The House Style: Words, Words, Words

8 April 2025

To quote the lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner from the song, Show Me, in My Fair Lady — with slight revisions by me:

Words, words, words

I’m so sick of words

I get words all day through

First from them, now from you

Is that all you faux-news scribblers can do?

Every morning, when I emerge from sleepdom, I ask Dear Husband:

“Is there any News?  And a statement is not News.  An X post is not News.  What So-and-So said, or did not say, is not News.”

“There’s no news,” is the accurate reply.

We Patriots in the States find ourselves in a fine mess, or, as the French say, un joli pétrin.

Except it’s not a fine mess, or pretty, or anything approaching describable.  The death of journalism was occurring when I first studied, and then worked, in the industry, during the Nixon-Carter era.  One job I held in the business office of ABC News, in D.C., was to pass out the agenda to the stuffed shirts at the long executive wooden table, at about 10 in the morning.  So these pompous prigs could decide which “stories” to run with that evening, on The News.

It was quite an education for someone barely out of high school!  It put to rest any questions I might have had about The News vs. The Facts, ma’am.  Just the facts.

I consequently found the field of fiction much more reliable!

It’s been said by many a reader of my writing that my fictional scenes are very cinematic.  Yes, they are.  One of the biggest, if not THE biggest influence upon my creative crystallization of A Scene is film.  The Golden Era of Hollywood taught, and trained, me about the placement, lighting, composition, set design, and directing of people, animals, landscape, scenery and those telling details in any fictional scene.

I suppose the theatre might have been instrumental in forming my “vision”, but, by the time that I was attending Broadway shows, in the 1970s, real drama was leaving The Boards.  And leaving the audience bored, bored, bored!

My research into the making of those phenomenal flicks was enormously enriched by the books of Rudy Behlmer.  This American film historian, writer, and fascinating raconteur was born 13 October 1926 in San Francisco California.  He passed away on 27 September 2019.  Shortly thereafter, I read, somewhat coincidentally, two of his books:

The Films of Errol Flynn (1969, co-written with Tony Thomas and Clifford McCarty);

and

Memo from David O. Selznick (1972).

The first book is a quick read, the second one a long slog.

The book on Flynn is excellent, albeit sad due to the tragic content of the life of Errol Flynn.  I was nonetheless impressed by the enormous body of work that Mr. Flynn created as an actor.  “Body” is the correct choice of word, but his mind was extraordinarily brilliant. Errol was perhaps the most under-rated, under-valued and over-fantasized actor in the Hollywood of that era.  He was, by the time of his arrival in TinselTown, already past mid-life.  He was scandalous and sinful, steeped in a Victorian morality against which he attempted to free himself, with dreadful results.

There is, within the telling of this factual filmography, a sense of sorrowful admiration for a man who purposely allowed, even encouraged, the misunderstanding of himself so that he could live out, as he pleased, a life that he knew would be brief.

Long before behaving badly became Online News Click-Bait, Errol Flynn was, indeed, in like Flynn.  He got not one red cent, however, from the sensationalization of his private life.  In fact, he paid dearly for those wicked ways, many of which I think were fictitious, with just as many real.  He thus became an even greater legend than anything that the Hollywood Media Machine could have dreamed up for him.

In a startlingly sorrowful approach to living, his way of controlling his life was often completely out-of-control.  He rather passively went with the flow of the boat named Errol Leslie Thomson Flynn.  He exerted more effort into the making of his screen-character than of his real self.  That intensely private being permitted few, if any, close to the actual man.  Compare that inner torment to the truly demented Hollyweirds of today.  Where would they be without self-promoting their lives as pornography?

Memo from David O. Selznick is a meticulous, often cumbersome, fact-filled literary annotation of the obsessive concerns of Mr. Selznick to produce/control/promote successful films within the Studio System that had ended by the time this book was published in 1972.  Mr. Behlmer, in essence, provides his inordinate knowledge to analyze, with detailed expertise, the evolution of this movie mogul in crafting his piece of the motion picture industry.

That piece is large in the legend and lore of the Golden Age of Hollywood in America.  I was astounded by the persnickety, sometimes pill-popping, energy that drove Mr. Selznick, and not always in a positive direction.  Success, at a very young age, led Mr. Selznick in the quest to top himself, for the rest of his life.

We in America have not seen the equivalent of his ingenious dynamism because financial success at a young age — among the digital masters of the universe — has created arrested development in highly immature individuals who see no point in growing up.  Growing old for them goes to infinity— and beyond — the spoiled-brat Baby-Boomer angst of no longer being a perpetual adolescent.

Where Mr. Behlmer really shines in his historical depiction of the factory industry, known as Hollywood, is his DVD commentary on the making of classic movies:  The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, Notorious, Gone with The Wind.

I learned from his concise critiques about something that he called “The House Style”.  I’ve subsequently applied his descriptive terminology to the not-so-fine mess that America finds itself in vis-à-vis The News.  I’ve put in about ten years, an entire decade, of chasing down facts, just the facts, because, Margaret, I DO care about what you nitwits did to a once-functional industry.

Journalism was never a bastion of ethics or an abundance of accuracy, but the reporters, several decades ago, tried to nail down the facts, and — to their surprise — they often did!

Print and television news media issued retractions of errors and mistakes, begrudgingly, but quickly, lest they lose viewership, or the FCC license that has become a sick joke.  Today, the errors and mistakes ARE the News, a reality that speaks volumes about how minuscule the market share is for those propagandists.

Even twenty years ago, the scribblers were also capable of stringing together a sentence of coherent, logical thought.  A print journalist received a higher gig only after having written a book, a good, serious book, not a ghost-written palaver as part of the cable-news-contract negotiation.  Image wasn’t show-biz.  The narcissistic mania of being A Star in The Media started when electronic-news-gathering (of the 1970s) shoved print journalism into the financial ditch.  It’s been a swift downhill slide for The Talking Heads ever since.

Breitbart News:  Warner Brothers.  The style was gritty reality, with stories pulled from the Headlines. Where the current Heads originate, I do not know.  Neither do the Heads, but they do offer popcorn on the side.

Mr. Nolte really needs to move on from covering Disney to expounding upon a more upbeat beat.  I fully believe that Abigail decided to go to her grave, penniless, after having spent boo-coo inherited bucks during her self-indulgent life.  It’s a piggish passion, but Nolte doesn’t seem to grasp the basic death-cultism of a Disney World that’s been lucky just to have survived Walt.

Babylon Bee.  Theatre of the Absurde, New Wave French cinéma, of the Auteur Style.  What started as a coping mechanism, comic relief, and quirky satire has, within the space of five years, become interchangeable with Hard News.  There are times when BB refers to Breitbart, and yet other times when it stands for Babylon Bee.

Last week, I overheard a patient in my dentist’s office answer a question as to where he gets his daily news:  “Babylon Bee headlines,” he replied, no tongue in cheek.  And I don’t think he was even undergoing a procedure!

The Weekly Standard:  I hypothesize that, pre-USAID $$$$$$, Mr. Kristol fancied himself as the content creator of MGM at its best:  opulence in Technicolor.  The fact that he was creating cartoons is still lost on this insufferable neo-con.

The Daily Caller:  Poverty Row along the Potomac.  On the cheap and minimalistic.  Mr. Tucker Carlson helped to found this Beltway bloviator which proved to him, real fast, that there’s no future in the past, i.e.  a newspaper format.  When Tucker bailed out in June 2020, the writing was on the wall about writing on the wall with words that bear witness to truth-in-journalism.  Click-bait Journalism took over complete, like crabgrass.  Those finely manicured lawns of D.C. will never be the same again.

Town Hall, with subsidiary RedState, is United Artists, with RedState striving to be Paramount.  I used to peruse RedState often because the content used to be weighted heavily toward California News.  Living in the Northern Appalachia of the Golden State, I try to keep up on the latest débâcles, but those catastrophes form an endless daisy chain, or do-loop.

The RedState writing has degenerated from marginally lucid into approximations of thoughts, as you scroll down screen, after screen, after screen — encountering even more errors in syntax and grammatical vagaries.  I lost count of the misplaced modifiers!

The linguistic atrocities reminded me too much of my one year of working in a private school, trying to teach the basics of writing to 5th graders!  I dared to touch, with my red pen, the gibberish, in essay form, of one of the Darlings whose mother controlled the classroom, the faculty, the school.

How dare I impose corrections upon the scribbling of a ten-year-old child!  Methinks that child has since gone into Network News!

The pervasive mindset, or House Message, at RedState is that California Needs A New Governor and all will be well at Paramount.

No.

California needs a vastly altered composition of the Boys and Girls Under the Dome.  The members of the Assembly and Senate constitute a freak show.  The Guv may be the biggest freak of all, but the Locals have gone loco.

Town Hall is United Artists because there’s some admirable writing going on there.  I particularly like the penned opinions of Kurt Schlichter, although I differ with him on the role of Justice Roberts in American jurisprudence.  Mr. Roberts, I saw, from the jump, as trying to re-incarnate Chief Justice John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court, long long before that institution became The Supremes.

I immediately saw his landmark decision on Obamacare on 28 June 2012 as a master-stroke (whether he intended it or not) in forcing Congress to either eat that beast (without throwing up), or kill it, dismantle it, or shrink the ogre down to size so that Hillary-care could not supplant it.

National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 is a landmark decision that shed me of a few friends who were impatient to slay the monstrous Obamacare-beast.  I’m not sure if Justice Roberts did the right thing for the wrong reason, or for the right reason, but he re-introduced the foundational law of Marbury v. Madison (1803) which established judicial review.  It was just the start of winning back America, one lawsuit at a time.

Foundational Law is hard to find, or found, when the rule of law in the States has broken down to a mob-mentality, backed by rogue Judges and by secret Super Bucks from The Zombies in the USA.

The American versions of the biggest hits of The (English) Zombies are quite unforgettable:

“She’s Not There” is Hillary’s “I’m With Her”.  “Tell Her No” weirdly morphed into the MeToo (I initially typed MeTwo) weaponization of those inter-personal relations about which The Globalist Media are completely obsessed.  And “Time of the Season” is the Election Cycle that never ends!

I’m leaving pod-casts out of this Media House Style reckoning.  I reckon that with the blaring, glaring, and scary arrival of Governor Gruesome (who can’t prove plausible deniability or plausible credibility), and Michelle (who can’t prove marketability) on the pod-cast scene, the Podcast is heading straight to the Morgue.

From a strictly historical and factual perspective:

The Morgue consists of the back-files of a newspaper.  Those dossiers were, once upon a 1st-Amendment time, used by the scribblers to offer depth, perspective, context, proportion, intelligence, palpability, believability — to a News Story.  With the desperate data-purging of ALLFILES, the Morgue is looking very empty.

Starting from scratch is a challenge, but Americans enjoy a challenge.  Some might say, We the People seek out challenges.  The United States are built upon the bedrock of challenge, a word that, in French, is défi, also known as:

Defiance.

Redcoats and Rebels.  There’s a House Style to inspire me!