Tag: Doug Barry

The soon-to-be major motion picture event Fifty Shades of Grey just got a screenwriter and her name, according to an announcement from Universal Pictures and its subsidiary Focus Features, is Kelly Marcel.

Marcel, as you may or may not know depending on how much slack you are willing to give bloated, uninteresting TV shows, served as co-creator and executive producer of Fox’s money-on-fire series Terra Nova. However, she also wrote the spec script for what sounds like a super-interesting movie, Saving Mr. Banks, which chronicles Walt Disney’s two-decade, dogged pursuit of the rights to author P.L. Travers’ novel Mary Poppins and will star Tom Hanks as Walt Disney’s severed, cryogenically preserved head.

Perhaps of more interest to Fifty Shades fans is that Marcel has had a working relationship with the pouty-lipped Tom Hardy (the pair recently formed a theater company together) ever since doing an emergency rewrite for Hardy’s film Bronson. Are your eyebrows raising? Could this be the latest Fifty Shades casting rumor run amuck? The Los Angeles Times, at least, does not speculate.

‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ movie lands its screenwriter [LA Times]

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An unlucky new study courtesy of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research has found that, on the whole, people who believe in luck — black cats sauntering across their paths, breaking mirrors, walking under ladders, or not simply waiting for all those pennies you dropped in your kitchen to eventually turn heads up — are more likely to live unhealthy lifestyles, since they believe life is just a crazy, random amusement ride with a whole section missing near the end and over which they have absolutely no control. Believing in luck, so this research suggests, is antithetical to bootstraps and rugged self-reliance.

According to Deborah Cobb-Clark, director of the Melbourne Institute, a link exists between people who let themselves buy snake oil to ward off all that black cat crossing guard luck and poor health. In other words, she explains, people are fat because they believe in luck rather than willpower, grit, and whatever other virtue people who spend four hours a day heaving kettlebells overhead and grunting like oxen:

The main policy response to the obesity epidemic has been the provision of better information, but information alone is insufficient to change people’s eating habits. Understanding the psychological underpinning of a person’s eating patterns and exercise habits is central to understanding obesity.

All those overweight people who think they just got stuck with a bad roll of the loaded gene dice are clearly kidding themselves. They just need better access to information, like pamphlets and Nordic personal trainers because thin people, well, just look at them! Clearly they have everything figured out because they’re sinewy enough to slip through wormholes and collect all the secrets of space and time.

Meanwhile, in the gender-specific portion of the study, researchers found that men wanted more often to see real, physical results from exercise, whereas women were content just to know that they were probably going to outlive most men anyway, but with exercise they would live to like a hundred and fifty.

Believers in luck = unhealthier lifestyle [UPI]

Image via CHRISTOPHE ROLLAND/Shutterstock.

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Chelsea Clinton may finally be ready to fulfill her political destiny and restore balance to the force, or, you know, at least run for office. In the September issue of Vogue, Clinton tantalizingly suggests that, if the planets aligned just and she had finally achieved the inner peace required to wade through the muck of a political campaign, she would maybe consider running for office.

When asked about her future in politics, Clinton said, “Before my mom’s campaign I would have said no. Not because it was something I had thought a lot about but because people have been asking me that my whole life.” She says that now, however, she’s not so quick to dismiss political ambitions:

I have voted in every election that I have been qualified to vote in since I turned eighteen. I believe that engaging in the political process is part of being a good person. And I certainly believe that part of helping to build a better world is ensuring that we have political leaders who are committed to that premise. So if there were to be a point where it was something I felt called to do and I didn’t think there was someone who was sufficiently committed to building a healthier, more just, more equitable, more productive world? Then that would be a question I’d have to ask and answer.

The big takeaway here is that Chelsea Clinton is a way better participating member of our civic process than even some of the most politically opinionated Americans. Clinton said that she’s been asked by reporters pretty much all her life whether she’d ever consider a future in politics, like in 1984 when, during her dad’s gubernatorial campaign, a reporter asked if she wanted to run for governor when she grew up and she politely answered, “No, I’m four.” That’s got to be quite a burdensome political legacy to live up to, so maybe she should stay away from national politics and instead run for comptroller in a town where she’d be such an overwhelming political juggernaut that she could run it like a mini-empire, the way the villain in Roadhouse runs his town.

Chelsea Clinton open to future career in politics [The Hill]

via Jezebel http://jezebel.com/5934817/chelsea-clinton-is-starting-to-realize-that-she-must-fulfill-her-political-destiny

There are a lot of personages floating around social media sites, a disconcertingly significant number of them with no more life or substance than a discarded shell whose hermit crab tenant abandoned it a long time ago. These “bots” are used to help athletes and celebrities bolster their Twitter accounts, or trick lonely people into thinking that the great grandniece of the long-lost Princess Anastasia wants to be friends with them on Facebook (8.7 percent of Facebook’s entire user population, btw, is composed entirely of such bots). More often than not, these bots feature pictures of women, and though the bots themselves aren’t real, the women in the profile pictures are, a fact that spurred Jason Feifer of Fast Company to try and figure out who these women are and how some marketing bot appropriated their likeness.

Feifer is painfully aware of how stalkerish his quest is even before the first phone call he makes to a bike shop owner and possible distant friend of a Twitter bot woman. He’s not even sure what he’s doing beyond just sleuthing around for a link between a bot and a real, live human, and he certainly doesn’t know what will happen if he ever finds that link.

This is a mostly pointless exercise, I knew: The story behind every photo would be different. And what would one of these women say—that she’s flattered to find her face spamming everyone on Twitter? Clearly, no.

Bots, though, are becoming a more common presence on sites like Twitter because they’re cheap to both create and purchase. According to Feifer, companies like Buy Real Marketing sell bots in packages of 1,000 for $17 to 25,000 for $247. Nobody admits to it (obviously), but a publicist Feifer spoke to said that bots are really popular among athletes looking to raise their profile, and, in the case of large companies, purchasing bots is about as risk-free a marketing ploy as one can imagine. There isn’t any way to figure out if someone purchased bots or if they just accumulated bots by accident, but bot profiles like those that Feifer was combing through are pretty easy to spot because they usually have “a long digital tail, having been posted on dozens of sketchy porn sites or blogs devoted to the barely legal.”

Eventually, Feifer tracks down a woman named Amanda whose 2009 SUNshine Girls calendar photo was used on a bot profile. Feifer calls her boss (accidentally revealing Amanda’s stint as a SUNshine Girl), and finally makes a connection with a real person. That’s it, though. After admitting that having her SUNshine Girls photo — which, so far as Feifer could tell, had been used for at least a few different bot profiles — circulating the internet was pretty creepy, the best solution Feifer can offer her is to “report the bot as spam, and hope for the best.”

In the meantime, Twitter will be playing hot potato with a picture of lingerie-clad Amanda, and there’s not a whole lot she can do about it except think of the internet as a big, occasionally wonderful, occasionally horrifying amusement park, where personal information gets lost as easily as a sandal on an inverted roller coaster.

Who’s That Woman In The Twitter Bot Profile? [Fast Company]

Image via BestPhotoStudio/Shutterstock.

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Two notable Democrats have recognized the cosmic inevitability that Hillary Clinton will one day become president of a utopian future nation comprised of every North and South America nation. Okay, no one’s exactly said anything like that, but both Nancy Pelosi and Ed Whoops-I’m-Still-Talking Rendell believe that Clinton will make a bid for the White House in 2016. Pelosi said touchingly that she thinks she has a really good chance to see a female president in her lifetime because how could Hillary Clinton not be president? “Why wouldn’t she run?” Pelosi rhetorically asked the San Francisco Chronicle. “She’s a magnificent secretary of state. She’s our shot.”

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, — which sort of sound like the beginning of a climactic chapter in a novel about Amish werewolves — former Governor Ed Rendell said with typical Philadelphia bluster that, not only has he been haranguing Clinton to run for president whenever she has downtime during her busy travel schedule, he’s also volunteered to serve as her campaign manager, for the price of on the house:

She is bone-tired – the job of secretary of state is far more grueling than that of the president, with the non-stop traveling, the constant jet lag, and the odd-hours phone calls to accommodate foreign officials’ schedules. Still I believe that when she gets some rest and has a chance to reflect on what she wants, the challenges facing the country will be too great for her to resist and she will change her mind.

“Gee, thanks, Ed!” is probably what Clinton texted him before then photoshopping a picture of him with cheesesteak all over his face and showing it to Angela Merkel for a hearty, international laugh.

Nancy Pelosi skilled in art of political warfare [San Francisco Chronicle]

Ed Rendell: I Believe Hillary Will Run [Buzzfeed]

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