"I love that they became friends because they both played Vegas and neither wanted to cheat on their wives."

Said Judd Apatow, quoted in "Judd Apatow’s 'Bob and Don: A Love Story'/Watch a short film about the lifelong friendship between Bob Newhart and Don Rickles, who were not an obvious match" (The New Yorker).

“What’s so different about them is Bob was a real writer. He wrote those routines, which were, like, one-man sketches. . . . Don came from working really hard playing lounges and strip clubs, figuring out how to do crowd work, doing multiple shows a night into the wee hours in Vegas. Bob just got huge immediately..... [Don] came from a time when his theory was, It’s O.K. to make fun of people as long as you make fun of all of them,” Apatow explained....

The New Yorker writer, Bruce Handy, quips: "Think of it as a very old-school version of D.E.I."

ADDED: I've given the impression that I think "very old-school version of D.E.I." is quite clever, but I don't. It's a variation on the cliché wisecrack: "I'm an equal opportunity offender."

Urban Dictionary has an entry for "equal opportunity offender": "One who bashes and trashes any and every different type of person known to earth; including the basher's own race. Don't call me racist, I am an Equal Opportunity Offender."

"New Yorker Festival Pulls Steve Bannon as Headliner Following High-Profile Dropouts."

The NYT reports.

The New Yorker dropped Bannon after John Mulaney, Judd Apatow, Jack Antonoff, and Jim Carrey all dropped out. And according to the editor David Remnick, "even New Yorker staff members had expressed discomfort" at including Bannon. Remnick also said, "The reaction on social media was critical and a lot of the dismay and anger was directed at me and my decision to engage him."

Jeez, the editor of The New Yorker is sensitive to "dismay and anger" that's directed at him personally? Stand up to it! "I don’t want well-meaning readers and staff members to think that I’ve ignored their concerns." What about the concerns of your readers who now think you're cowardly and lame? I'm a long-time subscriber to The New Yorker, and I think you're lame.

I think you've ignored my concerns, and I'd like to think your magazine challenges readers and isn't just about paying attention to our "concerns."

Bannon's response is, of course, much more appealing:

“The reason for my acceptance was simple: I would be facing one of the most fearless journalists of his generation,” Mr. Bannon said in a statement to The New York Times. “In what I would call a defining moment, David Remnick showed he was gutless when confronted by the howling online mob.” 

Remnick walked right into that.

ALSO: The article quotes Mulaney: "I’m out. I genuinely support public intellectual debate, and have paid to see people speak with whom I strongly disagree. But this isn’t James Baldwin vs William F Buckley.” And Antonoff: “respectfully that’s a full no for me and normalization of white supremacy.”

By the way, who are John Mulaney and Jack Antonoff? I think I might be familiar with Antonoff as the ex-boyfriend of Lena Dunham. Ah, yes:

Antonoff and Dunham remained together until January 2018, with representatives of both announcing their separation as "amicable".

In June 2014, Antonoff said he was "desperate" for kids, explaining:

It just seems like the most fun thing in the world. I've never met people who have kids who haven't looked me in the eye and been like, "It's the greatest thing that's ever happened." ... I think it's biological. I'm 30. I'm not that young, right? I'm not, like, 24 or 22. I'm no longer in the phase of my life where I talk about everything as in the future. Like, I'm in the future.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said:

Remnick was an idiot to invite Bannon in the first place. He was a fool if he didn’t know this all would happen.

Was Remnick an idiot? For one brief shining moment he believed that The New Yorker audience wants breadth and challenge. And some of us really do. But I guess he was an idiot not to see the game several moves ahead. Now, here he is, in the future, looking narrow and weak.

"There’s a lot of abuse in this town. Young actresses are mistreated in all sorts of ways by powerful men..."

"... who can dangle jobs or access to exciting parts of show business. I think a lot of people are mistreated and they don’t realize how badly they’re being mistreated.... People do not want to put their livelihoods at risk... That’s why people like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby get to operate like this for so many decades. The people around them — executives, assistants, drivers — they don’t want to risk everything."

Said producer and director Judd Apatow.

"Everyone knew [about Weinstein’s alleged behavior], just as they know about other high-profile people with power in the industry who get away with the exact same things. This is far-reaching, it is endemic, and we have to believe that the toppling of this mogul will lead to the toppling of others…. This is a bigger issue than taking down one person."

Said Kelly Marcel (a female screenwriter and producer).

(L.A. Times.)

Meanwhile, Rose McGowan has blown off the nondisclosure agreement and is saying that Harvey Weinstein raped her.

In a Twitter thread posted Thursday afternoon, addressed to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, McGowan said, “I told the head of your studio that HW raped me. Over & over I said it.”...

(She is reported to be the anonymous actress who pulled out of Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker story, telling him, “The legal angle is coming at me and I have no recourse.”) This week, McGowan asked if she’s “allowed to say rapist,” and in October 2016, she said she was raped by a studio executive. McGowan’s tweets come just after her account was suspended by Twitter Wednesday night.

"It’s very hard to lose weight in the Trump era.... I’m trying so hard to have it not turn into 30 pounds."

"I think it tests our ability to not want to numb out. There’s so many things that are hard to hear every day that you do want to have some Oreos. Like people say, what do you invest in during the Trump era? I feel like, Hostess Cakes. Most of us are just scared and eating ice cream."

Said Judd Apatow. He was talking Maureen Dowd, whom he treated to a meal of "spinach omelets with hash browns and hot sauce that he has picked up after dropping off his daughter at school."

I extract these details from the column because:

1. It's a somewhat charming, self-effacing confession that anyone might make: What's happening in politics seems horrible to me, so I comfort myself with the sweet, creamy foods of childhood.

2. Apatow is a big old powerful movie maker, so why is he being such a big baby? My guess is that his success lies in channeling the mundane reactions of young and powerless people, so it serves him well to relax into immature thinking patterns. It's creative, lucrative work for him. Easy work! What a lucky guy!

3. He's eating Oreos? That's his food reference? Trump owns Oreos foolery:



4. What kind of rich man entertains his NYT interviewer by serving her a take-out spinach omelet with hash browns and hot sauce? Take-out is bad enough, but a take-out omelet? I think an omelet is something you get out of the pan and onto the table in seconds or you just don't serve it at all. And then to make it spinach? What the hell are you trying to say? It would make more sense to serve Oreos and ice cream.

5. Has Maureen Dowd ever indicated her amenability to omelets? Back in February 2010, she forefronted an omelet served to her in a restaurant — so presumably she ordered it — in the presence of Harold Ford Jr. — or maybe it's only what he's eating — and she connected said eggs to the grossness of Harold Ford's feet:

Between bites of an egg-white garden omelet at a bistro in his Union Square neighborhood, Harold Ford Jr. defended himself on pedicures and flip-flops.

“I either run or try to play basketball every day,” he said. “I have severe athlete’s foot — feet. I get a foot scrub out of respect for my wife because getting into bed with what I have when I take my socks off isn’t respectful to anybody.”

I'm not reading that as an OK on omelets. I'm reading that as wafting methanethiol. And that was a high-tone, fresh-cooked, designed-for-a-lady egg-white garden omelet, not something that would be dumped into a styrofoam container to be called back to life with hot sauce.

"Do you know what the ‘Hunger Games’ movies are about?... It’s teenagers killing other teenagers."

Said Rush Limbaugh, quoted in Politico, "Rush ties killings to 'Hunger Games.'" The father of the Santa Barbara murderer was an assistant director on that movie, so what does that mean?

“Why not blame Hollywood movies here? Oh, we can never, ever go there...” [Rush] said, sarcastically.

The "sarcastically" is helpful, because people who don't listen to the show really do have trouble understanding what Rush is trying to say... especially if they are anti-Rush, and the fact is that Rush loves to rope in his antagonists and laugh at the way they don't get him. Listeners — and I am one — are encouraged to think of ourselves as in-the-know insiders. We get it.

I don't think you have to be that smart to get it if you listen and hear the performance of the words, especially if you're on Rush's side, and this interplay between Rush lovers and haters creates energy that Rush endlessly recycles and amplifies. It's a very popular and high-profile show, and yet, listening, you feel included in a pretty friendly little circle. It's magic. A different kind of magic than movies, and so it's interesting to get the radio man's take on Hollywood.

But Politico moves on to something a WaPo columnist wrote and the reaction it got from 2 Hollywoodland critters:

“How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like “Neighbors” and feel, as [suspect Elliot] Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of “sex and fun and pleasure”?” [Ann] Hornaday wrote over the weekend. “How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them.”

Both [Seth] Rogen and Apatow slammed Hornaday and called the critic misinformed, with Apatow adding that she “milked tragedy.”

Here's the transcript of the Rush show segment, "The Left Takes Another Human Tragedy and Converts It Into a Political Issue." Excerpt:

I can't tell you the number of guys I knew growing up that were bragging about all the sex they were having and it was simply a dream.  They wanted everybody to think it, but they couldn't get past first base any better than this kid could.  And the ones who weren't talking about it were the ones that you learned later on that were the studs. And they weren't talking about it because of manners, self-respect, respect for the girls involved, who knows what.

Of course, movies are that teenboy dream, the bragging of sexually unattractive males like Apatow and Rogen who — via Hollywood — get into a position to make the dream look real through the magic of cinema. Unlike the consumers of the cinema, the filmmakers acquire the money to make the dream real in their lives, even as Rush, through his radio magic, has acquired the money to get him the women he could only dream of in high school.

Rodger was the rich kid who reasoned that since he already had the money, he should already be the man to whom women yield. They didn't, and in his impoverished mind, he couldn't get any farther than that. He had to walk out of the rom-com showing on screen 1 in the multiplex and into the slasher film on screen 2.