Hollywood Week: SAG/AFTRA Contract Ratified, Taylor Swift, Norman Lear Legacy, Ryan O’Neal
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- Category: Entertainment News
- Published on Saturday, 09 December 2023 11:17
- Written by Janet Walker
With only 38% of the union members voting, the negotiated SAG/AFTRA contract has been ratified, with 78% of those who did vote approving the agreement which totaled more than a billion dollars of increases over the 2020 deal.
Taylor Swift Named by Time Magazine as "Person of the Year"
In a surprise move, Time Magazine has awarded its coveted "Person of the Year" title to singer, songwriter, and musician Taylor Swift.
For those who only know Swift, from the recent box office Taylor Swift Eras Film or the recent success of her Eras Tour, than you don't know the real Taylor Swift, who describes in the Time interview, the catalyst for the ERA tour was the theft of her Intellectual property and as she describes nearly destroyed her, something the public would have never known unless she chose to fight.
"Make no mistake — my career was taken away from me … You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar," Swift told Time. "That took me down psychologically to a place I've never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn't leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn't trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard," reported The Hollywood Reporter.
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Norman Lear Dead at 101
Norman Lear, a television writer, and producer and is best known and credited for transforming modern television, died this week in his Los Angeles home. He was 101.
Lear, who at the peak of his career had seven hit sitcoms running simultaneously. Not one to shy away from controversy, Lear brought the hidden secrets spoken, at that time, privately to television audiences and they loved him for it. The boundaries of modern television were transformed by Lear.
"Racial prejudice, divorce, rape, Black inner-city struggle, upward social mobility — themes almost nonexistent on commercial television — were suddenly brought to compelling life through Mr. Lear's juggernaut of hits, including "All in the Family," "Sanford and Son," "Maude," "Good Times," "The Jeffersons" and "One Day at a Time," The Washington Post reported.
Creator of "All in the Family," he challenged audiences with the racist remarks of Archie, played by Carroll O'Connor, his submissive wife, Edith, played by Jean Stapleton, his 1960 revolutionized daughter, Gloria, played by Sally Struthers, and her husband, Michael, "Meathead," Stivic, played by Rob Reiner. The episodes drove CBS to the top of the ratings and introduced topics critical to the times. Using words that would now result in ostracizing, or worse, Lear would radiate the pulse of a convulsing America, topics seen as taboo were suddenly conversational.
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More than simply creating a hit sitcom, Lear's work of writing current topics and issues into his characters dialogue became a masterclass for future situation comedies and even pushing the boundaries of other contemporary television.
Lear took on the taboo of Abortion in a spin off, "Maude," as main character Maude Finley, played by Bea Arthur, decides to have an abortion before the 1973 landmarked Roe v Wade ruling that gave women the right to autonomy over their reproductive medical decisions.
"Maude at first decides to have the baby because she thinks it is what her husband, Walter (Bill Macy), desires. When he finally tells her he wanted her to go through with the pregnancy only because he thought that's what she wanted, they hug and she resolves to have the abortion," The New York Times reports.
Abortion was so controversial at the time, that every sponsor, including Pepsi, and General Mills, pulled their advertising. Lear, to his credit, didn't back down, and the episode ran. Controversial even in reruns, when the episode aired for a second time, 39 of 159 then CBS affiliates refused to air the episode.
He also brought a trio of black sitcoms, including "Sandford and Son," with Redd Foxx, and Desmond Wilson, "The Jeffersons," with George Jefferson, played by Sherman Hemsley, his wife, Louise, played by Isabelle Sanford, and their housekeeper Florence, played by Marla Gibbs, and "Good Times," with Jimmie Walker in the lead.
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Lear built a hierarchy of upward mobility into his African American characters, beginning with what many looked at as the junk man, Fred Sanford, essentially a black Archie Bunker, with the residue of racism and the harsh realities of the civil right fight barely in the rearview, Fred Sanford, was a bigoted black man, who laughed all the way to the bank with his scrap yard of the white man's junk, next was moving up to the east side of Manhattan, "The Jefferson's," led by George, with a successful business and even a black housekeeper, living in a high rise building in New York City, that house the intellectuals, the enlightened thinkers, which allowed Lear to introduce liberal thought into middle America's living room.
"'The Jefferson's" introduced the first bi-racial couple, and "the show's actors lobbied Lear for a more rounded depiction of the Willises, portrayed by Roxie Roker and Franklin Cover as television's first interracial marriage between Black and white partners. As a result, the pair exchanged a kiss in a landmark 1974 episode," The New York Times reported.
With "Sanford and Son" and "The Jefferson's", Lear needed middle class, a family that represented the middle ground between the two, and developed "Good Times," starring Jimmie Walker, as J.J. Evans, an aspiring artist growing up in a Chicago housing project.
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Controversary, of course, was generated from this show as well. One of the head writers, Eric Monte, alleged that Lear stole his idea for "The Jeffersons," and received a million-dollar settlement.
Lear continued to make great television, and from all account was pitching ideas a week before his death. A convulsing America proved to be solid ground for the one-time skit writer, who was able to weave the controversary, his own activism, and beliefs, the pulse of the people, and create characters that continue to inspire some even fifty years later. Norman Lear, 1922-2023.
Ryan O'Neal Dead at 82
Ryan O'Neal, who had a long career in film and television, died this week of complications from cancer and Leukemia. He was 82.
O'Neal is best known as his roles in the 1970 film Love Story and the 1973 film Paper Moon, opposite his daughter, Oscar winner Tatum O'Neal, and for the controversy in his real-life on again/off again romance with Farrah Fawcett died this week.
