So the WGA strike is over and with the Oscars almost upon us the writers have been scribbling away furiously for 13 hours a day to put together the kind of quality we’ve come to expect from the Academy Awards. Frankly, I find that hard to believe — That is, I did find it hard to believe until I saw this video of one such dedicated scribe, hard at work, delivering Oscar-quality comedy.

Hollywood is breathing a collective sigh of relief this week as it appears the long, bitter WGA strike may be coming to an end. On Saturday, officials outlined the proposed agreement to a packed house of guild members and notable celebrities showing support for the writers’ cause.

And while the address (below) was meant to celebrate a triumph, it also provided a prime example of how tremendously the written word in Hollywood has suffered without its usual writers.

Welcome back, writers! Here’s to getting screwed slightly less!

When not blogging for Cracked, Michael makes public address videos as head writer and co-founder of Those Aren’t Muskets!

While browsing Google News yesterday, I suddenly came upon the headline “Maggie Gyllenhaal in Lesbian Orgy.” Needless to say, that’s the type of link I usually see while browsing certain other websites, so I was intrigued enough to click.

Ultimately, it was just a short film she made for “Speechless”, a campaign supporting the writers’ strike, and featured no nudity whatsoever.

And while I still managed to masturbate to the video several times, I have to say I was disappointed with the overall quality. It made it painfully clear that the writers are on strike, not through its own will, but simply by the fact that it felt like the plot had been conceived and written by a chimp on a bender.

In the vid, three women all arrive at an apartment for a date with (gasp!) the same man, AMPiTePa (get it?), who they then bag on for being selfish and arrogant. Then they bone. Then a pizza girl comes and presumably joins them. Oh, I see. I should support the writers.

A brief aside: I hate it when snide, jaded Internet writers say petty, mean things about celebrities, who after all are people too, and have feelings and self-images capable of being damaged. So it is with the utmost self-loathing that I hypocritically point out that Maggie Gyllenhaal is less than attractive in this video.

I only bring it up because I have been attracted to her in the past, and in this video there is a moment where she awkwardly smiles at another girl in an elevator and her cheeks balloon to the size of frightened blowfish. Perhaps the people who make her pretty are on strike as well; who knows.

But getting back to the writing, I find it a bit of a slap in the face to have it thought that I need dialogue and symbolism as transparent as this to get the point. I’m assuming the lesbian orgy bit was thrown in at the end because they worried about my minuscule attention span drifting if I didn’t have the promise of sex to look forward to.

Ever eager to scab, here are some brief outlines for more installments of the “Speechless” campaign that I feel capture the key elements they’re looking for:

If you or your organization are morons and would like to pay me to think for you, please leave your credit card information in the comments section below.

When not blogging for Cracked, Michael makes lesbian orgy videos as head writer and con-founder of Those Aren’t Muskets!

Considering the fact that Conan O’Brien wrote some of The Simpsons‘ funniest episodes (see exhibit A, Marge vs. the Monorail), I tuned to NBC on Thursday night assuming he would weather the writer’s strike without much problem.

I realized I was horrifically mistaken right about the second time he spun his wedding ring on his desk, an activity that took about three minutes at a stretch, and which he told the audience at the top of the show “he did when he was bored in rehearsals.”

Now THAT is an entertainer: “Oh this? This that I’m doing right now? This is what I do when there’s nothing interesting going on. This right here. We’ll be back after these messages.”

On the one hand, he played it classy by manning up and discussing the strike, supporting the writers, and admitting (way too frequently) that he was “just killing time.” On the other hand, who the hell wants to watch Conan O’Brien underperform an hour every night? I mean besides his wife.

In a lot of ways it reminded me of watching my grandfather try and entertain young children. There was the weird fascination with his beard (slow panning shots of which replaced most of the monologue), the manic clown-like dancing, and of course the glazed look of desperation whenever it dawned on him that he still had ten minutes to go before Saget came on. At that point, he would invariably say something hilarious like “this water is good,” “this is really good water,” or “you can’t get good water like this.”

He also showed a short video touring his office, revealing once and for all that he’s exactly as you imagine him to be: he plays electric guitar, talks into an old rotary phone, and performs puppet shows with an action figure of himself. In short, he’s your college roommate trying (unsuccessfully) to impress a girl into sleeping with him.

So thank you, Conan, for proving your dedication to the writers with a graphic depiction of why they are so very necessary. Here’s to your unsettling beard and funnier days.

Besides blogging for CRACKED, Michael also makes hilarious videos as writer and co-founder of Those Aren’t Muskets!

Awesome Video Of The Day

Speechless Hollywood

I get what United Hollywood is trying to get across with these spots, but I think watching Woody Allen sip coffee in a silent room for 22 minutes would actually be a pretty good show. If I were a television executive and somebody pitched that to me, I’d throw it on the air immediately. It’d be called That Woody! and it would generate billions of dollars in revenue, which I would use to finance a new gameshow where people get to keep all the money they can eat in one hour. I’d call that one Common Cents or GUTBUSTERZ!

Can somebody please tell me why I don’t have my own TV network already?

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If we didn’t know that Heroes was ending for the season next episode, this would have been a relatively satisfying episode. We got to find out a bit more about the Company and Adam Monroe, there was a modest amount of gunplay, and one of the Wondertwins got butchered. That ticks off a lot of check boxes. But knowing that we’ve only got 42 minutes of Heroes left this season, it’s hard not to feel like things are getting a bit rushed. The plague that threatens the world just doesn’t feel terribly menacing yet, there’s still a billion unanswered questions about Adam Monroe and the Company, and Sylar has been sidelined for most of the season. In the (potential) final episode next week, these topics are either going to be handled quickly, or not at all. That feels like kind of a rip. At first glance, the only ones we have to blame for this are the striking writers, and by extension, Communism. However, here at Cracked, our editors encourage us to take the long view, so I’m also going to blame George W. Bush, Rich Hollywood Jews, and my parents.

Things we now know:
How did Adam know exactly where Victoria Pratt was? Everything we knew about her suggested that she had gone deep into hiding, and very few people knew where she was. I’ll guess that the Nightmare man read Angela Petrelli’s mind and told Adam about it, even though we haven’t seen any direct evidence that the two are co-operating. Still, it beats my other theory, which centered around an edited scene of Adam and Peter Googling her.

We still don’t know whether it was Bob or Mohinder that decided to save Bennet’s life, although both are aware he pulled a Lazarus. The big question here of course is what form the inevitable father daughter reunion will take when Claire and Noah cross paths again. I’m personally hoping that it’s some kind of Three’s Company-esque situation, where having both had their memories erased by the Haitian, the two meet on a blind date. They immediately hit it off, and are only moments away from a passionate kiss, when they’re interrupted by Matt Parkman, who’s now their landlord.

Micah and his cousins are back, and take part in one of the most inane stories I’ve ever seen on television – the Great Backpack Caper. I understand that there have to be some lighthearted moments in a show that features such grave threats to the world, but this is taking things a bit far. Last year Hiro and Ando’s hijinx managed to lighten the mood of the show without coming off as contrived or trivial. Micah’s cousin (I’ve completely forgotten her name) has gotten a pretty raw deal. To be the worst new cast character in a field that also includes West and the Wondertwins is both astounding and shameful.

Speaking of everyone’s favorite Hondurans, a couple weeks ago I said I’d tolerate their return to the show once they finally did something. Technically they didn’t actually do anything this episode, though fortunately for us, someone did do something to them, in the form of a knife to the abdomen. Alejandro’s ambush of Sylar while armed with nothing more than a wispy mustache was woefully ill-advised.

Incidently, watching Sylar smooth-talk Typhoid Maya is really unpleasant to watch. It feels a little bit like watching old people flirt.

I’m a little fuzzy on how Peter intends to save Caitlin. How exactly does he think that changing the future will save the girl that he left there? For a plot device as overused as time travel, you’d think someone would have figured out by now how to use it properly. I’d suggest writers should steer well clear from using time travel in their stories. Aside from some very specific exceptions - e.g: stories where characters from Star Trek : The Next Generation travel back in time to take twentieth century fan fiction writers back to the future with them - I never use time travel in my own work any more.

Listen up, Hollywood Producers: your writers are striking, your comic book movies are tanking, and your minds are so disconnected from reality you wouldn’t know a good movie idea if it blogged up and bit you on the ass. So heed my words: MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT THIS GUY.

While Spider-Man was busy undergoing intense self-reflection, Batman was failing to let go of any goddamned bad thing that ever happened to him, and Superman was being charmingly aloof, this guy was saving an orphan from dying in the desert. The kicker? He was an illegal immigrant attempting to cross the border!

Jesus Cordova left his homeland and braved the merciless desert in order to earn money to send back to his family, came upon a 9-year-old boy who’d been involved in a car wreck, and rather than fleeing north as he’d planned, John McClaned it, gruffly muttered “I’m getting too old for this” (in Spanish, one assumes) and proceeded to keep the kid company and give him his fucking jacket until Border Patrol arrived to save the boy and deport his ass back to Mexico.

The movie’s basically done: you’ve got your selfless heroism, your innocent victim, and your tragic downfall. All you need to add is the uplifting finale where Cordova strides across the U.S.-Mexico border, each Patrol officer stepping aside in quiet respect.

Also, if this does get made into a movie (preferably starring Javier Bardem and Dakota Fanning), I get royalties. I called it.

While driving through Hollywood yesterday, as I do each Monday to attend my transcendental yogic sex therapy classes, I noticed a number of writers picketing outside Paramount studios. I honked in derision, which they took as a sign of support. In short, an embarrasing debacle for all involved.

But on the bright side, as a struggling writer myself, I realized that there is no better time than now to bombard Hollywood with my many PATENTED ideas for TV shows and movies.

If you’re reading this, Mr. Producer, consider it a Godsend and get in touch with me right away about producing one or all of the following projects. It sounds like a tall order, but I firmly believe I can produce up to three nightly TV shows and no less than eight movies simultaneously, provided all actors and sets are identical.

First off, the late night TV scene. These nightly shows are hard up for material, and have been the first to suffer due to the writer’s strike. May I suggest the following replacements?

Done and done. Next up, your television dramas–your Heroes and Losts–which are just now entering a golden age of addictiveness. You don’t want to lose that rabid viewership, and I’m the idea man who’s going to help you hang onto them.

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