“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from the week of August 26, 2018
This Week’s Podcast
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
RIP Neil Simon
I hope that I am about to underestimate the younger members of my audience. I really hope that you already know just how significant the name Neil Simon is in the world of theater and the movies. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the name may only ring a distant bell if you are below 40 years of age. And that would be a terrible thing to just let go.
Neil Simon was one of the most acclaimed playwrights from the 1960s into the early ‘90s. His first play “Come Blow Your Horn” ran for over six hundred performances. His next two, “Barefoot in the Park” and “The Odd Couple” won Simon his first two Tony awards. Not a bad start to any career. No other writer has ever received more Oscar and Tony award nominations.
Simon was a New York boy and started his professional writing career on television in the 1950s. He worked alongside Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, among others, on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows”. Once he brought his talents to the stage and then to the movies he was a superstar. Comedy, in a variety of forms, was what Simon did as well as any writer. The critics often complained that Simon didn’t bring enough depth to his work. Then and now, audiences don’t much care.
That’s because Simon created beautiful, clear characters that had flaws and strengths and lots of great lines. Whether it was Felix and Oscar, the mismatched roommates in “The Odd Couple”, Lewis and Clark, the well past their prime vaudevillians in “The Sunshine Boys” or the incompatible romantic pair in “The Goodbye Girl”, Simon gave us characters we could care about and made them funny to boot. His shows were a virtual lock to be a good time. Which made him one of the few playwrights that could guarantee advance ticket sales on Broadway. No other stage writer of his day was performed more often. In 1966, he had no fewer than four shows running on Broadway at the same time.
It’s been fifteen years since his last new Broadway show. That’s a long time in a popular culture that is constantly on the prowl for the next great thing. So here’s my advice to you. If you know Neil Simon, go watch your favorites again. If you’re not familiar with his work, do yourself a favor and watch a couple as well. I can’t imagine anything would make Simon happier than adding a few more smiles to his resume.
Neil Simon was 91 years old.
2018 Movie Season
It turns out that the predictions that the movie industry was headed to the dustbin of history may have been premature. Again. Television was supposed to kill off the movies back in the ‘50s. They are also supposed to be on death’s door again, this time being done in by television’s younger brother, streaming video.
And somehow, the movies continue to hang on.
The numbers to date for the movies have been surprisingly good. Summertime is an important time of year for the movies, and a solid final month of summer has put the box office for the season up almost fourteen percent. The number for the year is also good, up 9.4%.
I am struck by a couple things about this year at the movies. Hanging on at number one for the year in ticket sales is “Black Panther”. The official run of the Marvel Universe blockbuster ended a couple weeks ago, the numbers are over 700 million dollars in the domestic market. So my prediction that it would top the list for the year is looking pretty good. That is groundbreaking territory for a movie with a predominantly black cast. But the real question has been, was it a fluke? There is still a belief in some quarters that non-white films don’t make money. “Black Panther” is one argument against that idea.
The Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA offers another. They did a study looking at movies and television shows and discovered that casts with more diversity made more money.
While that academic proof may impress some, Hollywood is a bottom line business. So the success of “Crazy Rich Asians” in its first two weeks in the theater has to be getting their attention. The movie, with a mostly Asian cast, debuted in the number one spot. Even more impressive is that the box office totals only dipped a tiny 6% from week one to two. That’s one of the best numbers of its kind for any movie. The box office total puts “Crazy Rich Asians” in the number 22 slot for the year already. If the movie can continue any kind of reasonable numbers for a couple more weeks, Hollywood will have to start changing its mind about the kind of movies to make.
It won’t stop the endless number of sequels and mindless drivel that has been Hollywood’s stock in trade too often. But it may change the look of the movies.
And that is a very good idea.
Saving Local Media
Along with the big boys and girls in the media world, folks at the local media level are struggling too. It’s mostly the same issues. Old-line media trying to find how to make the transition to digital media and how to make it a paying proposition. Like the major media, the local folks are not always finding answers quickly enough. With less financial room to maneuver that has pushed more and more local outlets into difficult positions. What tends to happen are reductions. Reductions in staff, in operating hours, or in the number of days per week that new product is available.
There are some interesting ideas being floated in different parts of the world.
There is a push that local media, especially television, should be offering their audience special deals and discounts on products and services. A Virginia television group is offering a service they call “DealBoss”. It allows the group’s stations to add a commerce section, including a link with special Amazon deals to their online and social media. While it may improve the bottom line, it feels like it does it at the expense of the station’s core mission to me.
For media in a more financially flush market, you might follow the lead of a small newspaper group in the heart of California’s wine country. Sonoma West offered a direct public offering of stock in the four paper group. They were following the example of an independent paper in Berkeley California that raised a million dollars over the last two years. The upside is getting your local customers involved and, quite literally, invested in the future of your local media outlet. The downside is that you need to have people who have the money to invest and are interested enough in doing so.
Or you can focus on offering the kind of content that will strike the fancy of your audience. In Winnipeg, the provincial capital of the Canadian province of Manitoba, the Winnipeg Free Press tasked 24 reporters with telling stories about the city on a 24-hour basis. The focus of the stories was something that we all have some interest in, food. And the paper put the stories on the free side of their paywall, making available to everyone. The idea was inspired by a project at the New York Times that told the stories of 24 couples over 24 hours. In Winnipeg, the paper has seen definite interest from its readers.
In the end, I believe the best way to succeed is to create a product that people want to buy.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Stories Are My Life 
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