Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Christmas horror tonight + Perez Hilton sticks up for bloggers...

We are just hours away from the Christmas horror event of the season! At Grindhouse Film Festival tonight in Hollywood, the original Black Christmas (1974) and Silent Night, Bloody Night (also 1974) double feature! Silent Night, Bloody Night, the less famous of the films, stars Mary Woronov and John Carradine. I've seen it and it is good. The movie is set in Arlington MA, just a town over from where I grew up! I believe that the writer/producer of Silent Night is expected to be on hand as is Black Christmas director Bob Clark and star John Saxon.

Perez Hilton, who blogs out of a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Sunset Strip, is being sued - read about it here.

Now I'm sure all of us bloggers use photos we did not take and we don't pay to use any of them, but I see both sides of the issue here. Perez's blog is all tabloid photos and he makes a lot of money posting these photos that other media outlets have to pay to post of publish. Of course one could argue, and I'm sure Perez does, that part of the draw to his site is the that he doodles on these pictures and writes words across them. He is defending his use of the photos as "satire", therefore all technically legal. Ok, but the real untouched photos are clearly visible underneath his crude drawings and I'm sure that Perez's site is the first place and really the only place most readers need to go to see these star pictures. I'm saying that once a picture has been posted by Perez, there really is no need for any of his readers to find the untouched version elsewhere.

If Perez were not extremely successful, I'd be in his corner 100%, but he has got to be pulling in tons of ad revenue here. Don't you guys feel sorry for the camera men out on the streets trying to make an honest dollar? I was walking home the other night, pretty late, and saw a batch of them outside of the Roosevelt waiting for Lindsay Lohan to make her exit. I stayed and watched, there was no one else around, just the photographers, professional autograph seekers, and me, and then Lohan who zipped from the door to the car in about three seconds - posing for about one second before getting into the passenger seat. About 5000 pictures were taken, but not of the photographers seemed happy. They dispersed, grumbling, in various directions. What a miserable bunch.

Speaking of misery. Tonight's horror event looks to be the height of my holiday season. I'm not enjoying this one.

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