Put some fresh D-cells in the pity machine...

Thursday, January 13 12:43 PM

So let's see if the blog software is still working. This the first time the new edition has had to handle an end-of-year rollover, after all. No reason why it shouldn't work, but of course there's no reason why I couldn't have done something impressively counter-intelligent.

Am at Macworld Expo, which you probably knew already. But I am also finally seeing the tail and of a two-week cold, the highlight of which was spending four or five days in bed last week with a 104-degree fever, idly staring at the ceiling and wondering why the squirrel on the right would have gotten a Bruce Lee tattoo on its wings, which you probably didn't know.

So I'm still a little coughy-achy-stuffy-head-fever-so-I-should-rest-ish. Let's see if I can write about Expo later today. For now, it's twenty minutes to ten and I have an 11 AM appointment (first last start of the week...last night I spent an ambitious amount of time at the Ministry of Nightlife so it was very very important that I spend the morning horizontal and uncommunicative) and I suppose if I were to shave and brush my teeth, it'd be the first steps on a path to personal glory. Of some sort.

Push the button, Frank...

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American Idiot

Friday, January 14 1:09 AM

Back at the hotel for a 90-minute restorative session between marathon sessions at the Ministry of Nightlife. Had sushi with some good friends. The best kind of friends, at a trade show: a software company CEO, a PR rep, and the manager of one of Mac OS X 10.4's core technologies. IE, the sort of friends who are always tax-deductible. After a little more quality time here with the PowerBook and the comic books I bought on the walk from the Moscone Center and the TV, I'll head out to another party.

Before I leave, though, I need to fire off a pre-emptive apology to Wil Wheaton for something that happened on the show floor this afternoon. I was walking past the big temporary stage on my way to an author appearance at my publisher's booth. Wil and a couple of other folks were up there on the dais, taking part in a panel about blogging. I'd really hoped to catch his featured presentation this morning, but 9:30 found me still in my room, filing a story. So stopped for a minute at the back of the audience to listen to Wil tell a story.

Well, the moderator spotted me and waved energetically. I sort of waved back. Wil must have seen it because then he started waving at me, and at this point I felt that I needed to have some sort of justification for having (as far as he knew) chosen to distract in mid-talk. So I mimed "Your fly is undone" and then I sort of trotted away.

Actually, I just felt guilty for distracting him, and (wisely) left it at that. The moderator was flagging me down because he wanted me to speak for a couple of minutes. It was a cool panel and Wil had just said something that I knew I could play off of — and it was a good chance to plug my appearance in the Wiley booth — so I happily took part. It was a lot like what used to happen on the Merv Griffin Show, when Merv would be interviewing Hal Linden or somebody and then, hey! Bob Hope strolls onto the set! "Merv, I was just on my way to the studio across the hall to tape my next special, but I had to stop by..."

Wil said something about my blog that was so flattering that I actually sort of stammered a bit...and felt even more guilty. I would have left a gift basket for him, but unfortunately I wasn't carrying one. From now on, I'm keeping an assortment of cheeses and domestic wines in my wallet at all times, to avoid future embarrassments.

Later in the day, I had a swell opportunity to apologize. I was in the speakers' lounge chatting with another tax-deductible friend when Wil came in, accompanied by a handler and a camera crew. I certainly would have strolled over and said hi (I haven't actually seen him since Hawaii, though we've kept in touch since) but the camera crew quickly succombed to the predatory instincts of their species and began interviewing the man relentlessly, employing pack behavior for a sure and messy kill. Seemed like entirely the wrong time to apologize for having interrupted him, even though I hadn't been waving at him and hadn't even interrupted him. Particulary considering that I would have had to interrupt him from the interview to do so.

OK. Time to cut out for my next gig. One of the many differences between the aforementioned Enthusiastic Amateur and Trained Professional is that the latter is capable of inventing an entirely new interpretation of the material, instead of following an existing template to some extent. Another difference is that the Trained Professional's preparation consists of more than just trying to figure out if the buses run from here to 11th Street or if he'll have to hail a cab.

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Two Ships

Saturday, January 15 12:59 PM

Okay, it's nearly 3 AM now and I suppose I'll have to accept that Steve Jobs is not going to call me today, after all. Which in a very different context would be a very mistress-ey thing for me to say, I admit, but I remind you that this is the week of Macworld Expo. The fact that I was expecting a call from Steve is an indication of my fabulousness. The fact that it never came underscores Steve's ongoing nearly-perfect track record for common sense and good judgement, blemished only by that short period in which he wore bowties everywhere. I have newfound appreciation for the man.

I was on the show floor this afternoon when I got The Call Before The Call. I was at a software company's booth and the head of the outfit had just finished showing me an app that I was extremely interested in. He was about to start showing me an app that I wasn't really interrested in at all when my phone trilled and flashed a CallerID number that I immediately recognized as one of my Apple PR contacts.

"Do you have plans to review the iPod Shuffle?" she asked me, after a quick preamble.

Which isn't an unusual question. PR folks often ask about when a review is going to drop, so they can make sure that they read it. It's not so much about tracking what's being said about a product as it is about being aware that on this specific date, 300,000 Sun-Times readers will be reading about the product. I told her that I'd written my review and it'd probably run a week from Tuesday.

Then she asked me if the review was a positive one. This question was slightly out of the ordinary. It's unprofessional for a PR person to ask for an advance copy of a review and it's double-unprofessional for the writer to provide it. Many writers have a problem with even hinting at the general tone of a piece ahead of time. Me, don't see a big problem, particularly with a PR person whom I know well and can trust. If I tell a PR person "I liked it a lot" it neither helps nor hurts me. And if it's a negative review, it's not like they have the power to spike the column and without an advance copy, there's really no way that they can lobby me to change anything. So I said that yeah, I gave it my thumbs up (tm Roger Ebert), and that I only gigged it on a couple of very minor points.

She asked me a couple of other quick questions, which got me increasingly curious as to what this was all about. And then she told me what this was all about.

"Would you be interested in interviewing Steve Jobs? I might be able to get you five or ten minutes later today."

Folks, during a big trade show like Macworld Expo, my head's normally full of bees. My mind is on what I'm dealing with right now, plus I'm thinking about what I need to do later on in the day, plus how much time I have before I need to move on to my next thing, and on top of all that I'm sort of thinking about what I'll do if I find myself with some extra time on my hands. But at that moment the bees were silent, and my entire CPU was devoted to calculating a solution to the following question:

"Of all of the possible responses to this question, which one is least likely to **** this up for me?"

I switched over from the Friendly and Conversational voice to the Professional and Respectable one. I told her that yes, absolutely; I can file a revised column as late as Wednesday. She said that this was swell news and that she'd call me later on if she could make it happen.

I hung up. Her lead-up questions made perfect sense, now. Naturally, she wasn't going to put her boss into a hostile interview. Still, I wished she'd asked me straight off the top. I would have crafted an ambitious network of interlocking lies and deceptions to ensure that I got the interview. No, I haven't written it yet; my editor doesn't want me to write about any Apple products at all. Though gosh, I'm really lobbying him hard on this. If only there were some sort of "twist" or "hook" to this review; an "exclusive," as it were, that the Chicago Tribune didn't have. But hey, if wishes were horses, right?

By degrees, I became aware that I was still in a booth on the show floor and that the president of a software company was still showing me the app that I really wasn't interested in. He continued the demo but my head was filled with a brand new set of bees. Fortunately, I'm an experienced hand at these demos. I was able to keep saying "Okay," "Uh-huh" and "Got it" at random intervals automatically, shifting the task to my autonomous nervous system so I could commit all the duty cycles of my main CPU to this new problem.

Yeah, it was an exciting prospect. Over the course of the ten-minute product demo I'd figured that while a five or ten-minute interview wouldn't be nearly long enough to stretch into a feature article, it would be more than ample to get an original quote or two that'd greatly elevate the profile of my review. There would certainly be ground rules concerning the topics that I could or couldn't cover, but if I played my cards right I could probably get another couple of answers on the record, to pep up a couple of Apple-themed pieces I'm planning for the next month or so.

The software president said the phrase "...And we hope to ship by the start of the second quarter," which triggered my autonomic demo-response system to give my main CPU a nudge and tell it to start talking again. I thanked him for the all the demos, happily accepted a fistful of CDs, and bade him farewell, trotting to the Speakers' Lounge so I could strategize and prepare.

I should stress that I'm not overly intimidated by such things. Yeah, Steve Jobs is about as high-profile a CEO as there is, and if I anonymously shared an elevator with him I'd be dining out on the story for days. But alas, adulthood comes with some terrible costs, and one of them is the occasional need to buckle down and Act Like A Damned Professional. I had Goals for this interview, after all. Leading off by asking Steve if he'd record an outgoing message for my answering machine would probably result in negative yardage if not an immediately suspension of play.

So I came up with three or four questions and I formulated a general game plan. From what I know of the man and from past conversations with people who've had meetings with him, a successful interview with Steve Jobs isn't hard to pull off. So long as you're clear about what you're hoping to get out of it, ask focused questions, and you don't waste either your time or his, there shouldn't worry about anything. There's Steve's dazzle factor, o'course, but that's your problem, not his.

Okay. I wrote out my questions exactly in the form I wanted to ask them, exactly in the desired order. I was confident that these questions would achieve Goal One (get The Quote) as well as Goal Two (avoid saying anything that might end the career of the nice woman who set up the interview). And so, I waited. The phone never left my hand during the remaining three hours of Macworld Expo San Francisco 2005. Sure, I had heard it ringing in my pocket twenty minutes earlier, but (as I am fond of reminding people) I have not led an entirely pure and chaste life, and if I were Karma and I wanted to kick the ass of someone like me, I'd have him miss a call exactly as important as the one I was hoping for.

Every couple of minutes I checked the phone to make sure the ringer was on, or flicked the button to wake it up and make sure there were no missed calls. Yes, near the end of the show I bought one of those cellphone cases that can be mounted high on the shoulder strap of your backpack, up near your ear. No, it wasn't because I was still hoping that Apple would call. I insist that it was to enhance my show coverage, in some manner yet to be determined.

It was near my ear for the next two hours and it was on the table when I had dinner with a friend and apart from one call I received from a friend back home (which I terminated so abruptly that I probably now owe this man both dinner and the DVD boxed-set of his choice), it remained frustratingly silent.

Oh, well. I suppose that just like the question of "Who's faster: Superman, or The Flash?" we're just not destined to learn who has the greater power to dazzle.

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The important thing is just that you go out get some exercise.

Saturday, January 22 11:38 AM

Back home after taking my regular constitutional. But it's — hang on — minus five degrees Fahrenheit, according to 3D Weather Globe and Atlas. So, quite sensibly, I opted to drive instead of walk.

The primary objectives of the constitutional were met, regardless: I spent an hour away from my office and away from even the mere temptation of writing something, and I got to listen to music for a while. The net effect is to restore my overall elan and joie-de-vivre, two quantites which are sorely waning at times like these. Workload-wise, I am currently so deep in the soup that when my phone rings, I have to take a snorkel out of my mouth to say Hello. I am so busy that the urge to flee the country is increasingly persistent, and these little escapes to the roads in my immediate county help to postpone the big escape that involves duct-taping my life savings to my midsection and choosing a cool new name that I'll be living under for the rest of my life.

It is clearly much, much colder outside than it could possibly need to be. The first stop on my Constitutional was the drugstore, where I bought a couple of Cokes. I drank one during the trip, you know, just to make sure I stayed hydrated while I spent the next hour pressing the accelerator pedal and occasionally tapping the "Next Track" button on my iPod. When I got home I put the second one away to enjoy later on.

But the moment my hand dipped inside the fridge's airspace I realized that the bottle, after having spent a half an hour on the passenger seat of the car, was actually a lot colder than anything else that was in the refrigerator already. The fridge would, in fact, only heat the Coke up, which seemed to miss the point entirely. So instead I drank the Coke, scoring a thrilling victory for Order and Discipline and making it necessary for me to click into iCal and bump up "Urination" two or three slots on today's To-Do list.

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Rats.

Sunday, January 23 4:16 PM

"Be careful what you wish for; you might get it."

I opened the front door this morning with two vain hopes: (1) that perhaps the Sunday paper was delivered this morning despite the blizzard and (2) that it would actually be possible to go out there and find it under two feet of snow. It's true that I went to a public high school but despite that handicap I'm actually a pretty sharp individual, and thus when I saw that the snow on my front step was piled up against the glass of the storm door all the way up to my waist, I silently closed the front door again, fished my PowerBook out of the bed, and got my Sunday comics through Comictastic.

I got my morning news through Google and I got weather updates through three different sites, each of which told me that there wasn't any point to even trying to knock down any of the accumulated snow, because it was going to keep coming down until at least 6 PM, and any snow I threw into the air would be thrown right back in my face anyway, thanks to winds gusting from the north at 25 miles an hour.

I'm in The Bunker, temporarily snowbound. When terrible weather has you trapped in the house all day, nothing seems more like a gold-plated Gift from God than turning on the TV and discovering that every single channel is showing Johnny Carson clips all day long...and they're not even stopping for commercials.

Be careful what you freakin' wish for.

During Macworld Expo, a friend and I were having dinner, and talk turned to Carson. Ten years after he handed over The Tonight Show to Leno, we were still marveling at both Johnny's legend and at how successfully and completely the man had forsaken public life. I always thought that the latter was a damned shame. My big fear is that Carson will eventually suffer the same fate as Elvis. By the tenth anniversary of The King's death, Elvis had been reduced to a set of memes. He became both the beautiful young man deified in airbrushed portraits hanging in countless Fifties-themed diners and the long-past-it jumpsuited pill-popper lampooned in black-velvet paintings. And neither image provokes proper respect and admiration for a performer who influenced nearly every major artist who came after him.

No, the modern torch-holders of Elvis' legacy are the scores of Elvis impersonators whose vaudevillian snarls and gyrations have nearly completely supplanted the real thing in the public consciousness. Close your eyes and try to picture Elvis Presley and his music. Five will get you ten that you are, in fact, thinking of an Elvis impersonator's act.

Which on some level is probably appropriate, I have to admit. The very first person to impersonate Elvis wasn't Andy Kaufman...it was Elvis himself, at the end of his life. But when you go out and listen to the records he made before the cartoon overtook the man, you remember exactly how brilliant a performer he was. His early recordings are still fresh and thrilling. Some of the gospel tracks Elvis recorded before he gave up altogether can provoke genuine chills. It's all a pity, because Elvis' reputation might be irredeemable by now. When you think "Elvis," you think "Thankyew...thankyewverrmuch" and "Elvis has left the building." You can't help it; it's like hearing the William Tell Overture and trying not to think of the Lone Ranger.

After all, legacies require careful caretaking. The fact that Carson's DVDs are top-sellers is very encouraging. But it makes me cringe to imagine that there might come a time when the public's limited collective awareness, with a pressing need to free up some space for new "Saturday Night Live" catchphrases and reality-TV personalities, will ultimately strip Carson's legacy down so bare that it'll be reduced to Ed McMahon's "Hey-yo!!!" and a clip of a spider monkey peeing on Johnny's head. It's not inevitable; people will recognize brilliance if they see it. But while all of P.G. Wodehouse's 100 books remain in print, and you can click into iTunes and download 85 Elvis albums without even leaving your sofa, Carson's 30 years of "Tonight" shows are currently represented by a just a few DVDs. Of clips, mind you.

None of these discs present a typical "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" in its entirety. Cool: you can get Johnny's final two shows. They're hugely entertaining but the true power of Carson is represented by the dull routine, the overall continuum of broadcasts...a randomly-selected show in which his guests were the star of an NBC sitcom that you couldn't stand and a writer that you'd never heard of. Those shows are the ones that demonstrate why Carson was so damned good at what he did and why he was so sorely missed when he went away. He wasn't a comic or an entertainer: he was a broadcaster. His brilliance doesn't come through in a series of clips. You just can't get him unless you see him reacting to a live audience for an hour, and guiding two or three guests through their interviews. When the opening theme blared and Carson stepped through the curtains and into the lights, he was like a downhill skiier blasting through the starting gate. Night after night, you tuned in to watch Carson navigate from the top of the monologue to the bottom of the show, reacting to bumps and powering through straightaways as he went, emerging victorious every single time at the end. Carson was never about the material or the guests. They weren't why you tuned in; they were just the snow under Johnny's skis. When you tuned into Johnny, it was always because of the broadcast.

With Carson's passing, an entire generation of young adults have suddenly become Old. There's an entire generation behind us that never saw "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson." We will try — with embarrassing and dithering enthusiasm — to explain what the show was like and we'll fail. Completely. No doubt part of that's due to the fact that our childhoods are so deeply infused with memories of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The first time my parents and I were in the same room laughing at the same thing, we were watching The Tonight Show together. Some years later, our bedtimes were defined by the start or the end of the monologue. That's some powerful mojo, and those kinds of memories are shared by nearly everybody who was born before 1980.

A couple of years after Letterman moved to CBS and the 11:30 PM time slot, he did a week's worth of shows in Los Angeles. Early in the week, Carson made a quick cameo — literally, a drive-by — in a video piece that had Dave and Paul touring the streets of LA.

It was just two years after Carson had disappeared into retirement, and the audience went nuts. In his final LA show, David ended his monologue by asking the audience to welcome a surprise visitor: "Mr. Johnny Carson." And out came Calvert DeForrest, continuing a running gag that had been going on all week. Everyone knew who was going to step onto the stage, but there was still that moment when you let yourself believe that maybe, just maybe, it'd really be him.

DeForrest crossed the stage and passed by Dave's desk and waved to the crowd all the way to his exit. And then...Mr. Johnny Carson himself made the exact same entrance.

The audience quite simply died. The studio sank three inches into the ground as 600 people leaped thirty inches out of their seats and then landed on their feet. The audio engineer scrambled to his bank of sliders, to no avail: every mic was pegged into the red. Surely, VU meters exploded into showers of triumphant sparks, like the stadium lights when Robert Redford hit that home run at the end of The Natural.

Johnny sheepishly acknowledged the crowd and slowly crossed towards Dave's desk. As for Letterman himself, this clearly was the happiest moment of his life up 'till that point. It wasn't the fact that Johnny was appearing on his stage instead of Leno's. It was the simple fact that he was sharing a stage with Carson at all, being a witness to the tectonic waves of adulation that were being thrown at his mentor and idol.

It was almost a scary expression of love and it reminded me that feelings of rage and love both tend to fire from the same sector of the human brain. It was relentless, a living thing. There was just so much pent-up love out there for Johnny Carson, and this was the first time in two years that it had been provided with any sort of outlet. You could say that it was The Perfect Storm of audience reactions.

Dave crossed the stage and shook Johnny's hand. Johnny made some sort of gesture to Dave and then, getting a subtle but delightedly enthusiastic response from the host...he crossed behind Dave and sat down behind the desk. Dave walked around and sat in his own guest chair, having proved against all probabilities that it was possible for him to grin even more broadly than he had when Johnny took the stage a minute earlier.

Johnny smoothed his hands across the surface of the desk, clearly savoring a point of view he'd enjoyed for thirty years and which he'd missed since 1992. At home, I was leaning way forward out of my chair, almost paralyzed with expectation: what would he say? This was almost a historic moment; Johnny Carson was back on a talk-show set, sitting behind a desk!

But the audience ruined it for everybody. They simply could not restrain themselves. Johnny gave the desk another affectionate pat, like a retired Western lawman feeling the saddle of a horse for the first time in a year and possibly for the last time of his life, and then, with a start that suggested to me that he was snapping himself out of his own trance, Johnny Carson raised his hands in protest, shook Dave's hand again, and then he was gone.

For good, this time. It was somehow satisfying that he got that last burst of adulation, unwanted though it might have been, regardless of the fact that it wrecked what was going to be the greatest television moment of the year. It was came all on its own, isolated from all of the hype and promotion that had surrounded his final Tonight Shows. This applause wasn't a formal and final thank-you, fed by a month of pre-publicity and anticipation. It was genuine as any applause can be when it's generated within LA's airspace. And when it was unleashed...it proved to be literally unstoppable.

So today, Johnny is dead, and we're all old. When the time comes for me to explain to my nieces and nephews why Johnny Carson was so terrific, I think I'm going to pull out my tape of that Letterman show and play Carson's final walk-on. And then I'll ask the kids what a man needs to accomplish in a lifetime and what he would need to represent to 600 complete strangers to receive that kind of welcome.

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An Important Announcement for All Straight Men and Lesbians

Friday, January 28 5:53 AM

You must — you must — do whatever it takes to ensure that you get to see what will be airing today at 5:30 PM on the Turner Classic Movies channel. If you have a VCR, a TiVO, or a DVD recorder, read the manual that came with the device and work whatever sort of mojo it requires to record about two and a half hours' worth of video. If you don't have one of these devices, or if you can't get the thing to work no matter how carefully you read all three translations of the user guide, then it's time to use one of your sick days.

Because at 5:30 PM, TCM will air a 1954 MGM musical called "Deep In My Heart." It's the thrilling biography of Sigmund Romberg, famed composer of such legendary Broadway hits as "The Rose Of Stamboul" and "The Girl In Pink Tights." Yes, indeed! Your prayers have been answered, basic-cable subscribers!

Okay, look: this movie stinks. It was directed by Stanley Donen, so it's got that going for it, but it's a disposable movie made back when enormous studios cranked out Product on a weekly basis. Biopics of composers were the Hostess Twinkies of MGM's output: they're mostly chemicals and air. There's really no story to speak of; the narrative is just the cord upon which the studio strung a series of singing and dancing numbers. But honestly...who could blame 'em for making a movie like this? MGM had folks like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire under contract. Yup, they put their top stars in their top flicks (like "Singin' In The Rain" and "The Band-Wagon") but you know, those guys had to be paid whether they worked or not. And so, in much the same way that a McDonalds' employee will have a mop thrust angrily into his hands moments after he's spotted leaning against a case of frozen salad patties, whenever Jane Powell or Ann Miller spent too much time hanging out at the coffee machines they'd find themselves pushed onto a soundstage to appear in a biopic of someone or other.

And the movie's subject really didn't matter, either. These flicks may have been based on real composers but the studio quickly turned them into action figures with minimum points of articulation and an easy-to-communicate Concept. It's sort of fun to watch these flicks and listen for certain code phrases. When a doctor diagnoses a composer with "exhaustion" and demands that he check into a hospital instead of attending his latest premiere, you should hear the words "booze and pills," loud and clear. And traditionally, the gayer the guy was, the quicker the film sent him to either World War I (to suffer a War Wound that tragically prevented him from ever knowing the love of a woman) or to the Yukon, where he spent ten years catching wolverines with his bare hands and then clubbing grizzly bears to death with them.

Still, these variety shows are fun. Apart from a couple of nostalgia turns at the end of their careers, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly only danced together in one musical: a single number in "Ziegfeld Follies." You stoically maintain your patience throughout each of the bits that feature now-anonymous singers and dancers who didn't know at the time that this was as far as they were ever going to go in this business; you chuckle indulgently when the movie — oh, isn't this adorable — tries to advance the "plot"; and then when The Good Stuff comes along you perk up, like a pet beagle when a Liv-A-Snap are introduced into the immediate environment.

"The Good Stuff" of "Deep In My Heart" is, without question, the song "One Alone." I could describe it to you, but I think it'll be more effective if I create a bit of speculative fiction instead.

Our story begins in the expansive and expensive offices of the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, circa 1953. Via an intercom, he's reminded that he has an appointment with his son. Out of habit, he instructs his secretary to make his son wait outside for forty-five minutes. But eventually, the kid is buzzed into the inner office.

The son appears nervous. "I can't continue to live a lie: I'm gay, Dad," he says. "I know that this news shocks and disappoints you, but please understand that this announcement comes after years of soul-searching. I wouldn't have told you unless I was completely certain and confident...of my sexual orientation, and of your ability to continue to love me despite your disapproval."

There is silence. In fact, it becomes so quiet in the building that for the very first time, a screenwriter's objections to a star's requested script changes could actually be heard.

Finally, the studio chief speaks. "On your way out, ask Darlene to give you an appointment for two weeks from Thursday," he says, evenly. After his son leaves the office, he buzzes the secretary and instructs her to call his son next week to cancel and reschedule, again out of sheer reflex.

The next morning, he assembles the heads of each of MGM's various departments for an emergency meeting. They huddle around the huge conference table — built from a load of emergency firewood originally intended for an orphanage, and upholstered with a colorful assortment of skins collected from Last Known Breeding Pairs of a large number of species — and hope that this won't be another one of those meetings where he just shoots thumbtacks at them with a rubber band while he waits for an international call to be put through.

"Jeff!" he barks at his Head of Talent. "Who, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is the hottest female currently under contract with MGM?"

"Oh, Cyd Charisse, no question," the man replies. "In fact, we had to install an isolated set of air-conditioning ducts just for her part of the studio. Her pheromones were negatively impacting shooting schedules on adjacent stages."

"Pull her out of whatever picture she's working on," he commands, and then he turns to a man in a purple suit. "Max," he says, "I need your wardrobe department to create the tighest dress ever made."

The head of the wardrobe department's name is, in fact, Oscar, but he nods anyway. "Not a problem," he says. In fact, we can design her a costume that's so tight, we'll have to actually sew her into it. If you really want to go all-out, that is."

"Yes, I really want to go all-out," the chief confirms. "But no, a sewn-on costume just won't be tight enough. Not nearly tight enough."

Max — for he was already redefining himself based upon his boss' will and whim — mused on this. "Well, we have a couple of guys who worked for the Army during the war, developing plastics," he says, thinking aloud. "It might be possible to produce sheer, lace fabric in aerosol form."

"You mean, a spray-on wardrobe?"

"Theoretically, yes."

"Just what the doctor ordered," he says, twitching his cigar in satisfaction. "Okay. This is good. I'm liking what I'm hearing. Conrad: do we have any music in the library that mandates twirly, shimmery, undulating body movements, and how quickly can you write up the charts and record it with a forty-piece orchestra?"

And so, he goes around the table, assembling and motivating each of his Iron Chefs and focusing the entire studio on a single goal: to cast, costume, score, light, choreograph, stage, and ultimately shoot the single most provocative five minutes of film ever recorded, before or since.

Word quickly spreads of what these men and women were trying to achieve. The Hays Office — the Government's official censorship board — sends a telegram immediately, saying only that the studio's cause is Right and that it is Good, and that as a result the Office would disband itself immediately, duly shamed. Photons start lining up at the Casting Department's door by the hundreds, desperate for the honor of bouncing off of Cyd Charisse's body and then disappearing into a camera lens...never to escape, but satisfied that they'd lived fond, full half-lifes.

Three weeks later, the studio chief's son returns for his follow-up meeting. He is directed to a screening room where he's met by his father, who wordlessly points to a chair, dead-center. And then, as is his custom, he flung a shoe at the projectionist's window to cue the start of the film.

The lights dimmed and "One Alone" unspools for the very first time. The music swells and Charisse makes her entrance, teasingly clad in a long green velvet robe that she will soon gratefully shed. She has secretly won entrance to the Sultan's inner chamber; over the next few minutes, she will implore him, through song and provocative dance, to allow her to remain.

Ultimately, the number ends and the lights go up. The chief (who had huddled inside a lightproof and soundproof panic room so that his head would remain clear for the conversation to come) emerges and lights a triumphant cigar.

"Well?" he says, shaking out his match.

The young man sighs. "Seriously, Dad: gay, gay, gay."

Children, the chief's Grinchy heart grew three sizes that day.

"Son," he says, stabbing out his cigar (on the neck of an intern...once again, out of sheer reflex), "I have wronged you. Surely, this is who you are and not what you choose to be; and if I could be so wrong about such a fundamental fact about homosexuality, then as a parent I dare not risk allowing my ignorances to jeopardize my relationship with my only child."

And with that, he considers the issue closed.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that this is, indeed, the most gloriously and geniusly prurient footage currently available to the general public. I will allow for the possibility that even sexier scenes may have been created, with government funding. You know, as a sort of doomsday weapon against enemies foreign and domestic.

Even so, I'm not allowing for the possibility that "One Alone" is only the second-hottest piece of film in existance. It's more like I'm simply acknowledging that a truly open-minded man can't make a declaration regarding that which is, by its nature, unknowable. This same principle is the root of Agnosticism, which is very, very correct: if you've seen this footage, you'll understand that it is completely appropriate to describe Ms. Charisse and her performance in theological terms.

Yes, I have seen "9 1/2 Weeks." Ms. Basinger is a charming woman, but even when she's writhing in the rain wearing nothing but a cotton tank-top, she lacks a certain vim. You can't possibly make a first impression as positive as Uma Thurman's — naked and emerging from an accurate reprodution of Boticelli's "Birth of Venus" in Terry Gilliam's "The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen" — but where was the dancing? Where was the heart?

And I am indeed very familiar with the work of Ms. Jennifer Connelly. Still, she has to be satisfied with second place in this particular race. It's not her fault; her standing merely demonstrates the importance (in screen sexuality as in Oscar races) of having the support of an experienced major studio that knows what it's doing.

So this is my gift to you for the week. You straight men and lesbians will see this footage and you will recalibrate various detectors and meters. Cyd Charisse in "One Alone" is the speed of light. You can approach it, but you can never reach it.

Or if you did, you'd go back in time. Which when you think about it would actually be a great thing, because there's every chance that you'd wind up in 1954...and then, you could conceivably hit on her in person.

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