Just for the Hell of it: Episode Fifteen

                                Where there's smoke, there's usually fire...

                                    Quote of the Week

“With the possible exception of romantic love, nothing drives human narrative as often and as forcefully as the quest for justice. In the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the nature of the universe usually comes down to how a story answers one simple question: Even if they are rich and powerful or poor and disenfranchised, do people get what they deserve in the end?

Over and over, in literature, film and television, we tell ourselves that the answer is yes.

Mysteries are solved, often at the eleventh hour or decades later, through the miracles of technology or cleverly induced confession. The bubbles of money and privilege are burst revealing the craven humans within who are then punished. The wrongly imprisoned are freed, the wrongly accused exonerated. Either way the truth is known, order and faith restored.

None of which is likely to happen here.”

Mary McNamara, from her excellent column in the LA Times on the increasingly sordid mess of the Bill Cosby affair.

I didn't really want to write about this.  So much has already been said (and for my money, Mary McNamara's piece is the best of the lot), so what could I add to the conversation?  Nothing new or profound, that's for sure. But I couldn't get it out of my head, and when that happens it usually means I have to write about whatever it is just get the bile out of my system. So I wrote what was on my mind, never intending to post it… but as the weeks before, during and after the holidays came and went, I found myself coming back to it again and again -- adding, cutting, re-writing, chewing on it like a dog with a bone.  

So I'm posting it, if for no other reason than to get it over with so I can find something else to chew on for a while.  Feel free to ignore the following and skip down to the bottom (where some good stuff awaits), or yell at me if you disagree -- I think we all have some bile generated by all this, so go ahead and vent if you need to.  

I'm doing this one for me. 

There’s no way the current generation can fathom what an enormously positive impact Bill Cosby had on our culture and the business of television. Sometimes you just had to be there to understand.  First as a comic, then as an actor, Cosby connected with mainstream American culture like no other black celebrity before -- not Flip Wilson, Sidney Poitier, or Sammy Davis Junior, as talented and successful as all three of them were.

First co-starring with Robert Culp in I Spy (a terrific show at the time -- “must-see” TV long before NBC came up with the term) and later as Cliff Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” he created and occupied a singular niche on the tube.  Forget all those stupid, cloying (and lucrative) Jello commercials -- in his prime, Cosby was an astonishingly powerful force on screen.  He may well have been the most likable man on television.  

Like everybody else, I was a huge fan back in the day, but have no first-hand knowledge of Bill Cosby.  I've never met or worked with the man during my three-and-a-half decades of toiling on set. The only inkling I had about his predilections came from an old friend more than twenty years ago, who had worked on a show with him and was disappointed to see the very married Cosby entertain a series of beautiful young women in his dressing room for reasons that seemed obvious at the time. 

It’s possible her assumptions were wrong, and whatever went on behind those dressing room doors was innocent -- I wasn’t there -- but either way, the dynamics of Bill Cosby’s marriage were (and are) none of my business.  Besides, philandering husbands are nothing new in Hollywood or anywhere else… but that was then and this is now.  The sheer weight of accusations gathered against Cosby over the last few months suggest something much more serious than a married man with a wandering eye.  According to the growing legion of women speaking up, Bill Cosby is nothing less than a serial rapist, a sexual predator who drugged them into unconsciousness, then did whatever he pleased. 

Can all these stories be true?  Maybe, maybe not.  Are all of these women lying through their teeth?  That seems unlikely.  This isn't the McMartin preschool case, where hysterical parents conjured up fantasies in some kind of bizarre feedback loop with their young children -- a sensational legal circus that played out to a gullible public who ate it up with a spoon.  But those were children;  the two dozen or so women accusing Bill Cosby are full grown.  Still, only those women and Cosby know for sure what happened -- anything written or said by others is empty speculation -- but at this point it almost doesn’t matter. Even If only a fraction of those charges are true, Bill Cosby is nothing like the man we thought he was.   “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” the saying goes, and there’s a dense cloud of smoke rising from the charred remains of Bill Cosby’s reputation right now. 

Everybody has a demon or two under their skin, and maybe a few skeletons in their closet.  We're all human, and thus highly imperfect. We say and do stupid, hurtful things that -- later, hopefully -- cause us to feel shame and regret.  That doesn't seem to be happening in this case.  I suppose that's understandable -- if these charges are true, admitting it would completely destroy whatever's left of Bill Cosby's career.  If not, then he's in an utterly impossible position.

I don't know what the truth is here, but it seems yet another icon of my generation turns out to have feet of clay.  Or is it mud? 

How depressing… and how the mighty have fallen. 

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This being the first "JFTHOI" post of the 2015, I don’t want to end on a negative note, so here are a couple of excellent podcasts.  First, seventeen minutes on what just might be the strangest film set ever, then a terrific forty minute interview with George Pelecanos, novelist and writer/producer for “The Wire” and "Treme," among many other things.  

Pelecanos has some very interesting and useful things to say about life, writing, and working on set. Unlike so many writers, he has a deep respect for those of us who together do the heavy lifting necessary to put his words on screen. There's a lot in this interview -- enough that I listened to it twice.  


And although it's a little late at this point, Happy New Year...