Roger Ebert
September 23, 1969
If your bag is shelling out several bucks (click here) to witness phallus (flaccid), then "I Am Curious (Yellow)" is the flick for you. But it you hope for anything else (that the movie might be erotic, for example, or even funny), forget it. It's a dog. A real dog.
What I'm curious about is how Barney Rossett and his pious pornographers at Grove Press got away with it. Sure, they edged it through the courts. But how have they convinced so many yahoos to spend (at last count) $4,500,000 to see it? You'd think the word would eventually get around....
"I Am Curious Yellow" was the focus of a Supreme Court decision that liberated freedom of speech.
August 10, 2011
...No doubt intrigued by the film’s controversy and hype, (click here) Bostonians waited in lines extending onto Huntington Ave. for tickets to the two-hour film. But “Curious” would only run five times that day, as city police arrived at the Symphony Cinemas around 5:15pm and seized the reels from both theaters, leaving audience members for the 3 and 4pm shows literally in the dark. The ban came from Massachusetts Superior Court Chief Justice G. Joseph Tauro, who issued a 60-page ruling that labeled the film obscene—and therefore subject to state regulation—after it met the Supreme Court’s three criteria for obscenity as established in the 1957 case Roth v. United States(more on that shortly)....
August 10, 2011
...No doubt intrigued by the film’s controversy and hype, (click here) Bostonians waited in lines extending onto Huntington Ave. for tickets to the two-hour film. But “Curious” would only run five times that day, as city police arrived at the Symphony Cinemas around 5:15pm and seized the reels from both theaters, leaving audience members for the 3 and 4pm shows literally in the dark. The ban came from Massachusetts Superior Court Chief Justice G. Joseph Tauro, who issued a 60-page ruling that labeled the film obscene—and therefore subject to state regulation—after it met the Supreme Court’s three criteria for obscenity as established in the 1957 case Roth v. United States(more on that shortly)....
It is happening. Free speech since "I Am Curious Yellow" is ending and it is ending because of the million-billionaires created by 40 years of exploitative Republican politics and policy. Thank your Republican Senator and Congressman they have delivered the Grand Package of 'bought and paid for' politics to Wall Street.
The Supreme Court in the case of "I Am Curious Yellow" opened not only the right of Freedom of Speech to include movies and adventurous thinking as an expression of art to the American citizen, it unwittingly provided a platform for a burgeoning and enormous industry that now has it's own web address. But, "Yellow" was not about concentrating power because very few Porn stars can acclaim being born with a silver spoon in their mouth. Quite the contrary. "Yellow" opened the door to the least among us. "Yellow" provided a opportunity as well, along with Freedom.
Now, the Koch Brothers have so much clout within the public sector it can simply close the doors on public radio and television by withholding funding. The Koch Brothers and their exploitative industries are not interested in expanding the rights of American citizens, they are ONLY interested in controlling them.
Why is Gas Fracking so important? It is important to American Energy? Hell, no. It is important to a demand for political control that should have faded long ago.
The documentary "Citizen Koch" (click here) had two high-profile screenings at the Wisconsin Film Festival in April. But it likely won't be coming to a public television station near you.
On the day after those screenings, the filmmakers found out that their public television backers were pulling the funding, possibly to placate billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.
"This report highlights the absolute need for broader public funding for the arts and public media, free of the influence of private donors," "Citizen Koch" co-director Carl Deal told the Capital Times on Monday.
In an illuminating new article in this week's New Yorker that posted online Monday, Jane Mayer chronicles how the documentary from Carl Deal and Tia Lessin became collateral damage in a squabble between the Koch brothers and PBS over a different documentary. "Citizen Koch" looks at the effects of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which opened the floodgates for unlimited contributions from billionaires like the Kochs, on politics in Wisconsin....
By the way, I thought "The Ed Show" was suppose to be two hours Saturday Evening.
The United States of Corporation is being delivered.
The United States of Koch.
Public television's attempt to placate David Koch (click here)
By Jane Mayer
May 27, 2013
Last Fall, Alex Giney, a documentary filmmaker who won an Academy Award in 2008 for an expose of torture at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan, completed a film called “Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream.” It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th. The movie had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation. “Park Avenue” is a pointed exploration of the growing economic inequality in America and a meditation on the often self-justifying mind-set of “the one per cent.” As a narrative device, Gibney focusses on one of the most expensive apartment buildings in Manhattan—740 Park Avenue—portraying it as an emblem of concentrated wealth and contrasting the lives of its inhabitants with those of poor people living at the other end of Park Avenue, in the Bronx.
Among the wealthiest residents of 740 Park is David Koch, the billionaire industrialist, who, with his brother Charles, owns Koch Industries, a huge energy-and-chemical conglomerate. The Koch brothers are known for their strongly conservative politics and for their efforts to finance a network of advocacy groups whose goal is to move the country to the right. David Koch is a major philanthropist, contributing to cultural and medical institutions that include Lincoln Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. In the nineteen-eighties, he began expanding his charitable contributions to the media, donating twenty-three million dollars to public television over the years....
