This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she’s laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.

(Yes, I made this. Go here for more stuff like it.)

From Flesh Gordon to The Sperminator, spoofs of mainstream cultural offerings have long been a staple of the porn industry. Shakespeare porn in particular is surprisingly common, as I found in 2001 when writing an article for Lingua Franca, “The Pound of Flesh.” But here’s something I hadn’t actually seen before: Kubrick porn. In The Sexxxing, a 2005 quickie from Danni.com, a young woman named Miss Torrent applies to be the winter manager of a porn company’s offices—and the place turns out to be haunted by horny, fake-breasted lesbians. Orgasms ensue.

The two clips in the video below are pretty tame, because I edited them that way. But be careful if you’re at work, because there’s a bare breast or two and a few seconds of moaning. The opening titles, in Futura Extra Bold, Kubrick’s favorite typeface, are mine. As is often the case with porn spoofs, this one is an adaptation only in the loosest sense (double entendre alert!), and it was probably filmed in a single afternoon.

There have been several other porn films inspired by Kubrick’s oeuvre, including Spermacus, 2002: A Sex Odyssey, Thighs Wide Shut, and A Clockwork Orgy. I found copies of the last two, but I won’t be posting clips, as they appear to be pretty hardcore all the way through. You’re in luck, though, because I just found the work-safe trailer for A Clockwork Orgy on YouTube. This was made in 1995:

The website Adult DVD Empire has a page for The Sexxxing that isn’t quite safe for work.

And this fake Shining trailer from 2005 is still the funniest thing ever.

Mad Men is a terrific show for lots of reasons, and it’s rightly been praised for its obsessive re-creation of the fashions, values, and emotional landscape of the early 1960s, a transitional period between the dull, ordered Eisenhower years and the cultural chaos that would soon follow. Part of the fun of watching Mad Men is knowing that we’re watching the tail end of an era—and knowing that few of the characters have any idea what’s about to happen. The show occasionally hints at the deepening cracks in the American order of things, and I’m convinced this will be a bigger and bigger aspect of Mad Men in the episodes and seasons to come.

The show’s fixation on the seemingly superficial details of a bygone era could have overwhelmed a series with second-rate writing or a weak cast. In the hands of less talented people, it might have been nothing more than That Show With the Amazing Production Design. Instead, everything is of a piece: The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.

Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers—okay, just the font freaks—will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica. The main giveaways are the “R”s and the “G”s:

Thanks mainly to Microsoft, which has bundled Arial with every version of Windows since version 3.1, this “shameless impostor” has become one of the most widely used fonts in the world, if not the most widely used. No respectable designer would ever choose to use Arial, except in small sizes on the web, where its ubiquity must be catered to. The use of Arial indicates that Mad Men’s designers, so fussy about everything else, don’t consider the closing credits to be worthy of their oversight. (You’ll also notice that the single and double quotes in the screenshot above are straight, not curly—another indication that the design staff is not involved. And jeez, I just noticed that the “r” in “Dr. Oliver” is inadvertently non-italic.)

Of course this raises a conceptual issue: Do a show’s closing credits take place outside the world of the show? If so—and it ain’t hard to make that argument—then who cares if the credits are set in a shitty font? Well, then, why are opening credits usually so carefully art directed? They usually don’t exist within the world of the show either. It’s partly because an effective opening credits sequence helps set a tone and a style. So why not sustain the tone and the style all the way to the end of the closing credits?

No one would argue that Mad Men’s producers should spend as much time or money on the closing credits as they did on the opening credits. And it’s not like they necessarily had to choose a font that existed by 1962. (The font in the opening credits looks like Trade Gothic Condensed or a similar classic gothic, but it may well be a modern cut.) My point is, it wouldn’t be hard to choose Helvetica or Futura or even EF Windsor Light Condensed from the drop-down font list in whatever program is used to create the closing credits.

This is obviously a small detail. But Mad Men is a show that matches small details as well as any series that’s ever been on the air. Why does such a pitch-perfect show end with such a jarring anachronism?

Related articles: “The Scourge of Arial” and “How to Spot Arial.”

There’s no current hook for this post about a little-known Hollywood scandal. It’s just something I’ve been meaning to post about for a couple of years. The bare details have been mentioned online, but only in passing, and as far as I know the scandal has never been officially reported anywhere.

So here it is: Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese’s excellent 1985 film After Hours—a significant portion of the movie’s first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from “Lies,” a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who’s gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It’s possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film’s release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I’ve found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.”

The Wikipedia page for the screenwriter of After Hours, Joseph Minion, mentions that the film included some “minor details” borrowed from Joe Frank, and that Frank successfully sued over it. But the theft was far from minor. Many of the details in the film’s first half hour are similar, if not copied outright: the chance meeting of a man and a kooky but sexy woman; the woman’s offer to set the man up with some of her artist roommate’s plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights; the man’s late-night phone call to the woman; his cab ride to meet her, at the end of which his only cash flies out the window; her wearing of a loosely tied bathrobe when she answers the door; her tale of having been raped by man who came down the fire escape; and so forth.

Here’s the entire monologue so you can judge for yourself. It’s 11 minutes long. If you’ve seen the film, much of this will sound very familiar indeed:

(If you don’t see the Flash audio player, here’s a direct link to the audio file.)

Joseph Minion apparently created the script in his mid-twenties as part of his work at Columbia’s Graduate Film Program. It was later optioned by Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, who showed it to Scorsese. Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise.

There’s also a weird twist: The cabbie who drives Griffin Dunne downtown is played by an actor named Larry Block, and he’s apparently the same Larry Block who appeared on many of Joe Frank’s shows for KCRW in the 1990s. Was the plagiarism discovered during the making of the film, and the role given to Frank’s friend Block as part of the lawsuit negotiations? Whatever the reason, it’s hard to believe Block’s casting was just a coincidence.

If you have any insight into any of this, post away in the comments…

Okay, I am a TOTAL FREAK for having noticed this weird typographic pattern on 24. You have been warned. My discovery of this bizarre typographic anomaly took place in a few steps over the course of several episodes, so bear with me as I explain.

I loved the first season of 24, but I gave up on the show after the second season, because the pulled-out-of-thin-air plot twists, the hammy acting, and the fluid-as-water loyalties of the characters became increasingly maddening. “This show is ridiculous,” I eventually said to myself, perhaps when drunk, because I don’t usually talk to myself. “I refuse to watch it anymore.” But thanks to recommendations from a few enthusiastic friends, I returned to the show late in the fourth season, and now I’m totally hooked again. The fifth season has been fantastically entertaining. The producers have worked out most of the kinks in the format and now know exactly what they’re doing. The show is still ridiculous sometimes, but that’s part of the fun.

A few months ago I began to notice something unusual about the 24 clock—the timer that appears onscreen at regular intervals throughout each episode. It’s modeled on a standard LED clock, the kind you’ll see on the radio next to your bed or the microwave in your kitchen or inside a ticking rogue nuclear weapon once you’ve pulled off the face plate. You know—the standard workaday places. On a typical such clock, each number is rendered within a matrix of two vertical bars on either side and three horizontal bars in the middle. At first glance, the 24 clock appears to be based around exactly that sort of matrix. Here’s a screenshot from last Monday’s episode:

A couple of months ago, I noticed that the 24 clock renders the numeral 1 with a short serif at the top. Here’s another screenshot from last Monday’s episode, with the serif circled:

That serif is a needless typographic flourish. A normal clock wouldn’t have a serif there, and in fact it’s totally illogical for the 24 clock to have one: None of the other numerals show evidence that the LEDs on top are split in half and can render a serif. The LED bars along the top are always solid when used in the other numerals, and the light that illuminates the top bars in the other numerals is consistent and unbroken.

So I noticed this and it amused me, but I didn’t think much of it, because why should the 24 clock have to be logical and believable? Every episode of the show contains a lot of stuff that’s illogical and unbelievable. This typographic inconsistency is no more ridiculous than, say, Jack Bauer sneaking onto a diplomatic flight, hijacking the plane in midair, finding the evidence that implicates the president, forcing the bad-guy copilot to land the plane on a Los Angeles freeway, and then eluding the president’s military goons once the plane comes to a halt on the makeshift runway. To mention just one recent half-hour sequence.

[Continue reading "There Is Something Weird Going on With the Clock on 24"...]

In 1990, a year or two before he became super-famous, Rush Limbaugh guest-hosted Pat Sajak’s short-lived talk show. It didn’t go so well: The taping was disrupted by a group of angry activists who were seated throughout the audience. A visibly rattled Limbaugh was unable to regain control of the show. “He came out full of bluster and left a very shaken man,” a CBS executive later said. “I had never seen a man sweat as much in my life.” Eventually Limbaugh made it to the first commercial break, and then, barely, to the next one; when the show returned from the second break, the activists were gone—along with the rest of the audience. A demoralized Limbaugh then delivered self-serving closing remarks to an empty studio.

This is from one of my Media Shower tapes (hence the phone number and other graphics that are occasionally superimposed over the video). Yesterday I figured out how to embed a YouTube video on a web page, which will allow me to put up stuff like this without worrying about bandwidth. You’ll need the Flash plugin. The clip is about 11 minutes long, and it’s fricking awesome.

Yesterday Gawker expressed bafflement regarding Russ Smith’s assertion in The New York Press that Gawker Media has been sold to The New York Times Company for $32 million. “As this is utterly ridiculous and unequivocally not true,” Gawker wrote, “we imagine Smith intended the piece as some sort of quasi-parody.”

But Smith, as unhinged as he most certainly is, may be onto something. A well-placed source inside the Times sent me a screenshot of an in-house mockup of Gawker redesigned to conform to the look, feel, and editorial tone of the Times Company’s flagship website. It’s not a pretty thing: Something is definitely lost when the snarkiness of Gawker is filtered through the bland, establishment-friendly tone of the Times. Let’s hope this deal doesn’t actually go through—it would mean the end of Gawker as we know it. Click on the logotype below to see the rest of this top-secret design.

Added this weekend: a Best Of archive that brings together about 30 of my favorite Panopticist posts from the past ten months. You really can’t afford to miss this thrilling new category archive.

This exciting compilation contains many recent smash hits—“Judy Miller Finally Goes Off the Deep End” and “The iPod Harper’s Special Edition,” among others—as well as some early classics you might have missed:

• “Seven-Year-Olds Can’t Write Upside Down,” in which I trace my artistic development all the way back to my favorite childhood dinner plate;
• “The Only Interesting Thing About Paris Hilton,” in which I share a not-widely-known nugget of trivia about the overexposed, undereducated heiress;
• “Bill Laimbeer Was a Sleestak,” in which I reveal that Bill Laimbeer was, in fact, a Sleestak;
• “Microsoft Caught in Sinister Copyediting Conspiracy!,” in which I expose Bill Gates’s ongoing efforts to crush longstanding English formatting rules; and
• “Entry Points,” my first-ever post, in which I explain the origins of this site’s name, among other things.

Regarding the album whose cover is parodied above, don’t pretend like you didn’t dance around drunk to it at least once in high school or college. Or maybe during a candy-induced sugar high in elementary school. I know your secrets, people.

I had no idea how bad things had gotten for Judith Miller until I saw the Ethicist column in this past Sunday’s Times Magazine. When is the Times finally going to rein in this crazy woman?

(Here’s a link to this week’s Ethicist column.)

At a joint press conference yesterday at 666 Broadway, Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs and Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham announced a historic collaboration between their two companies: the iPod Harper’s Special Edition.

“This merging of two iconic designs is exactly the sort of innovation that has made Steve Jobs the most dynamic businessman of his generation,” said Lapham. “From the tasteful use of the Goudy Old Style typeface to the reproduction of my signature on the back, this gadget perfectly captures the essence of the Harper’s brand—and the sound quality is nothing short of Brahms-worthy. I am thrilled to lend the magazine’s name to this ingenious device.”

“The iPod Harper’s Special Edition is a perfect combination of form, function, literary merit, and antiplutocratic politics,” said Jobs. “The massive hard drive and crisp full-color screen are ideal for storing and displaying photographs, and each unit comes preloaded with high-resolution photos of every writer whose work has appeared in the magazine during Lewis’s long tenure: Thomas Frank, Barbara Ehrenreich, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen—even Christopher Hitchens, though you can easily delete that one if you want to.”

“Total storage space on the iPod Harper’s Special Edition, in gigabytes: 60,” said Lapham. “Amount each one will cost: $399.”

“Number of media legends who came together to create this exciting new Apple product: 2,” said Jobs. “Chance that literary-minded American consumers will find this new iPod impossible to resist: 1 in 1.”