#PEDRO WAS SNUBBED I TELL YOU | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

acdeaky · 3 years

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gentle arms (with kind eyes)

warning: fluff (like major, this is so soft)

note: javi deserves some love (and the world) so here’s reader doing just that//also this is based off this ask that @nathan-bateman received!

word count: 1.1k

there would never be a day where you disagreed with someone over colombian sunsets. through the slightly glazed windows of your apartment, the golden haze slipped through, coating your living room in orange and yellow hues, furniture dripping in brightness.

the day was long gone, leaving the night and evening time to settle, though that was futile in stopping javier peña from working. as soon as you stepped out of the bathroom, his hunched figure came into view, sat at the kitchen table with paper surrounding him. two snubbed out cigarettes and one light one sat in his ashtray, the smoke circulating in the air before dissipating.

a hand began carding through his unruly hair, an exasperated sigh accompanying it. that was when you decided enough was enough. it seemed that this was all javier would do lately: work his usual day and then bring it home with him, sitting for hours while scanning and reading over reports. it was time for a rest, god knows he needed it.

your footsteps were light as you walked over to him; not even the patter of your bare feet on the tiles disturbed him. once you stood behind him, you hands ran over his broad shoulders, wrapping themselves around to his front as your head rested on your left arm.

“javi,” you whispered gently, pressing a soft kiss to the underside of his ear, “come to bed.” your voice was like velvet, so desperately drawing him to the prospect of joining you, but his head brought him back to the task at hand.

his unresponsiveness spurred you on, pressing more kisses onto his skin, finding the curve of his neck under his yellow shirt. as you covered more of his skin, javier’s body began to lean into yours; his back beginning to press tightly against your chest.

here, with you, is home, he knows this. but in the back of his mind, the thought of escobar ruining the country and everything in it would mean no home, no you. so, he lets himself bask in you for a moment, allows himself the privilege of your lips across his skin as he takes a moment to breathe.

only a few minutes go by before you feel him pull away from you. his back stiffens and straightens up before his picking up his pen again and ignoring your hands (which are still running across his chest).

“querida,” he whispered like you earlier, his voice so quiet it seemed like only a mumble, “i have to get back to work.”

but that wasn’t enough for you. as soon as those words left his mouth, your body was quickly pressed to his again, your lips not stopping their ministrations as kisses were pressed into javier’s hair, the skin over his shoulders and up and down the column of his neck.

still, he stayed where he was, eyes flittering over the words of the reports, blurred, but still visible. the voice in the back of his head was telling him, urging him, to let you consume him, to let you look after him, so good, like you always did. but the inevitable threat of escobar silenced it, wanting nothing more than keeping you safe.

if this is what he had to do to achieve that, this is what he would do.

though, it didn’t help when your hands left his body altogether, the settling comfort they provided disappearing so suddenly. but you returned, this time in front of him as you shifted your body over his and onto his lap.

you quickly found your spot, settling down before you wrapped an arm around him again, pulling his chest to yours as your face nestled into his neck. your right hand rested over his heart, your palm feeling the steady thumps which you had missed so dearly.

sooner than you expected, the clatter of javi’s pen on the table came and his hands rested on your lower back. his shoulder nudged your head, shifting your own to look at him. your soft eyes met his tired ones, hiding how exhausted he felt behind them, but you knew. you always knew.

“i think it’s time for bed.” your voice was soft and gentle, hands moving from where they were to cradle his face. javier nodded, his head dipping down to meet your forehead, placing a kiss onto your lips as he did so.

the two of you sat there for a moment longer, breathing in one another as the golden light soon turned dark, the yellow hues turning to a deep blue as night took over the sun and the moon shone instead.

javier took your hand as you moved off of him and he stood, allowing you to guide him through to your shared room. he was still as you unbuttoned his shirt, his eyes watching your nimble fingers work against the fabric, practiced and perfect.

just before you pushed his shirt from his shoulders, his hands interrupted yours and made their way down to his belt buckle. the metal clashed together as he undid the clasp, slightly pulling it loose before popping the button and unzipping his fly.

this time, your hands interrupted his, gently pulling his away as you pushed his tight denim down, now leaving javier in only his boxers and his shirt. at their usual resting place, his hands tightened their grip on your hips, watching as your own traced up his stomach and chest, pushing the fabric off of his shoulders.

it joined the rest of his clothes on the floor; a visible weight lifted from his shoulders.

like earlier, you lead him to his side of the bed, pushing his body down by his shoulders until he was sat on the soft mattress. you left his side for your own, giving him a delicate kiss on his forehead before doing so; a promise that you would be with him again, you would be with him always.

so, as you laid there together, javier’s back pressed against the bed with you pressed into his side. your head rested on his chest, hearing the gentle thumps of his heart beneath your ear to remind you he was here. the worries of the day and the world were at bay for another night, stripped and gone from the two of you as you settled with each other, basked in the company of your favourite person.

there would never be a day where you disagreed with someone over colombian sunsets. through the thin curtains of your bedroom, the darkened haze slipped through, coating you and javi in purple and blue hues, bodies pressed together against the world.

you only accepted sunsets with gentle arms, watching them with kind eyes by your lover’s side. tonight was no different.

translation: querida - darling

taglist: @shes-over-bored @i-barely-go-on-online @sohoneyspreadyourwings @brian-maybe-not @deakysbabybooty @1001-yellow-daffodils @retromusicsalad @hardcoredisneynerd @painkiller80 @goldhoran @scarecrowmax @mebeatlized @seesiderendezvous @alright-mrfahrenheit @someone-get-a-medic @miamideacon @chlobo6 @teenagepeterpan @spacedustmazzello @deakysgurl @forever-rogue @xcdelilahxc @keepsdrawings @igotsuckedintothevoid @kill4hqueen @supersonicfreddie @laedymoon @inthedayswhenlandswerefew @warriorteam1924 @painandpleasure86 @boomerangbassist @mamaskillerqueen @bhxrdy

pedro tags: @goldhoran @whenthe-smokeisinyoureyes @fioccodineveautunnale @yespolkadotkitty @marvgrrl @wander-lustbabe

javier tags: @chaotic-noceur @opheliaelysia

#pedro pascal #pedro pascal x reader #javier peña #javier pena #javier peña x reader #x reader #narcos #she’s been sat in the drafts for a while #but here we are 😌#and i love her #so yeh #hope you enjoy!#acdeaky

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mothandpidgeon · 3 years

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Takes Two to Tango Pt 2 WIP snippet!

I actually knocked some things off of my to do list today so I’m sharing a little piece of part 2! Mobster!Pedro has taken over my brain. (Part 1 is here!)

This is a little nsfw!

Miguel began to pat you down and you looked to the ceiling with a huff.

“Miguel, what the hell are you doing?” Pedro asked.

The man stopped awkwardly, thick hands hanging around your elbow. This wasn’t procedure.

“Enough,” he waved him away. “Go.”

He left and the two of you were alone.

Pedro wondered if you’d dressed to get his attention. You wore a tight body suit under jeans with a denim jacket. A necklace dangling between your tits. No bra.

“I apologize but you can’t be too careful. There are a lot of very dangerous people around here,” he explained.

“You trust me that much?” you asked.

Pedro looked at the floor thoughtfully. He knew you had a gun. Years hanging around with the wrong types of people and he could tell that just by the way you’d walked in. He approached you carefully. You stiffened when he was close and he swore he saw goosebumps. He could smell your perfume, the sweet notes of Charlie, and the scent of cigarettes that clung to your hair. You practically stopped breathing as he leaned in, slipping his hand under your jacket and down the small of your back.

Just as he’d suspected. He pulled out a little snub nose revolver that had been tucked into your waistband.

When he backed off, your lips were parted, your cheeks flushed. He could see your nipples through the fabric of your top. If that was all it took, imagine if he had you the way that he wanted. The things he would do to you right here. But he wouldn’t, not while he toyed with a gun. Your gun.

“What’s this for?” he asked.

He pushed out the cylinder and dumped the bullets into his palm. You swallowed so words would come.

“There are a lot of dangerous people around here,” you repeated.

#might post part 2 on friday #it's a sexy one #wip snippet #writing fic #mobster!pedro pascal #mob!pedro pascal #mobster! pedro #pedro pascal x reader #i guess let me know if you want to be tagged!

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bestintheparsec · 4 years

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☕️ Pedro not getting and Emmy nomination 😭😒

I’m disappointed af like everyone, but unfortunately these snubs are very common 😭 especially when it comes to actors that aren’t as “mainstream” (although the show itself is insanely popular, I don’t think that Pedro is as widely known? I have no idea). But it’s okay! We love and appreciate him, and I’m sure he knows, and that’s all that matters anyways😌

send me ☕️ + [topic] and i’ll tell you my opinion on it!

#answered

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duamuteffe · 4 years

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So I woke up far too early this morning (thanks, depression) and suddenly remembered an episode from the somewhat distant past that relates rather directly to the shittiness in the Amalgamated Pedro Pascal Characters fandom yesterday.

I had spent summers here and there in my twenties as a camp counselor at an excellent horse camp, which means I lived in a cabin for two months and rode herd on a large group of girls from the ages of nine to sixteen. One day- my day off, to be specific- I was sacked out cold in my little room off the main cabin. I was awoken to the sounds of a group of the girls going through another (absent) girl's belongings. As I lay there trying to wake up and reach coherency they started reading her diary out loud and making fun of it. I got mad, got up, and marched them all down to the Director, who I later heard made it known as only a grandmother can that digging around in people's stuff and ridiculing them is tremendously nasty behavior and will not be tolerated. I can only imagine the levels of disappointment she applied to the situation.

So yeah, I figured that was the end of it, but the group came to me later that evening as a delegation and told me that I shouldn't have done what I did. They told me that I should have announced my presence the second I was aware they were there (because on my day off my priority should clearly be saving them the trouble of checking to see if the cabin was empty, I guess, and not, you know, enjoying my nap and assuming they were coming back to get a forgotten boot or hair tie as happened about twenty times a day) and that because of being caught and chewed out, they were upset and it was my fault.

I was bewildered. "What you did was wrong, " I said, and one of the girls burst out- in the most outraged tone I had heard to that date in my life, "Yes, but you made us feel bad!"

Everyone nodded sagely at me while I stared. Like, here's five white upper middle class teenage girls telling me that sure, they had gone through another girl's stuff and said cruel things about her diary which were spread through the camp and left her sobbing on her bunk for nearly three solid hours, but the real crime in their minds, the real tragedy, was that I had made them feel bad for it.

"You should feel bad, " I said, in continued bewilderment, and because I am not nearly as articulate irl as I am on paper I repeated, "What you did was wrong."

"You're not our mother!" one of them yelled, and I blinked at them and managed, "Well clearly someone has to be, " because at this point I was really starting to wonder if Rod Serling was going to step in through the door. The girls looked even more upset but the leader shushed them, said, "Well clearly we're not getting anywhere, " and sheparded them out of my room. As far as I am aware they never gave the girl whose posessions they'd rifled a sincere apology, and spent the rest of their camp session attempting to snub me (a grown-ass adult, who was absolutely not a part of their social circle and thus couldn't care less about their approval) for the terrible crime of *checks notes* making them feel bad for their shitty behavior.

And that is exactly what we saw yesterday; the unbridled indignation of someone being told off for being shitty and deciding that the real issue is them facing consequences for their actions. And it is just as bewildering a stance to me as it was that first time I encountered it, and even less acceptable coming from grown-ass adults who should absolutely and with no excuse be better than that. The immaturity and entitlement are just dripping from everything they've said about it, and they are doing the exact same thing those girls did lo those many years ago; they're claiming everyone but them is the problem, that their fetishization and objectification of a real actual human being isn't a big deal, it's the people who are calling them out for their assholery, just like those girls did, claiming that their violation of another person's privacy and posessions was a minor issue compared with they themselves being made to feel bad about it. And it still sounds just as fucking stupid as it did then.

#life in the duamuteffe household

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anarchistemma · 5 years

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Jerry Lewis. No comedian since Charles Chaplin has been so loved and so reviled. He is America’s Dark Prince of Comedy--brilliant, bitter, passionate and deeply conflicted. A man of many demons, his cockiness conceals a labyrinth of doubts and self-destructive impulses. An American original whom Americans have never quite come to terms with, he also happens to be one of the greatest filmmakers of the latter half of the 20th century. And for this he deserves an Academy Award.

It’s not surprising that he’s never even been nominated for one. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a tradition of snubbing comedians. The list of those whose movies failed to win a single Oscar is appallingly long and distinguished: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Mabel Normand, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Abbott and Costello, Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Bill Cosby, Richard Pryor, to name a few. The academy finally gave Keaton an honorary Oscar in 1960, and one to Stan Laurel in 1961 (after Lewis lobbied passionately on his behalf), and even one to Charlie Chaplin in 1972, bringing the once-demonized “un-American” director back to Hollywood after 20 years of exile in Europe.

Now it’s time to honor Jerry Lewis.

Lewis was a superstar in the 1950s and early ‘60s, the I Like Ike era of “The Organization Man,” when a Wonder Bread corporate monoculture force-fed an entire generation a bland diet of conformity. In a time of crew cuts and bouffant hairdos, of TV dinners, suburban tract houses, gleaming new supermarkets and the homogenized nuclear family paradigm set forth by “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver,” Lewis’ archetypal character, “the Kid,” served as an escape valve--a personification of the American id, cavorting across TV and movie screens, acting on the anarchistic impulses his audiences felt obliged to repress.

“We used to hang out on street corners, and guys would do Jerry Lewis imitations,” says Philip Kaufman, director of “The Right Stuff” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” who came of age in the 1950s. “The way that Jerry Lewis walked, that staggering, uncoordinated adolescent walk--you could feel the American youth culture being born. . . . Lewis and Elvis had this primordial American energy.”

Lewis gradually filled his comic archetype with nuances and complexities, so that it continued to resonate on deeper and yet deeper levels. He did this by becoming what he calls “a total filmmaker,” as Chaplin and Keaton had been. When Lewis began appearing in movies in 1949, he set about learning the technical intricacies of every aspect of production. “After about a year and a half I was able to load a BNC [35mm Mitchell] camera and do anything on the set that any technician did--maybe not with the quality of a man who’s done it for 25 years, but if he got sick, I could do it,” Lewis told me in an interview in December 2003. “I know depth of field like you know your wife’s first name. . . . I therefore proceeded to own every union card in the picture business.” Along the way, he also managed to invent the video assist, which allowed him to instantly replay scenes he’d just shot--now standard equipment on most Hollywood sets.

Once he’d mastered the filmmaking process, Lewis dared to declare his independence from the studio system. He wrote, directed and starred in a series of features that he also co-financed with his own money. “I mortgaged my house a couple of times, sold two cars, I remember that!” Lewis told me. In exchange for putting up half or sometimes the entire budgets of the films he directed, he got 50% or more of the profits and a level of creative autonomy that no screen comedian had commanded since Chaplin. “I had final cut on everything,” he said.

“I would love to have achieved the level of independence that he had,” Kaufman says. “The opposite is Orson Welles. He’s a half a generation before Jerry Lewis, but he gets destroyed because he can’t control the films.”

The movies Lewis directed--including “The Bellboy” (1960), “The Ladies Man” (1961), “The Errand Boy” (1961), “The Nutty Professor” (1963) and “The Patsy” (1964)--were bizarre stream-of-consciousness concoctions packed with brilliant pantomime set pieces and surreal comic nightmare sequences, moving Rorschach inkblots that reflected Lewis’ deeply conflicted psyche. “They were not regular Hollywood films,” says director Martin Scorsese. “There were no stories. No plots. They were very dreamlike, going from one free association to the next, almost like the later Luis Bunuel pictures, like ‘The Phantom of Liberty,’ which was a dream within a dream within a dream. You know you’re in the hands of a master; you just let him take you along. His films were almost avant-garde.”

Like Buster Keaton, Scorsese says, Lewis had an uncanny ability to pour his subconscious onto a movie screen, creating phantasmagoric visions permeated with disturbing psychological undertones. Unlike Keaton, Lewis often worked in color. He urged his cinematographer, W. Wallace Kelley, to pump huge amounts of light onto his sets until the comic book hues popped off the screen. “Lewis’ use of color has influenced many filmmakers, [such as] the way David Lynch uses color, and Pedro Almodovar,” Scorsese says.

In the mid-'60s, European critics--the French, most famously, or infamously, depending on your point of view--embraced Lewis as a genius, an heir to Chaplin and Keaton. Chagrined American critics sputtered outrage. They saw Lewis as a vulgarian, a pretentious, sentimental egomaniac who was a tad less subtle than the Three Stooges, and a lot less funny. And those were the good reviews. “Mr. Lewis is a frenetic performer,” wrote Eugene Archer of the New York Times, “but he lacks a point . . . a rubber-limbed robot making faces in a void.” Harriet Van Horne of the World Telegram wrote of a Lewis performance, “you flinch from the soulless vulgarity of his spastic twitches and low-class leers.” In his 1968 book “The American Cinema,” Andrew Sarris demeaned not only Lewis, but also his fans. “Lewis appeals to unsophisticated audiences in the sticks and to ungenteel audiences in the urban slums,” Sarris wrote. “He is bigger on 42nd Street, for example, than anyplace else in the city.”

Lewis seemed to scuttle any chance that American intellectuals would change their minds by taking the fight to the enemy. He wrote nasty letters to reviewers and denounced them on television and radio. He said they were “caustic, rude, unkind and sinister. . . . They’re burying the business they’re paid by.” And in his most infamous salvo, blasted in a 1981 Los Angeles Times interview, he called them “whores.”

But beneath his belligerence one sensed the man had been deeply wounded. In a telling passage in his landmark 1971 book about moviemaking, “The Total Film-maker,” Lewis confessed: “I cannot sit at certain tables at the Directors Guild because I make what some people consider is a ‘hokey’ product. John Frankenheimer waves and hopes that no one else sees his hand, simply because I film pratfalls and spritz water and throw pies.”

In countless magazine profiles and biographies, Lewis has been vividly portrayed as a tantrum-throwing egomaniac. But there is another side. I’ve talked with many people who worked with Lewis over the years--including his longtime collaborators, writer Bill Richmond and comedienne Kathleen Freeman--who told me stories of his private acts of extraordinary kindness and generosity. Peter Bogdanovich tells of how Lewis befriended him when he was a poor, young aspiring filmmaker--lending him a car, allowing him to screen movies at Paramount and charge the cost to Lewis’ production company. “He’s been a good friend to me for more than 40 years,” Bogdanovich says. When I first interviewed Lewis a year ago, I found him to be a perceptive, articulate but deeply divided man who oscillated during the course of our one-hour conversation from laughter to anger to tears. His ability to infuse his movies with these seething emotions gave them their strange emotional charge, and helped make them audacious and poetic works of art.

In “The Bellboy” and “The Errand Boy,” Lewis’ Kid finds himself wandering through sprawling corporate complexes: the ultramodern curvilinear interiors of Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau hotel, and the cavernous soundstages and maze-like streets and corridors of a movie studio. He desperately tries to mesh with the gears of the industrial combine, but his inability to function with the automaton efficiency of his co-workers inevitably causes catastrophe. “There’s a sense in which he’s a modern man, a universal figure confronted with modernity, with bosses and difficult jobs, and especially with a fast pace that’s difficult to keep up with,” says Henry Sheehan, critic for KPCC-FM and KCET.

There are haunting moments that evoke the lonely yearnings of the alienated in America’s increasingly institutionalized society, such as the brilliant pantomimes in which the Kid conducts an imaginary orchestra or imagines himself to be a movie mogul holding forth in a deserted boardroom. Or the scene where the Kid is assigned the Sisyphean task of setting up more than 1,000 chairs in an auditorium the size of a football field. Lewis films from one wide angle, holding the shot as the Kid recedes farther and farther into the great hollow hall. “When he started directing his own pictures there was a powerful visual sense,” Scorsese says. “It was almost as if the films were drawn by hand--animated. Something was very arresting about the way Lewis designed his scenes and shot them, the way he focused the eye of the audience.”

In the middle of “The Bellboy,” the Kid is ordered to help with the luggage of an arriving celebrity: Jerry Lewis, the movie star. Lewis the star arrives in a limousine with a huge retinue of yes-men and sycophants. “That kind of thing was refreshing and brilliant,” Scorsese says. “It opened the audience’s mind. What is the reality? We know we’re watching a film. We know it’s directed by him. We know he’s in control. Then he shows up as a film star within the movie! It plays with your sense of what reality is and what cinema is--and also what celebrity is.” In a culture obsessed with celebrity, Lewis shows us that a star is as objectified as a Playboy centerfold, and his existence at the top of the ladder every bit as lonely as that of the Kid at the bottom. The entourage of Jerry Lewis the movie star laughs at his every remark. When he tearfully reveals that a beloved aunt just died, the crowd howls with unhinged hilarity. “Nothing like a laugh!” someone screams.

In “The Ladies Man,” the Kid serves as a gofer in a boarding house full of young women. Lewis built the entire mansion--four stories tall, including a stairway and working elevator--on two soundstages at Paramount, with the fourth wall of every room cut away, like a giant dollhouse, so the camera could swoop on a crane from room to room, each of which was pre-lighted and wired for sound. It was another groundbreaking technical innovation, and a fantastic dreamscape through which Lewis’ imagination ran wild. In one spectacular crane shot, Lewis pulls back to show the entire dollhouse. “That shot is so striking,” Scorsese says. “In a funny way, it had something to do with the way I did a shot in ‘Gangs of New York’ in the beginning of the film, showing the [multileveled] hell of the old brewery

Scorsese found more inspiration in Lewis’ masterpiece, “The Nutty Professor,” in the famous sequence that occurs after Professor Kelp has transformed himself into the incandescent lounge lizard Buddy Love. At first we do not see Love. Instead we see the world through his eyes. In an intricately choreographed tracking shot, Love walks through the street toward the Purple Pit nightclub and various passersby react with astonishment to his high-voltage charisma. “I use that as an example of the kind of point-of-view shots that I use,” Scorsese says. In “Gangs of New York,” he told his assistant director, Joseph Reidy, that he wanted to choreograph a similar point-of-view shot in the scene where Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) places a rabbit pelt on a Five Points fence as a declaration of war. “I am constantly referring back to Lewis’ work,” Scorsese says.

Lewis explored the polarities of his personality--the lonely kid he had been in his youth and still felt himself to be, and the polished persona he presented on television and in live performances--not only in “The Bellboy,” but also in “Cinderfella” (directed by Frank Tashlin and produced by Lewis) and “The Errand Boy.” This theme reached its full and most complex expression in “The Nutty Professor.” The movie is an extended investigation of Lewis the public performer, and his insecure inner self. But more than a movie star’s exercise in self-absorption, it is a meditation on the American model of masculinity. Lewis acknowledges its pathology even as he admits that he cannot free himself of his aspiration to embody it. In the climax of the movie, Buddy Love transforms back into Professor Kelp before a stunned crowd of college students. Kelp makes a heartfelt speech about the fallacy of trying to create a false personality to please others and the need for self-acceptance, and there’s not a dry eye in the house. But in the film’s denouement, as Kelp leaves for his wedding with heartthrob Stella (Stella Stevens), the director reveals that she has stuffed two bottles of Kelp’s magic tonic in the pockets of her jeans--an admission that there’s a dark, erotic power to Love’s aggressive posturing that Americans find irresistible, despite whatever lip service they may pay to the values of sensitivity and brains.

“Lewis’ sense of burlesque is a strange type of comedy because it’s full of anxiety,” says director Barbet Schroeder (“Barfly,” “Single White Female”). “It’s a tragic vision that makes you laugh. . . . And all that is completely personal and completely extraordinary. He took burlesque comedy one step further, like any great artist, to a very freaky, disturbing modern tone.”

In 1977, someone at an American Film Institute seminar asked Lewis why his films hadn’t been rediscovered, as those of other great comics had been. “They wait until you die,” he snapped. Until recently, it looked as if Lewis might be right. During the last decade, a series of serious health problems--bouts of meningitis and pulmonary fibrosis--forced him to cancel live engagements and spend long stretches in the hospital. But last year, Lewis bounced back. He returned home from the hospital, and in the fall he released sparkling wide-screen DVD transfers of 10 movies from his golden period, complete with outtakes and commentary tracks.

And the damnedest thing happened. They got good reviews. The New York Times published not one but two rave notices. In the second one, Dave Kehr wrote: “Is it finally time to stop with the French-love-him jokes and acknowledge that Jerry Lewis is one of the great American filmmakers?” Kehr noted that the DVDs “reveal both the fierce creativity of his comic performances and the extreme formal sophistication of his direction. The centerpiece is the 1963 ‘The Nutty Professor’ . . . a study in split personality that both anticipates Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 ‘Persona’ and surpasses it in psychological acuity. It’s also a lot funnier.”

In December 2004, the Library of Congress concluded that “The Nutty Professor” is a movie of lasting cultural significance, worthy of preservation, and added it to the National Film Registry. Then in January, Lewis received a career achievement award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. The explanation for this turnaround is simple: As older critics retired, a new generation replaced them. They had come of age in the 1950s and ‘60s and had spent the better part of their youth in the dark, watching Jerry Lewis and laughing till they just about wet their pants. “For me, personally, the impact of watching ‘The Nutty Professor’ as a boy in a drive-in in the Valley was huge,” says Robert Koehler, who writes for Variety. “It was the first time I had felt a weird sense of terror, horror and comedy all in one fell swoop. I’d never felt that before in a movie. There was something going on here besides just another Hollywood comedy. There was a sense of wild theatrics. I was only 7 years old at the time; I couldn’t even put my finger on it, but it so absolutely impressed my young mind.”

As they grew older, like Morty S. Tashman in “The Errand Boy,” these young fans made their way to Hollywood to become part of show business. Their film school professors and older critics had told them Lewis was vulgar and tasteless, but they went back and watched the movies and didn’t believe it. “I always thought he was funny, from the first time I came to him, at 9 years old,” says Henry Sheehan, president of the L.A. critics association. “Once I grew older and learned something about composition and the mechanics of gags, I was full of admiration for him. I think my experience is pretty common for people my age.”

For years a growing number of Lewis supporters had been urging the association to give the comedian the career achievement award. This year the membership suddenly agreed. “It was pretty widely supported,” Koehler says. “In the past there have been complaints. The first year I was in the group, his name was brought up and some people were openly contemptuous. I heard none of that this time. I don’t know why. I think it’s the test of time.”

As the night of the awards ceremony approached, a question loomed: How would Lewis react? Would he be able to drop the contentious attitude he’d held against his old adversaries for more than half a century? When I talked with him shortly after the award had been announced, he seemed to be struggling for his equilibrium. “I don’t really know how I’m going to deal with it,” he admitted, then murmured something about handling it with grace. But when he talked with other journalists, some of the old fighting verbiage crept into his remarks. He told Larry King the award was “the best revenge I’ve ever had.” And to a reporter from the Los Angeles Daily News, he said, “Jesus Christ, is that retribution or not?”

Finally, the moment came. Peter Bogdanovich presented the plaque. Lewis stepped to the podium. His eyes passed over the crowd. “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. I am delighted to be the recipient of this award. . . . What took so goddamned long?” The room exploded with laughter. Lewis segued smoothly into his Vegas act and did about 10 minutes that had the critics, filmmakers and stars doubled over and gasping for air.

Then he stopped, his voice growing serious. “I would feel somewhat remiss if I didn’t show you something that I believe brought me here tonight,” he said. Film rolled, and on the screen behind him appeared a 35-year-old Jerry Lewis doing the famous Chairman of the Board pantomime from “The Errand Boy,” his gesticulations and mugging timed to the tempo of Count Basie’s “Blues in Hoss’ Flat.” It was much more than funny. It was at once melancholy, poetic and exhilarating. When it was over, the room rose in a howling, hooting standing ovation. The only one of the night.

Now it’s the academy’s turn to step up. A few months ago, Bogdanovich wrote a letter to its president, Frank Pierson, suggesting that Lewis be given an Oscar. I hope the Academy doesn’t take too long. The hour is late. Another great clown and groundbreaking filmmaker, too long ignored, deserves to be honored by his peers.

JL’s yahrzeit

The once and future King of Comedy 👑

#rip #jerry lewis #the once and future king of comedy #yahrzeit #LA Times #david weddle #jerry lewis deserves an oscar #king of comedy #quote

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gastonlibrary · 7 years

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2017 Oscar Nomination Predictions

Its Oscar season again! This year, the nominations will be announced at 8:15 a.m. EST on Tuesday, January 24th. Here is a sneak peak that the potential nominees from our resident Oscarologist Andrew Pierce!

Best Picture

Arrival

Fences

Hacksaw Ridge

Hell or High Water

Hidden Figures

La La Land

Lion

Manchester By the Sea

Moonlight

Other Possibilities – Nocturnal Animals, Florence Foster Jenkins, Deadpool, Loving, Sully, 20th Century Women, Captain Fantastic, I, Daniel Blake,

Commentary - Before we get in to the predictions, it’s probably best to explain how this whole nomination process works. During the nomination phase, the 6,500 or so members of the Academy vote for the category that corresponds to their branch. So costume designers pick the five nominees for Best Costume Design, the animation branch picks the five nominees for Best Animated Feature, etc. But all members are eligible to vote for Best Picture nominations across the various branches. Since 2011, the number of nominees can vary between 5 and 10 depending on the voting. The first two years there were nine, the last two years there were eight. There is a lot of math behind it, but trust the experts that say that it is nearly impossible to have just 5 or 10, it is almost always going to fall in the 6-9 range, with 8 or 9 seeming like the sweet spot. The voters rank their favorite films, and starting with first place votes, each film that hits the right number of votes gets nominated. Then it goes to second or third, and so on until a film gets the right number of votes. That means if you really want to get a film nominated for Best Picture, put it at number 1. In the second phase where a winner is picked, the preferential ballot favors a film that is well liked, and gets as many second and third place votes as first place votes. But for the nomination phase it is passion that counts. Confused yet? You’re not alone. That’s why there is simply no science to predicting the Oscars. It’s a mixture of precursor knowledge, knowledge of Academy history, and a whole lot of gut. I am picking nine films this year, because the voting has seemingly coalesced around these nine films. The BAFTA surge for Nocturnal Animals makes it a threat. Florence Foster Jenkins is set to actually do pretty well across the board, and the big surprise this year was Deadpool which managed a Producers Guild (PGA), Writers Guild (WGA), and an American Cinema Editors (ACE) Eddie nomination. So don’t discount that trio. At the top of the pack is the trio that has been there all season: La La Land, Manchester by the Sea, and Moonlight. Expect your Best Picture winner to come from that group. Arrival has shown tremendous strength across the guilds, critics, and BAFTA voters, as has Lion, whose first time director Garth Davis snagged an impressive Director’s Guild (DGA) nomination. If there were only five nominees, I think these would be the five. Beyond that it gets a bit tricky. Fences and Hidden Figures got SAG ensemble nominations, and have done well elsewhere. But neither are strong contenders for some of the other major awards like director. Still, I think they make the cut. Hell or High Water is the little indie that could this year, and despite some misses here and there, I think that the largely white, male Academy will make sure this gets in. Finally there is Hacksaw Ridge. Mel Gibson is still not off the hook with many in Hollywood, but they really respect this film. It will be interesting to see if they are willing to forgive the fallen, but talented star.

Best Director

Denis Villeneuve “Arrival”

Damien Chazelle “La La Land”

Kenneth Lonergan “Manchester By the Sea”

Barry Jenkins “Moonlight”

Tom Ford “Nocturnal Animals”

Other Possibilities – Garth Davis “Lion”, Martin Scorsese “Silence”, Denzel Washington “Fences”, David Mackenzie “Hell or High Water”, Theodore Melfi “Hidden Figures”, Mel Gibson “Hacksaw Ridge”, Stephen Frears “Florence Foster Jenkins”, Ken Loach “I, Daniel Blake”

Commentary – This is the branch that famously snubbed Ben Affleck for Argo and Ridley Scott for The Martian, and threw in some out of the box choices like Fernando Meirelles, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch, Julian Schnabel, Benh Zeitlin, and Michael Haneke. So I’m always on the lookout for the surprise nominee. Last year it was Lenny Abrahamson for Room. The year before it was Bennett Miller for Foxcatcher, whose film didn’t even make the Best Picture cut. I think a similar thing will happen for Tom Ford this year. Nocturnal Animals is on the cusp of a Best Picture nomination. But it’s not a film people love; it’s a film people clearly respect, especially the craft of it. A similar fate just happened to it at BAFTA, where it landed in a lot of categories except the top one. It’s a long shot call, but when you have four easy slots, and one question mark with the Directors Branch, always go for the long shot. The other four are Lonergan, Jenkins, Chazelle and Villeneuve, who feel pretty safe. Davis could follow up his DGA nomination, Marty is a legend, Gibson (see Best Picture), and Mackenzie, Melfi, Washington, and Frears have potential Best Picture nominees on their hands. Finally, after getting the BAFTA nomination, don’t be shocked if this very European branch goes for a really outside the box pick with Ken Loach

Best Actor

Casey Affleck “Manchester By the Sea”

Andrew Garfield “Hacksaw Ridge”

Ryan Gosling “La La Land”

Viggo Mortensen “Captain Fantastic”

Denzel Washington “Fences”

Other Possibilities– Jake Gyllenhaal “Nocturnal Animals”, Ryan Reynolds “Deadpool”, Joel Edgerton “Loving”, Tom Hanks “Sully”

Commentary – Jake Gyllenhaal seemingly threw a wrench in this race when he beat out Denzel Washington for the fifth slot at BAFTA. But then I did a little digging and realized that in the three decades since Denzel Washington became a glorified movie star, he has received six Oscar nominations and won twice. In that same time period, he has received a whopping zero BAFTA nominations. So there is some weird think with British voters and Denzel, but that certainly is not the case over here. That leaves the same five that all got Globe and SAG nominations: Garfield, Gosling, Affleck, Washington, and Mortensen. I would be surprised if this didn’t match 5/5.

Best Actress

Amy Adams “Arrival”

Emily Blunt “The Girl on the Train”

Natalie Portman “Jackie”

Emma Stone “La La Land”

Meryl Streep “Florence Foster Jenkins”

Other Possibilities- Isabelle Huppert “Elle”, Taraji P. Henson “Hidden Figures”, Annette Bening “20th Century Women”, Ruth Negga “Loving”

Commentary – This race has become incredibly crowded this year, which is fantastic considering the lack of leading roles for women in film. The two major groups that cross over the Oscars are SAG and BAFTA, and this year they matched 5/5. A lot of folks are underestimating Emily Blunt despite these two nominations because the film was not well received. They may be right, but those folks are stupid to ignore the stats favoring her nomination. Yes Isabelle Huppert won the Globe for Elle, but did enough voters see it? Will her unlikeable character be a distraction? Yes Hidden Figures is hitting its stride, but will Taraji P. Henson make it in without any major precursors? Is an Annette Bening prediction crazy, without SAG (6 nominations and 2 wins) and BAFTA (3 nominations, 1 win), two organizations that normally love her? There are too many questions marks for the other possibiltiies, and I simply don’t know who would replace Blunt. So I’m taking the safe road, and sticking with the usually telling SAG/BAFTA combination.

Best Supporting Actor

Mahershala Ali “Moonlight”

Jeff Bridges “Hell or High Water”

Hugh Grant “Florence Foster Jenkins”

Dev Patel “Lion”

Aaron Taylor-Johnson “Nocturnal Animals”

Other Possibilities – Lucas Hedges “Manchester By the Sea”, Kevin Costner “Hidden Figures”, Michael Shannon “Nocturnal Animals”, Simon Helberg “Florence Foster Jenkins”, Ben Foster “Hell or High Water”

Commentary – When Aaron Taylor-Johnson pulled off an upset at the Globes, it seemed like one of those strange anomalies that would not cross over to the Oscars. But then his momentum continued with a BAFTA nomination and a strong showing for Nocturnal Animals overall. Unfortunately that means that the talented Lucas Hedges, in his big breakthrough Manchester By the Sea, will probably miss out, as Ali, Bridges, Grant and Patel all got Golden Globe, SAG, and BAFTA nominations.

Best Supporting Actress

Viola Davis “Fences”

Naomie Harris “Moonlight”

Nicole Kidman “Lion”

Octavia Spencer “Hidden Figures”

Michelle Williams “Manchester By the Sea”

Other Contenders – Janelle Monae “Hidden Figures”, Hayley Squires “I, Daniel Blake”

Commentary – So the Globes and SAG matched up perfectly, and the only wrench in the equation was a surprise nomination for Hayley Squires at BAFTA. I, Daniel Blake feels like a truly British effort that I was doubt was widely seen enough by Oscar voters to register. That leaves the final five looking pretty comfortable: Davis, Harris, Kidman, Spencer, and Williams.

Here are the rest of the categories:

Best Adapted Screenplay

Eric Heisserer "Arrival"

August Wilson "Fences"

Luke Davies "Lion"

Barry Jenkins and Tarell Alvin McRaney "Moonlight"

Tom Ford "Nocturnal Animals"

Best Original Screenplay

Taylor Sheridan "Hell or High Water"

Damien Chazelle "La La Land"

Efthymis Filippou and Yorgos Lanthimos "The Lobster"

Kenneth Lonergan "Manchester By the Sea"

Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush, Jim Reardon, Josie Trinidad, Phil Johnston and Jennifer Lee "Zootopia"

Best Animated Feature

Kubo and the Two Strings

Moana

My Life as a Zucchini

The Red Turtle

Zootopia

Best Documentary Feature

13th

Cameraperson

Gleason

I Am Not Your Negro

O.J.: Made in America

Best Foreign Language Film

Land of Mine (Demark)

A Man Called Ove (Sweden)

My Life as a Zucchini (Switzerland)

The Salesman (Iran)

Toni Erdmann (Germany)

Best Cinematography

Bradford Young "Arrival"

Linus Sandgren "La La Land"

James Laxton "Moonlight"

Seamus McGarvey "Nocturnal Animals"

Rodrigo Prieto "Silence"

Best Costume Design

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Florence Foster Jenkins

Hail, Caesar!

Jackie

La La Land

Best Film Editing

Arrival

Hacksaw Ridge

La La Land

Manchester By the Sea

Moonlight

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Deadpool

Florence Foster Jenkins

A Man Called Ove

Best Original Score

John Williams "The BFG"

Alexandre Desplat "Florence Foster Jenkins"

Justin Hurwitz "La La Land"

Dustin O'Halloran and Hauschka "Lion"

Nicholas Britell "Moonlight"

Best Original Song

Hidden Figures - Runnin'

Jim: The James Foley Story - The Empty Chair

La La Land - Audition

La La Land - City of Stars

Moana - How Far I'll Go

Best Production Design

Arrival

Doctor Strange

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Hail, Caesar!

La La Land

Best Sound Mixing

Arrival

Hacksaw Ridge

La La Land

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Sully

Best Sound Editing

Arrival

Deepwater Horizon

Hacksaw Ridge

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Sully

Best Visual Effects

Arrival

Deepwater Horizon

Doctor Strange

The Jungle Book

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Best Animated Short

The Head Vanishes

Inner Workings

Pearl

Piper

Sous Tes Doigts

Best Documentary Short

Extremis

Joe's Violin

The Mute's House

Watani: My Homeland

The White Helmets

Best Live Action Short

Nocturne Black

The Rifle, the Jackal, The Wolf and the Boy

Sing

Timecode

The Way of Tea

#gastonlibrary #oscars 2017 #oscars #arrival #fences #hidden figures #la la land #manchester by the sea #moonlight #hacksaw ridge #lion #hell or high water

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biofunmy · 5 years

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Russell Harvard, Reaching Beyond ‘King Lear’

Even though he gouges out eyeballs eight times a week, Russell Harvard seems like a really nice guy.

When I tell the actor that I have a cold, as we sit in a corner of the Lambs Club in the theater district, he insists on pouring me a glass of the jasmine, elderflower and violet kombucha he is drinking.

“That’s my favorite,” said Mr. Harvard, who is deaf. He can speak with what he has called “a deaf accent” and, with a hearing aid, the sound in his right ear can get “pretty crisp.” But for this interview, he mostly relied on an American Sign Language interpreter, his friend Steven Nugent.

The tall, brawny Mr. Harvard, 38, is playing the Duke of Cornwall, the sadistic husband of Lear’s rotten daughter, Regan, in the buzzy (if mostly Tony-snubbed) Broadway production of “King Lear,” with Glenda Jackson as Lear.

I had always thought of “King Lear” in terms of metaphors about sight. Lear and his ally, the Earl of Gloucester, are both blind when it comes to deciding which of their children to trust. An obtuse Lear orders his loyal daughter, Cordelia, out of his sight. “See better, Lear,” his friend, the Earl of Kent, warns him. Cornwall stabs Gloucester’s eyes with the imprecation, “Out, vile jelly!”

But now, thanks to Mr. Harvard, who translates Shakespearean language into sign language for his role, I also think about the play in terms of metaphors about deafness.

Like Donald Trump and so many other leaders and moguls bombarded with the white noise of flattery, Lear cannot hear the truth. His ears are attuned only to sycophants, a ruinous trait.

“The word ‘nothing’ is the most important word of the play, and absence is an important theme,’’ said Sam Gold, who directed “King Lear.” “Speechlessness. Literal and metaphorical blindness. The silence and lack of spoken language in my production is an exploration of that thematic nothingness.”

Mr. Harvard’s interpreter onstage is his childhood friend Michael Arden, who also plays Cornwall’s servant. Mr. Harvard, Mr. Gold and Alexandria Wailes, the show’s director of artistic sign language, worked together to interpret Shakespeare.

“Russell is a very beautiful and poetic signer,” Mr. Gold said. “Sign language is the perfect language for translating Shakespeare because it’s filled with imagery and metaphor. Shakespeare’s language, unlike contemporary English, is dense with images and invented words, much like A.S.L.”

As Cornwall, Mr. Harvard wears a kilt. “I’m keeping the kilt for a burlesque show,” he joked. He and Aisling O’Sullivan, the Irish actress and Nicole Kidman look-alike who plays Regan, have conjured elaborate back stories about their characters, and sign them as the play begins.

The relationship between Cornwall and Regan is passionate. “I noticed that Russell smelled very good, and I asked him what scent he was wearing,” Ms. O’Sullivan said. “He told me it was Zum Mist, frankincense and myrrh. The following day he presented me with a bottle of Zum Mist, which I now wear, too. The couple that smells together, stays together.”

Pedro Pascal, who was the sexy Oberyn, Prince of Dorne in “Game of Thrones” and now plays the sexy villainous Edmund, the bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, in “King Lear,” said that Mr. Harvard’s kindness as a person and generosity as an actor shine through his bad guys in “Fargo” and “Lear” and “ends up creating a much more original villain, more human and accessible and ultimately more terrifying because you can see yourself in it.”

Ms. Jackson told me that “Russell can be ferocious on the stage, but invariably charming and utterly delightful off.”

When I asked what Ms. Jackson was like, Mr. Harvard grinned and said, “She’s a diva. She’s obviously extremely talented. She knows what she’s doing.”

He recalled a tussle between Mr. Gold and Ms. Jackson about whether to waterboard Gloucester. Mr. Gold, with a set redolent of Trump’s glittering Fifth Avenue penthouse, was trying to heighten the comparisons between their mad king and the current occupant of the White House. But Ms. Jackson objected to adding Trump-approved torture and in the end, they did it Glenda’s way.

“She’s the director,” Mr. Harvard said, laughing.

‘Now We Sign Bigger’

For the premiere party at the Bowery Hotel, the actor wore a pink suit he found on Amazon for $100 by typing in the words “rose gold.” Inspired by Michael B. Jordan’s Louis Vuitton harness at the Screen Actors Guild awards, he added a black chain harness that his friend Mr. Nugent found on Etsy.

For our interview, Mr. Harvard was dressed down in Levi’s, an olive Banana Republic shirt, Jordan kicks and a baseball cap, backward, depicting a wolf howling at the moon.

“I love the moon,” he said. “I go to it for advice.” He named his chocolate Labradoodle Lunar.

He talked about going to see Muse, the English rock band, on his day off and his YouTube channel, where he has over 6,500 subscribers to see his American Sign Language (A.S.L.) interpretations of Top 40 songs and classics, including “The Chain,” by Fleetwood Mac.

Mr. Harvard, who made a splash off Broadway in “Tribes,” by Nina Raine, and “I was Most Alive With You,” by Craig Lucas, is from a third-generation deaf family in Texas.

He lives with his mother (“best roommate ever”) in a house he bought in Austin, Tex. His aunt lives across the street and other family members live on the block. His father, now divorced from his mother but still good friends, lives in a nearby retirement home.

Russell attended the Texas School for the Deaf, where his parents and grandparents also went and his father worked as a dormitory house parent. Then he studied theater at Gallaudet University in D.C. before starting his career with a bang, playing the adult adopted deaf son of Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, the oilman Daniel Plainview, in the 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson epic, “There Will Be Blood.”

For that movie, Mr. Harvard employed a vintage form of sign language used at the turn of the 20th century: signing “small,” as he put it.

“Now we sign bigger,” he said. “There’s a lot more facial expression. Back in earlier decades, facial expression was very limited. We were a lot more stoic when we signed, because we didn’t want to be too intrusive with hearing people in their environment.”

Dauntingly, his first movie audition was with Mr. Anderson. After two readings in New York, he was asked to fly to Los Angeles to try out with Mr. Day-Lewis at the Chateau Marmont.

He felt confident, but after he signed his scene, Mr. Thomas said, “Do a little less.” So Mr. Harvard reined in his facial expressions, emotions and gestures, and still the director said, “Do it less.”

“So I signed as quietly as I could,” Mr. Harvard said. He recalled walking outside and Mr. Thomas running after him, frantically grabbing a cigarette and saying, “You got it! You got it!”

“I gave him my thumbs up,” Mr. Harvard said. “Then I went back into my hotel room and I started jumping up and down on my bed. I was like, ‘Yay, I got it!’”

He remembered Mr. Day-Lewis as very reserved, locked in his rapacious character. “He had tattoos all over his arms,” Mr. Harvard said. “I never thought he would. He has sons and their handprints as children are on his arm. So that was kind of cute. I really like what he does. He’s very, very Method. It’s really beautiful. Because I was chatting with whoever the hell would listen.”

His next film was an indie, “The Hammer,” about a deaf college wrestler named Matt Hamill; he inherited the part after another actor stepped aside to accommodate the deaf community’s wish to see a deaf actor in the role.

Mr. Harvard said that he knows that it’s “a fine line,” noting: “I was talking to a friend of mine who was debating whether her straight friend, who was playing a lesbian role, should not have that. And I said, ‘Fine, then you can’t play a straight person.’ And it caught her off guard a little bit.”

Still, he said, he thinks that it’s important for deaf people to play deaf roles, because “obviously deaf people can’t play hearing roles. And I mean, we have so many deaf actors out there. Why are we not taking advantage of that?” He credited Julianne Moore for doing well in a deaf role in Todd Haynes’s 2017 “Wonderstruck,” but would have preferred to see a deaf actress get the job.

“I’ve met with people from CBS and NBC and they’ve asked me, ‘What would you like to see?’ And I say, ‘I challenge you to have an all-deaf cast on a TV show.’ Because for example, ‘Animal Planet,’ they have a TV show mainly about meerkats.” And why can there be a show about meerkats but not deaf people?

“And they were like, ‘How do we understand you guys?’ And I said, ‘Subtitles. I’ve been reading subtitles, captions, on movies my entire life. Now it’s your turn.’ And they laughed at me. But they said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re right. Take “The Americans.” They speak in the Russian language and they subtitle it.’ I’m like, ‘Exactly.’

“Are the writers afraid of writing deaf characters? Are we too complex?”

Mr. Harvard invoked a D.C. Comics character called Man-Bat, a scientist who develops a serum to cure deafness and who tangles with Batman sometimes.

“It’s a tad offensive,” he said. “Because being deaf is sacred. It’s pride, it’s culture. We have our community. We have our language. We have our mores.” (He said that what he was doing a bit with me, signing and speaking at the same time — known as SimCom, for simultaneous communication — is “strongly discouraged” in the community “because you’re not able to do both languages perfectly at the same time.”)

Mr. Harvard continued, “I was thinking that it would be really cool to have a deaf character play Man-Bat’s part. Maybe it doesn’t happen in New York. Maybe it happens in Texas, because they have the famous bat bridge, the Congress Avenue Bridge where the bats fly out.”

He pondered whether he could get Noah Hawley, who created the TV shows “Legion” and “Fargo,” to help him write it. Mr. Hawley, who lives in Austin near the Texas School for the Deaf, was inspired by seeing his neighbors communicating in “a secret language” to write a popular deaf hit man character named Mr. Wrench for “Fargo.”

Mr. Harvard played the role with a fringed suede jacket that shimmied when he signed and a hidden buzzer inside a jacket pocket that signaled him when the director was yelling “cut.”

Mr. Hawley liked the actor so much that he brought him back for another season. “There are a lot of actors who work very hard and do complicated things,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s really about what the camera tells you when you’re looking at their face.” He said that Mr. Harvard has “an empathetic quality” that tugs at your heart, even when he’s doing bad things.

I asked him why more people in charge of shows don’t create deaf characters. “There’s no nefarious reason,” Mr. Hawley said. “It’s just not in their consciousness. And you create a challenge for yourself.”

‘Looking, Looking, Looking’

Mr. Harvard, who first got smitten with acting as a child when he saw his cousin play a witch in “The Wizard of Oz,” said he likes dark roles. He would love to do an all-deaf production of “Macbeth” on or Off Broadway with Mr. Gold directing. Even though his friends in grade school told him boys couldn’t be witches, he managed to play a female witch in a play in fifth grade.

“And my dad came and he saw the show,” Mr. Harvard said. “And after, he came up to me and he’s like, ‘Why? Why did you have to play a female witch?’ He was a little disappointed. And I said, ‘Well, because I wanted to.’”

When he told his parents later that he was gay, it was a “little bit of a struggle,” he said, noting that his father was hoping for a different scenario: “Have a wife, have a kid, the very ideal American family.”

“My mom was absolutely easy and of course O.K. with it and my dad now admires me, but we just don’t quite talk about it, I guess you could say.”

In 2015, he was on Broadway for the first time in a revival of “Spring Awakening,” put on by Deaf West Theater and also starring Marlee Matlin, who became a “sweet” mentor.

His drinking amped up “into hyperdrive,” he said. “The cast members are drinking, you know? So I would have a drink. But then after the show every night, I would go hit up a bar. I would meet a bunch of fans. ‘Let me get you a shot! Let me hug you. Let me love you.’ It helps you to feel excited. And then the next day, I wouldn’t feel good. And I do not miss the hangovers.”

That year, he went to Madonna’s Rebel Heart Tour at Madison Square Garden, “which is the best place that you can go and use your deaf card and get access to the very front.”

He went heavy on the Patrón. “I woke up and people were leaving the arena,” he said.

He hit bottom in Austin after a night of drinking in April 2018. “I kneeled down, and I did a very primal scream,” he said. He said that his mom, who is also deaf, couldn’t hear his scream but his dog freaked out and ran out of the room. “It was so worth it, so I could reflect. Knowing I squirmed like a worm. It was the saddest thing I could see.”

He called his agent, who told him to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. But it took him 48 hours to get an interpreter to go with him to his first meeting. He says he has been sober for a year.

“I have a lot more clarity,” he said. “I never thought that I was an addict. Because my brother is, and I never thought that I was like him. But I really was. I would say I was an alcoholic. And probably a little bit of drugs, too.” He said that he took care of his brother, who is even more profoundly deaf, and then took a break, moving to Alaska to teach preschool deaf and hard-of-hearing kids.

“For a really long time, I’ve been looking, searching, looking, looking, looking for love in all the wrong places and experiencing heartbreak,” he said, “and I finally have become sober and I just feel like I don’t have the need to look. And it feels great. And I feel like I’ve found myself for the very first time and I’m just relishing it. I would rather have something happen organically.”

He’s not on Tinder or Grindr. “My dating is if I see someone at the gym or Facebook or Instagram,” he said. “Those are my dating apps.”

It’s time for Mr. Harvard to go. He’s got some eyes to gouge out.

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celticnoise · 6 years

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Sevco. You gotta hand it to them.

Who the Hell advised these people on media management? I thought they might make some attempt at media deflection today, as a means of trying to bury the Dave King story, but I had no inkling of what was around the corner.

They have tried to bury bad news with … errrr … worse news.

A seven week managerial hunt has ended today, with Graeme Murty. When I wrote yesterday about how Tony Pulis was a pipedream and that no “big name” could be expected I had no idea that it would be so swiftly, and definitively, confirmed. A fortnight ago Graeme Murty was taking the final bow. He was packing his pencils and talking about how much he was looking forward to taking a back seat role again. Today he’s got the job.

It’s just till the end of the season, according to the club. But that, in itself, is suspect. The announcement says he will be given full control over the January window – a total 100% reversal on the statement he himself made just seven days ago – and that he will have an input into the summer’s targets.

Does that sound at all tenable to you if they guy is going to be replaced then? It is farcical. It’s like they panicked this morning and decided to try to change the media story from the King situation to something that would be guaranteed to sweep it off the back pages … and they chose this. And our media is too spoon fed to challenge it in any way.

But the reek of chaos wafts off Ibrox in waves now.

This goes beyond mere shambles. This is anarchy.

Nothing at that club works as it should.

The boardroom wars which have raged over who the manager should be are over for the moment; the Murty faction has its man in place, the other side has collapsed in exhaustion. But even now no side has triumphed. Their opponents were weak enough that they got their one concession, the idea it’s not a permanent arrangement.

All this does is ensure that the agony will last all the way. When Murty comes to Celtic Park at the end of the month and goes home whining, tail between his legs like a whipped dog, the faction of the board which never wanted him in the first place will be vocal in its determination to undermine him. The stories about the global search will start anew.

There is no way that this lasts until the end of the season; Murty will be gone long before then, and serious damage will have been done to his career prospects. He must be a mug for agreeing to this, working amidst the noise of this insane asylum.

Perhaps he simply feels, as the minions of Milton’s Satan did, that it is better to reign in the Palace of Pandemonium than to serve with the angels in Heaven. What a let-down for him when he finds out that the third-rate Beelzebub who runs the club has no loyalty to a living soul except for himself. Murty is going to be hung up on a bracket before this is done, as pickings from crows. King is in full scale denial mode and so is his board. They will sacrifice anyone before admitting they’ve gotten all of this horribly, horribly – and hilariously – wrong.

What mugs King has made of a whole lot of people here. The media who expected a huge name and were steered to write glowing tributes to the likes of McInnes – not to mention Craig Swan’s toe-curling piece of yesterday on Pulis; Good God he must want to hide under the bed this afternoon – in an effort to boost his credentials as one, have so much egg running down their faces even Kirk Broadfoot is jealous. They cannot keep on denying what is obvious now.

Sevco is not a big club. They are not seen as one. They are certainly not acting like one. No-one credible wants the job, and why should they? Because this club does not resemble an organisation with a scintilla of credibility. Everything it does is reactive and short term. They are locked in a spiral of bad decision making and panic which leads to more bad decision making which leads to panic which leads to … which leads to … which leads to.

And the most incredible thing about this is that it just keeps on getting worse. I know we all mourned terribly when Pedro left because you couldn’t help thinking that this was the nadir, that we’d seen the lowest of the low, that it could not possibly become any more hysterically incompetent, that they would never be able to beat that.

A six week global hunt which ended in being snubbed by the boss of Aberdeen and has resulted in them giving the job to an Under 21 coach who’s already lost three games … a complete reversal of club transfer policy, the upending of a thousand media pipedreams … on the day a court tells their “penniless” chairman to cough up £11 million ….

And to bury that story, they gave us this instead.

I watched Fargo the other day, one of my favourite movies ever, and I was struck as ever by the utter wretchedness of Steve Buscemi’s character, for whom everything that can possibly go wrong over the course of a movie does …

That’s what Sevco is like now. The hapless victim of a Coen Brothers film, stumbling from one indignity to another, like a drunk who’s shit himself and doesn’t even know it.

Who said the Banter Years were over?

It feels like this is just getting started.

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celticnoise · 7 years

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The long suffering Sevco fans must be wondering what they did to deserve this campaign. I could tell them it was five years of sectarian singing, denying the Death of Rangers, pretending that defrauding the tax payer ain’t no big thing or a host of other nasties, but they don’t do self-analysis and the whole question is more about self-pity than anything else.

All I know is that it ain’t getting any better for them.

Today there are some developments on the Sevco transfer front. Quite a few of them, and not a single one promises anything good.

Billy Gilmour, “teen sensation”, who few people had heard of until The Daily Record started touting him as the new Charlie Adam (tongue firmly in cheek, as you can probably guess) has left for Chelsea. The club says it did everything it could to keep him; the mooted £500,000 development fee suggests different. Had Chelsea actually made them an offer like that Dave King’s eyes would have lit up like a pinball machine and he’d have snatched at the hand offering the cash like a Doberman going for a steak cutlet.

In truth, Sevco will have been lucky to see half of that money, at least in the here and now, but the very possibility of getting it will probably have assured that when they made their efforts to keep him they didn’t try terribly hard.

Nevertheless their fans are pretty spiky about this one, and it’s not the only transfer story that’s bothering them today.

Clint Hill has been refused a new deal, and if you thought that would be greeted with relief you’d be dead wrong. Hill has surprised everyone, critics like me included, by turning in solid but unspectacular displays for most of the season. He wouldn’t get into the Aberdeen first team, or the one at Hearts probably, but he’s not entirely useless, and compared to the other centre backs they have on the books he’s Maldini.

Senderos has been told he can go, and that hasn’t surprised a living soul as he was perhaps the most useless footballer ever to get a full-time contract with a Scottish club. A complete liability, a total waste of money, a guy who was only here on holiday and barely got off the beach. But Hill was reliable and could do a job for them. That has stunned a lot of their supporters. Those not voicing their displeasure have been dissuaded from doing it because they believe this fits into a plan, and that it meant Bruno Alves was on his way to the club.

Alas, in another transfer blow he appears to have ruled that out. He prefers playing out the last year of his career in Italy, to the amazement only of the Daily Record sports desk and Pedro Caixinha himself. Whatever he was told about the “draw” of Ibrox, it no longer applies without serious financial weight backing it up, and a good team to play in.

Alves is at the fag end of his career, like Hill, and that they thought to replace one with the other was pretty desperate stuff. That they’ve not even been able to manage it is worse. Their fans liked the sound of this one. Now they are left with the Qatari league player who was on loan from a club in Kuwait. Exciting times at Ibrox alright.

On top of this, it’s been suggested that the club has been snubbed in an attempt to sign Christophe Berra, who Ipswich have released on freedom of contract. He has opted to move to Hearts, who he played for once before and is known to support. Nevertheless, this is an astonishing snub if true, and no-one would have raised eyebrows if Sevco had gone for that guy. He’s a very good player with bags of experience, and would have been a cut above their current options.

As they chase Qatari league footballers and sweat over deals for the likes of Kenny Miller it is astonishing that a Scottish international has slipped through their fingers at a time when they are desperate, and all the more incredible that he’s gone to Hearts instead.

Emerson Hyndman has also left Ibrox, which is a blow as they had recently named him their young player of the year and had held out hope of getting him on an extended deal. When a loanee who’s been at your club for only a few months can scoop an award like that you’re in hard times. There had been some suggestion they’d try to get him on a longer term deal – similar to what we did with Patrick Roberts originally – but that’s now been dashed.

The hits just keep on coming at Ibrox right now.

I’m loving it.

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