be able to fine you $2,500 if you show up late or are not “attentive to the services for which [you] have been engaged.” This means you could be fined for almost anything: checking an incoming text, posting to your Twitter feed, even zoning out for a second. If a producer feels you are being “inattentive,” they want the option to fine you $2,500.
Our employers want to be able to fine the union $50,000-$100,000 if your franchised agent doesn’t send you out on certain auditions (like Atmospheric Voices or One Hour One Voice sessions)?

I’m sorry. What? The studios want to fine us if we’re “inattentive”? What does that even mean? And they want to fine SAG-AFTRA up to $100,000 if our agents don’t send us out on an audition? Because these same people who refuse to discuss any of our proposals for this upcoming contract believe … what, exactly? That they own us all and they can force our agents to do whatever they want them to do? This makes literally no sense at all.

If your agent chooses not to submit you for certain auditions, our employers want to put into our contract language forcing SAG-AFTRA to revoke your agent’s union franchise. This would mean that your agency would not be able to send you out on any union jobs, including those in animation, TV/film, commercials, etc.

So this is ludicrous. I can not think of a single instance in the history of the entertainment industry where a studio of any sort has asked for and gotten something like this. If my agent doesn’t submit me for something, for whatever reason, that’s between my agent and me. Maybe I don’t want to work for a certain studio, so my agent doesn’t submit me for their projects. Maybe I don’t want to work with a certain director, or another performer or whatever I feel like because I’m a sentient human being who makes his own decisions. These employers (at video game companies and video game studios) want to have the option of preventing our agents from submitting us for any work at all, and that’s outrageous. Our relationship with our agents is, frankly, none of any studio’s business.

IT’S NOT JUST SECONDARY PAYMENTS WE’RE FIGHTING FOR. IT’S THE FUTURE OF THE WORK WE DO.
We are at a crossroads, and we have a choice to make.

This is the crux of it, really. It really, really, really and honestly and truly isn’t about money. Sure, payment and compensation is certainly part of it, but it’s not all of it, and it isn’t even the biggest part of it. We really are fighting for the future of our ability to work in this business.

If we stand united, we have a chance to make real gains in this contract and to avoid these onerous rules and fines. SAG-AFTRA is one union now. We have power we’ve never had before, and it needs to be deployed now.
If we don’t stand together, we won’t even be able to maintain the status quo.
That’s why your Negotiating Committee, Executive Committee and National Board have all voted unanimously to support this action. Now, it’s in your hands. We hope you’ll join us and vote YES for a strike authorization.
Voting YES for a strike authorization does NOT mean we are on strike, it does NOT mean that we have to strike or that we will strike. It simply means that you authorize your Negotiating Committee and elected representatives to call for a strike against video game companies as a last resort, in order to make sure that your safety and well-being are protected, and that your future is free from any unnecessary fines and penalties. A strike authorization gives your Negotiating Committee real power at the bargaining table.

I love the work that I do. I’m grateful for the work that I have, and I’ve been lucky to work with some incredibly talented people on both sides of the recording studio glass. This isn’t about making enemies of the other creative people in the business, be they directors, studio engineers, artists, programmers, sound designers, writers, etc. This is about a handful of extremely wealthy, extremely powerful people trying to take away our ability to make a living, to take care of our voices, and to be safe on the set.

We in the voice acting community — along with the programmers and engineers, of course — have helped video games grow into a multi-billion dollar industry. Video games rival movies not because we push buttons and get loot, but because video games tell amazing stories that touch our lives in ways that movies can not.

I sincerely hope that a strike won’t be necessary. I sincerely hope that our employers will come to the negotiating table and talk with us in good faith, to reach an agreement that’s fair.

But if they won’t, I’ll go on strike unless and until they will, because I believe that #PerformanceMatters.

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    Wil Wheaton

    Wizard. Time Lord. Fake geek girl. On a good day I am charming as fuck.

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