Previously on Dynasty: The same clips of Fallon wanting the COO job and Cristal getting it; Fallon declared that she’s building the company with Jeff on her own; Jeff said he needed to rethink the company with Fallon; Fallon leaked Cristal’s sex tape and got kicked out of Blake’s house; Kori Rucks, a councilwoman, slept with Michael; Claudia publicly accused Blake of killing Matthew; Cristal apologized to Claudia but Blake ran over Claudia just as she was about to bean Cristal with a cement block.
Previously on Dynasty: Cristal got the COO job Fallon wanted; Fallon decided to start a new company with Jeff; Fallon told an obnoxious dude named Robbie Reed that Michael was her boyfriend but told Monica that was just a lie to get rid of Robbie, and Michael overheard her; Michael slept with Kori Rucks, the city councilwoman who had refused a contract to Fallon; Steven tried to help Sam only to learn that he orchestrated a robbery; Cristal and Blake offered to pay for Cristal’s dead, married ex-boyfriend’s funeral and his sad wife Claudia accepted; Cristal and Matthew’s sex tape was a huge hit on the internet and Claudia saw it.
During our epic Dawson’s Creek rewatch (oh yes, that’s coming), I stumbled on this oldie-but-goodie article from The Awl about Dawson’s, that fake artist “Jarvis” (who is actually sort of real), and the treatment of art on television.
OMG, OMG, OMG, Julianna Margulies is not only coming back to television, she’s playing a Miranda Priestly-type boss bitch on a show by Marti Noxon (Buffy, UnREAL) about radical feminist terrorists. Amazing.
You know how sometimes people get in trouble for saying sexist things and you start thinking to yourself, oh, are we being too judgmental, maybe he just made a mistake? Well, sometimes, people just happen to be unable to think of women writers who inspire them and it turns out later that they also think rape victims should just “suck it up” and not ruin Kevin Spacey’s career. Thanks for sharing, Gay Talese. (via Vulture)
The New York Times has an oral history of the making of the original Jumanji, focusing on Robin Williams. I don’t even want to see the new one. You can’t beat Bonnie Hunt, Robin Williams, the young Kirsten Dunst, and this immortal comeback, spoken from an angry cop to an aggressively acquisitive vine from a magical forest:
“FINE! TAKE IT!
Meanwhile, in the category of slightly more surprising oral histories, GQ did an oral history of… Jeff Goldblum. This is a new idea, but who better to start with than the man who is his own mythologization? Highlight: The woman who spent a plane ride listening to Jeff Goldblum read her the last ninety pages of the book she was reading.
Previously on Dynasty: Cristal became COO of Carrington Atlantic, so Fallon decided to be CEO of Carrington Windbriar, backed by Jeff. Blake brought Matthew by the house to mess with Cristal, but then Matthew died, and Cristal was all sad. Steven got arrested for Matthew’s death. Cristal didn’t want to tell Blake that she had a bad past in Mexico, so Sammy Joe just orchestrated a robbery to get money for Cristal’s sister back in Mexico. But he didn’t realize Blake had Matthew’s stolen phone, which went missing in the robbery, and the stuff on that phone could “ruin the Carrington name.”
This week under the heading of “blog post ideas I really wish I’d had first,” Lit Hub has a hilarious post called “Take a Literary World Tour Alongside Paul Manafort’s Dirty Money,” subtitled “An essential book from every country where Paul Manafort allegedly laundered his money.” Ha! I’ve been thinking of reading The Big Green Tent; maybe it’s finally time.
Did you know Lydia Davis and Siri Hustvedt have both been married to Paul Auster? We didn’t. Anyway, here’s an amazing interview with Hustvedt (who is still married to Auster) about the sexist assumption of confessional writing that dogs her but not her husband.
The reviews for Netflix’s competing Margaret Atwood adaptation, Alias Grace, have emerged, and they’re raves.
Previously on Dynasty: Fallon thought she deserved to run her dad’s company, but he offered the COO position to his new fiancee, Cristal. So Fallon teamed up with this guy Jeff to form a company called Carrington Windbriar. Cristal’s nephew Sammy Joe declared her the “black sheep” of the family, and Cranky Butler had dirt on her but we don’t know what it is. Finally, Cristal’s married ex-lover died at Windbriar and Steven got arrested for it.
If you haven’t read it, Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” published in Granta a few years ago and based on the story of the girl with the green ribbon around her neck, makes for great Halloween reading.
LitHub has a fascinating article on James Baldwin’s giant FBI file. Turns out one way to make the bureau lose its shit was to be an influential black writer who was planning a book on the FBI.
I remember how amused I was when I went to Planet Fitness last year and realized TNT was STILL rerunning Charmed every morning. I was trying to think of something that was more undeserving of such longevity and the best I could come up with is “It’s like if a radio station was still playing S Club 7 every day.” Anyway, Vulture published a hilarious piece called “The Best Thing to Watch at the Gym Is Silent Reruns of Charmed,” where the author tries to figure out the plot just from staring at Charmed playing every morning at the gym. Money quote: “I tried dating Charmed episodes by fashion, but the series takes place in a world where crop tops are always in style.”
Previously on Dynasty: The Carringtons are super rich; Fallon Carrington’s father Blake got engaged to Cristal; Cristal had a married ex-boyfriend, a mischievous nephew named Sammy Joe who made out with Fallon’s brother Steven Carrington, and a dark secret that Cranky Butler totally knows, but we don’t. Cristal got the COO position that Fallon wanted, so Fallon got a guy named Jeff to back her as the CEO of a different company, Carrington Windbriar. Then Cristal’s married ex got blown up and squished by a windmill blade at Windbriar, and his wife thought Blake did it.
The Harvey Weinstein revelations continue. I’ll draw your attention to a pair of New York Times articles that I think are particularly important. In the first, Lupita Nyong’o describes in an op-ed just how hard Harvey Weinstein worked to try to get around her clearly stated boundaries, and how alone she felt in her situation. In the second, Quentin Tarantino gives a brutally self-aware interview about the fact that he knew about Weinstein and failed to do anything. I think his interview really shows how normal this thought process seems despite the horrifying consequences, and also shows that people who aren’t invested in seeming like perfect allies (ahem, Ben Affleck) are sometimes more capable of learning and improving. (Assuming, of course, that Tarantino does improve in the future.)
“I chalked it up to a ’50s-’60s era image of a boss chasing a secretary around the desk,” he said. “As if that’s O.K.”
Speaking of which, Hachette has quickly and quietly “terminated” Weinstein Books, per The Guardian, but are keeping all of the titles and transferring the women who run the imprint to the main branch. That’s how you do it.
James Wood wrote a piece in The New Yorker dissecting why Never Let Me Go by recently crowned Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro is so great (or, in his words, “one of the central novels of our age”).
The first people to appear onscreen in the series premiere of Dynasty, Josh Schwartz’s modernized remake of the classic show, are the Trumps: Donald, Ivanka, Tiffany, Trump Junior, and Eric are at a ribbon cutting ceremony. This is followed by a shot of the Kardashians.
I take this as a declaration of intent: Like Gossip Girl and The OC before it, the latest Josh Schwartz creation is going to be about rich people. But this time it’s not those quiet, repressed, Emily Gilmore-type rich people who seem to throw big parties precisely in order to avoid having scenes. These are rich people who throw parties in order to have more witnesses when they do make a scene. These are rich people for the age of reality TV! We aren’t on the Upper East Side anymore, baby.
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