“What are the things that evolution has at its disposal to define a creature, to mix and match the parts, and eventually come up with a unique organism that’s going to live its life and try to reproduce?” — Will Wright, gaming innovator, EA’s Maxis Studio

Premiering on NGC Tuesday, September 9 and 10pm ET, How To Build A Better Being is the companion documentary to Spore. The show, which is also included in the limited run of the collectable “Spore Galactic Edition,” joins Wright and leading scientists in exploring the genetic information we share with all animals — even creatures we could never have envisioned. How To Build A Better Being follows Will Wright as he meets with geneticists, paleontologists, and other scientists as they strive to design the “ultimate animal” by using extensive knowledge of animal diversity.

One scientist, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Tierney Thys, called it a “dream”.

“It’s kind of a biologist’s dream to be able to design your own animal, to pick and choose the traits of animal groups that you most enjoy … Oh my gosh, I love this.,.” stated Tierney Thys.

About Spore:
The newest creation from Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) and video game pioneer and “The Sims” mastermind Will Wright, Spore enables players to design a virtual galaxy of new life, such as a one-eyed web-footed creature with a snout, and then control their species’ evolution. But how much real-world science is behind this groundbreaking new game? And what genetic connections do people share with a universe of strange organisms? Spore will be released on Sunday, September 7, 2008, for the PC, Mac, Nintendo DS(TM) and mobile phones.

Tonight, FOX has a two hour The Moment of Truth special presentation.

Over on cable, History Channel has the The Works, which goes on hiatus after tonight.

In sports news, unbelievably tonight in the start of the college football season.

Enter our drawing for a chance to win a Greek Prize Pack that includes a DVD set, t-shirt, Frisbee and a drink cozy.

This morning, I will have the opportunity to interview Spike Feresten from Talkshow with Spike Feresten about his show and the upcoming season. If you’ve got a question for the former Seinfeld producer/writer now talk show host that you’d like me to ask, you can leave it in the comments below or email them to me using the contact form before 11:00 a.m. PT.

Prime Picks

Smallville (The CW): Repeat. Clark gets the It’s A Wonderful Life treatment when Jor-El shows him what things would be like if he had never arrived on Earth, in “Apocalypse” from this past season.

Grey’s Anatomy (ABC): Repeat. Addison is back, but not really, and can’t believe how much has changed in the short time she has been gone, in “Piece of My Heart” from this past season.

ABC, CBS, and NBC all have Democratic National Convention coverage tonight, but it plays depending on your time zone. Like here on the west coast they are all on at 7:00 p.m. PT.

Solid Selections

Ugly Betty (ABC): Repeat. Renee thinks Betty has a thing for Daniel and Hilda is being taunted by a former nemesis, in “Burning Questions” from this past season.

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS): Repeat. A washed up boxer dies, but there turns out to be a lot of things that could of killed him, in “Ending Happy” from season seven.

ABC, CBS, and NBC all have Democratic National Convention coverage tonight, but it plays depending on your time zone. Like here on the west coast they are all on at 7:00 p.m. PT.

Cable Choices

Burn Notice (USA): Repeats. Three episodes from season one replay. First up is “Wanted Man,” then comes a “Hard Bargain” and finally a “False Flag.” Last week’s episode, “Rough Seas,” replays later.

Other Options

• Ace of Cakes (Food Network): New. A cake modeled after the Stanley Cup is made for a wedding. A repeat episode follows. Both play again later.
• Friends (Food Network): Repeats. It is “The One Where Rachel Has a Baby, Part 1 & 2,” where hilarity ensues at the hospital.
• The Gong Show with Dave Attell (Comedy Central): New. Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, Adam Carolla and Kate Walsh are the judges. Plays again later.

Sports Notes

• ESPN has college football action with North Carolina State at South Carolina.
• ESPN2 has college football action with Oregon State at Stanford.
• NBC has a NFL preseason football game with the Jacksonville Jaguars at the Washington Redskins.
• USA has U.S. Open Tennis coverage.

Late Night

• Burn Notice (USA): Repeat. Last week’s episode, “Rough Seas,” replays.

TV Marathons

CMT has eight hours of Nanny 911 episodes.
E! has the five-part 101 Even Bigger Celebrity Oops!.
Oxygen has 12 episodes of Roseanne early and 12 episodes of Snapped tonight.
Sci Fi has eight episodes of The Outer Limits early.
Spike has six episodes of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation that play twice.
TNT has six episodes of Law & Order tonight.

• Printable Fall 2008 TV Schedule v1.03 (PDF) - Last Updated: 8.09.2008 - Get a look at the Fall schedules for ABC, CBS, The CW, FOX and NBC all on one page.
• Printable Fall 2008 Cable TV Schedule is in the works.

A good interview, from the filmmakers’ point of view, is one where the press walks away more interested in the project than when they came in. While I’m not planning to be first in line for the videogame adaptation Max Payne when it opens in October, I’m definitely curious. Part of that comes from the charisma of Mark Wahlberg and director John Moore, who at least talk a good game when it comes to this crime saga.

(CHUD)

Hey there folks! For your viewing and listening enjoyment The Movie Blog: Uncut is very pleased to once again be joined by the writers and directors of “Crank”, the upcoming “Crank 2″ as well as the upcoming new Gerard Butler movie “Game”, Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor. It’s always… ummm… interesting when these guys are on. This episode was originally recorded on Wednesday August 27th 2008.

You can WATCH the show here:

You can listen to or download the audio only version here:

Subscribe to the podcast feed with this link

Or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes

This same question came up repeatedly around the turn of the century regarding Star Trek. The notion that people were tired of Trek when there was only one show on the air and the occasional movie is silly when, from 1987-1999, there were one or two shows on the air and a movie every 2-3 years -- and the franchise was at its most popular and nobody was sick of it. What hurt Star Trek wasn't too much Star Trek, but too much Star Trek that wasn't appealing to people.

Star Wars is hitting the same problem. It's not that people are tired of Star Wars, it's that they're tired of Star Wars that ain't so hot. The problem The Clone Wars is having is that it's not something that the world at large is dying to know about. Whatever the flaws of the prequel trilogy -- and they were legion -- they were also chronicling the background of Darth Vader, one of the greatest menaces of 20th-century fiction. There's no similar hook in The Clone Wars -- not aided by the fact that this conflict has already been covered in novel, comic book, and animated form previously (Genndy Tartovsky's collection of five-minute shorts was a magnificent piece of work) -- and people are also fatigued from the giant black hole of dreadful that was the prequel trilogy.

People are more than happy to keep coming back if they enjoy what they see. The Stargate franchise is an excellent example of that. Stargate SG1 lasted ten years, and now is being continued in very successful direct-to-DVD movies, Stargate Atlantis is now in its fifth season, and a third TV show is in development. Nobody's talking about franchise fatigue for Stargate, because they're still producing material that people want to see.

If the new live-action Star Wars series is good and appealing to a large audience, then it will breathe new life. If it continues the downward trend of the live-action films that really goes back to the moment the Ewoks first showed up in Return of the Jedi, then they've got problems.

No one, I hope, will question my Star Wars fanboy credentials. I own my own lightsaber. I know the name of the jedi-knight with tentacles on his head who appears on screen for one second in Revenge of the Sith, and gets killed (Kit Fisto). I love these movies.

No, let me correct that. I love Star Wars, the idea of Star Wars; I love what Star Wars should have been. I hate the movies, precisely because they are not
what they should have been. Let me tell you (in reverse order) what they are, and what they should have been, and tell you why they are not what they should have been.

They are not what they should have been because George Lucas is not one of us. He is not a science fiction guy. He does not have a feel for space opera. He does not get it.

This sounds too absurd to believe, does it not? Star Wars was a phenomenon. There has never been anything like it before. Had it not been for Star Wars, there would have been no Star Trek The Motion Picture, no Star Trek The Next Generation, and no Battlestar Galactica, not the original and not the re-imagining. No Sci-Fi Channel; no plethora of science fiction and fantasy television shows. Science fiction books would still be relegated to one small bookrack in the bookstore, not three or four aisles, plus a new romance-SFF section. In short, Star Wars is what made Science Fiction mainstream. And yet I say George Lucas does not get science fiction. He does not understand it and does not know how to do it.

What he does know is movies. He especially knows and loves the old Saturday Matinee cliffhanger serials: Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon staring Buster Crabbe, and maybe even Phantom Empire starring Gene Autry. He knew how to update those old space operas with new special effects like nothing ever seen before: he
understood 'the sense of wonder': he got gosh-wow.

Everyone in the audience knew what kind of film they were in for the moment the words started crawling up the screen. There is only one kind of film where words crawl up the screen. Star Wars was an homage and a love letter to the beloved space operas of this country's youth.

So what happened? Gosh-wow cannot be sustained over six movies over twenty years. So George Lucas had to add stature: he had to add some grander theme. The end of Empire Strikes Back added a theme as grand as anything in a Greek Tragedy: Vader is Luke's father. Well, the theme then became one of redemption: could Luke save his father's soul from the corruption of the Dark Side? For the prequel movies, the theme became one of corruption: what turns whiney teen Jedi Anakin into dark and mysterious Darth Vader? Unfortunately, George Lucas did not have any clear idea of what makes a Republic turn into an Empire, or what makes a knight turn into a traitor.

You see, my point here is that George Lucas tried to add stature in a human dimension, by making Luke or Anakin face impressive moral quandaries. What he did not add is stature in a science fiction direction. Let us compare and contrast: the sequels to, let's say Galactic Patrol by Doc E.E. Smith or the sequel to Skylark of Space got bigger by orders of magnitude to their predecessors. In Galactic Patrol the Gray Lensman is fighting Space Pirates. By the third or fourth sequel, he is fighting in the immortal interdimensional super-psionic superhuman creatures known of Eddore. In the Skylark of Space Richard Seaton is fighting the World Steel corporation. In Skylark Duquense, he is teleporting one galaxy into another galaxy to turn the whole thing into a galaxy-sized cloud of supernova material, meanwhile teleporting all the human planets through the fourth dimension to a third and safer galaxy. That is scope. That is grandeur. That is a sense of scale.

By the time Return of the Jedi rolled around, the planet-destroying threat of the Death Star was, well, another Death Star. Meanwhile, teddy bears were wiping out walking tanks on the forest moon of Endor. With logs. Wooden logs. The prequel was a giant step backward. Instead of a space drama, we got a confused clash of robots fighting clones and a bunch of soap opera.

I notice that Dark Helmet can recover from getting all four limbs chopped off and being dunked in lava, but Space Princess cannot survive a C-section...? Dying in childbirth might be fine for a soap opera, and draw a tear, but it is not even as impressive a Science Fiction Physician operation as something from a Jame White Sector General story, or even the futuristic sick bay of Dr. McCoy.

Where was the sense of wonder, the grandeur, the spectacle? Where was the science fiction? Where was the space opera?

Well, I will tell you where it was. Genndy Tartakovsky had it. The five-minute Clone Wars cartoons had cooler heroes and more dramatic villains than anything George Lucas could do, even though George Lucas was the one who made them up. For example, General Grievous kicks major ass in the Genndy Tartakovsky cartoon, and in the movie he is just a thug who gets mopped up with not much drama by young Obi Wan. Glenndy Tartakovsky got the concept of awe and wonder. The difference between the two, using the same characters and same material, could not have been more clear. Tartakovsky understands science fiction. His Samurai Jack can attest to that. He is an SF guy. He is one of us.

Hope? I think there is hope for Star Wars for the same reason there was hope for Star Trek once the beloved Gene Roddenberry was no longer in the picture. If George Lucas does not have much to do with the live action TV show, it may do just fine.

If someone who is of us, someone who gets it, gets his hands on the franchise, if another Lawrence Kashdan or Genndy Tartakovsky takes the helm, we can hope for the best.

Growing up, I was a major Star Wars fan. The movies sent tingles through me. I could recite just about everything. I had shelves and shelves full of all the Star Wars books that came out, and when I began stumbling into writing, it was Star Wars stories (They were rubbish...but they weren't so bad, and I'm proud of that kid who wrote 'em for trying). I had all the Star Wars games, and that's continued pretty much to this day.

And the movies... The movies just generally did less and less for me as I got older. Especially when the prequels came out and we, as a nation of Star Wars fans, collectively went "er..."

But as I watched the prequels (and I dared to get excited for every one, based on the trailers, and my own nutter optimism), I got to really thinking about why they did and didn't work. They had wooden acting. Well, watching objectively, the original Star Wars trilogy had some pretty wooden acting too. The dialog was bad. It wasn't always so hot in the original trilogy either. They were campy, they were big and noisy and they were all of them full of little people. So I guess I came away thinking that the prequels were really, pretty much on-par with the original trilogy. Good for what they are, but non-existent when you try to reach beyond that.

So much of the fantastic, breath-taking passionate and decade-spanning love of Star Wars is all in our heads. We did all the legwork and imagination. We took good movies, and we turned them into life-altering things in our excited (perhaps overheated from standing in line) brains. And that's fine. I think that they're good if they do that to you. All of 'em.

That's the first thing I think. The second conclusion I have is that you really do need to be a certain age when you first come into Star Wars, to make it all work for you. I've never had the shadow of a doubt that out there, there's some eight-to-fourteen year old who just sat down and watched Episodes I through VI and is blown away, in a way that someone who grew up in a world where there were no prequels could be.

I also just realized that the Expanded Universe, the books and the comics, were always far more interesting and exciting to me than the movies. The stories were better. And I hope Star Wars continues making enough public noise to justify the Star Wars publishing empire. Through Star Wars books, I discovered Timothy Zahn, A.C. Crispin, and others. They make a great gateway drug into other SF literature. Today, Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire. Tomorrow, Timothy Zahn's Angelmass. The day after...the world.

And this all comes at a point when I've just watched an official release trailer for the video game Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, said trailer giving a teaser of the storyline, and I am excited for it in a way that I was when I was very young and Star Wars really entered my life. I can't wait. When no one's around, I keep re-watching the trailer. And getting more excited. The video games have very, very rarely let me down.

And if nothing else, the Star Wars movies - especially the prequels - gave us astonishing soundtracks. I thought the Episode I, II, and III soundtracks were some of John Williams' best work.

I was personally very sad to hear there was going to be a Star Wars television series. I love the iconography of Star Wars - The Phantom Menace is a great movie to watch without sound - and Star Wars is unequaled in the amount of creativity, thought, and effort that has gone into the design of its various aliens, ships, planets and hardware. Sadly, its storytelling is rarely up to the level of its artistry, and so when Revenge of the Sith ended, I quietly celebrated what I thought was the vacated niche that other creative people could now rush in to fill with new space operas just as beautiful to look at, but hopefully more rewarding to listen to.

Now that we know we're not rid of Star Wars yet, I can only hope that younger, more intelligent storytellers are engaged to pen the series, and then left alone to do so. Nothing would make me happier than to see a new Star Wars that excited me as much as The Empire Strikes Back did all those decades ago. I remain hopeful, because, good or ill, it's looking like the force will be with us, always...

Just like with Star Trek, or with any other entertainment, there has to be a good story first. (As Walt Disney said, "get the story right.") CGI, no matter how spectacular, doesn't engage without a story that grabs people. The Lord of the Rings movies built on a great story, and the CGI supported that.Other movies tried to use CGI for big battles (Troy, Alexander, etc) and they bombed, because the story was only there to support the CGI.

Unfortunately, Lucas isn't married, so he doesn't have a wife to keep telling him he's not a god and he really needs someone else to write movies. So if Star Wars is to be saved, Lucas needs to be married, preferably to someone with the temperament of Princess Leia in A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. (I can just see her grabbing the script from Lucas: "You didn't plan this very well, did you?")

The place of Star Wars in modern pop culture is secure; fixed and immutable. The release of the original 1977 movie, and the gas bubble in the zeitgeist subsequently associated with that event, was so significant, it put a permanent dent in the scrith. Yes, in hindsight it now appears that the brilliance of the original movie was more a matter of serendipity than intent, as Lucas's subsequent remixes and reissues prove, but to argue about those points now seems about as productive as arguing about the quirk of fate that cast Humphrey Bogart in the lead role in Casablanca. Star Wars is, and for better or worse, we're stuck with it.

Is it time for Star Wars to go on hiatus? Probably not. Lucas has flopped before, and if you don't believe me, I've got a copy of The Ewok Adventure here I'll gladly loan you. I keep it in a special place in my film library, right between THX-1138 and Howard the Duck. Lucas has not only flopped before, he's delivered some big whoppin' navel-poppin' skin-burnin' high-board pool-emptying bellyflops before, but sooner or later, he always manages to bob back to what's left of the surface. Case in point, does anyone else here remember The Star Wars Droids and Ewoks Adventure Hour?

Is there hope that the new, live-action TV series will breathe new life into the series? Again, probably not. Older fans, like me, have mostly reached the stage of grief known as acceptance. We have come to realize that like it or not, Star Wars is Mr. Lucas's personal amusement park, and if he wishes to paint the sidewalks purple, fill the water slide with kitty litter, and rename the Tilt-a-Whirl the Great Gungan Gooberfish Boomerizer, there's nothing we can do about it except turn our backs, walk away, and spend our entertainment dollars elsewhere.

But what of the younger fans? Is there no hope that the Star Wars universe will deliver something for them? Why yes, as a matter of fact, I do work with a carefully selected focus group of 12- to 15-year-old boys, and to a man -- er, boy -- there is something they want to see from Star Wars. It's not a new book. It's not a new movie. It is most definitely not a new TV series. No, what they all want to know is:

When is LucasArts going to release Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron for the PlayStation and XBox?

Because, let's face it: Star Wars is an amusement park. What made me love the original movie 31 years ago, now that I think about it, wasn't that I gave a fig about the plot, the acting, or the story arc; it was that I wanted to be in the movie, driving a landspeeder, flying an X-wing, blowing up shit, playing with cool toys, and beating the stuffings out of straw villains with a magic sword. Thirty-one years later, that is still the essential Star Wars experience.

And if that is not enough for you, maybe it's time to think about leaving LucasLand and going someplace where you can hang out with adults. I hear ScalziLand is pretty good this time of year.

Star Wars was a thing of beauty when at its core it was a love-letter to all the pulps and serials that tent-poled the genre long ago. But it has devolved not only to the level of horrible SF/Fantasy, but of bad storytelling, rife with nonsensical politics, vague meaningless prophecies, and convoluted conspiracies. It occupies the same dramatic strata as Pokemon and Power Rangers, only with a bigger budget and better looking aliens.

The central conflict is pretty piss-poor. The Jedi, unstoppable telekinetic warrior supermen, are horrible at their jobs. They will chase any distraction they see, lack even basic deductive skills, and (aside from Obi-wan) seem incapable of winning a fight.

The villains all look really cool and menacing, but none of them match Dr. Loveless or Bester of Psi-Corp for true classic antagonist status. Armies of droids and clones carry out epic battles that don't serve any real purpose or have any lasting significance.

In the end it's an "epic" devoid of virtues, conscience, or hubris. Those aspects of drama it does deliver, like fallibility and damnation, it does so only in big sloppy handfuls.

The exception to all this is Dark Horse Comics' Star Wars line, which has been spectacular. It's gone from the deep history of the old republic to several generations past the end of RotJ, featured some truly compelling characters with tangible motivations, and shown some eye-candy moments that even the films haven't approached.

But the sales numbers on these books are the barest fraction of Star Wars fandom. I wouldn't go so far as to say that those die-hard fans who view the films as a "mythos" and proclaim the primacy of Star Wars in the SF genre are hypocrites who require pretty pictures flashing in front of them to placate their brains, but...well, actually I would say that.

Star Wars place in popular culture is irrelevant. It's Lucas' baby, let him purposely deform it if he wants.

When Episode VI came out, it was a disappointment. Perhaps, after Episode V promised a darker and more profound story than we had ever expected, this was inevitable. But the Ewoks, and their triumph over Imperial forces, signaled a turn in the saga toward more child-friendly, less serious storytelling. It felt as if the director was turning to me and saying, "You didn't really take all this stuff seriously, did you?"

Episodes I, II, and III were one blow after the next for me. Each time I hoped George Lucas would tap the power of the original two films, but I was left in the theater feeling nothing for the characters and caring nothing about the events they showed.

I have not seen The Clone Wars; I'll probably rent it on DVD. I don't hold out any hope that future Star Wars films or TV shows will recapture the magic of the original films. I think George Lucas has clearly shown, over multiple films, what he wants Star Wars to be, and unfortunately, it is not the saga that I originally fell in love with.

I think that George Lucas could certainly create magic again, with a new universe and a new story, and I would love to see that, because few works of art have struck me with the power that Episodes IV and V did. But as for Star Wars, I've been disappointed too many times now and am afraid I will have to move on.

The truth is that various Star Wars products started letting us down as far back as Splinter of the Mind's Eye, Alan Dean Foster's serviceable but dull novel. Of course we can rationalize any single inconvenient story or piece of data away -- it's just when they come in cohorts that we have trouble. The Han Solo books were oddball space opera and the Lando Calrissian books even weirder, but Empire Strikes Back was the rare middle of a trilogy that didn't sag (probably because it was the movie where George Lucas ceded the most power to real professional writers and directors), so the mystique could live on.

And then Return of the Jedi had Ewoks, but also lightsaber duels and the rehabilitation of Darth Vader (which seemed like a good idea at the time), so we were happy. And then we had to live off the other media for a long time -- and those weren't real -- so Star Wars got tied up with nostalgia and our images of our past selves. It's not quite that nothing could live up to our image of Star Wars, but it's awfully close, since that image was mostly of who we were then.

And so the last decade has been a string of disappointments, because that's what adulthood is for most of us. We're not thirteen anymore, and most of us never kissed the prom queen or scored the winning touchdown or even made a fortune on our Internet start-ups. We're older, but we still expect a new Star Wars product to make us as exuberantly happy as Empire did. Those of us who actually did grow up, and not just get older, found other things that make us that happy -- I could mention, for myself, the birth of my two sons, and a lot of moments with them since.

Oh, sure, the more recent trilogy is pretty lousy, and apparently the new animated Clone Wars movie is even worse -- I won't dispute that -- but even if they were as good as Return (and Revenge of the Sith is, most of the time), that wouldn't be enough. We can't get as happy as that anymore.

If you look at them with dispassionate eyes, all of the Star Wars movies are no more than decent space opera -- the first trilogy is indisputably more successful than the second (in all areas except quality of special effects), but those aren't on any intelligent person's list of the best hundred movies ever made. (Even when it comes to great adventure movies, Lucas's greatest contribution will always be Raiders of the Lost Ark, where he had Stephen Spielberg to know what to do with the camera.)

So: Star Wars was never as good as we thought it was, and our kids know that it's not as bad as we think it is now. (They'll be disillusioned by it -- or maybe by something else -- in their turn.) And the question of the "life" of the series will be determined by how many people actually watch the new animated TV show, week in and week out -- not by any number of us grumpy old fen pontificating on the Internet. We'll continue to be disappointed, because that's what happens to people our age. Soon, we'll start yelling at the kids playing on our lawns and talking about the "good old days."

But, referencing one of the studio's rare successes, he said he had a plan "to first revive the big franchises, but I don't think that's enough. I think you need volume as well. And out of the volume, something good can come up, such as Rocky Balboa."

The key reason for the abrupt departure this month of U.A. C.E.O. Paula Wagner was a purported stall in the production pipeline. (As has often been repeated, including on this blog, her partnership with longtime ally Tom Cruise produced one miss, and the low prospect of earning back a reported $130 million investment in the troubled December release Valkyrie.)

That story had barely boiled away when Grover's piece lit up a new front-burner Hollywood object lesson by reporting that Goldman Sachs was helping shop MGM, which a consortium of investors had acquired in 2005 for $5 billion, for a supposed price tag of $5.2 billion.

Soon a related story from the New York Post detailed a case of nerves being suffered by Merrill Lynch as that currently challenged firm sought to reframe its $500 million production fund for United Artists.

That story brought into the light what's been a tug of war in which Sloan purportedly tries to shift the capital raised for Wagner and Cruise's projects at U.A. into the coffers available to new MGM production chief Mary Parent.

There was some speculation that the studio could go the route of an initial public offering, but its deflated value and current market conditions make that option unlikely.

There was even a reported $3 billion offer from billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, who's owned the company several times and sold it to the current private-equity ownership in 2004. That offer was apparently rejected.

But the company categorically denied the most damaging speculation as framed by Grover.

"There is no 'asking price' for the company," the studio said. "MGM's existing financing arrangements are sufficient to meet its needs. Goldman Sachs has been retained to explore enhancements to MGM's long-term capital structure."

Sloan has managed an upbeat demeanor in confessing to the New York Times recently that the company lost $400 million in its most recent fiscal year ending in March.

But with an annual debt service of an estimated $300 million against the company's $3.7 billion debt, they've had understandable problems seeking fresh capital. Word is the key would-be savior, Royal Bank of Scotland, has had little success attracting institutional investors to provide the desired $500 million credit line.

Short of an offer from the kind of investors who specialize in turning massively debt-ridden enterprises around, MGM may just have to tough it out and hope for a change of fortune.

I propped up Mister Buddwing a couple of weeks ago in my weekly TCM picks. Some minor research left me hesitant but entirely intrigued. James Garner as a guy who wanders around the streets of Manhattan in search of himself sounded familiar. I’ve never experienced memory loss or found myself in Central Park without any idea of how I got there, but there are less literal ways of interpreting the plot.

There’s surprisingly little out there written on the film, and what there is seems mostly dismissive. My enthusiasm is often countered by dolts who act like this or that movie is so appalling as to have devalued their own ever-precious life. The disadvantage of everyone having an opinion on the internet is that, well, everyone has an opinion. Some are well-reasoned and considered while others are from the same type of people who desire, consume, and love the unchallenging byproducts of the entertainment lobotomies beamed directly into their living rooms daily. As someone who does in fact regularly give my own opinion on movies, I recognize the irony in those complaints. Still, dealing too much in absolutes makes me uneasy and I’d be the first person to encourage someone to watch based on one’s own views instead of a negative reaction elsewhere. If a movie sounds interesting, dive in headfirst and sort out the details later.

So that’s what I did with Mister Buddwing, directed by Marty helmer Delbert Mann and based on an Evan Hunter book. The film opens with a first-person point of view shot, black and white, in the city. The man whose eyes we’re looking through peers down at his hands. He’s wearing a ring, broken stone. An inscription of “From G.V.” lines the band. He starts walking from a bench in Central Park and to the Plaza Hotel. When we finally do see the man, he appears well-dressed in a suit and increasingly in need of a shave. At the hotel, he dials a phone number that had been written on a slip of paper he’d found inside the suit. A woman, Gloria, answers. Our man doesn’t know his name and he doesn’t know Gloria either so he has to navigate through some awkward introductions. Gloria, who’s played by the terrific Angela Lansbury, believes the man could be Sam, which is good enough for the stranger. The newly christened Sam makes plans to visit Gloria in hopes of getting this whole identity thing straightened out. He leaves the hotel, sees a Budweiser beer truck, looks at a plane flying through the sky, and decides on Buddwing as a last name.

It’s quickly established that the man is not actually Sam, which turns out to be the name of Gloria’s estranged husband. Gloria doesn’t knows Mr. Buddwing any more than he knows himself. She asks him some questions that he doesn’t have the answers for, making the man more and more irritated at his lack of memory. He’s then sent on his way with a few extra dollars and still no idea what’s going on. At this point early in the film, and throughout actually, it’s most intriguing that the viewer is really no better informed than Mr. Buddwing. The line of defeat and frustration James Garner treads in his performance is equally shared by the audience.

I’ve always felt Garner was better as a screen presence than he necessarily was as an actor. He was adept at playing not just an everyman, but the ideal everyman. Who wouldn’t want to be James Garner? That deceptively easy ability to make the viewer identify with him was put to good use in Mister Buddwing. There’s a great deal of psychological undercurrent running through the picture. The mood it sustains reminded me of a less dystopian version of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, released in the same year. Garner has to be believable as a guy we want to solve these personal mysteries, but there also has to be an air of danger where he could slip into almost insanity at any point. The reveal that a murderous mental patient has just escaped from a nearby institution adds enormous possibility, both for the film and Garner’s performance. The actor does well in never entirely hiding how unhinged his character is, creating conflict in the viewer by way of this lingering uncertainty as to Buddwing’s real identity.

More ammunition for Buddwing’s questionable mental health is sourced from the relationships the amnesiac develops with three random women he spots on the streets of New York. He sees a young brunette (Katharine Ross) and yells out the name “Grace,” but the woman ignores him as she gets into a taxi. Buddwing hails a cab, driven by Marty supporting actor Joe Mantell, and instructs the hack to follow the other car. En route, the driver recounts a fare he’d had recently, an attractive blonde woman who was drunk and less than candid on her $28 ride. Though this moment seems inconsequential, it comes up again later as we realize that much of the film feels like it was thrown into an unreliable blender. Everything doesn’t mix as it might should, leaving ample opportunity for false impressions.

Just as the nervous jazz score and frequent shots of Garner wandering around the city ply into the viewer’s consciousness, so do the perpetually ominous depictions of a city on a completely different pace as our protagonist. This constant unease amid a mass of people who at the very least know more than Buddwing because they know their own name is somewhat underexplored, but entirely effective when given the opportunity. The skyscraper-rich city is enough to induce confusion in anyone, much less a person in total disarray. As with much of Mann’s movie, the tension could have been ratcheted up even further, resulting in a bit of a missed opportunity. As a study in disorientation, however, Mister Buddwing should be re-discovered.

While the film hearkens back to amnesia-heavy suspense movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, as well as foreshadowing more recent fare including Memento and The Bourne Identity, it seems to also accurately predict the oncoming paranoia found in the 1970s. Buddwing becomes so at odds with himself that he can hardly trust his own instincts. In another of the film’s interesting decisions, each potential Grace, starting with Ross, flashes back to Buddwing’s memories of the woman. With every glimpse of the past, the relationship between Buddwing and Grace grows devastatingly harsher. The vibrant optimism of their newlywed days is replaced by turmoil and acrimony, slowly shattering the dreams of youth. That each incarnation of Grace is played by a different actress highlights the stark changes life has to offer over time.

Perhaps done unintentionally, but there’s a strange juxtaposition between how the past versions of Buddwing and Grace move further apart and how amnesiac Buddwing gets closer and closer with his false Graces. Janet, the woman played by Ross, brushes him off completely, even involving the police, but actress Fiddle (Suzanne Pleshette) takes him into her home. The blonde woman (Jean Simmons) he meets next is even more friendly and carefree. Yet, Buddwing seems to become less balanced as he struggles to piece together his past. By the end, when the nobody and the blonde find themselves involved in a high-stakes dice game, his memories spin him into levels near madness.

In trying to get a handle on the film, I found myself curious as to why it’s so little cared about or known, and why there’s not much support among those who have seen this strange portrait of memory loss. It’s far from perfect, not a great film really, and always seems like it could go further than it does (in contrast to Seconds). But there’s definitely something there. That feeling it emits, one of suspense but also caution and deep empathy for the protagonist, is rare in such a tightly wound movie of its era. There’s also a building turmoil we can see coming, but are helpless to stop. Buddwing’s destruction becomes inevitable and that nearly horrific unfolding of how he got to Central Park may be painful for the invested viewer.

The ending changes the game too much for my taste, ultimately making clear that there’s some heavy Christian symbolism at work as it placates the mid-sixties studio film audiences. I’m not impressed with the result, but I do like how it’s handled. The decision to retain a considerable dose of ambiguity is assuring despite an otherwise flat conclusion. I can imagine how I’d like to have the film end, but it doesn’t really matter. Even the apparent happy ending, when kept in the context with Buddwing’s memories, promises little outside the veiled religious undertones.

(Mister Buddwing was made for MGM. Its rights should rest with Warner Bros., but the film is not on DVD.)