"If France makes movies for the French, and America makes movies for the world, who's left to make movies for America?" asks David Kipen, the very sharp literary editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, in a recent article called "Offshoring the Audience" for The Atlantic. In a variation on what Tyler Cowen calls the "tragedy of cultural loss," Kipen sees the Global Movie trend as, ironically, victimizing Americans: "The movie business is booming abroad precisely because Hollywood is making pictures for the world market —at the expense of customers in America, where, not surprisingly, business is tanking."

While I have several disagreements with the premise, it's an intricate argument, and includes a reappraisal of the myth of the Seventies Golden Age with its enshrinement of the Hot Directors:

One could, however, imagine a very different book about 1970s filmmaking that profiled none of these men. Instead it would devote a chapter apiece to the less erratic, more thematically unified work of each of the men and women who merely wrote all those illustrious directors' movies for them. Rather than draw tortured auteurist parallels between The French Connection and The Exorcist simply because William Friedkin directed them both, such a book might more profitably examine the career of, say, Robert Getchell. In the 1970s Getchell received sole screen credit for both Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Bound for Glory. In the years since, he's written, among others, Sweet Dreams and This Boy's Life. Yet no film scholars think to study Getchell's career—whatever its inevitable contingencies at the whim of studio fortune or favor—as an organic whole. Add to Getchell's body of work those of the similarly anonymous Buck Henry, Nancy Dowd, Waldo Salt, and any number of others, and it becomes apparent that the 1970s represented not the decade of the director but a golden age of screenwriting.

Hear hear. Even Jaws, the seventies picture whose "Smile, you sonofabitch" ushered in the era of decrepit action movie one-liners, is remarkable now for having such an articulate and disciplined script. But there's plenty of evidence against the claim that movie globalization is squeezing out literate scripts. Among other things:

There is a writers' medium, which is immeasurably larger than the movies. It's called television. TV producers love writer-driven stuff for the same reasons old-Hollywood producers loved it: It's cheaper to produce, and writers are easier to replace, underpay, ignore, and otherwise push around than are directors, stars, etc. The dialogue in Gilmore Girls might not be as good as the dialogue in His Girl Friday, but it's just as fast.

Even if you stick to movies, the supply of dialogue-driven product exceeds the demand. Who are Wes Anderson and Neil LaBute and Kevin Smith and Woody Allen making movies for, anyway? (OK, Woody Allen's making movies for nobody, but still...)

If there's a problem for well written movies, the problem is on the audience side, not the production side: The artsyfartsy types who could be supporting this stuff don't have the courage of their convictions. Unlike the millions of yahoos who braved unanimous critical pans to give Van Helsing a massive opening, fans of literate pictures actually pay attention to bad reviews. Consider this exchange I had with a hyperborean buddy of mine a while back:

Me: "Did you see The Ladykillers?"

HB: "No, it looked really bad."

"Bad? Tom Hanks as an evil Colonel Sanders with yellow teeth and a maniacal gigle looks bad?"

"Well it got terrible reviews."

"So on the one hand you have two decades of experience with great movies by the Coen brothers, and on the other you have a pan by Jeffrey Lyons, and you're giving Lyons the edge."

(Of course, you must imagine my interlocutor speaking with a nasal, moronic whine, while I speak with a mellow, sexy baritone.) My point here is not that the Coens' remake of The Ladykillers is particularly great. But like all Coen movies, it had an elaborate plot, vivid characters, and plenty of colorful dialogue. It got a wide release, and nobody saw it but me.

The biggest problem for literate movies is that there is no problem for literate movies. Counting all the small-budget pictures, independents, vanity projects where Gwyneth Paltrow (our generation's T.S. Eliot) speaks with an English accent, and so on, there are more dialogue-driven movies being made now than ever before. If 95 percent of today's movies are crap, that's because 95 percent of all movies have always been crap, not because of some new macro trend.

At least as interesting as a pro-Bush pizza-maker being slapped around by the Beantown Demo machine is the way the Net can turn the story into national issue with a few keystrokes.

Mark Pasquale clearly has a First Amendment claim to his "Go Bush" sign, but you watch, the potential for the sign to cause a "disturbance" will carry the day. Time was the entire point of a political convention was disturbance.

If Dubya was running a nimble operation he'd show up at Pasquale's for a piece of pie, but that would invite reciprocal opposition action during the GOP's lockdown of NYC, and Lord knows we can't have that.

I've been a Sim City fan for a long time, dating back to the days of Super Nintendo. The games are great fun, despite the frustration of built-in anti-libertarian bias: you're mayor for life (actually for all eternity) without electoral challenges, zoning is a must, and citizens are woefully incapable of independent thought and action. But hey, if SimCitizens could do everything for themselves, it wouldn't be much of a game.

Anyway, my interest was piqued when I flipped through the L.A. Weekly at lunch today and found this review of a game that lets you pretend to be a presidential candidate in the 2004 election and several historical elections. There's a Canadian version, too. I'm downloading this as soon as I get home, definitely. Here's the link: President Forever 2004.

Hanah Metchis on the great Geico/Google trademark flap.

As I predicted in this article from the year 2000 in The American Enterprise about the follies and uncertainties of the federal "Everglades restoration," the expected cost just keeps rising.

"Restoration" is a misnomer. And it should be remembered that the damage the Army Corps' project is now trying to fix was caused by the last time the Army Corps chose to treat the 'Glades as a tinkertoy set in the late '40s. The Corps’ current $7.8-billion-and-rising work will just be another human re-engineering, reflecting current human wants. And, as I wrote in TAE:

As one report from a science sub-group to the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force put it, “the effects on the system of substantially altering large-scale ecological processes are largely unknown.” We simply don’t know what we need to know to have any assurance that the end result of the Re-Study will be any closer to anyone’s ideal Everglades than the result of the last manipulation.

Jacob Sullum digests what happens when the morbidly obese surrender responsibility to the pleasantly plump.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) introduces a bill, H.R. 1941, to normalize ballot access requirements across the states. (And yes, he's found explicit constitutional authorization for the federal Congress to take such an action.) While his mini-speech introducing it before the House refers to Ralph Nader's problems with getting on the ballot for president, the bill itself applies only to federal House of Representatives elections. If passed, it would allow you to get on any ballot for such an election with just 1,000 signatures of registered voters, or people eligible to vote if "the State in which the district is located does not provide for voter registration." (Anyone know what states those might be?)

That purportedly suspicious band of Syrians on a June 29 Detroit-L.A. flight that caused a wave of terror about potential terror in the blogging world has been positively identified on National Review Online. Clinton W. Taylor does some deducing and makes some phone calls and discovers that, in fact, these guys were perfectly normal passengers, the backup band for Syrian singer Nour Mehana, on their way to perform at the Sycuan Casino & Resort, near San Diego.

Strangely, after explaining that these guys were perfectly innocent musicians, Taylor still concluded that there was something wrong with the fact that

rather than land the plane in Las Vegas or Omaha, it was allowed to continue on to Los Angeles without interruption, as if everything were hunky-dory on board. It certainly wasn't. If this had been the real thing, and the musicians had instead been terrorists, nothing was stopping them from taking control of the plane or assembling a bomb in the restroom.

Wait--what about Annie Jacobsen, whose breathless account of her nerve-wracking experience watching these musicians run amok with their standing and bathroom-going started it all? What if she had instead been a terrorist? By the same logic, nothing was stopping her from taking control of the plane either, or assembling a bomb in the restroom.

In fact, even today, the skies are filled with people who, just like on that flight, are not terrorists and have no intention of taking control of a plane or assembling a bomb in it. Yet they are, as NRO points out regarding Jacobsen's sub-Shatnerian nightmare at 20,000 feet, blithely allowed to continue on to their destination without being brought down in some other city instead. I can only thank NRO for bringing that problem to our attention.

The Aladdin casino in Las Vegas made headlines earlier this week when it booted Linda Ronstadt for pimping Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11 during her show. Apparently, though, the Aladdin is in the process of being bought out by Planet Hollywood. The new CEO says he'll invite back Ronstadt and Moore for a double-header. I can only assume he was inspired by that double-CD set comprising a Chumbawamba album and a Noam Chomsky talk. Anyway, this sounds like a grand opportunity to let what happens in Vegas stay in Vegas. For as long as possible.

Reader Russ A. Dewey points us to a whole new meaning for term "public teat":

The New Yorker magazine reports in its July 26th edition that members of all four branches of the US military can get face-lifts, breast enlargements, liposuction and nose jobs for free -- something the military says helps surgeons practice their skills.

"Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible," Bob Lyons, chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio told the magazine, which said soldiers needed the approval of their commanding officers to get the time off.

Whole story here.

No wonder wars cost so much more these days.

Canada's first wave of gay marriages leads to first attempt at gay divorce; a June 18, 2003, legal union between two women causes a 10-year relationship to splinter after five days. Unfortunately, Canadian divorce law does not yet make any allowances for this situation.

"We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company."

That Lily Tomlin bit has been outdated for a couple decades. Having lost its status as the phone company, AT&T; is struggling to remain a phone company at all.

The emotional appeal may not be as obvious as a "Reach Out and Touch Someone" commercial, but it still gives me a warm feeling.

Low-power radio enjoys a victory in the Senate Commerce Committee. Unless you live in New Jersey.

The endless search for Masonic symbolism takes a detour.

Drinkable donut.

Police seal off Kerry HQ after staffer opens white-powder package.

A rousing end-credits fanfare for my favorite composer of movie scores. This Reuters story perversely identifies him as "'Rambo' composer Jerry Goldsmith." Though I'm a fan of both Goldsmith and the Rambo franchise, this was not among his better efforts. I sang Jerry's praises in a discussion a while back, so in honor of his death you can reread my comments at no additional charge:

John Williams couldn't hold Jerry Goldsmith's jockstrap. In a lot of ways Goldsmith is Williams's b-side, and in fact in some cases Goldsmith would do the music for the less prestigious of back-to-back Spielberg productions (Poltergeist, for example, while Williams got E.T.) He's been tarred by doing a lot of work on bad films—often a Goldsmith score is the only reason to see a movie—and is not unreasonably considered a hack.

Since I admire hacks, I'll make the case for Goldsmith. He's produced countless memorable scores in every style imaginable: waltz (The Boys From Brazil), march (Patton), tango (Six Degrees of Separation), avant-garde suite (Planet of the Apes), Ravel/DeBussy-type fantasia (incidental music in Poltergeist), ersatz church chant (The Omen), innumerable variations on Richard Rodgers's Victory at Sea music (he's the go-to man for commando/special forces pictures), novelty/merry-go-round music (Gremlins) and so on. Even when he clips a score, as he did in taking Leonard Bernstein's On the Waterfront for L.A. Confidential, he makes sure to steal a good one.

Make mine Jerry!

Americans aren't bothering with books anymore. Charles Paul Freund reads the good news to William Morris.

Caroline Waters shows how sensible HIV restrictions have coagulated into a real threat to America's veins.

Time was you could tell an addict by his sickly pallor. No longer.

The freshly renamed Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the costs of our military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq are getting out of hand. From the Washington Post, via MSNBC.

The U.S. military has spent most of the $65 billion that Congress approved for fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is scrambling to find $12.3 billion more from within the Defense Department to finance the wars through the end of the fiscal year....

Already, the GAO said, the services have deferred the repair of equipment used in Iraq, grounded some Air Force and Navy pilots, canceled training exercises, and delayed facility-restoration projects. The Air Force is straining to cover the cost of body armor for airmen in combat areas, night-vision gear and surveillance equipment, according to the report.

The Army, which is overspending its budget by $10.2 billion for operations and maintenance, is asking the Marines and the Air Force to help cover the escalating costs of its logistics contract with Halliburton Co. But the Air Force is also exceeding its budget by $1.4 billion, while the Marines are coming up $500 million short. The Army is even having trouble paying the contractors guarding its garrisons outside the war zones, the report said.
....
The GAO report detailed just why a $65 billion emergency appropriation has proved to be insufficient. When Bush requested that money, the Pentagon assumed that troop levels in Iraq would decline from 130,000 to 99,000 by Sept. 30, that a more peaceful Iraq would allow the use of more cost-effective but slower sea lifts to transport troops and equipment, and that troops rotating in would need fewer armored vehicles than the service members they replace.

Instead, troop levels will remain at 138,000 for the foreseeable future, the military is heavily dependent on costly airlifts and the Army's force has actually become more dependent on heavily armored vehicles. The weight of those vehicles, in turn, has contributed to higher-than-anticipated repair and maintenance costs. Higher troop levels have also pushed up the cost of the Pentagon's massive logistical contract with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root.

More expensive details in the full story. The GAO report is here.

Do attempts to crack down on smoking increase obesity-related deaths as those who've quit chunk up? Quite a dilemma... if only there were some simple way of making the complex tradeoffs between health risks for millions of people. A board of experts? Supercomputers monitoring personal consumption habits? It's a puzzler.

I thought I'd never say this, but left-leaning columnist Barbara Ehrenreich has a remarkably interesting op/ed in today's New York Times. "Abortion is legal - it's just not supposed to be mentioned or acknowledged as an acceptable option," notes Ehrenreich. Mentioned or not, most Americans do know a daughter, a wife, a lover, or a friend who has made this choice. Some 30 million American women have chosen to have an abortion, but the fact that one has had one is simply not talked about in polite society. Ehrenreich is right when she warns, "The freedoms that we exercise but do not acknowledge are easily taken away."

In what has to be one of the most-anticipated commission reports since the Warren Commission, the panel investigating the 9/11 attacks has delivered its final report to the president.

In MSNBC's telling, the report "slams 'deep' failings in government." Snippets:

"Since the 9/11 plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them," the bipartisan commission said. "What we can say with confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the U.S. government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress" of the plot by the al-Qaida network.

The report, as expected, called for the appointment of an overall director of U.S. intelligence operations....

The report also debunks what commissioners called “myths” that have built up around the terrorist strikes that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania, the officials said. Those include these findings:

* The Saudi government did not fund the 19 hijackers.

* Relatives of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden were not allowed to fly out of the country until after air traffic was allowed to move freely after it was grounded following the attacks. Moreover, those family members had no connection to the terrorist plot.

* Bush did not know about the specific threat beforehand, and there was little more that he could to prevent it....

The whole report is supposed to be released on the commission's web site later today.

One other piece of paper the former national security adviser--memorably and accurately described by Reason's own Tim Cavanaugh as a Gale Gordon manque--finally got around to returning.

As this Washington Post article makes clear, the Bergergate is in every sense an echo of the Clinton scandals: Stupid, petty, not fully provable, mostly irrelevant but a dark window into how power players act, and almost destined to die not from a bang but from a whimper. And, I should add, a good deal of fun, especially in its ability to generate all sorts of demeaning, if apocryphal, details.