I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.
Literature – and in particular science fiction – has a long tradition of imagining what life would be like if everyone in the world was dead except for one person. Indeed, the very first English-language novel, Robinson Crusoe, is largely about one man’s exploits alone on a desert island. And since then, there’s been the likes of Castaway, Life After People, 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, The Omega Man, Silent Running and even Red Dwarf.
A common theme ever since Crusoe has been that finally having no distractions and the chance to do whatever one wants by oneself is unbearable. And almost always the author gives in and provides the hero someone else with whom he can interact – because the story’s also pretty dull otherwise. Crusoe had his Man Friday, Silent Running had its little robots, Red Dwarf had its Rimmer and so on.
So in a sense, the similarly themed The Last Man on Earth is nothing new, despite being both a sitcom and having the unlikely home of Fox. The show sees Saturday Night Live’s Will Forte seemingly the only man alive in the whole of North America, if not the world, following the outbreak of a terrible virus (that apparently destroys human bodies right down to the skeletons, leaving no ugly dead bodies behind anywhere…). For over a year, he’s by himself doing whatever he wants, appropriating whatever he needs from wherever he visits, but apparently happy to settle down in a McMansion in his home town of Tucson, Arizona.
Gradually, he begins to realise there’s no point to life without other people and prays to God that He send someone, anyone, to end his loneliness – preferably female, though. God fails to answer, so Forte tries to kill himself. Except at the last moment, it turns out his prayers have been answered and there is one woman alive in the world still, and she’s found Forte.
Unfortunately, she’s Kristen Schaal. And just as Burgess Meredith discovered in Time Enough At Last, you should be careful what you wish for.
The Vaughn has another terrible-looking movie out this week called Unfinished Business, in which a bunch of American businessmen + Nick Frost + Tom Wilkinson head off to Germany to arrange a deal but things end up getting a bit raucous. Because, you know, Germany. Or something.
It looks dreadful, it’s likely to be forgotten within about two weeks and if I were Germany, I’d probably want to sue the filmmakers for defamation. Or something.
However, there is one good thing coming out of this whole sorry (unfinished) business and that’s the fact that the cast have created some publicity photos in the style of the tedious stock photography that gets included in business magazines and presentations…
…and then made them available royalty-free through genuine top photo library iStock.
I work on a lot of magazines that use iStock. I wonder if I should warn them, because depending on how seamless this whole thing is and how long the images remain in the library, it’s entirely possible that not too long from now, a business magazine somewhere is going to end up using these images unironically. And then the legacy of Unfinished Business will linger for far longer than it should have done. Maybe that’s the only good thing about it.
First, an introduction for younger readers. This is the group of actor/singers known as the Rat Pack. They were big in the 60s. You weren’t alive then. Neither was I.
I don’t quite know why I’m mentioning them since they’re irrelevant to this piece. However, this is the far more relevant Brat Pack. They were big in the 80s. You might have been alive then. I definitely was.
To be exact, that’s not quite the Brat Pack, so much as the cast of St Elmo’s Fire, most of whom were in the Brat Pack – look closely and you’ll spot Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Ally Sheedy and Demi Moore (as well as the lesser known Judd Nelson and even lesser known Mare Winningham).
However, the Brat Pack was made up of a group of young actors and actresses who dated each other and/or frequently appeared together in movies (eg The Breakfast Club, Oxford Blues, Sixteen Candles) and their numbers also included the likes of Kiefer Sutherland, Robert Downey Jr, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall and James Spader.
One of the most notable and iconic Brat Pack movies was Pretty In Pink, which starred Ringwald, McCarthy and Spader, as well as Jon Cryer who would go on to star in Two And A Half Men with the somewhat infamous Brat Pack member Charlie Sheen. Here’s a trailer to explain the basic plot, which involves Ringwald picking the right boy – and the right dress – for her prom: should it be good guy Andrew McCarthy, bad guy James Spader or unnoticed best friend Cryer?
Here are Spader and McCarthy being interviewed about the movie at the time. My, how young they look, don’t they?
But as we’ve seen, careers can go in odd directions. I really don’t need to tell you what Robert Downey Jr has been up to since, while Rob Lowe – who was the baddest of the bad in the Brat Pack – has also gone on to numerous decent roles in things like The West Wing and Parks and Recreation, and Kiefer Sutherland became the TV star of the 2000s as Jack Bauer in 24 and Demi Moore became an action movie star. Others have branched off into different parts of the industry – Emilio Estevez won a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival for his biopic of Robert Kennedy, Bobby, which he wrote and directed.
Spader, by contrast, has gone through a slow process of ‘Shatnerisation’, slowly going from the acclaimed movie performances of Sex, Lies and Videotape and Crash down into a hammy TV hell of his own making, perhaps in part caused by his proximity to the Shat himself in Boston Legal.
Meanwhile, Andrew McCarthy after sticking around in acting doing the serious likes of John Frankenheimer’s Year of the Gun with Sharon Stone…
…ended up mainly behind the camera, the difference being that he’s stuck to directing TV, on shows such as Gossip Girl, Alpha House, Orange is the New Black, The Carrie Diaries, and Lipstick Jungle.
Oh, and The Blacklist, which stars James Spader, and for which McCarthy has directed three episodes this season.
“They’re both great artists who have had such a wonderful working relationship in the past, it just seemed like too good of an opportunity to pass up,” series executive producers Jon Bokenkamp and John Eisendrath said [via].
Look, here they are together behind the scenes. My, don’t they look not quite so young? But then, don’t we all?
