islanded in a stream of stars

If you have no interest in the Prisoner, then the rest of this entry will be rather pointless for you to read.

Mike Reiss, one of the producers and writers on the Simpsons came to talk about his experience working on the show this evening; he's probably the best comic I've ever heard. Or maybe it was because we all like bashing the University of Arkansas for no good reason.

Being the obscure!fangeek that I am, I waited around half an hour afterwards to ask him how the heck they ever got Patrick McGoohan to appear for the Prisoner spoof episode, "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes," considering that he hasn't really done anything since Braveheart



His reply (roughly paraphrased):
To be honest, we have absolutely no idea. We didn't realize how hard he was to get a hold of until everyone else was asking us "How did you get him to appear?" He was really a great guy to work with, quite nice...we really had no idea how lucky we were until afterwards. Isn't there supposed to be a movie based on the Prisoner coming out soon?

That now leads me to the question-BBC is doing a Prisoner remake with Dr. Who's Chris Eccleston next year, but is the on-again, off-again "movie in the works" actually happening? There were some rumors flying around about that last year, but they panned out. I didn't want to ask anything more of Reiss as I didn't want to take up too much of his time, but he was really kind and patient with everyone who wanted to ask him a question or for his autograph.

It is probably widely known that I have problems being serious for long stretches of time, and theoretically having three days of free time has made me rather silly. Compounded by watching a lot of cult 60's spy TV within those three days among pretending to be a French kindergardener and painting large pieces of cardboard, I may or may have not gone slightly insane.

So if you aren't a Prisoner addict, the following won't be in the least bit funny.

( I am not a number! I am a free man! )

There are three numbers: 8, 58, and 86. I am to be represented by one of those three numbers. Which one should I choose? Leave a comment to indicate your choice.

I can explain it later, but I'd like some outside opinions as I'm having problems choosing among those three.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/TV/11/08/television.littleton.reut/index.html

A nice little summary of what goes on in the Prisoner, if you're curious. If it's possible to have a mad crush on a TV show then I have one on the Prisoner. There's something really disturbing when you feel like writing about the existentialist aspects of a seventeen episode show that played over forty years ago.

And for memesheepness, look under the LJ-cut.

( Baah. Ram. Ewe. Sheep be true. )

Interesting quotations from said interview:

(And if you're curious, McGoohan is a devout Catholic and considered training to be a priest.)

"Our only hope," he says, "is really whatever our youngsters are after. The wild beauty of a child's mind, a garden of Eden with craggy peaks, is one of the most virile things you can talk about; it is a tremendous responsibility to preserve this in your children and make sure the seeds flower.

“No one can 'qualify' to be an individual," he mused. "You know, get a certificate saying, 'Individual.' You can't 'do your own thing, I don’t believe anybody has been able to do that in honesty and get away with it. It's a tired old advertising expression I refuse to use. 'Meaningful’ is a tired, unmeaningful word. Slums with rats in them are not 'semidepressed areas.

People talk and talk and talk - about Lake Erie being polluted, about everything! 'We're going to have a meaningful solution to semidepressed areas,” he mimed "Such statements are the products of mass individualism, your great American success stories. What it means is that they have nothing to say. It's like packets of Kleenex. "One of the worst pollutions is the spread of the dissipated word: truth, dissipated by virtue of the fact that it has to please so many people. 'I'll be right back, after this message, to tell you about the end of the world.'

I think the first discipline a child should be taught is to take no notice of all that, to continue to ask his own questions his own answers, instead of watching all the people being interviewed giving answers."

Advertising is one of the greatest curses of civilization, more so than the bomb itself. It is a worse death than blood and bones. It is a question of the survival of the individual. The area of choice is being narrowed. For the mass of the people the only question is, Who has the better ad campaign? 'The man who calls a spade a spade is only fit to handle one.' Who was it said that? Well, it ain't true.

"Man has to be a moral being in order to survive. If there is no morality, he has to create it."

"One must live with the awareness of constant choice. Because people have been put slap bang into the desert again. There is happiness in it. It brings out the morality in people. Our hardest battle is recognizing what is evil and fighting it. How to sell truth? How to push truth without going over to Ultra Brite. (I bought a tube of the stuff to try, by the way. Sex appeal! It didn’t even clean.”

Note to self: Don't buy Ultra Brite toothpaste.

"How long will they sit there, waiting for the miracle, carried along by the momentum of nothingness? The danger is that the rot will overtake the waiting period, this embryo period we have when we don't know what we are going to do...Well, make sure they don't go through all their experiences before they're used up. Experience is something to be treated sparingly."

"We're on this treadmill, this machine that's carrying us into that cul-de-sac of manipulation, of 'owing so much.' You can't please all the people all the time. You've got to offend a huge mass to save the world." "I would be arrogant enough to say it's essentia1 for every man to do the equivalent of getting down on his knees and conceding that there is something bigger than he is, within whose shadow he lives," he said, with the magnetic inner certainty of a man who's had to fight for his beliefs. "Because once you go out and say, 'I know better than whatever that power or force is,' it doesn't work out. And a man has to suffer. It's bad to have it easy.

"Education is hard work. To go to college and expect great truths to come rolling across all the time is animal arrogance. Best teacher I ever knew, he used to shake and stammer. But if you gave this man a chance he could illuminate a piece of literature for you in two sentences. You'd see something in it you'd never seen before. You've got to work to find truth-- yourself. Nobody else can show it to you. We are so geared to the vicarious thrill! Pretend-life for life. It's an indication of the age.

"Truth is an essence. An essence does not change. It emanates. Any man or any woman can have it inside them as a result of their own private war within themselves. It's not just the college they fight, not just society. That's just a sideline we're trying to improve. They are fighting themselves. And if they win some of those battles, there comes an essence which by the nature of life emanates. The way a good tree pollenates and you get other good trees. The airwaves take it out. And you have the ingredients to do something that the world sees. You'll have met people who emanate this thing. It's old-fashioned. It's hard work. It can be hell. But do these kids discard it?"

"Within, within...there shall the vulture that gnaws the will be slain."