With Verizon offering a pseudo a la carte TV model, is cable as we know it becoming a thing of the past?; L.A. Opera's production of "Hercules vs. Vampires" (pictured) blends a campy sword-and-sandal film with high art; Kyle Kinane admits the absurdity of his job as a stand-up comic.
Comedian Kyle Kinane's mom is his biggest fan and that's not always a good thing
Kyle Kinane has had a wild life, which has served as grist for his widely acclaimed comedy. He's got a new album, "I Liked His Old Stuff Better," which is being released on vinyl for Record Store Day.
Kinane used to play with punk band the Grand Marquis. The band was named after the Mercury Grand Marquis car, though the band's spelling and pronunciation remained under debate, Kinane said. One such argument:
"Apostrophes aren't punk rock, man! You can't put an apostrophe on it!"
The comedian said he's always lived by the band's motto: "It's not talent, but it's at least entertainment." He eventually decided that music wasn't the way to go:
"Looking down at a guitar and realizing, no matter how hard you try, you're not going to be Eddie Van Halen. [But], you know how people laugh in between songs? What if we focus on that small segment of the live performance?"
When Kinane was a kid, his biggest inspirations were Johnny Carson and "The Kids In The Hall." He told his kindergarten teacher that Carson was his favorite thing on TV, and he managed to get his mom in trouble for letting him stay up so late. Kinane says he loved being able to stay up and see people getting together and have a good time on TV.
When it came to watching "The Kids In The Hall," Kinane says he loved the strangeness: "Who are these weirdos? Is this just what Canada is?"
That strangeness also applied to the first standup comic he connected with — Mitch Hedberg. When Kinane saw him, he thought, "He doesn't belong here. He's not talking about a wife and kids. Because I don't have a wife, I don't have kids, I can relate to this guy just being a weirdo and an outsider, and staring at the floor the whole time."
Kinane credits seeing Hedberg with helping him see that he could do stand-up.
Kinane's new album, "I Liked His Old Stuff Better," was inspired by not trying to get locked into one thing.
"Just because being cynical got me some laughs, and it was kind of funny to complain about stuff, at what point do you give up that? That's like a teenage attitude," he said.
"I'm 38. No, I'm short-changing myself on life experiences. Instead of thinking this is going to suck, why not go in [thinking], Maybe this is going to be great, and let's let the experience prove me wrong — as opposed to denying myself joy, right off the bat."
Kinane says that being able to make money by doing comedy makes him feel guilty — he said he'd feel less guilt if he'd just decided to rob banks.
"I've joked before, it's not a skill, it's a personality trait I'm trying to capitalize on. That's all it is," Kinane said.
And, it's worked for him. He's also made his parents very proud, though he gets a little uncomfortable knowing that his mom Googles him every morning.
"It's the juxtaposition of having supportive parents, but then they're supporting you doing something you really wish they never heard about," Kinane said.
For all the success he's had so far, Kinane said he remains deeply grateful.
"I still wake up [thinking], You're allowed to do this. At some point, the universe may be like, You're done, go get a real job. And I just go, Hey, thanks, that was a great time, I appreciate being allowed to do that for a time."
Watch Kinane on his childhood favorite "The Tonight Show" from earlier this year:
Kyle Kinane on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon
Kinane also happens to be the voice of Comedy Central:
Kinane as the voice of Comedy Central
Kinane on Comedy Central:
Verizon gets closer to 'unbundling' with new customizable pay-TV service
You didn’t used to have a lot of choice when it came to your cable or satellite TV subscription. You either paid for a ton of channels you didn’t ever watch, or you put some rabbit ears on the top of your set.
These days, there’s something called cord-cutting — rather than paying a fortune for channels like ESPN Classic College Water Polo, you can order off an a la carte menu. Dish Network now has a $20-a-month service that includes about 20 channels, and you can use Internet streaming services like Netflix, Hulu or HBO Now to tailor your channel lineup.
Now, another major media company says it’s going to give customers even more options. Starting this Sunday, Verizon will offer a stripped down, or “skinny” version of its TV packages, called FiOS Custom TV. Customers start with the basics for $55 — which includes AMC and CNN — and then have the option to add packages for $10 each.
The Frame host John Horn caught up with Wall Street Journal reporter Shalini Ramachandran to get a better sense of what Verizon’s latest move means.
Interview Highlights
What is Verizon offering with this new skinny option for bundling?
“They basically want to give customers a way to customize their TV bundle. So [they] just have a base package and on top of that, you add whatever channel packages you want. Now this might sound familiar but what they do is they put into tiers all these popular channels that could be expensive... So they kind of give you a way to customize your package.
A recent Nielsen study said that most cable households receive 189 channels but typically watch just 17. So that’s kind of part of what Verizon is reacting to right?
“They found that... maybe people people will feel that they’re getting more value for the money they’re paying if they get to actually customize which packages they’re receiving.
How does what Verizon is doing right now fit into what HBO is doing with HBO Now, what Netflix and Hulu are doing?
“They’re definitely chasing. I think all the pay-TV providers are trying to adapt to the fact that all these premium channels like HBO, Starz, Showtime, they’re all looking at ways to sell their channels directly to customers. And what that means is customers will have the option, if they really only watch just HBO and nothing else, they can get that for $15 now and don’t have to buy that $90 bundle.”
Verizon, or any company that’s trying to unbundle, has to have some pretty difficult negotiations with the content providers themselves. What are they offering and are the content providers willing to play ball?
“The content providers now have been seeing cord-cutting accelerate... They’ve seen 'cord shaving,' where people are downgrading to skinnier bundles of channels. So you’ve seen big channels like ESPN and TNT lose something like 3, 4, 5 million customers, according to Nielsen, over the last few years. So all the content companies see this as a real threat, and they want to be in those skinny bundle packages.”
Does all of this give consumers more negotiating power?
“Definitely. I think consumers probably have more choices now than they ever have before. Sorting through all of it could be a hassle... But if you’re OK with catch-up TV and HBO, I think you could easily cut your cable bill in half today, and it’s something that probably couldn’t have been done a couple years ago.”
'Hercules vs. Vampires' brings campy, cult cinema to the LA Opera stage
The 1961 film “Hercules In The Haunted World” would be a perfect choice for the show "Mystery Science Theater 3000."
Yet “Hercules in the Haunted World” has a lot of serious fans. Many think the movie’s Italian director, Mario Bava, was a hugely influential filmmaker — and his “Hercules” movie was incredibly ambitious for its time, in terms of its look, special effects and underworld plot.
Rather than hold it up for ridicule, composer Patrick Morganelli used “Hercules in the Haunted World” as the basis for an opera called “Hercules vs. Vampires." The production was originally commissioned in Portland, Oregon back in 2010, but its now headed to the L.A. Opera April 23-26.
Audiences will see the movie projected on stage, but instead of the dubbed dialogue and original score, they will hear Morganelli’s score and English-language libretto performed by a live orchestra and opera singers.
Morganelli stopped by The Frame to talk about why Mario Bava is important, the difficulty of adapting the film for the stage and why he rewrote part of the score specifically for the L.A. performance.
Interview Highlights:
What makes director Mario Bava so influential?
One of the amazing things about Mario Bava was that because he was originally a cinematographer, he had an amazing sense of how to light a scene, how to frame it...when he stepped up to become a director he was really able to bring this visual sense to it. Specifically what we see in this particular film is he shot it in anamorphic widescreen, which of course looks spectacular for a low-budget film like that. The color composition of it, and in particular roughly a third of the film takes place in Hades. The scenes in Hades are beyond belief.
On staying true to the original story:
I stuck as close as I could to the story of the film. I didn't want to start doing things that were going to not really make sense with the picture. The difficulty there is that in taking film dialogue and creating an operatic libretto out of it, you have not only artistic issues of how do you condense everything into fewer words, but artistically they have to be words that are singable when you put all that together and then try and match that up with the actual mouth movements of the screen — it was technically quite difficult.
On what will be different between the L.A. performance and the original in Portland, Oregon:
First of all, I have a larger orchestra here, and I wanted to take advantage of that. The production in Portland really was very well done, but I didn't know any of the people — in particular I didn't know anyone in the orchestra, so I was really very conservative with the score. When I realized that L.A. Opera was going to do this, I did a major revision to the score where I revised all of the orchestration to take advantage of the orchestra that we have down here and the amount of rehearsal time that we were going to have down here. There is roughly 10 minutes of the score that I completely replaced, because I was not that happy with it, up in Portland, with the composition itself. I thought this is a good time for me to take another stab at trying to get it right
"Hercules vs. Vampires" runs at the L.A. Opera April 23-April 26.