Skin Deep
The Man Who Aged Me

By TOM HANKS
Published: April 27, 2006











Tom Hanks and Dan Striepeke on the set of "The Green Mile."

LAST October, after my final shot as Robert Langdon in "The Da Vinci Code" — after the hugs, presents and the jokes about unemployment — a birthday cake big enough to feed our entire unit was rolled out, candles blazing. The cake wasn't for me; I'd already celebrated in July, when the English and French crew sang "Happy Birthday" to me in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre. Rather, in what must have been a divinely timed coincidence, I wrapped "The Da Vinci Code" on the same day Dan Striepeke, my makeup man for 19 years, turned 75.
Showbiz has always been full of inspired timing of this sort, supplied by a goddess I call Pelicula, who weaves her magic for everyone from hopeful actors and agents to animal trainers and gate guards. She turns ordinary moments into serendipitous ones, often propelling careers at the same time.

The cake wasn't for me; I'd already celebrated in July, when the English and French crew sang "Happy Birthday" to me in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre. Rather, in what must have been a divinely timed coincidence, I wrapped "The Da Vinci Code" on the same day Dan Striepeke, my makeup man for 19 years, turned 75.

Showbiz has always been full of inspired timing of this sort, supplied by a goddess I call Pelicula, who weaves her magic for everyone from hopeful actors and agents to animal trainers and gate guards. She turns ordinary moments into serendipitous ones, often propelling careers at the same time.

In 1986, when I was leaping from one film to another without the benefit of a filmmaking posse — a would-be Boy Wonder without a Batman — Pelicula must have been watching in the ripples of her celestial pond. For, Lo! I was cast in "Dragnet" as Detective Pep Streebeck and placed in Danny Striepeke's makeup chair for the first time, our rhyming names hinting at the rightness of our screenplay-formula cute meet.


Danny drove a beautiful vintage Mustang convertible back then. He lived in Marina del Rey with his wife, Carol, and spent weekends on his sailboat, so more often than not he was wearing deck shoes, some kind of rope belt and vinyl windbreakers in every color in nature.
Having had a heart scare, he kept in fighting trim with exercise and a diet featuring a lot of Granny Smith apples — "Damn good stuff for the heart," he'd say.

I had earned enough industry clout — and had learned enough — to choose as the keystone of my squad this 40-year veteran of moviemaking, who had given Elvis Presley his tan in "Viva Las Vegas" and Laurence Olivier his Roman nose in "Spartacus."

Most civilians — people who don't make movies for a living — think makeup men are little more than hovering sprites who powder noses. But they are true artists, often unsung, who imprint films with the soft touch of their brushes and the hard work of their craft. Their creation, which will be examined on the big screen for as many years as the film holds its audience, is the most physical manifestation of an actor's interpretation of his role.

Trust is required of both parties, in the instincts of the actor and in the skills of the makeup man. In a partnership any actor would envy, Danny protected the exterior finish of my characters so I could ponder my roles without having to explain things that can't be explained anyway.

Danny turned our makeup trailer into an oasis of order amid the chaos and oftentimes panic of the set. Well before my tardy clomp up the trailer steps, he would arrange his station, make coffee, tune in National Public Radio and sometimes put out a plate of breakfast delicacies.
My shaving tools would be at the ready — a Norelco razor, a stick of roll-on talc, a disposable blade for the tough whiskers. And then, with a ritualistic slap of Sea Breeze on my face, I'd declare, "Shave, where be thy sting?" and off to work we'd go.

On both movies that were fun ("Catch Me if You Can") and movies that were tough ("Turner & Hooch" — ridiculously tough), Danny juggled my mercurial attitudes and the condition of my skin, offering his ear for my complaints and altering my body chemistry when necessary with a new facial scrub, a homemade bran muffin or a glass of cabernet.

My makeup man and I worked around the world and at every studio in Hollywood. With my face as his canvas, he turned me into a cop, an astronaut, an Army Ranger, an F.B.I. agent, a Master of the Universe, a Slavic tourist and even Santa Claus.

Through a freezing Chicago winter on "Road to Perdition," he showed the violence of my character with a slightly broken nose and eyes framed by the harsh lines of my hat and mustache. "Cast Away" was all Danny and the hair stylist Kathy Blondell. As I lost weight to show four years of being marooned in the South Pacific, Danny created scars, sunburns, rashes, rotted teeth and seeping wounds. Hours before sunrise on the set in a Fijian paradise, I nodded back to sleep as Danny and his crew fought fatigue and the clock, deconstructing me in a frenzy equal to a Nascar pit crew getting a car back onto the track.

On "Forrest Gump," we worked a 27-day stretch without a day off, grabbing shots in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine before returning to South Carolina, all in one weekend. That's four states and three full-length beards in two days! Danny took me from a teenager to a Vietnam soldier to parenthood as Sally Field died of cancer, earning him and his team one of Gump's Academy Award nominations. Perhaps because few voters realized the makeup was there, he went home empty-handed.

We started our careers in California high schools — I in Oakland, he in Santa Rosa — separated by a generation but twinned in our love of the theater arts. I went east to become an actor. Danny packed his makeup boxes and headed south for Hollywood. Pelicula must have been watching his pilgrim's progress, for one autumn morning in the late 1940's she steered him down La Cienega Boulevard and smack into his fate.

The Century Players were rehearsing "The Fabulous Invalid" by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, which Danny had done at Santa Rosa High School. He slipped into a seat in the back of the theater, and then approached the director, John Claar, during a break.
"You need a makeup artist. I'm your man."

"Yeah, kid?" Claar sipped a coffee and pointed to an actor. "Then turn him into Louis Wolheim from 'All Quiet on the Western Front.' "

Danny yanked his tools from the trunk of his '41 Plymouth and went to work with crepe hair and spirit gum, completing the job in 20 minutes.

Claar, it turned out, was a founder of KTTV, one of L.A.'s infant television stations, and he needed nonunion makeup artists. Danny was soon painting brown lipstick on Adele Jurgens and powdering the noses of the bandleader Freddy Martin and his vocalist, Merv Griffin.
From his perch at the makeup chair, Danny told of those and other moments in his career, dazzling me by the titles alone: "The Ten Commandments," "Kismet," "Giant," "Around the World in 80 Days," "The Sound of Music."

He'd tell of taking the shine off Pinky Lee and Tennessee Ernie Ford on live TV and having only a 90-second commercial break to make an old broken-down boxer out of a young, gorgeous Paul Newman. He told of how he earned his first screen credit on "The Magnificent Seven," and I asked, "How many did you do?"

"Four!" Danny ticked them off. "McQueen, Vaughn, Coburn, Brad Dexter and their stunt doubles, too."

I'd demand a story about Elvis, from one of the three epics he made with the King, and Danny would tell of Presley's gentlemanly manners and squirt-gun playfulness. I'd hear about the Memphis Mafia, Ann-Margret and how "Harum Scarum" was a big piece of junk.
After running the premiere season of "Mission: Impossible," Danny was tapped by Pelicula once more. Ben Nye, a makeup legend, was retiring as head of the makeup department at 20th Century Fox. He had been eyeing Danny's work for years and chose him as his successor.
The kid from Santa Rosa became a colleague of the likes of George Cukor, Gene Kelly and George C. Scott in "Patton," in a job that constantly tested him. His very first task in his new role at the studio was "Planet of the Apes." Danny kept the film on schedule and helped the movie's makeup designer, John Chambers, win an Academy Award, only the second Oscar given for makeup.

In 1994 I was so foolish as to write, direct and play a role in "That Thing You Do!" At least I was smart enough to hire Danny as makeup chief. But midway through production, he took a phone call and suddenly left the set. Carol had a brain tumor and would not survive the year.
When I saw him next in the postproduction offices eight months later, Danny was a widower. We threw our arms around each other and wept. After we wiped the tears from our eyes, he asked, "How is the picture going?" We wept again.

Since our meeting on "Dragnet" in the mid-80's, Danny has spent thousands of 15-hour days as my cosmetic consigliere. He's seen my kids grow up and my marriage grow long. We made deeply emotional journeys on "Saving Private Ryan" and had hilarious laugh attacks with the fake convicts and prison guards of "The Green Mile."

He shared the fresh albacore he caught off Catalina Island, and I served my own crockpot barbecue sandwiches during night shoots. He would find great restaurants for Team Hanks dinners in Moscow and Paris and not let me pick up the tab.

This past January, Danny called my office with news: he was done. Done, done. There would be no more 5 a.m. calls; no more night shoots in exotic locations like Moscow, Monument Valley or Stage 5 at Culver Studios. He had other things he wanted to do besides put goop on my face in an increasingly difficult effort to make me look good.

Through almost half of my life and nearly a quarter of his we had made 17 films, ending on a high note with "The Da Vinci Code." We told each other what wonderful adventures those years had given us, and how much we loved each other.

So here I am, with a void in my entourage once filled by one of the greatest makeup artists ever.
What do I do without Danny Striepeke?
Help me, Pelicula! I beseech ye!

Hello.

Hi, you smucks!!

Este articulo va para todos aquellos que estan buenos para crear un C.A. (Cibernautas Anonimos). Jajaja, espero que no sea el caso de ninguno de ustedes. Paz.

En auge, la adicción a la Internet, el nuevo problema siquiátrico
*Lo comparan con el alcoholismo, el juego compulsivo o la drogadicción .
*Especialistas han creado programas de 12 pasos para evitar la obsesión y grupos de ciberviudas para esposas engañadas por sus maridos en la red.
*Saldos millonarios por competitividad perdida.

ANDREW GUMBEL THE INDEPENDENT

Los Angeles. Un grupo cada vez mayor de profesionales de la salud mental en Estados Unidos ha señalado el surgimiento de un nuevo problema siquiátrico, equiparable al alcoholismo, el abuso de las drogas y el juego compulsivo: el desorden de adicción a la Internet.

Los Angeles. Un grupo cada vez mayor de profesionales de la salud mental en Estados Unidos ha señalado el surgimiento de un nuevo problema siquiátrico, equiparable al alcoholismo, el abuso de las drogas y el juego compulsivo: el desorden de adicción a la Internet.

Un empleado de oficina debe concentrarse en su trabajo cotidiano, pero pasa muchas y valiosas horas jugando futbol americano de fantasía en la computadora. Un ejecutivo tiene tanto apego por su Blackberry que lo último que hace antes de acostarse es consultarla, y vuelve a hacerlo en el momento mismo en que abre los ojos al día siguiente.

Algunas personas pasan tanto tiempo en línea que dejan de salir a la calle, sus matrimonios se arruinan y se sienten abrumadas por la depresión y los sentimientos suicidas.

Según estimaciones citadas por The New York Times, se puede decir que hasta 10 por ciento de los 189 millones de usuarios de la Internet en Estados Unidos son adictos a sus computadoras y dispositivos de mano. Otros profesionales no están tan seguros; se preguntan si la adicción a la Internet no es sino una nueva plataforma para otras patologías como el juego o la obsesión por la pornografía, y descartan la idea de la Internet como una nueva fuga.

Otros aún no se deciden a categorizar el problema. La revisión obsesiva del correo electrónico ¿entra en la misma categoría que gastar múltiples horas cada día jugando EverQuest y cualquier otro juego de la red? ¿Enviar mensajes instantáneos es tan dañino como los juegos de apuesta en línea? ¿Las charlas sexuales con extraños en los salones de chat para adultos son un problema conyugal tan serio como la infidelidad sexual?

Hilarie Cash, directora de los Servicios para Adicción a la Internet y la Computadora en la ciudad de Redmond, a las afueras de Seattle -hogar de Microsoft-, ha identificado una corriente química específica -un flujo alto de dopamina- generada por los juegos, e incluso por algo tan sencillo como recibir un e-mail. Declaró al New York Times que ha visto múltiples casos de ansiedad y depresión en sus pacientes.

Otros pioneros en el campo han desarrollado programas de 12 pasos para arrancar a las personas de la adicción a estar en línea, o creado grupos de ciberviudas para las esposas de adictos que tienen "aventurillas" en la red.

Una de las muchas definiciones del desorden de adicción a la Internet, propuesta por Jennifer Ferris, sicóloga de Virginia, apunta a siete signos reveladores, entre ellos una sed de pasar más tiempo en línea; temblor o incluso movimientos involuntarios de los dedos cuando el usuario está lejos de la computadora, disfunciones en las relaciones cotidianas con amigos y compañeros de trabajo y, en casos extremos, pérdida del empleo o del matrimonio.

Por lo general la Internet está en ascenso. Un informe del proyecto Pew sobre Internet y la vida en Estados Unidos, realizado el verano pasado, descubrió que más de la mitad de los adolescentes del país se conectan día a día, en comparación con 42 por ciento hace cinco años.
Y sus impactos económicos negativos comienzan a cuantificarse. La firma consultora empresarial Challenger, Gray & Christmas calculó en fecha reciente que sólo el futbol americano de fantasía costaba a los empleadores estadunidenses 200 millones de dólares en competitividad perdida cada temporada.

© The Independent
Traducción: Jorge Anaya

The New York Times. This article is about a controversial video made by a police officer of San Francisco. It could seem something innocent at first, but for some people, as one person said "The question is: Were the clips a glimpse into what the cops really think about the people they serve?".Police officers are intended to serve people, not to make fun of them. What do you think?

Officer's New Video Stirs More Ire in San Francisco

By CAROLYN MARSHALL
Published: January 9, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 8 - The police officer whose amateur video raised concerns among city officials about racism, sexism and homophobia within the San Francisco Police Department is hoping his filmmaking skills can help undo the damage and refocus the debate. But critics suggest he is making matters worse.

The officer, Andrew Cohen, was temporarily suspended last month along with 23 other officers connected to the video, which depicted uniformed and plainclothes officers in skits that mocked the homeless, gay men and lesbians, African-Americans and others.

Though reinstated, the police officers remain under investigation in the making of the videotape, and Officer Cohen and some others have been reassigned.

Now Officer Cohen has embarked on a one-man public relations effort to promote a 28-minute video - which he started working on two years ago and calls a serious documentary - that shows the difficulties of police work in some of the city's most crime-ridden and violent neighborhoods.
"This will show you what I'm all about and what the department is about," Officer Cohen said at a screening of the video on Wednesday. "The officers that were suspended are nothing like the accusations."

Peter Ragone, a spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom, said that Officer Cohen was "acting unilaterally" in publicizing his new video and that the mayor and Police Chief Heather Fong had no part in the effort. Mr. Ragone said many people, including fellow officers, had asked Officer Cohen to "stop trying to promote himself."

"I honestly do not know, nor do I care to speculate, about what Mr. Cohen and his lawyer are up to," Mr. Ragone said.

Whatever the intent, Mr. Ragone added: "It doesn't change the fact that we have videos that make fun of Chief Fong's Asian heritage and segments that have a white officer running over a black homeless woman. There is simply nothing funny about it."

Before screening the new video at the 4-Star Theater, Officer Cohen urged members of the public in the overflow crowd to focus on his serious filmmaking efforts, which have included the production of at least eight educational videos for and about the Police Department.

"Forget about the comedy video," he said during the free screening, which was viewed by several hundred people. "It's got to go away."

Many in the audience, though, said afterward that the film's promotion had led them to expect that they were going to see the controversial video.

"Everybody feels lied to," said Damien Ross, 25. "We all came to see something, and it wasn't shown."

Jeff Simmons, 45, described the video that was shown as "a half-hour infomercial."

"I know it's tough to be a cop in the Bayview," Mr. Simmons said. "The question is: Were the clips a glimpse into what the cops really think about the people they serve?"

Mr. Simmons, echoing others, said he had wanted to see the skits to make up his own mind about the controversy they have generated.

"I know the mayor's spin; I know the police spin," he said. "Where can I actually see the video?"
Called "Inside the S.F.P.D.: The Bayview," the new video being promoted by Officer Cohen depicts officers from the city's Bayview station, where he worked when he shot it, in dicey confrontations, arresting suspects, rescuing bloodied victims and rounding up drug dealers in a troubled neighborhood. Woven through the scenes are interviews with the officers, who speak about the dangers of police work.

Parts of the movie were also used to produce the controversial "comedy video." That video spliced together tape, much of it shot while Officer Cohen and the other officers were on duty, that parodied the life of police officers. Sexually explicit skits spoofed the television series "Charlie's Angels," and some segments showed officers ignoring crime dispatches. Officer Cohen said the video was intended as a gag for the station's annual Christmas party.

Clips from the Christmas video first appeared on Officer Cohen's personal Website but were more widely distributed at a news conference on Dec. 7 held by Mayor Newsom and Chief Fong, who said they were outraged about the contents. There was also a strong reaction among many Asian-American, African-American and gay and lesbian residents, resuscitating accusations of racism and sexism in the Police Department.

In an open letter to the San Francisco Police Commission, Asian community leaders called for disciplinary action against the 24 officers.

"This video vividly illustrates disrespect towards the disenfranchised communities of San Francisco and represents a fundamental breach in the promise of the city's police officers to protect and serve our communities," the letter said.

Mr. Ragone, the mayor's spokesman, said the Police Department's investigation could last several months. In cases of wrongdoing, he said, discipline could include a formal reprimand or dismissal.

This is an article i found in the New York Times website. It's very interesting. Read it.

Nerds in the Hood, Stars on the Web










Chris Parnell, above left, and Adam Samberg in "Lazy Sunday," the "Saturday Night Live" video that has become an Internet sensation.

By DAVE ITZKOFF
Published: December 27, 2005
For most aspiring rappers, the fastest route to having material circulated around the World Wide Web is to produce a work that is radical, cutting-edge and, in a word, cool. But now a pair of "Saturday Night Live" performers turned unexpected hip-hop icons are discovering that Internet stardom may be more easily achieved by being as nerdy as possible.

In "Lazy Sunday," a music video that had its debut on the Dec. 17 broadcast of "SNL," two cast members, Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg, adopt the brash personas of head-bopping, hand-waving rappers. But as they make their way around Manhattan's West Village, they rhyme with conviction about subjects that are anything but hard-core: they boast about eating cupcakes from the Magnolia Bakery, searching for travel directions on MapQuest and achieving their ultimate goal of attending a matinee of the fantasy movie "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
It is their obliviousness to their total lack of menace - or maybe the ostentatious way they pay for convenience-store candy with $10 bills - that makes the video so funny, but it is the Internet that has made it a hit. Since it was originally broadcast on NBC, "Lazy Sunday" has been downloaded more than 1.2 million times from the video-sharing Web site YouTube.com; it has cracked the upper echelons of the video charts at NBC.com and the iTunes Music Store; and it has even inspired a line of T-shirts, available at Teetastic.com.
"I've been recognized more times since the Saturday it aired than since I started on the show," said Mr. Samberg, 27, a featured player in his first season on "SNL." "It definitely felt like something changed overnight."
But Mr. Samberg is already well aware of the Internet's power to transform relative unknowns into superstars. In 2000, when he and his childhood friends Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, both 28, who wrote "Lazy Sunday" with Mr. Samberg and Mr. Parnell, were still struggling comedy writers living together in Los Angeles, they created a Web site, the Lonely Island, to house their self-produced skits and video experiments.
"Honestly, almost every single one of the films was done at like 4 in the morning, kind of drunk," Mr. Taccone said. But the short movies they posted on thelonelyisland.com - everything from cartoons assembled from clips of old Nintendo video games to satirical rap videos performed in the styles of their favorite hip-hop artists - also gave the three a place to develop their comic voices without the pressure of having to deliver professionally polished work.
"The Internet allowed us to show people much faster, in a way that you don't embarrass yourself," Mr. Taccone said. "You don't have to hand someone a VHS. It's just on their computer."
These videos also provided the Lonely Island team with careers: through their Internet work, they landed an agent, pilot deals with Comedy Central and Fox, and writing jobs for the MTV Movie Awards. In 2005, they joined "SNL," Mr. Samberg as a performer and Mr. Taccone and Mr. Schaffer as writers.
At "SNL" they found a kind of kindred spirit in Mr. Parnell, who has used the program's "Weekend Update" segment to deliver highly inappropriate rap tributes to some of the show's comelier female guest hosts. "I don't think I ever heard from Britney Spears," said Mr. Parnell, 38, who has been with the show since 1998. "But Kirsten Dunst and Jennifer Garner seemed to really enjoy it, and thankfully not be creeped out by it."
On the evening of Dec. 12, the four wrote a song about "two guys rapping about very lame, sensitive stuff," as Mr. Samberg described it. They recorded it the following night in the office Mr. Samberg shares with Mr. Schaffer and Mr. Taccone at "SNL," using a laptop computer that Mr. Taccone bought on Craigslist.
Then, while their colleagues were rehearsing and rewriting that Saturday's show, the group spent the morning of Dec. 15 shooting their video with a borrowed camera, using the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in Chelsea to stand in for a multiplex cinema and Mr. Taccone's girlfriend's sister to play a convenience-store clerk. Mr. Schaffer spent the next night - and morning - editing the video and working with technicians to bring it up to broadcast standards. Finally, at about 11 p.m. on Dec. 17, the four learned from Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of "SNL," that "Lazy Sunday" would be shown on that night's show.
By the next morning, the video had burrowed its way into the nation's cultural consciousness. "It brought a breath of fresh air to the show," Mr. Parnell said, adding that he received a congratulatory phone call soon after "Lazy Sunday" was shown from his co-star Maya Rudolph, who is on maternity leave, and her boyfriend, the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. "It's something the likes of which we haven't seen on 'SNL' anytime recently."
Mr. Schaffer and Mr. Taccone were also contacted by friends who heard the rap played on radio stations and in bars. And Mr. Samberg found himself in the delicate position of having to explain to his mother that the song's chorus is a play on words involving the name "Chronicles of Narnia" and the word chronic, a slang term for marijuana. "She's like, 'So is it actually about weed?' " Mr. Samberg said. "It makes you think it's going to be about weed, but then it's actually just about 'Narnia.' She's like, 'Oh, I think I get it.' "
While Mr. Parnell anticipates that the buzz surrounding "Lazy Sunday" will eventually die down, he said the video's success would continue to pay dividends for his young collaborators.
"It will have whatever life people are interested in it having, and then it'll pass out of being the thing of the moment," he said. "But it encourages Lorne and everybody involved with the show to trust them more, and to put their stuff out there."
Mr. Schaffer, who has written just two live sketches with Mr. Taccone that have survived the Darwinian "SNL" dress rehearsal process and made it onto the air, said he appreciated the attention "Lazy Sunday" has received. But he also said he expected no special treatment when the show's staff resumes work in January.
"The thing about 'SNL,' " Mr. Schaffer said, "is that all of this could happen, and we could still come in on Monday morning with zero ideas. No matter what, that's intimidating. We could use all the help we can get."

A spot to let my mind go free and say whatever I want to say.

Welcome to my blog. This is a place where i will share with the world the way i intepret and see it and in which whoever is free to express whatever they want to say. The place is now open and waiting for information. Information is power. Let's start becoming powerful.

Bienvenidos a mi blog. Este es un lugar donde compartire la manera en que veo e interpreto el mundo y en el cual cualquiera es libre de expresar lo que sea que quieran decir. El espacio esta abierto y esperando informacion. La informacion es poder. Entonces, empezemos a ser poderosos.