[Sven2]

Milch has a renewed contract with HBO, and here's one more project he'll be working on. Unfortunately, it also signals the end of hopes for Deadwood movies or a TV conclusion.

David Milch Strikes Deal to Bring Faulkner Works to HBO
By DAVE ITZKOFF


David Milch, a television producer who knows a thing or two about sound and fury, has concluded a new production deal with HBO that will allow him to produce television shows and movies from the literary works of William Faulkner, the cable channel announced on Wednesday.

"I'm not, probably, the first person they would have thought of approaching them," Mr. Milch said in a phone interview, referring to his months-long discussions with the William Faulkner Literary Estate. "But a number of conversations were fruitful and here we are."
William FaulknerAssociated Press William Faulkner

In his television career, Mr. Milch is best known for creating Emmy Award-winning series like "NYPD Blue" (with Steven Bochco) and "Deadwood," the vulgar and violent (and never properly concluded) western that ran on HBO.

But before he started putting colorful words in the mouths of Andy Sipowicz and Al Swearengen, Mr. Milch made his literary bones as an undergraduate at Yale University and a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa; he worked with Robert Penn Warren (who shared a biographer, Joseph Blotner, with Faulkner), Cleanth Brooks and R. W. B. Lewis on a history of American literature, and contributed fiction and criticism to publications like The Southern Review and The Atlantic Monthly.

More recently, Mr. Milch said, his daughter Olivia had been studying Faulkner's novel "Light in August" at Yale and "renewed my engagement with the material," eventually leading to discussions between his company, Red Board Productions, and the William Faulkner Literary Estate.

Under the terms of their agreement, Mr. Milch and the estate's executor, Lee Caplin, will work together to choose from 19 novels and 125 short stories by Faulkner that could be adapted for film or television. (Olivia Milch will be a coordinating producer on the adaptations.) HBO said in a news release that it would have the first opportunity to finance and produce these projects.

"My hope is to steer the project, as much as to be its source," Mr. Milch said, adding that "conversations were ongoing" with other writers and artists who would handle the adaptations of specific Faulkner works.

Mr. Milch's new exclusive deal with HBO will also cover his new drama series "Luck," which stars Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte.

Just don't hold out much hope that this pact will lead to a long-awaited ending to "Deadwood," which broadcast its last episode in 2006.

"Every man's entitled to hope," Mr. Milch said with a laugh. "It looked like we were getting close, about six months ago. It's a complicated transaction, so we're moving forward in other areas."

from:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/david-milch-strikes-deal-to-bring-william-faulkner-to-hbo/?ref=arts


Milch to cover Faulkner for HBO
By Verne Gay

 David Milch, pretty much the premiere TV writer of his generation, has an HBO deal to adapt over a hundred novels and short stories of William Faulkner, pretty much the premiere writer of his.

 Some deal indeed, and highly unusual - maybe unprecedented. Of course, many Faulkner novels have been adapted for the screen like "The Reivers" but rarely for TV for the simple and obvious reason that they are difficult,dense, complicated and - hence - not exactly commercial TV material. But if anyone can make this work, Milch is certainly the man. Come to think of it, "Deadwood" was kind of like Faulkner - "As I Lay Dying," for example. Check out the statement below - some of the books could yield movies or miniseries.

Per the HBO release: "Under the terms of the agreement, Milch will partner with Lee Caplin, the executor of the William Faulkner Literary Estate and CEO of Picture Entertainment Corp., to choose which works to develop, package and produce. Both Milch and Caplin will act as executive producers of those projects, with Milch serving as the executive writer in charge of adapting the works. The agreement gives HBO an exclusive first opportunity to finance, produce and distribute the projects as movies, miniseries and series. Olivia Milch will serve as coordinating producer on the projects."

 Milch's Dustin Hoffman starrer, "Luck" will be previewed in a week or so.

from:
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/tv-zone-1.811968/milch-to-cover-faulkner-for-hbo-1.3356512

[Sven2]

Excerpt from an interview with Mr.Milch regarding Faulkner, Deadwood, etc., printed in LA Times.

"David Milch, the man behind "Deadwood" and "NYPD Blue," has signed a deal with HBO and William Faulkner's estate to produce TV series and original movies based on Faulkner's writing. The agreement, which has been brewing for 18 months, is tremendously broad, encompassing 19 novels and 125 short stories by one of American's most challenging writers. Faulkner won the Nobel prize for literature, the Pulitzer Prize and was even a screenwriter in Hollywood. Milch, who has won four Emmys and is currently at work on HBO's "Luck," a horse racing series featuring Dustin Hoffman, spoke to Carolyn Kellogg by phone.

What was the first William Faulkner work you read?

I think it was [the short story] "The Bear," when I was in high school. In college I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature -- I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened, and has been sustained ever since.

Do you have a favorite Faulkner novel?

I guess if I had to pick one I'd pick "Absalom, Absalom!" but [laughs] a lot of them are pretty good.

People have said that he's an unfilmmable writer.

I've never understood that. To me he seems enormously cinematic. But I've heard that, once or twice.

In "Deadwood," you were known for coining a unique language, and Faulkner did that as well. What do you think of the texture of Faulkner's prose, and of his dialogue?

They are superb, and compelling, and absolutely authentic. They're so contemporary. You know, Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.

What attracted you to Faulkner in particular?

For me, he is a distinctive voice in American literature in the last century. The variety of the work, and the richness of its perspectives on the great themes. Faulkner speaks to us on the questions of race, the challenges of modernity and modern man's dilemma in all of its aspects. That he is able to specify among those and bring those themes alive is one of his great gifts. There are so many different kinds of pleasures one gets from encountering those materials. I remember when I was reading "The Bear," I was reading as a kid. All these years later one returns to that for an entirely different reason. That's true of so many of his works.

Do you know which of his works you'll start with?

We haven't made those decisions as of yet.

Have you visited Oxford, Miss. (where Faulkner lived, and his home is preserved as a museum)?

I haven't, but my daughter Olivia lives down there, and has generated a friendship with several people connected with the estate. It was through her good offices that I most recently became aware of the possibility of entering into this type of connection.

Faulkner himself, apart from his work, seems like a really interesting character. Biographically, is there anything that could make its way into your upcoming HBO project?

By refraction, that might be the case. It's important, I feel, to separate the man from his work. He lived a fascinating life, but my teacher Robert Penn Warren was emphatic on the separation of the man and the work. I guess I'll stick with that."

from:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2011/11/david-milch-on-william-faulkner-and-his-new-deal-with-hbo.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ShowTracker+%28L.A.+Times+-+Show+Tracker%29

[Sven2]

Ah, it still makes waves...

from SurferMag message board:

"Killer show. Great writing. Wish it was back. David Milch is a genius. Remember when the kid (Grayson) mysteriously hurts himself surfing a contest, then shows up healed, then later that night is skating a ramp as if nothing had happened? They framed it like it was an act of God - an act of God that he healed spontaneously, or that a human being can float in mid air and return to earth on top of a small, almost weightless object? It's surfing really an act of God? That show was able to capture the mystery of surfing more effectively than any other movie about surfing (not talk about surf flicks) could do... I guess, except for North Shore. "

posted 10/15/11 by Ibc980
as per Zen on Mars request, here's the link:
http://forum.surfermag.com/forum/showflat.php?Number=2165729&page=0

[Sven2]

This picture I've found on Tumblr, together with some accolades to JFC.  Here is an example:
"Remember this show that aired on HBO a few years ago? It contained surfing, Lynchian mind screw nonsense, Ed O'Neill in a virtuoso performance as an ex-cop who talks to birds, and an amazing opening sequence featuring this song by Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros", by kurtispopp
The picture was posted by fuckeahaustinnichols (got to give credit to the two gals that run the blog dedicated to Nichols)


from:
http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/john-from-cincinnati?before=1309293666

[ZenOnMars]

Sven2,

Any links for either the SurferMag or Tumblr articles?  The internet is Big. :)

Zen, look up, the links are added as you wished. (Apologies, being a mod I invaded your post, so it would stay as the last on the thread. Good to see you, BTW. How's life?)
Sven.

[ZenOnMars]

Thanks, Sven!  And yes life is good. :) 

[Sven2]

It's a long article, it didn't fit in the allotted space, so it's broken in two parts.
Wildly Enigmatic Case File #7: John From Cincinnati


by Nathan Rabin
January 18, 2012

On the evening of June 10, 2007, a culture-wide roar of agitated confusion swept over this great land. From satellites in outer space, an audible cry of "What the fuck? No, seriously. What the fuck?" could be heard ringing out loudly, followed immediately by, "You've got to be shitting us, right? I mean, seriously? What the fuck? You have got to be kidding us with this bullshit!" The cause for this tidal wave of anger and confusion was an exquisitely, maddeningly, insufferably, gloriously enigmatic surfing drama from David Milch, the cultishly revered creator of Deadwood and co-creator of NYPD Blue. John From Cincinnati's premiere followed the series finale of The Sopranos—no pressure there—which engendered some complicated emotions of its own among loyal viewers.

When John From Cincinnati was greenlit and cast with every recognizable face known to man, Milch had a reputation not just as a peerless television writer and producer, but as a genius, a poet of profanity who went beyond creating shows to creating vast, nuanced, intricate universes. Along with peers David Chase and David Simon, Milch was among those heralded with elevating television to unparalleled heights. Deadwood and its HBO compatriots The Wire and The Sopranos were often trotted out as exhibits A, B, and C in pieces about how television, or more specifically HBO, was churning out art so transcendent it made cinema look like a giant pile of horseshit by comparison. They weren't just praised for being cinematic; they were being heralded as better than the best films.

Milch was a groundbreaker. Yet despite the accolades thrown its way, Deadwood was cancelled after three expensive seasons, and plans to continue the saga with a pair of television movies never came to fruition, to the disappointment and anger of the show's devoted fans. HBO wasn't willing to take a chance on continuing a story that resonated strongly with a small but devoted cadre of viewers, yet it was somewhat puzzlingly willing to take an enormous, even insane chance on a Milch-co-created project unlike anything anyone had ever seen, a television show so preposterous-sounding and peculiar it occupies a subgenre of one: supernatural, metaphysical, spiritual surf comedy-drama-noir.

Milch described his role on John From Cincinnati less as a conventional show-runner, creator, or executive producer than, as he told the New York Times, "an instrument of purposes that I don't fully understand," not caring how grand or silly it might sound. "Time will tell whether I am a wing nut or a megalomaniac," he added. "The difference between a cult and faith is time. I believe that we are a single organism, and that something is at stake in this particular moment." HBO agreed that something was at stake (in this case, a fuck-ton of its money and reputation), but in a different fashion. Even the artiest and most progressive pay-cable channel could not afford to disregard completely the dictates of commerce. Yet John From Cincinnati ignores the screaming, insatiable demands of commercial television as defiantly as any show this side of Wonder Showzen.

In an interview with Ocean Drive magazine, actor Austin Nichols, who appeared on both Deadwood and John From Cincinnati, described Milch as, "pretty much clinically insane." He goes on:

   "He's a lunatic. It's sometimes very difficult to be around him, and other times it's just the greatest thing ever. You have to stay on your toes... It's all moment to moment. Our production shares the [Alcoholics Anonymous] credo, 'One day at a time.' We literally don't have a plan, we don't have a shooting schedule, we don't have a script. We get pages the night before, or we may get to the set and improvise or David will dictate lines to us on the spot. It's very in the moment. But I've always craved spontaneity in my work, so this has been the greatest thing ever."

That approach is evident in the show itself. At best, John From Cincinnati's Jean-Luc Godard-like working methods lend the show an exhilarating spontaneity and sense of possibility. It's quite literally a show where anything can happen. At worst, it feels clumsily put-together on the spot by actors groping to comprehend a master plan even a super-genius like Milch doesn't seem to understand.

In a move of staggering perversity worthy of John From Cincinnati itself, HBO said "no" to giving Milch more money to continue a proven, beloved property like Deadwood only to spend what I can only imagine was a vast fortune on John From Cincinnati. That's a little like nixing a Saw sequel in favor of a $300 million experimental film featuring extensive bisexual bestiality. There hadn't been a surfing show for a long time before John From Cincinnati, yet Milch brought surfing back to television in the unlikeliest possible fashion. But it wasn't just surfing that made John From Cincinnati such unlikely TV fodder, even for HBO. It was also rather nakedly a show about spirituality, a subject that has never gained much traction on American television. As if all that weren't enough to scare potential viewers, the show boasted a title seemingly designed to chase away the few viewers it didn't confuse into a stupor. Who was John From Cincinnati? What was John From Cincinnati? And what kind of a name is John From Cincinnati for a television show about a depressed Southern California surfing town? It's as if Milch and co-creator/novelist Kem Nunn couldn't wait for the actual premiere of John From Cincinnati to confuse and disappoint audiences (especially those seeking a surf-world Deadwood), so they figured they'd get a head start with a maddeningly cryptic, counterintuitive title.

It worked. Despite airing after one of the most talked-about and watched pay-cable finales of all time, and possessing a cast that includes Bruce Greenwood, Rebecca De Mornay, Ed O' Neill, Luke Perry, Luis Guzman, Willie Garson, Jennifer Grey, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and Howard Hesseman (as a burnout LSD manufacturer, of course), John retained far less than a third of the audience for The Sopranos. And that was in its first week, when anticipation was at its highest and culture-wide confusion about the show had not yet sunk in.

If I were to delineate all of John From Cincinnati's crowd-alienating perversities, this piece could stretch to book length. So I will merely single out one of the show's most glaring eccentricities: For a television show about surfers, John From Cincinnati features little in the way of actual surfing. John From Cincinnati's pilot waits more or less until the end for surfing footage that reminds audiences that central family the Yosts are something more than a miserable, shouty, and aggressively one-note aggregation of has-beens, junkies, and burnouts leading glumly tragic existences in the endless shadow of their former glory. Surfing is the Yosts' superpower. It's a place where they can abandon the limitations of a corrupt material world and attain a higher, more profound state of consciousness. So perhaps it's appropriate that these broken, exhausted, and defeated survivors can only really practice their art form when nobody is watching and the stakes couldn't be lower.

There is, however, an awful lot of surfing in what almost invariably qualifies as the most accomplished, artful, successful, and moving 87 seconds of every episode: a beautifully downbeat opening-credits sequence that sets up the show's setting and subject, but more importantly establishes a fragile, sad tone of broken-down grace, of half-mad stumbling for transcendence. This perfect fusion of sound (in this case Joe Strummer And The Mescaleros' "Johnny Appleseed") and image goes a long way toward determining the show's greatest asset: a hard-to-quantify mood of resigned sadness and cosmic resignation. And it's got soul. That counts for an awful lot. John doesn't lose the plot so much as angrily throw it away, but it's always got soul.

At the nucleus of John From Cincinnati lies a pair of beautifully mysterious blanks around whom the cast rotates unsteadily. Professional skateboarder Greyson Fletcher stars as Shaun Yost, a cherubic teenager whose preternatural talent for surfing threatens to resurrect a surfing dynasty that has lain dormant ever since Shaun's similarly gifted father Butchie (Brian Van Holt) crashed and burned spectacularly after trading surf stardom for a grubby, ramshackle existence as a heroin addict. Butchie is the son of patriarch Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood), a legendary surfer who retired from the public eye after nearly losing part of his leg in a surfing accident, much to the chagrin of an adoring and uncomprehending public. Mitch never recovered. He dishonors his gift by surfing only in private, far from the prying eyes of surf fans who never forgot him or stopped mourning his wasted potential. He's weighed down by an almost unbearable heaviness until one day, for reasons that remain unfathomable to him, he begins to float. Literally. He doesn't soar; he simply floats a few feet above the ground, trapped in some weird limbo between the material world and the heavens. This is where the mystery begins. It's not certain where, if ever, it ends.  

The Yosts' glory is irrevocably intertwined with its shame and fall. The characters are stuck in an endless loop where they're doomed to forever repeat the mistakes of the past, which makes a victim of nearly every one of the show's characters. Physically and emotionally, Shaun is unfinished and unformed, a sun-baked innocent with a dead-eyed stare and an affectless monotone, yet he's still oppressed by his family's legacy of failure and ruin. History repeats itself as both comedy and tragedy.

Mitch and Butchie deal with their personal downfalls in antithetical ways. Mitch leads an ascetic existence. He denies the world the pleasure of watching him surf and himself the rewards that would come with letting others share his gift. Butchie, in sharp contrast, denies himself nothing; after years, even decades of moral rot and physical and emotional decay, he's become a grubby creature of habit and need, a junkie whose life begins and ends with scoring that next fix. Milch was an obscenely high-functioning heroin addict for three decades, even as he soared to the top of his profession, so John From Cincinnati's portrayal of the pathological neediness of addiction has a lived-in sense of authenticity.

Butchie wants only to get high, but the fates have other plans for him and the desperate souls around him. Butchie isn't able to score at all throughout John From Cincinnati—the best he can manage is what Milch refers to as a "beat bag," a bogus package of smack—yet he never gets dope-sick either, because he is under the care and protection, after a fashion, of the title character and other beautiful blank (Nichols), a tall, handsome enigma with the leanly stylized look and pompadour of a '50s greaser.

John's surname is Monad, in what Milch described in a talk at his alma mater Yale—where he was both a student and a teacher who collaborated with writer/mentor Robert Penn Warren, whose ideas and aesthetic would go on to have an enormous influence on Milch, and John From Cincinnati—as an homage to 17th-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz's idea of "monads." I am not nearly smart enough to understand Leibniz's conception of "monads," but it seems to refer to an incredibly loose metaphysical conceit involving God and the oneness of everything in the universe.

On the surface, John Monad appears autistic. He seems incapable of making connections and associations on his own. Instead, he engages extensively in echolalia, the ritualistic repetition of words and phrases. In that respect he's less a window than a mirror that constantly reflects the other characters' words, thoughts, and ideas back to them in ways that inspire both anger—to the unenlightened, John's repetition can come off as mocking and bratty—and soulful introspection. Monad doesn't just possess an unusually strong link to the divine; he is divine, a slick surfing Asperger-y Christ figure seemingly sent to earth by his "father" to reconnect the Yost family to their lost spiritual core. John has no past, no connections, no family beyond his heavenly "father." He consequently is the only character able to live in the moment and not in a tragic past.

John arrives in the Yosts' hometown of Imperial Beach, California, and suddenly their grubby, low-rent lives are inundated with unexplained phenomena. Shaun breaks his neck surfing, then is miraculously cured soon after, much to the bewilderment of Dr. Michael Smith (Garret Dillahunt), the neurologist who treats him after his accident. Mitch begins floating periodically. Characters begin having mystical visions and vivid hallucinations.

John From Cincinnati simultaneously occupies two realms: the spiritual and the physical. In the spiritual realm, grace and transcendence are becoming glorious possibilities as John cryptically points the way toward peace and consciousness beyond our rational understanding. In the physical realm, meanwhile, Luke Perry's cold-blooded surf-gear magnate Linc Stark is looking for a way to monetize both Shaun's gift and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his resurrection. To that end, Linc has a filmmaker named Cass (Emily Rose) seduce Mitch in an attempt to get Shaun to sign with his company, and lures Shaun's mother Tina Blake (Chandra West), a pornographic actress and prostitute, back into Shaun and Butchie's life to nefarious ends.

Ah, but the women in John From Cincinnati aren't all prostitutes, porn stars, and cynical opportunists willing to use sex to further their careers. There's also what is referred to more than once, and with ample justification, as the worst ball-buster in universe: Shaun's mother Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay). While high on LSD decades earlier, Cissy stumbled onto a young masturbating Butchie, fresh off his latest surfing triumph, and finished him off with a handjob. She has consequently never stopped punishing herself or the universe for her transgression by becoming the most insufferable shrew in existence. De Mornay seems afflicted with a terrible case of the Botox shouts: She can't use her frozen facial muscles to express emotion anymore (Cissy's emotions run the gamut from anger to rage to blinding fury), so she uses deafening volume and frantic mugging to overcompensate. She's Imperial Beach's low-rent answer to Lady Macbeth, and the only character here engaged enough in the world to be angry all the time. (On his wonderful commentary track, Milch says, "I tried to cast as many people who are very identifiable from a single role as a way of mobilizing viewers' sense of the possible arbitrariness of how we remember things. Oh Rebecca De Mornay. She gave Tom Cruise a handjob or whatever it was. They also starred together in Risky Business!" That might seem disrespectful, but he does later compliment De Mornay for having a great ass, so he's not all rough edges and leering sexism.

from:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/wildly-enigmatic-case-file-7-john-from-cincinnati,67835/1/

continued:

[Sven2]

My World Of Flops
Wildly Enigmatic Case File #7: John From Cincinnati

Part Two

There are a lot of parasites in John, primarily Linc, who is all naked guile and scheming calculation in a frustratingly one-note role and performance. Even more perplexingly, Mark Paul-Gosselaar shows up much later in the series—Milch wasn't kidding about wanting to cast actors known only for one role—as Linc's business partner and delivers more or less the exact same one-note, glowering performance as Perry. They're even costumed to look nearly identical. 

The Yosts' talent and legacy invites avaricious attention of parasites, but it also invites the protectiveness of Ed O'Neill's Bill Jacks, a retired police officer who has adopted the Yosts as a surrogate family and spends much of his time conducting elaborate, animated, and understandably one-sided conversations with a collection of birds that may or may not have magical powers. Luis Guzman also costars as Ramon, a worker at a fleabag motel that has been purchased by eccentric, gay lottery-winner Barry Cunningham (Matt Winston, in a performance that seeks to transcend the retrograde stereotype of the tragic, melodramatic queen by embodying it to a grotesque degree) with the intention of tearing it down because it was the site of his worst adolescent traumas. Like so many of the show's characters, Barry is doomed to shadowbox a past that's more real and tangible to him than anything in his present life. Barry wants to tear the motel down, but surfing lawyer Meyer Dickstein (Willie Garson), who arranged the sale, keeps it intact almost exclusively so that it can provide a home to Butchie, whom Dickstein idolizes and Barry despises for abusing him when they were children. In playing a man who hopes against all hope that all the random weirdness and freaky occurrences will eventually lead to a big payoff, monetarily and otherwise, Guzman comes perilously close to serving as an audience surrogate. I'm not sure that's something John ultimately wants or needs. John From Cincinnati angrily defies edification. It wants us to get lost and find our own way out.

Nowhere is this more apparent than during an epic monologue in the sixth episode where John Monad issues a series of cryptic proclamations that, in keeping with the show's modest scope and humble aspirations, connect the characters and the seminal moments where they each went awry with the evolution of mankind and the cultivation of civilization through the millennia.

By this point in my John From Cincinnati journey (it really is a spiritual journey more than a television show), I was exhilaratingly lost. I had stopped trying to understand or figure out the show and given myself over to it completely. That's ultimately what John From Cincinnati is about: forsaking the rational in favor of the unknowable. John From Cincinnati at times feels more like a waking dream or a visual poem than a conventional TV series. It's a weirdly alive series of powerful contradictions, a sordid melodrama about life's most profound questions. It's less a show divided against itself than a program that embodies its central split between the mind and the body, the spirit and the ego. It's about abandoning the search for answers and giving in to the divine and unknowable.

To the surprise of no one, John From Cincinnati was cancelled after only one season, though as he reveals on the audio commentary, Milch was thoughtful enough to have John Monad rattle off what would have happened in a second season, had the show miraculously renewed. (Spoiler: A bunch of freaky-ass shit would have happened that would have had people all, "Say what?!!!") John crashed and burned, Butchie Yost-style, but Milch has proven extraordinarily resilient. In 2011, HBO signed a deal with Milch to produce a series of William Faulkner adaptations. The same year, HBO picked up Luck, a Dustin Hoffman-starring drama centered on the world of horse-racing that's one of the year's most eagerly anticipated dramas.

John From Cincinnati is a ferociously imperfect show, a strange, unwieldy combination of pulp fiction and cracked spirituality. Yet it's gloriously unlike anything that had become before, in television or elsewhere. In the words of A Serious Man (and my colleague Scott Tobias' fine essay about the superlative last year in film), it invites us to "accept the mystery" of existence while stressing the interconnectedness of all things. Enjoying John From Cincinnati requires a massive leap of faith, a high tolerance for quirkiness and self-indulgence, and an awful lot patience, but its rewards and cockeyed charms are as substantive as they are beguilingly ethereal.

from:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/wildly-enigmatic-case-file-7-john-from-cincinnati,67835/1/

[Sven2]

Probably it's not news at all, doesn't belong here, etc., etc., but I have to tell - to everyone who wants to hear - that there is a vibrant, regularly updated,  discussion about JFC on IMDB. I am completely enamored by this discovery. The most recent posts there are from the end of January and there is an  abundance of intelligent, emotional comments about JFC. This board unfortunately petered out, as the influx of fresh voices slowly dried out and completely ceased, but on IMDB you'd find the people that still get amazed by John's visit and they speak well.

So, go and see for yourself:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814164/board/
If you still have the urge to discuss JFC - go for it, you'll find yourself in good company!

[Sven2]

Wildly Enigmatic Case File #7: John From Cincinnati

by Nathan Rabin January 18, 2012

On the evening of June 10, 2007, a culture-wide roar of agitated confusion swept over this great land. From satellites in outer space, an audible cry of "What the fuck? No, seriously. What the fuck?" could be heard ringing out loudly, followed immediately by, "You've got to be shitting us, right? I mean, seriously? What the fuck? You have got to be kidding us with this bullshit!" The cause for this tidal wave of anger and confusion was an exquisitely, maddeningly, insufferably, gloriously enigmatic surfing drama from David Milch, the cultishly revered creator of Deadwood and co-creator of NYPD Blue. John From Cincinnati's premiere followed the series finale of The Sopranos—no pressure there—which engendered some complicated emotions of its own among loyal viewers.

When John From Cincinnati was greenlit and cast with every recognizable face known to man, Milch had a reputation not just as a peerless television writer and producer, but as a genius, a poet of profanity who went beyond creating shows to creating vast, nuanced, intricate universes. Along with peers David Chase and David Simon, Milch was among those heralded with elevating television to unparalleled heights. Deadwood and its HBO compatriots The Wire and The Sopranos were often trotted out as exhibits A, B, and C in pieces about how television, or more specifically HBO, was churning out art so transcendent it made cinema look like a giant pile of horseshit by comparison. They weren't just praised for being cinematic; they were being heralded as better than the best films.

Milch was a groundbreaker. Yet despite the accolades thrown its way, Deadwood was cancelled after three expensive seasons, and plans to continue the saga with a pair of television movies never came to fruition, to the disappointment and anger of the show's devoted fans. HBO wasn't willing to take a chance on continuing a story that resonated strongly with a small but devoted cadre of viewers, yet it was somewhat puzzlingly willing to take an enormous, even insane chance on a Milch-co-created project unlike anything anyone had ever seen, a television show so preposterous-sounding and peculiar it occupies a subgenre of one: supernatural, metaphysical, spiritual surf comedy-drama-noir.

Milch described his role on John From Cincinnati less as a conventional show-runner, creator, or executive producer than, as he told the New York Times, "an instrument of purposes that I don't fully understand," not caring how grand or silly it might sound. "Time will tell whether I am a wing nut or a megalomaniac," he added. "The difference between a cult and faith is time. I believe that we are a single organism, and that something is at stake in this particular moment." HBO agreed that something was at stake (in this case, a fuck-ton of its money and reputation), but in a different fashion. Even the artiest and most progressive pay-cable channel could not afford to disregard completely the dictates of commerce. Yet John From Cincinnati ignores the screaming, insatiable demands of commercial television as defiantly as any show this side of Wonder Showzen.

In an interview with Ocean Drive magazine, actor Austin Nichols, who appeared on both Deadwood and John From Cincinnati, described Milch as, "pretty much clinically insane." He goes on:

   "He's a lunatic. It's sometimes very difficult to be around him, and other times it's just the greatest thing ever. You have to stay on your toes... It's all moment to moment. Our production shares the [Alcoholics Anonymous] credo, 'One day at a time.' We literally don't have a plan, we don't have a shooting schedule, we don't have a script. We get pages the night before, or we may get to the set and improvise or David will dictate lines to us on the spot. It's very in the moment. But I've always craved spontaneity in my work, so this has been the greatest thing ever."

That approach is evident in the show itself. At best, John From Cincinnati's Jean-Luc Godard-like working methods lend the show an exhilarating spontaneity and sense of possibility. It's quite literally a show where anything can happen. At worst, it feels clumsily put-together on the spot by actors groping to comprehend a master plan even a super-genius like Milch doesn't seem to understand.

In a move of staggering perversity worthy of John From Cincinnati itself, HBO said "no" to giving Milch more money to continue a proven, beloved property like Deadwood only to spend what I can only imagine was a vast fortune on John From Cincinnati. That's a little like nixing a Saw sequel in favor of a $300 million experimental film featuring extensive bisexual bestiality. There hadn't been a surfing show for a long time before John From Cincinnati, yet Milch brought surfing back to television in the unlikeliest possible fashion. But it wasn't just surfing that made John From Cincinnati such unlikely TV fodder, even for HBO. It was also rather nakedly a show about spirituality, a subject that has never gained much traction on American television. As if all that weren't enough to scare potential viewers, the show boasted a title seemingly designed to chase away the few viewers it didn't confuse into a stupor. Who was John From Cincinnati? What was John From Cincinnati? And what kind of a name is John From Cincinnati for a television show about a depressed Southern California surfing town? It's as if Milch and co-creator/novelist Kem Nunn couldn't wait for the actual premiere of John From Cincinnati to confuse and disappoint audiences (especially those seeking a surf-world Deadwood), so they figured they'd get a head start with a maddeningly cryptic, counterintuitive title.

It worked. Despite airing after one of the most talked-about and watched pay-cable finales of all time, and possessing a cast that includes Bruce Greenwood, Rebecca De Mornay, Ed O' Neill, Luke Perry, Luis Guzman, Willie Garson, Jennifer Grey, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and Howard Hesseman (as a burnout LSD manufacturer, of course), John retained far less than a third of the audience for The Sopranos. And that was in its first week, when anticipation was at its highest and culture-wide confusion about the show had not yet sunk in.

If I were to delineate all of John From Cincinnati's crowd-alienating perversities, this piece could stretch to book length. So I will merely single out one of the show's most glaring eccentricities: For a television show about surfers, John From Cincinnati features little in the way of actual surfing. John From Cincinnati's pilot waits more or less until the end for surfing footage that reminds audiences that central family the Yosts are something more than a miserable, shouty, and aggressively one-note aggregation of has-beens, junkies, and burnouts leading glumly tragic existences in the endless shadow of their former glory. Surfing is the Yosts' superpower. It's a place where they can abandon the limitations of a corrupt material world and attain a higher, more profound state of consciousness. So perhaps it's appropriate that these broken, exhausted, and defeated survivors can only really practice their art form when nobody is watching and the stakes couldn't be lower.

There is, however, an awful lot of surfing in what almost invariably qualifies as the most accomplished, artful, successful, and moving 87 seconds of every episode: a beautifully downbeat opening-credits sequence that sets up the show's setting and subject, but more importantly establishes a fragile, sad tone of broken-down grace, of half-mad stumbling for transcendence. This perfect fusion of sound (in this case Joe Strummer And The Mescaleros' "Johnny Appleseed") and image goes a long way toward determining the show's greatest asset: a hard-to-quantify mood of resigned sadness and cosmic resignation. And it's got soul. That counts for an awful lot. John doesn't lose the plot so much as angrily throw it away, but it's always got soul.

At the nucleus of John From Cincinnati lies a pair of beautifully mysterious blanks around whom the cast rotates unsteadily. Professional skateboarder Greyson Fletcher stars as Shaun Yost, a cherubic teenager whose preternatural talent for surfing threatens to resurrect a surfing dynasty that has lain dormant ever since Shaun's similarly gifted father Butchie (Brian Van Holt) crashed and burned spectacularly after trading surf stardom for a grubby, ramshackle existence as a heroin addict. Butchie is the son of patriarch Mitch Yost (Bruce Greenwood), a legendary surfer who retired from the public eye after nearly losing part of his leg in a surfing accident, much to the chagrin of an adoring and uncomprehending public. Mitch never recovered. He dishonors his gift by surfing only in private, far from the prying eyes of surf fans who never forgot him or stopped mourning his wasted potential. He's weighed down by an almost unbearable heaviness until one day, for reasons that remain unfathomable to him, he begins to float. Literally. He doesn't soar; he simply floats a few feet above the ground, trapped in some weird limbo between the material world and the heavens. This is where the mystery begins. It's not certain where, if ever, it ends.  

The Yosts' glory is irrevocably intertwined with its shame and fall. The characters are stuck in an endless loop where they're doomed to forever repeat the mistakes of the past, which makes a victim of nearly every one of the show's characters. Physically and emotionally, Shaun is unfinished and unformed, a sun-baked innocent with a dead-eyed stare and an affectless monotone, yet he's still oppressed by his family's legacy of failure and ruin. History repeats itself as both comedy and tragedy.

Mitch and Butchie deal with their personal downfalls in antithetical ways. Mitch leads an ascetic existence. He denies the world the pleasure of watching him surf and himself the rewards that would come with letting others share his gift. Butchie, in sharp contrast, denies himself nothing; after years, even decades of moral rot and physical and emotional decay, he's become a grubby creature of habit and need, a junkie whose life begins and ends with scoring that next fix. Milch was an obscenely high-functioning heroin addict for three decades, even as he soared to the top of his profession, so John From Cincinnati's portrayal of the pathological neediness of addiction has a lived-in sense of authenticity.

Butchie wants only to get high, but the fates have other plans for him and the desperate souls around him. Butchie isn't able to score at all throughout John From Cincinnati—the best he can manage is what Milch refers to as a "beat bag," a bogus package of smack—yet he never gets dope-sick either, because he is under the care and protection, after a fashion, of the title character and other beautiful blank (Nichols), a tall, handsome enigma with the leanly stylized look and pompadour of a '50s greaser.

--see next:

[Sven2]

--continued

John's surname is Monad, in what Milch described in a talk at his alma mater Yale—where he was both a student and a teacher who collaborated with writer/mentor Robert Penn Warren, whose ideas and aesthetic would go on to have an enormous influence on Milch, and John From Cincinnati—as an homage to 17th-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz's idea of "monads." I am not nearly smart enough to understand Leibniz's conception of "monads," but it seems to refer to an incredibly loose metaphysical conceit involving God and the oneness of everything in the universe.

On the surface, John Monad appears autistic. He seems incapable of making connections and associations on his own. Instead, he engages extensively in echolalia, the ritualistic repetition of words and phrases. In that respect he's less a window than a mirror that constantly reflects the other characters' words, thoughts, and ideas back to them in ways that inspire both anger—to the unenlightened, John's repetition can come off as mocking and bratty—and soulful introspection. Monad doesn't just possess an unusually strong link to the divine; he is divine, a slick surfing Asperger-y Christ figure seemingly sent to earth by his "father" to reconnect the Yost family to their lost spiritual core. John has no past, no connections, no family beyond his heavenly "father." He consequently is the only character able to live in the moment and not in a tragic past.

John arrives in the Yosts' hometown of Imperial Beach, California, and suddenly their grubby, low-rent lives are inundated with unexplained phenomena. Shaun breaks his neck surfing, then is miraculously cured soon after, much to the bewilderment of Dr. Michael Smith (Garret Dillahunt), the neurologist who treats him after his accident. Mitch begins floating periodically. Characters begin having mystical visions and vivid hallucinations.

John From Cincinnati simultaneously occupies two realms: the spiritual and the physical. In the spiritual realm, grace and transcendence are becoming glorious possibilities as John cryptically points the way toward peace and consciousness beyond our rational understanding. In the physical realm, meanwhile, Luke Perry's cold-blooded surf-gear magnate Linc Stark is looking for a way to monetize both Shaun's gift and the mysterious circumstances surrounding his resurrection. To that end, Linc has a filmmaker named Cass (Emily Rose) seduce Mitch in an attempt to get Shaun to sign with his company, and lures Shaun's mother Tina Blake (Chandra West), a pornographic actress and prostitute, back into Shaun and Butchie's life to nefarious ends.

Ah, but the women in John From Cincinnati aren't all prostitutes, porn stars, and cynical opportunists willing to use sex to further their careers. There's also what is referred to more than once, and with ample justification, as the worst ball-buster in universe: Shaun's mother Cissy (Rebecca De Mornay). While high on LSD decades earlier, Cissy stumbled onto a young masturbating Butchie, fresh off his latest surfing triumph, and finished him off with a handjob. She has consequently never stopped punishing herself or the universe for her transgression by becoming the most insufferable shrew in existence. De Mornay seems afflicted with a terrible case of the Botox shouts: She can't use her frozen facial muscles to express emotion anymore (Cissy's emotions run the gamut from anger to rage to blinding fury), so she uses deafening volume and frantic mugging to overcompensate. She's Imperial Beach's low-rent answer to Lady Macbeth, and the only character here engaged enough in the world to be angry all the time. (On his wonderful commentary track, Milch says, "I tried to cast as many people who are very identifiable from a single role as a way of mobilizing viewers' sense of the possible arbitrariness of how we remember things. Oh Rebecca De Mornay. She gave Tom Cruise a handjob or whatever it was. They also starred together in Risky Business!" That might seem disrespectful, but he does later compliment De Mornay for having a great ass, so he's not all rough edges and leering sexism.

There are a lot of parasites in John, primarily Linc, who is all naked guile and scheming calculation in a frustratingly one-note role and performance. Even more perplexingly, Mark Paul-Gosselaar shows up much later in the series—Milch wasn't kidding about wanting to cast actors known only for one role—as Linc's business partner and delivers more or less the exact same one-note, glowering performance as Perry. They're even costumed to look nearly identical. 

The Yosts' talent and legacy invites avaricious attention of parasites, but it also invites the protectiveness of Ed O'Neill's Bill Jacks, a retired police officer who has adopted the Yosts as a surrogate family and spends much of his time conducting elaborate, animated, and understandably one-sided conversations with a collection of birds that may or may not have magical powers. Luis Guzman also costars as Ramon, a worker at a fleabag motel that has been purchased by eccentric, gay lottery-winner Barry Cunningham (Matt Winston, in a performance that seeks to transcend the retrograde stereotype of the tragic, melodramatic queen by embodying it to a grotesque degree) with the intention of tearing it down because it was the site of his worst adolescent traumas. Like so many of the show's characters, Barry is doomed to shadowbox a past that's more real and tangible to him than anything in his present life. Barry wants to tear the motel down, but surfing lawyer Meyer Dickstein (Willie Garson), who arranged the sale, keeps it intact almost exclusively so that it can provide a home to Butchie, whom Dickstein idolizes and Barry despises for abusing him when they were children. In playing a man who hopes against all hope that all the random weirdness and freaky occurrences will eventually lead to a big payoff, monetarily and otherwise, Guzman comes perilously close to serving as an audience surrogate. I'm not sure that's something John ultimately wants or needs. John From Cincinnati angrily defies edification. It wants us to get lost and find our own way out.

Nowhere is this more apparent than during an epic monologue in the sixth episode where John Monad issues a series of cryptic proclamations that, in keeping with the show's modest scope and humble aspirations, connect the characters and the seminal moments where they each went awry with the evolution of mankind and the cultivation of civilization through the millennia.

By this point in my John From Cincinnati journey (it really is a spiritual journey more than a television show), I was exhilaratingly lost. I had stopped trying to understand or figure out the show and given myself over to it completely. That's ultimately what John From Cincinnati is about: forsaking the rational in favor of the unknowable. John From Cincinnati at times feels more like a waking dream or a visual poem than a conventional TV series. It's a weirdly alive series of powerful contradictions, a sordid melodrama about life's most profound questions. It's less a show divided against itself than a program that embodies its central split between the mind and the body, the spirit and the ego. It's about abandoning the search for answers and giving in to the divine and unknowable.

To the surprise of no one, John From Cincinnati was cancelled after only one season, though as he reveals on the audio commentary, Milch was thoughtful enough to have John Monad rattle off what would have happened in a second season, had the show miraculously renewed. (Spoiler: A bunch of freaky-ass shit would have happened that would have had people all, "Say what?!!!") John crashed and burned, Butchie Yost-style, but Milch has proven extraordinarily resilient. In 2011, HBO signed a deal with Milch to produce a series of William Faulkner adaptations. The same year, HBO picked up Luck, a Dustin Hoffman-starring drama centered on the world of horse-racing that's one of the year's most eagerly anticipated dramas.

John From Cincinnati is a ferociously imperfect show, a strange, unwieldy combination of pulp fiction and cracked spirituality. Yet it's gloriously unlike anything that had become before, in television or elsewhere. In the words of A Serious Man (and my colleague Scott Tobias' fine essay about the superlative last year in film), it invites us to "accept the mystery" of existence while stressing the interconnectedness of all things. Enjoying John From Cincinnati requires a massive leap of faith, a high tolerance for quirkiness and self-indulgence, and an awful lot patience, but its rewards and cockeyed charms are as substantive as they are beguilingly ethereal.

from:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/wildly-enigmatic-case-file-7-john-from-cincinnati,67835/

[Sven2]

Interview with David Milch tonight, at 12.30 e.t. on Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson on CBS.

[Sven2]

TWEETS about David Milch (retweeted by Matt Zeitz, a TV critic:

"The second time you used a David Milch GPS, it would make so much more sense".

"A David Milch-scripted GPS service would be abstractedly beautiful. And get me lost every time."

"A David Milch GPS would also complain about the arch speech patterns used by other GPS units (also written by Milch)".

I find it beautifully funny as truth often is.

[Cissy]

I know we're doing 'Luck' here, and glad we are, but I have to post here, right here! I saw Brian V. Holt, Butchie, now Bobbie surfing tonight, in the same ocean, and he's looking so good on that board!!
I watch the tv show Cougartown because he is in it, and he plays towards Butchies good parts, tonight, they had him teaching another member of that cast how to surf. At the end? Everyone was out there in a wetsuit on a board.
It was, suh weet!!

[Cissy]

Gee, it'd be nice if I remembered to share where to see BVH surfing again!
It's abc.go.com/shows/cougar-town
He surfs just a little maybe 10 or less minutes into the 24 minutes, but at
the end, you could believe, for a little bit, you were watching Butchie, healthy
on the waves again. In IB.
sniff