Bad Teacher, Review and Playing House

Review was my favorite thing to watch this season aside from "Archer." Starring straight-man extraordinaire Andy Daly, the premise posits the show as a distant cousin of the "Truman Show" in the way that presenting a man's life choices being driven entirely by the demands of a media audience leads to some very deep satire. In this case, Daly is TV show host Forrest MacNeil who will review any life experience anyone tells him to without question.

Over the course of this season, he is forced to experience road rage (losing two cars in the process), become an overt racist, proposition and sleep with a celebrity, get addicted to crack, and more. Worst of all, he has to divorce his wife which leads to one of the major thru-lines of the season of winning his wife back.

Why his wife is in the dark about the nature of his day job or why the production team doesn't filter out the more life-threatening requests seem like gaping plot holes at first but that's because the viewer is being inserted into the story midstream. The cleverest thing about "Review" is how it drops clues towards the genesis to the show-within-a-show and the larger storyline about a somewhat overeager broadcaster being manipulated by a ruthless producer. Viewers are challenged to decipher these clues and it's not until the end of the season that some of the blanks are filled in a season finale, which made the ending feel so cathartic.

The character of AJ Gibbs (Megan Stevenson) is an equally wonderful creation because it's so tough to get a handle on her: Is she equally complicit in Forrest's misery? How does she see Forrest and why won't she take one for the team and be his celebrity hook-up? Is she an airhead or a ruthless go-getter? Stevenson's performance is even more impressive when one considers she never gets more than a couple lines of dialogue and a reaction shot to communicate who she is. 

Like "The Truman Show", "Review" is a very thinky show but the comic undertones of "The Truman Show" are amped up quite a bit here. It's hard to explain why watching a man destroying his life is hilarious. My best guess would be awkward shock value (kind of like "The Office"). Even if I can't explain why I laughed, I found myself laughing a lot. Five Stars.

Playing House 
I probably wouldn't have watched this show if the show's creators didn't personally beg me to watch their show. And I am thrilled to say that I'm not making that up.

Here's the story: As I finished watching "Review," the show's star, Andrew Daly, tweeted that everyone should check out his costar's new show "Playing House." I commented that I likely wouldn't watch. This prompted the the star of the show, Jessica St. Clair (who I previously knew from her zingy jokes on the first incarnation of "Best Week Ever") wrote as follows:

@okonh0wp @tvsandydaly @lennonparham @lennonparham Orrin, if we get cancelled, Len & I will finish acting out the season in ur living room
— Jessica St. Clair (@Jessica_StClair) May 2, 2014

 Which prompted quite a flurry of responses like these:

@gongofdoom @Jessica_StClair @okonh0wp @TVsAndyDaly @lennonparham Also, does it apply to every person? Will there be a living room tour?
— Wawa Skittletits (@MrsLauraRoslin) May 2, 2014

@lennonparham @Jessica_StClair @okonh0wp @TVsAndyDaly is it going to be a dealie where ya'll play every part, or will there be sock puppets?
— stock photo memories (@ajapelian) May 2, 2014

In which case I said I'll watch and got this: 

@okonh0wp Orrin, you are a gentleman and a scholar. Thank u! @PlayingHouseUSA
— Jessica St. Clair (@Jessica_StClair) May 2, 2014

My twitter profile mentions my journalistic publication credits in the Mid-Atlantic. It's entirely possible that Jessica St. Clair  and Lennon Parham mistakenly think that I'm some sort of influential TV critic instead of someone at the extreme bottom of the ladder in the pantheon of TV criticics.

Either way, it's been fun and kind of surreal corresponding with TV stars. The caveat, however, is that I've been hypercautious of writing anything about the show that isn't extremely well-thought out knowing that the people who create the show might read this (and just to be clear, they might read this because I am going to tweet this directly at them when I'm done typing it, having two TV stars read your blog post about their show is too good of an experience to not aggressively pursue).


My opinion:
The show stars Lennon as a pregnant woman (Maggie) who has just kicked out her husband over an affair and St. Clair (Emma) as a globetrotting businesswoman who decides to drop her career and move in with her friend to help her raise a baby. I know that show premises are generally gimmicks that are used to get the show greenlit and hook in the audience, but is there even much of a premise here? For one, the husband is still in the show's cast so it doesn't appear that Maggie really needs another co-parent. More importantly, the baby's not born yet, so it's not really two women raising a baby as it is two adult woman going on low-key escapades. Low key escapades isn't bad (see: "Legit", "It's Always Sunny", and "Broad City") but the show treats the pair as if they're doing something high-key (or whatever the opposite of low-key is). When Emma emotionally tells her mom, "hey, aren't you proud of me, I'm doing something important. I'm helping my friend raise a child," the proper response should be "Um, are you sure? Did you sign any paperwork as a legal guardian? It looks like you quit your job and are just crashing on your friend's couch."

I've heard the show described as UCB meets Gilmore Girls which sounds accurate enough. I'm not entirely familiar with "Gilmore Girls" but I was into Amy Sherman Palladino's follow-up "Bunheads," and can see the connection as both shows revolve around female characters without being seen as exclusive anthems of girl power. Some of my least favorite entertainment is created exclusively for women OR men. I'm an equal opportunity hater here: Neither "Sex and the City" or "Entourage"--in which members of the same sex get together and talk all day about the opposite sex and other sexy sex-related topics-- qualify as anything but awful TV in my opinion.

While "Playing House" isn't entirely chick flick territory, I do find some elements hard to connect to as a male viewer. When Maggie and Emma are dealing with a strife in their friendship over a shared crush on a guy, it occurred to me that I rarely have conversations with male friends over our feelings (Not saying I wouldn't want to. It just doesn't seem to happen). At least not like Maggie and Emma. The only exception would be male roommates where we have to share living space an work really hard on those issues.

On the flipside, I can really relate to the idea of being in your hometown and navigating the dissonance of constantly bumping into people from various points of your past. For better or worse, that's my life right now and while it's great to see people from a relatively healthy past, there are all sorts of complications even from bumping into someone you remember fondly. All of the highs and lows of the process--finding out someone is more successful than you, hardly recognizing the person's personality anymore, maintaining the illusion in the present that you never really got along in high school, the arduous process of catching someone up on the last 10 years -- are captured fairly well here.

As for the humor, one gets the sense that the edges are a bit sanded off from network notes. The show creators do an excellent job of not going dirty just because they can. The plots seem somewhat  conventional and don't really stretch outside of the box. The shows on USA Network tend to be less ambitious and there's nothing wrong here with fitting the specifications of the USA Brand.

The supporting cast has a lot going for it. It's really nice to see Keegan Michael Key, who must feel pressure to live up to his label as an edgy sketch comic, sink his teeth into a nice zany sitcom character role that you would find on a TGIF-sitcom. Two of the three first episodes featured Key as a frustrated cop on superfluous errands which isn't even a bad idea for a spin-off. Zach Woods reprises his weird guy role from "The Office" and "In the Loop" in a way that screams "Please typecast me this way for life." As long as he's used well here, I'm OK with it. Then again, I'm not his agent. Lastly, the show has Jane Kaczmarek as Emma's mom who has some weird mother-daughter issues. Like the genesis for the show, the genesis of the Emma-Emma's mom riff doesn't seem very well though-out, but Kaczmarek is such an underrated actress who adds to every show she's in, I don't really care.

The show's enjoyable enough that I'll stick with it to see how it turns out. More importantly, even if the show isn't to my specific tastes, it's an intelligently thought-out premise that I'm happy to see add some life to the USA Network. It's fan-base is highly visible (especially the ones who attacked me on twitter) and it seems like Jessica and Lennon have found a niche that TV needs.


Bad Teacher

By earning its second season renewal, "About a Boy" demonstrated how one can build a TV-oriented world around a film: Step 1) Make sure your film adaptation has characters who have room to grow beyond ninety minutes and Step 2) World build to your heart's content. Bad Teacher was a fairly solid film that seems ripe for transplantation (a fancy word I just made up) to another medium. The  concept of a teacher who isn't really into the profession and wants to get by on as little work as possible is intriguing.

The bad teacher, in this case, is a gold digger with little to no moral code who starts the school year so depressed at having been dumped that she doesn't even have the energy to teach her class. She shows them movies and most of her effort on the school premises are spent trying to elude trouble and trying to court a wealthy substitute teacher.

Over the course of 92 minutes, Cameron Diaz undergoes sufficient transformations to becoming a better person and teacher. In the second act, she realizes that being a good teacher would strategically work out better for her short-term earnings so she can afford the boob job necessary to land a man. In the third act, she's ditched the boob job idea and genuinely has become a better teacher and person

The three act story structure isn't really working in this TV show. I was thinking that it would start with the bad teacher being awful and gradually reforming over the course of a season or two, but it seems like the show isn't up to the challenge of trying to separate the Act 1, Act 2, and Act 3 versions of the Cameron Diaz character. The result is a somewhat muddled character who is simultaneously showing signs of someone who's genuinely grown while continuing to do very stupid things.

That's pretty much the biggest minus in the show, but there seems like a lot of room for the show to surprise me. In the plus column, the sexual tension between Meredith (originally, her name was Elizabeth, not sure why it's changed here) and the Jason Segel/Ryan Hansen seems put to rest surprisingly early so that Elizabeth can go in different directions romantically or even go at no permanent direction at all.

There are a number of pros and cons of how the TV version differs from the movie version, but that's what makes it interesting. So far, there seems a lot of room to play around and I'm on board the ride at the moment.

Remembering Anthony Minghellia and Sidney Pollack

News update: The content farm Helium to which I'd contributed some 150 articles between 2008 and 2010 announced that it is closing shop and deleting their sites from existence by December 2012. I think this is a great decision as it will allow its writers to find out their true worth and expand their content from something that pays them a few cents to someone that will pay them in dollars. It will also clean up the internet a little. The article-sphere is diluted by articles written to make (quite literally) nickels and dimes. In any case, I will share some of the articles that I wrote back in those days on this blog


As everyone was mourning Heath Ledger's death and considering the loss to future moviedom from pictures he never made, I found it curious that the Heath Ledger effect doesn't work for directors as well. Within the same four-month period, the two founders of Mirage died premature deaths this past year and while Sidney Pollack's funeral was one of the most widely attended events in Hollywood this past year, no one has had the discussion about whether there will be a loss to the world of movies that he won't be making any more pictures. I imagine Pollack might have had two or three films left in him. He was 74 when he died, which is pretty old, but Altman, Lumet and Scorsesee seem on course to make films into their 80s as does Eastwood.

Minghellia is an even more extreme case. At age 54, he could have done a dozen more films before his natural death and while Pollack could be uneven, Minghellia's films were usually Oscar-caliber. He won an Oscar as the director for the English Patient (1996), and earned a follow-up nomination for best writing on his next film, Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). His adaptation of the Charles Frazier novel, Cold Mountain (2003), was the most buzzed about film of its year, and earned Minghellia his highest box office take to date. In his subsequent film, he came very close to being nominated for a second directorial Oscar and earned Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations for his directorial and writing work. Breaking and Entering (2006) was quiet and not widely viewed but it was well-received among those who had seen it. Minghellia usually tackled books and challenging adaptations and while they weren't necessarily topical, they had potential to be timeless.

Not only did Minghellia tackle books but he tackled the best: Talented Mr. Ripley, The English Patient and Cold Mountain had all earned accolades as novels and one has to surmise it was the scribe in Minghellia who loved the challenge of taking good source material and capturing the essence of a good novel.

One should also credit Minghellia and Pollack as producers for having an eye for good material. It's a tribute to them that their final picture before departing the planet, The Reader, upset the Dark Knight and Wall-E to grab an Oscar nomination. The credits are currently in dispute because I imagine they want someone who's alive to pick up the statue and represent the film at the Academy Awards Ceremony, but if Heath Ledger can be honored posthomously, it is my wish that Anthony Minghellia can be honored as well.

Update: Although "The Reader" lost to "Slumdog Millionaire", Syndey Pollack and Anthony Minghellia were credited as producers for their final film and had the honor of repeating as Academy Award nominees in the first Oscar ceremony since their deaths.

My advice to jornalism college students graduating today

If this falls under TL;DNR for you, skip the first five paragraphs:

A few weeks ago, I was invited be on a panel on journalism composed of my school's alumni to speak to current students and provide career advice. I'm not sure if my career trajectory was that impressive  but I have dabbled in writing and giving advice about journalism on my blog and I believe that stood out to them.

The experience was easily one of the highlights of the year: It was fun to take a road trip to a place I hadn't been to in over five years, I made a lot of beneficial contacts, it was fun to briefly see old professors who all remembered me to varying degrees, and it was really flattering that my college thought I was important enough to give a speech to their current crop of journalism students.

This might be called my first public speaking engagement and I picked up the challenge of trying to think about how I'd distill my successes and failures into bite-size bits of useful advice. Because I'd written on this but have never spoken about it, I tried getting people to ask me questions in advance so I'd have some idea if I would be articulate or not when asked questions on the spot.

The whole thing happened in a whirl and I didn't really get any of the questions in advance except for the moderator telling us the night before to prepare a response for "What do you wish you'd known then that you'd known now?" It's hard to say how I did for sure but it's likely somewhere between completely terrible and amazing. I'm pretty sure I didn't self-destruct on stage and likely said something that was useful to some of the people there so I was pretty pleased.

However, I'm now looking back as college graduations are prevalent in the news right now this and it just occurred to me that I had something really important to say and that important thing was an entirely unique message compared to the six other panelists that day. Furthermore, this message could save some people from being miserable in the following months after college, so I want to say this with more clarity now:

MY MESSAGE:

A lot of the career advice you're going to get is how to get a job. It's good advice and you should listen to it. BUT here's the thing:

Some of you will get jobs and that will be great. But some of you will take all of that good job advice and do everything right and either still not got a "job" or get an internship that will frustrate you because it's not a "job." OR you'll work retail or substitute teach or wait tables to keep you afloat in the interim and be frustrated because it isn't yet a "job." OR you might get a job that takes a long time to get a security clearance for. OR you might get a job that doesn't look entirely what you envisioned as a job (it might be with a start-up that can't pay you much as they are getting their operations off the ground). OR you might get a job and then get laid off (this happens a lot in this industry. I know someone who worked for CBS but was laid off and went to work for the New York Post. I also know someone at Newsweek who was laid off and went to work for CBS).

The point being there's a lot of different things that could happen to you other than "getting a job" and while it's important to know how to land said "job," it's equally important to react to not getting your dream job. You have to know how to make lemonade out of lemons if said "job" doesn't come, because that will likely happen far more often.

The important thing is to have a strong mental constitution through the process and ability to adapt to professional rejection. Understand that there's a lot of randomness to who gets jobs and it's not as much of a measure of your personal worth whether you get one or not. Also, consider that when you apply for a salaried job, you're essentially asking someone to give you tens of thousands of dollars every year. Unless it's the government or a humongous company, people do tend to care about who they give that much money away to and they can't just do it for you unless they're pretty darn sure it will be a good investment. They can't just do it because you're a college graduate and society dictates someone give you that much money.

The other important thing is to reconsider your definition about what a job is. For example, in the field of journalism, what would happen if you got hired as a staff reporter for a newspaper?  You'd be writing articles for a living. This field is a unique one in that you can often write articles for money for a newspaper without being on staff. So take solace that you're doing the same thing you would be doing anyway. In the vast majority of scenarios, being a staff writer is a more ideal position to have but I'm talking about the life skill of adapting to not having a job. If you can't get a job on a staff, look into the avenue of writing articles freelance.

Similarly, what does a PR firm do? They handle PR accounts one at a time. It's entirely possible to get someone to pay you (likely a smaller amount at first) to do PR work for them if you don't belong to a PR firm. Opportunities can be found on Odesk or Craigslist. Again, I'm not suggesting this will necessarily pay as well, but it is an option. I've attracted some attention from clients by going to small business meetings. You're not completely cut off from earning money just because you haven't been hired for a PR firm is my point.

There are a number of ways to earn money out there, big and small, and I recommend seeking out both the big and small ones.

I essentially don't believe that finding a job is a full-time job. Sure, keep job searching, but it's not a productive use of your day to devote it entirely on finding a job that might or might not benefit you in the future when there's something you can do in the here and now. Spend at least some of it working on something productive in the here and now. You'll pick up experience along the way and you won't look back at 2014 and remember it as the year you sat around applying for a job.

Famous People I've Interviewed Update

I've always preached that one of the keys to writing success is to obsessively compare yourself to Kenny Herzog and think about your shortcomings in comparison to his. Kenny Herzog is a guy who's been published everywhere and occasionally talks to me on twitter. He has a list of famous people he's interviewed, so let me give you my list which is much shorter than his is. I'm also including people who might not fall under the definition of famous but they're all "famous" to me.

Category One: Famous People I've Interviewed

1. Jamie Escalante-The inspiration behind Stand and Deliver for the JMU Breeze

2. Kris Humphries AKA Mr. Kim Khardashian. I was attending a summer session at the University of Minnesota when I heard from this guy I was hitching a ride to class that he had been invited to some party Kris Humphries was throwing with friends and family. Without any prior experience writing for the Minnesota school newspaper or so much as a conversation with the editors (it was 6 pm at the time), I immediately bolted to that restaraunt after class and snagged Mr. Humphries up for an interview approximately a half hour after he was selected Number 14 in the NBA draft. One of the big highlights of my career. I also was incredibly lucky that he became even more famous afterwards. More on the story is here

4. Connaitre Miller-Director of Afro-Blue, a group that rocked it out on the reality TV show The Sing Off, for the a capella blog. 

5. Oren Brimer-Filmmaker for Front Page Films, Field director for the Daily Show-I was bored one day and started browsing College Humor's web pages and wanted to know who the heck all these people were that were making these comedy videos that were flooding the internet. I spent a good 45 minutes talking with Oren on the phone as an exercise in quenching my thirst for curiosity about internet filmmakers. Fortunately it wasn't a complete waste of Oren's time, because I did have some luck finding a newspaper to publish it pretty soon thereafter. Oren has since become a producer for the Pete Holmes show. 

7. Jazz Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis-It was a brief interview for the NBC DC Scene blog (or "Blahg"). I interviewed him at the same time as one other reporter who had all these pointed political questions to ask him, so that was kind of squeamish.  I can't remember the degree of publication at this point but there was at least a preview of it on the DC Scene Blahg

8. Ari Lewis of The Maccabeats-The Maccabeats are the biggest thing to rock the Jewish world since Matisyahu and the guy from the Beastie Boys who just died. They are an Orthodox Jewish a capella group that's been invited to the White House and the Parliament to sing. I spent a lot of time in a close-knit Orthodox Jewish commuity in Richmond where one the Maccabeats was raised. I knew his parents and siblings and seeking to write an article about the Maccabeats, I decided to go with Ari Lewis.

9. Frank Calliendo-Formerly of Mad TV and The Frank Show on TBS-This was a big deal for me at the time. I 
set up the interview through his agent and first spoke to his brother on the phone. I happen to know 
something interesting that was never printed because he said "off the record" so I'll have to keep that secret

10. Pullitzer Prize winning writer Dave Barry-He's here in Washington every year for a treasure hunt I participate in. I've interviewed him twice. The first interview was hastily dumped on NBC's blog 4 months after I interviewed him and the interview got aggregated by Washington City Paper in a most amusing way. The second time, he was used as a secondary source on an article for Connection newspapers on the scavenger hunt's winning team. I also bumped into him at an airport and said "Hey, you're Dave Barry, I've interviewed you twice" and he still didn't recognize me 

11. American record holder and 1976 Olympic participant Matt Centrowicz Sr. and World Championships bronze medalist Matt Centrowicz Jr. (and 4th place finisher in the 2012 Olympics)-Centrowicz Junior would have been an Olympics bronze medalist if the Olympics were held in '11 instead of '12. A great article on the father-son tandem while I was on my way out the door of the Connection Newspapers, but hesitated because I didn't think it would become localized enough. I later found a place for the article at Arlingtoncounty.com. The article is currently published at Pacers New Balance

12. Seseame Street's Abby Cadaby and Gordon (Roscoe Orman) for AOL Patch in Fort Meyer-Abby Cadaby is a puppet, by the way. And she's really cute. 

13. Greg Garcia, creator of My Name is Earl and Raising Hope-I'm reediting this list because I just landed an interview with Greg Garcia tomorrow for Northern Virginia Magazine. He comes from my hometown so there was a lot of impetus among the newspapers in the area I write for to get a Greg Garcia interview.
[Update: Greg Garcia was a really cool guy. I even met him at the Memorial Day Parade (it's also thanks to Garcia, that I know there's a such thing as a memorial day parade) for a photo shoot and I needed to use a phone on the fly so I could locate him in the parade. My phone went dead, so a waitress at a nearby bar (named Shani) allowed me to use the map feature on her phone and when I told her it was to locate Greg Garcia, she was really excited so I asked Greg to autograph something for her. He also told me how his show "My Name is Earl" would have ended. I'm one of the few people on the planet who knows that]

14. Sam Reich, director-in-chief of CollegeHumor and Elaine Carroll, actress-A while ago, I interviewed Oren Brimer in an effort to get to the white whale that was College Humor. I once discovered that one of his actresses and his wife was a Richmond native so I randomly e-mailed her and was put in touch relatively quickly with CollegeHumor's publicist who was superpsyched to get Elaine in her hometown newspaper. I honestly didn't think an actress like that would care but they pushed pretty hard for me to get published and I got to talk to both Reich and Carroll. Reich, the actor, I was more familiar with, was a humongous amount of fun to talk to, and he even listened to my crazy screenplay idea. I asked him how come so many different actors appear in his videos. Is his circle of friends that wide? and he said "I have a lot of sleepovers." I published the Elaine Carroll interview in the Times Dispatch of Richmond but I'm still looking for a home for the Sam Reich interview. Any takers?

15. World-Class miler David Torrence-This interview is currently in process. He's a friend of a friend and I chatted with him on Facebook a couple times. He's definitely an interesting guy and finished 5th or 6th in the last 3 World Championship/Olympic trials. He's also a national record holder in the 1000 meter run. 

16. Congressman Jim Moran-Got some quotes from him for Arlington Connection when Senator Webb spoke at an Arlington Chamber of Commerce lunch and got a picture with him. I have seen him multiple times. 

17. Christine O'Donnell's campaign manager-Got a secondary source from him at a Newt Gingrich rally for AOL Patch last December. I think I might have also interviewed Gingrich's campaign manager or his Virginia campaign manager. I sat at a bar with him and talked to him about what it was like to have her parodied on SNL and such too.

18. Jamey Turner, world-renowned glass harp-This person was on the Tonight Show four times and plays the saw as well as the glass harp. I can't take credit for the initial story, however. At a newsroom meeting at the Connection, one of the interns suggested writing a story on a guy at the end of King Street who played a glass harp. We didn't know much about him and we walked all the way down King Street (our office was on the other end of Old Town) and the two interns decided to break for either lunch or another story, so I asked if they still wanted to explore the story about this guy and they shrugged it off. I got a fantastic story out of it 

19. Patrick Burn, location scout for films and TV shows such as House of Cards, JFK, Nixon, the Firm, J. Edgar, Bourne Identity, and National Treasure-I found Burn in a circuitous way. I was on a media list for DC and they were shooting a film that I was thinking of attending but it was last minute, so they told me to call the location manager about where they were filming that day. When I started talking to Burn, I realized he was worthy of a story. 

Famous people I've interviewed that are currently looking for an outlet:
20. David Wallechinsky, world's foremost Olympic historian-In my Olympics articles, I've always referenced this guy's books and everyone else references his work. I tracked him down and he agreed to an interview. We had a highly fascinating chat and a former editor advised me that this was a national story. I went everywhere with it: The LA Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and no one bit in time. A couple people said they were interested but the news cycle was no longer timely. I started several weeks early. It was a shame, but next Olympic cycle, this guy's in.
21. Ben Relles, founder of Barely Political-When I was writing for Reel SEO (an e-magazine that writes about YouTube trends, I e-mailed their site seeking some clarification and then wound up speaking to Ben himself. I then scored an interview. Relles was the person who created the Obama girl character from the 2008 presidential election and has one of the most viewed comedy channels on YouTube including the Key of Awesome. He's currently the head of YouTube's Next Lab. The initial publication I interviewed the person for changed their mind about the demographic.

Famous people I've sort of interviewed
22. Nick Clooney-George Clooney's dad but more than that, he's a television game show host, broadcast journalist, and film historian. We had a lengthy 70-minute conversation but there's little reason to brag here because the article did not get published through my own fault. 

23. Olympic gold medalist and world record holder (as of last week: congratulations Aries!) in the 110 meter Hurdles Aries Merritt. I asked him two questions on a media teleconference call that I never used for a blog but possibly other people used who were in on the call.

24. Chris Gethard-A fascinating Kaufmenesque comedian who I tracked down on twitter the morning a big piece was written about him on Cracked.com and talked to him for a good 45 minutes. I planned to write the results of the interview on the blog if he'd tweet it out, but I lost the file upon which the interview took place and this is my first time admitting it out loud. Yes, I lost the file. Chris is getting bigger now and gets a lot of coverage on Splitsider over his new book, so this would have been good. Sorry Chris.  I interviewed him around the time I made the first version of the list, and I asked him how he compared himself to the other famous people I interviewed and he was very humble and said at the very bottom, I think he even put himself below country board members but I hope he seems himself higher now. 

25. Chris Pratt, Parks and Recreation-I covered him when he shot here and took pictures. I asked him approximately 1 and 1/2 questions, none of which went into the article, but the pics and the story was the most important part and I got a picture in.

26. American mile record holder Alan Webb-Webb is a semi-famous person I sort of know through other people (he's a good friend of a good friend of mine) and always wanted to interview him. I used him as a tertiary source on a track meet he attended but his quote got cut from the final article. Wonder if that still counts. I later asked to interview him in 2007 when he was ranked #1. He said "sure" to an email interview but I sent him the questions too close to the world championships and he lost the championships, so he was probably not in the mood to participate

People who've rejected me for an interview (no hard feelings):
Tennis player Johnny Isner (nice guy, though. I caught him on his way out), Jake Hurwitz of College Humor (also a great guy. Just had a busy schedule), Who's Line is it Anyway's Greg Proops (a colleague of mine at DC Scene interviewed him first), Author Joel Garreau (as far as I know), the prince of Bhutan (this was at the D.C. folk life festival and I garnered interest from a local paper. I was a number of people who requested an interview with him and got turned down because he doesn't do interviews. For some inexplicable reason, NPR got to interview him, which made the whole incident kind of wierd), SNL cast member Jay Pharoah