Dirty Sexy Money di Craig Wright (USA 2007) Prima stagione

Bizzarra serie televisiva che sembra fondere “Dallas” e “I Tenenbaum”. Protagonista, Nick George, un giovane avvocato dai sani principi che deve prendere il posto del padre (morto in un sospetto incidente aereo) come avvocato di famiglia della più ricca e chiaccherata famiglia di New York.

Come spesso capita la puntata pilota è intrigante, ma il resto della stagione si invischia in eccessi di macrotrama (chi ha ucciso il padre di Nick? chi è il figlio illegittimo nella famiglia Darling) e la vagonata di intrighi, scandali, gelosie e intrallazzi sentimentali che in genere vengono usati ed abusati per tentare di fidelizzare lo spettatore alla serie Tv. Anche se la serie è ben confezionata con una fotografia elegante, una buona regia ed un cast notevole (Donald Sutherland, Jill Clayburgh, William Baldwin), la formula di “Dirty Sexy Money” tende subito a stancare. Il tono grottesco e comico di questa famiglia scandalosamente ricca e decadente abbinato ad una trama contorta e parzialmente drammatica, non funziona del tutto. Per non parlare dell’odioso attore che interpreta Nick George, ovvero Peter Krause protagonista della serie “Six Feet Under”, che sa esibire anche qui come in “Six Feet Under” solo tre espressioni: perplesso, irritato e perplesso-irritato. Fantastica invece come sempre l’interpretazione di Donald Sutherland, sempre qualche metro sopra il resto del cast, ma che non basta a salvare questa serie dal meritato oblio. La ABC infatti ha cancellato “Dirty Sexy Money” dal proprio palinsensto alla fine della seconda stagione a causa del basso seguito da parte del  pubblico.

Voto: 5 secchi di vomito

Good news for Old Town’s A Red Orchid Theatre: tickets for their current production Mistakes Were Made (our review here), by Craig Wright, have been selling like hot cakes – so much so that they’ve added an extra Wednesday night performance for all of October.  Be sure to check it out before it closes on October 31st.  Mistakes Were Made stars Michael Shannon, and is directed by Dexter Bullard.   (h/t Chris Jones)

Check out the interview with Chicago Shakes artistic director (and founder) Barbara Gaines regarding her direction of the company’s current production, Richard III. Well worth the read.

The Daily Beast has posted a rave review of Tracy Letts’ Superior Donuts, which played last year to positive reviews at Steppenwolf. An excerpt:

Letts and his cast can breathe deeply today. While a far less ambitious play than August, with its three-story set and sprawling cast, Superior Donuts is no less successful for what it aims to be: a tender, funny, and often tragic valentine to Letts’ Chicago in a time of intense cultural change. Fans of August won’t find that play’s heavy, gut-wrenching revelations here, but Donuts was always intended to be a smaller, lighter effort, as delightful and sweet as a doughnut itself. The play, which Letts began writing even before August, earned positive reviews when it first opened in Chicago with the same cast in July 2008, and after a year of Letts’ tweaks and rewrites, it may be even better….

Read the entire review here.

Per Perez Hilton:

Tina Fey’s brilliant comedy, 30 Rock, may be getting the one thing it’s severely lacking – a hot piece of eye candy!

Rumors are circulating that Broadway hottie, openly gay and successful actor Cheyenne Jackson, will allegedly be joining the cast in a semi or possibly a completely permanent capacity.

For those of you who don’t live and die by the goings on of the Great White Way, Cheyenne has been in productions like Xanadu and All Shook Up!. 

More here.

Craig Wright, criador de ‘Dirty Sexy Money’, se uniu ao produtor Mark Burnett para criar um novo projeto para a CBS.

Ainda sem título, o piloto, escrito por Wright, será produzido pela Sony Pictures TV e fala sobre um advogado que após um acidente de carro quase fatal, recebe uma segunda chance do fantasma de sua ex-mulher.

O roteirista também está atrelado a produção, ao lado de Burnett e sua mulher, Roma Downey. O acordo com a CBS possui uma multa com grande compensação financeira caso o piloto não se transforme em seriado.

Para quem não é familiarizado com Craig Wright, foi roteirista de ‘Lost’ e ‘Six Feet Under’, ganhando um WGA Award pela primeira e um Emmy pela segunda. Wright também foi produtor executivo de ‘Brothers & Sisters’, drama da ABC.

It was all my fault

A Red Orchid Theatre presents:

Mistakes Were Made
by Craig Wright
directed by Dexter Bullard
extended through October 31st (but tickets)

reviewed by Timothy McGuire

Craig Wright, Emmy-nominated writer of the hit HBO series Six Feet Under, has created in Mistakes Were Made an entertaining and intelligently witty play, even as Oscar Nominee Michael Shannon is alone on stage throughout most of the play; his time spent engaging in frantic phone conversations, as well as therapeutic talks with his close companion Denise, his fish.

Felix Artiflex (Michael Shannon) is desperately trying to put together a new play starring only the best actors and directors. He is frantically making promises beyond his control; doing anything he can to make this project a reality. Felix is a desperate man after losing someone close to him (his daughter?). We do not actually know much about his personal life, but we can tell by the way he works that there is a void in his life and a happiness that he is searching for. Felix has made some grave mistakes in his life, but he believes this new world premiere play about the French Revolution is his chance at redemption and achievement. In his attempts to fulfill all of his desires, he loses everything once again, but finds a small sense of happiness when he faces his own humility.

The stage is Felix’s office, and looks like an old fashion producer’s office from back in the 1970’s. I was surprised when I noticed that this play was taking place in relatively the present day, but considering the lack of money that sometimes comes from working in theatre, some offices no doubt still look like that in 2009. Tom Burch has designed the office littered with drama books, scripts and paperwork. Pictures of actresses and actors, that one assumes Felix has worked with in the past, are hanging on the walls. Pushed away, almost hidden amongst the paperwork and business memorabilia, are a few scattered kid’s toys showing us that there is or was a child that would come around his office.

The make-up artist Nan Zabriskie does an extraordinary job. She makes Shannon looked aged, not as an old man aged by years but by pressure and stress. Shannon’s cheeks look sucked-in, making it appear as if his skin hangs just a bit against his bone structure and his eyes look stressed like a man who hasn’t been able to relax for years.

This is a piece that the audience can relate to; the fight to get others to share in your vision and the struggle to escape hardships and find better, more respectable days in the future. Craig Wright’s writing is wonderfully done, including the emotional complexity involved when working while your personal life sits in the back of your mind. Wright has written a variety of characters that Felix interacts with over the telephone creating gripping twists in the plot line, as well as a nice interjection of intelligent humor. Having some knowledge of theatre and classic plays does increase the impact of some of his jokes: since Felix is a theatre producer, the jokes are industry friendly.

The performance by Shannon lives up to the hype, as he portrays the driven attitude of a man nearing the end of his career, reaching for something that he can achieve and hold on to. I felt as if I had an idea of what had happened to Felix and how his life had reached this point. Shannon gave Felix depth and a personal past through his display of tense emotions. We have a sense that he is missing the love and respect of someone in particular without it having to be specifically said. The constant busy-ness of jumping from conversation to conversation is made light and humorous with the pleasant interruptions by the secretary, Esther, played by Mierka Girten.

Even with this gripping performance, the play was too long for a basically one man act. While watching one of the best solo performances I have seen the man next to me feel asleep, and I began to get a serious leg cramp. I recommend this show because it is a rare opportunity to see an outstanding actor perform an intelligently written piece just ten feet away from you. It is an amazing experience to watch Michael Shannon capture the whole essence of Felix’s character, although an hour and 45 minutes with no intermission is just a little too long to watch even this man.

Rating: «««

Mistakes Were Made is playing at A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 North Wells St., Chicago, Thursdays – Sundays and has now been extended through October 31.

Personnel for Mistakes Were Made

I recently put together a post on signs of Bill James emerging into the mainstream in 1982. As a complement to that post, here are some excerpts from a Newsweek article on May 23, 1983, entitled “The Computers of Summer”:

The Chicago White Sox manager speaks fondly of his data base. His counterpart in Oakland spouts terms such as “printout” and “information retrieval” in lieu of the usual tobacco juice. Clearly Tony La Russa and Steve Boros are pleased to be pioneers in baseball’s computer age. But if the White Sox and A’s enjoy an advantage because of their Apple II Pluses, they had better exploit it quickly. The New York Yankees are coming on line in June, several other managers have expressed a serious interest in computers and even the more conservative clubs have begun scribbling statistics with unprecedented fervor. “I don’t know if you could call what’s happening a revolution,” says Craig White, a superstatistician who works full time for the Texas Rangers. “But baseball people are definitely seeking out new and more meaningful ways to scientifically analyze the game.”

The A’s inadvertently ushered in the computer era when they bought a system called Edge 1,000 for their broadcast team two years ago. The brainchild of Richard D. Cramer, a Philadelphian who designs pharmaceuticals by computer for a living, the Edge was used to determine mundane things like batting averages and runs batted in and to keep track of how certain hitters and pitchers matched up.

A digression here: Cramer went on to found STATS, Inc., and is Science VP for Tripos International, which “helps pharmaceutical companies and research facilities around the world successfully accelerate the identification and optimization of new compounds that have the potential to become drug products.” Read more about Cramer’s scientific career here. Back to the article:

At that time Billy Martin, who was then manager, wanted no part of the newfangled gizmo, so it fell to the White Sox, Edge’s only other subscriber, to adapt the system for managerial use. Today both teams employ computer operators who, by dint of some furious keyboard tapping, manage to record a highly nuanced, pitch-by-pitch account of each game. (“If the ball hits an outfielder on the peak of his cap and he gets charged with a four-base error,” says Chicago programmer Dan Evans, “we’re ready for that.”) The ballpark computers are connected via telephone hookup to a Philadelphia-based mainframe that stores the information and/or combines it with massive doses of leaguewide data to produce detailed player evaluations. . . .

The Society for American Baseball Research, a group of avowed figure filberts, now claims more than 3,200 “sabermetricians” who spend countless hours analyzing the game from odd angles. SABR member Craig Wright was hired by the Rangers after he produced hard evidence that players who grew up in warm climates performed better in steamy Arlington Stadium than those who did not. Although he’s made some suggestions to manager Doug Rader about which pitcher-catcher combinations seem to work best, Wright views his brand of sabermetrics as “mostly a front-office tool” that will be used to point up each player’s limitations at contract-negotiation time. The players realize that, and some have hired Bill James, author of the annual “Baseball Abstract,” as a consultant. Now when a management representative informs a player that he ranked a miserable 107th in the league in early-inning triples, agents can respond by noting that Billy Joe also was among the top 10 in bat-day bunts.

On the other hand, all the hoopla about “sabermetrics” was undercut a little by two quotes in the article, one from La Russa: “There’s not a heck of a lot of time to punch some buttons, wait for a machine to grind away and then learn that if we bunt we’ve got an 83 percent chance of doing this or that. The day the computers do the managing, machines will be playing the game.”

And another one from Craig Wright: “Every good manager is a sabermetrician at heart. I’m constantly amazed that when a manager is presented with a supposedly new fact, he already has it.”

[I've added a sequel to this post called More on Sabermetrics in 1983.]

Title: Lost: Season Two
Year: 2005-2006
Network: ABC
Creators: J.J. Abrams, Jeffrey Lieber, Damon Lindelof
Directors: Jack Bender, Stephen Williams, Alan Taylor, Adam Davidson, Eric Laneuville, Paul A. Edwards, Matt Earl Beesley, Roxann Dawson, Karen Gaviola, Deran Sarafian
Writers: Damon Lindelof, Steven Maeda, Leonard Dick, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Craig Wright, Edward Kitsis, Adam Horowitz, Carlton Cuse, Elizabeth Sarnoff, Christina M. Kim, Dawn Lambertsen-Kelly, Matt Ragghianti
Starring: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Naveen Andrews, Emilie de Ravin, Matthew Fox, Jorge Garcia, Josh Holloway, Malcolm David Kelley, Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim, Evangeline Lilly, Dominic Monaghan, Terry O’Quinn, Harold Perrineau, Michelle Rodriguez, Cynthia Watros
Music: Michael Giacchino
Episodes: 24, at c. 43 minutes
Synopsis: Walt is held by the “others,” a second group of survivors is found, and a Locke pushes a button
How I saw it: on video (rented from Netflix), September 2006
Subjective Rating: 8/10
Objective Rating: 10/10

Slightly better than the first season.  Enough questions are answered that when loads of new inexplicable things happen, you’re able to trust they will be explained eventually, which makes it all the more exciting.

Ayer decidí ver el estreno de Dirty Sexy Money en Antena 3 (ellos llaman a la serie Sexy Money, vaya usted a saber por qué). Tenía miedito por aquello de las pausas publicitarias eternas pero hicieron una emisión altamente respetuosa, teniendo en cuenta que son una generalista. Empezaron puntuales, el primer episodio se emitió del tirón, hubo un corte cuando terminó y un segundo corte de seis minutos al final del segundo capítulo. Menos mal que me había hecho la cena antes.

La serie me enganchó con la presentación de los personajes en el funeral, momento que podéis ver en el vídeo de arriba. Ante tamaña prueba de audacia y de inteligencia no pude hacer más que someterme y quedarme prendada de los Darling. En cierta manera el contexto de la serie me recordaba a Arrested development, otra serie de una familia rica con problemas y un pepito grillo en forma de abogado, sólo que Arrested development es una comedia y Dirty Sexy Money es un drama.

El reparto es absolutamente impresionante. Ya he comentado otras veces mi predilección por Peter Krause (A dos metros bajo tierra, La habitación perdida), y el resto del elenco no desmerece en absoluto esa tendencia actual de componer familias de rancio abolengo, como los Walker de Cinco hermanos (Brothers & Sisters en el original), con una equilibrada mezcla de actores y actrices del cine y de la tele de los que yo destacaría a Donald Sutherland, como un patriarca que da la falsa impresión de que no se entera de nada; Seth Gabel, como a un hijo con problemas dignos de Gossip Girl y que me dejó marcada cuando apareció brutalmente atormentado en Nip/Tuck; y Samaire Armstrong, la hija mimada que “renuncia” a su fortuna y que me cayó muy bien en The O.C., donde hacía de la lista fea, una especie de Andrea Zuckerman moderna (la de Sensación de Vivir); y también sale el que se ha comido a William Baldwin.

De todos los personajes me quedo con Brian Darling, el cura menos piadoso de la tele y que mantiene una relación de odio con Nick, el salvador de la familia (Peter Krause). Pero si es que sólo podía salir una buena serie del teclado de Craig Wright, que ha escrito también en Cinco hermanos, Perdidos y A dos metros bajo tierra.

Si la audiencia lo permite y Antena 3 sigue emitiendo la serie así de bien, voy a pasar los domingos muy entretenidos hasta que Telecinco estrene Hermanos y detectives el mes que viene, entonces me encontraré ante un dilema que aún no sé cómo voy a solucionar. Igual me toca confiar en los designios de mi disco duro para ver si cae algún capítulo de algún sitio porque la serie de Telecinco, que no tiene nada que ver con ésta, también me gusta bastante.

Craig Wright et Peter Krause reviennent dans une série ! Presque deux ans après l’arrêt de Six feet under, the best serie ever (j’avais pleuré en voyant le dernier épisode), Craig Wright a écrit Dirty sexy money, avec bien sûr comme personnage principal Peter Krause (feu Nate Fisher). J’ai donc maté le premier épisode hier soir (oui oui ça continue) et évidemment c’est absolument génial (trois jours, trois superbes séries, c’est rare non ?). Le pitch : le superbe Nick George est un brillant avocat (petite ascension sociale depuis Six feet under) dont le père n’était autre que « l’homme à tout faire » de la puissante famille Darling (un peu les Kennedy de la fiction)… Nick a toujours détesté cette famille (scandaleuse of course !) : argent, pouvoir, ambition et frasques… Trop peu pour lui. Mais c’est alors qu’à la suite du décès de son daddy, le vieux Darling lui propose 10 millions de dollars ($$$) annuel pour être l’avocat de la famille. Et bien sûr, il va accepter (10 millions $$$$$$ quand même), mais il ne sait pas bien à quoi il s’expose : la progéniture du vieux Darling est insupportable (hé hé…)…