Category Archives: Media & Entertainment

Sarah Cooper

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One of the few bright spots of the last 8 months is Sarah Cooper and her brilliant videos. Nice piece in the Washington Post.

In a medium where teenage gamers become instant multimillionaires, Cooper is the strangest kind of overnight star. She has earned a master’s degree, written three books and developed more than a casual understanding of John Maynard Keynes. She was in her 30s before she did her first standup set, and spent the bulk of her adult life working at tech companies, most recently Google, where she led the team that redesigned the company’s popular word-processing program, Google Docs.

Gotta say it… I’m impressed by the Google Docs thing. She went from doing gigs in a pizza place in January to a Netflix special on October 27.

It is not your standard Netflix comedy show. For one thing, “Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine” is not standup. The special is a darkly hilarious and political sketch show filmed on the covid-claustrophobic set of a fictitious morning program hosted by a needy and desperately cheery character named Sarah Cooper.

If you’ve been living in a cave (or watching nothing but Fox News) you can check out her work on YouTube.

Laurel Canyon

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I really liked this documentary. Late 60’s, early 70’s was my era, but it was just a very well done film. I learned a lot about the music and the musicians from that time and that place. I was playing a lot of this music on the radio in the early 70’s but had no real appreciation for the artists or the place the music was coming from.

When online video was hard

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Everywhere you look people are streaming live video. TV news programs, late night talk shows, online classes, grandmothers Zooming with their grandkids. It has never been easier to “video chat” with someone. But it wasn’t always this way. Here are a few of my memories from the early days. (6 min)

Turbo Encabulator

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YouTube notes: “This is the first time Turbo Encabulator was recorded with picture. I shot this in the late 70’s at Regan Studios in Detroit on 16mm film. The narrator and writer is Bud Haggert. He was the top voice-over talent on technical films. He wrote the script because he rarely understood the technical copy he was asked to read and felt he shouldn’t be alone. We had just finished a production for GMC Trucks and Bud asked since this was the perfect setting could we film his Turbo Encabulator script. He was using an audio prompter referred to as “the ear”. He was actually the pioneer of the ear. He was to deliver a live speech without a prompter. After struggling in his hotel room trying to commit to memory he went to plan B. He recorded it to a large Wollensak reel to reel recorder and placed it in the bottom of the podium. With a wired earplug he used it for the speech and the “ear” was invented. Today every on-camera spokesperson uses a variation of Bud’s innovation. Dave Rondot (me) was the director and John Choate was the DP on this production. The first laugh at the end is mine. My hat’s off to Bud a true talent.”

View on YouTube

HBO Intro (1983)

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Lots of folks reading this weren’t born in 1972 when HBO launched. Hard to explain why it was such a big deal. If you wanted to watch a movie on TV back then, you waited for one of the networks’ “Movie of the Week” or something from a local affiliate. A cable channel that just showed movies (in those days) was a big deal. Met with a lot of skepticism (“Why would you pay for movies when you can get them for free?!”)

In 1983 HBO introduced a new logo that was revolutionary for the time. I share it because one of the people who worked on it (David Bruce) was from my little town. He did the Stargate effect which would be no big deal when computer generated graphics came along but was very cool in 1983.