Yay, more of one of the proudest Batiuk traditions. Being a passive-aggressive jackass about something without speaking your mind or doing anything to improve your situation.
Is Alan Silver even an actual executive, or just some guy with an office? For all I know he’s Mason’s insurance agent. He sure doesn’t seem to have any Hollywood wisdom, since I’m pretty sure people always like watching chemistry between actors, especially in a romance. I’m pretty sure it’s the one essential for a romance movie.
It’s also helpful of Alan to explain exactly who Marianne Winters is, for those people in the room who don’t already know. Oh wait.
by spacemanspiff85 | May 8, 2020 · 10:30 pm
You’re Right Les, Lisa Sucked
Link To Today’s Strip
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Tagged as Alan Silver, cancer films, Les, Lisa's Story, listen to you, Mason, ray guns, rehashes
Son of Stuck Funky 
Good ol’ Myopic Tom, milking the living hell out of that premise, a rehashed premise, no less. Leave it to BatHack to not only not improve on a recycled story but to actually make it even dumber and more boring, which shouldn’t even be possible. “Lisa’s Story” is the greatest story ever told, Hollywood is all about the money…he just can’t help but wear that bitterness on his writin’ sleeve at all times. I wonder if he even realizes how whiny his demented Les fantasies make him seem? I’m guessing no. I’d have been seriously embarrassed to have written something this bad, but obviously he has no such qualms. And once again his lack of respect for his readers is right there for everyone to see. What a dick.
“Mason, the trouble is that your chemistry with Marianne Winters is like mixing salt and peter!”
If I remember my high school chemistry classes correctly, it’s more like adding water to acid.
And much closer to watered-down water.
The dialogue in this episode reads like someone is having a stroke. It’s like he’s trying to get a week’s worth of quips in one strip.
it’s not going to play in Beijing and it’s not a film that anyone wants to see, then why the fuck is anyone even talking about casting it?
Wait, you mean you don’t have executives wait to tell you there’s no possible way your idea would work until they’ve had a one-on-one meeting with you in their office? They have assistants who tell you that so their time isn’t wasted? What world are you living in?
One where the phrase “box office chemistry” actually exists?
“I like you, Les. I’ll kill you last.”
So Todd actually came up with the notion of Lisa nuking cancer with ray gun – twice – because it comforted her to feel as though she was fighting back – and then has his surrogate Less throw her under the bus? Because no one’s good enough to play the woman…that he just trashed for not surviving? What a pair of pricks.
Is it just me, or is the link to today’s strip missing? I had to pull up yesterdays and change the date to access it.
Fixed!
Has anyone bothered to ask Marianne Winters if she wants to play Lisa? Is there an assumption that she’ll be a good girl and perform for the boys, even if she’s already cast in a major role? Or hasn’t she been cast in anything other than Starsux movies, because Hollywood has her typecast as the old, humdrum tomboy-raised-by-aliens stereotype?
Marianne is waiting in Mason and Cindy’s closet until someone puts her batteries back in. Don’t worry.
Maybe Batty is using the “third time’s the charm” trope here. The first two efforts fail, leaving the embattled heroes to face defeat, but the third effort against the foe brings glorious success. So maybe next week Mason tells Les there’s one last studio in Hollywood that might tackle the Lisa project. It’s Nineteenth Century Fox, run by an elderly husband-and-wife who yearn for the glory days of Mary Pickford and Marie Dressler (who they knew personally). Land’s sake, Mr. Jarre, this Lisa story is just like what we made in the good old days! Real entertainment for down-home folks! Have some hot chocolate, Mr. Jarre, and Pa will toss your pet marmoset a cookie!
I like it. They’ll be in their mid-90s and it’ll turn out that journeyed to Hollywood on a tramp steamer, then were blackballed for their comic book leanings.
The fatal blow came when their brilliant screenwriter, Georgia Wrapper, died under mysterious circumstances at Butter Brinkle’s Hollywood mansion.
You were saying, Les?
You left too many details out in that first word balloon, Tom. Why not “And you want Marianne Winters, the supposed box office draw superstar who later was depicted as a naive ingenue who was driven to distraction by a single tabloid article about an alleged romance with you and was so crushed she considered jumping off the Hollywood sign, but got better and played your buxom sidekick and love interest Jupiter Moon in the Starbuck Jones movie you recently starred in, to play Lisa?”
Seriously, buddy, all you had to do say was “So, you want your Starbuck Jones co-star, Marianne Winters, to play Lisa?”. 12 words instead of 17, and it gets the important information across without hammering backstory over the reader’s head. It’s not rocket science…no pun intended.
Agh that week long climb to the top of the Hollywood sign. Such rich drama. It’s almost like that week long letter opening arc.
And here we are again reminding ourselves that the person who knew the least about Lisa was Les himself. That’s kind of why they took so blasted long to finally get married….well, that and the fact that she was kind of a flake.
Marianne Winters?? WHY?! I mean aside from the fact that Batuik is lazy and doesn’t want to invent another actress with a punny name…
Starsuck was her breakout role but her psyche is so fragile she contemplated suicide because someone on Twitter hurt her feelings… Oh, and don’t get me started on a Hollywood actress who is clearly older than 18 but still lives with her goddamn mother and HAS TO BUM A RIDE TO THE STUDIO EVERYDAY!
Isn’t the role of Lisa supposed to be played by someone who can carry some emotional weight? Don’t you have to get a name at least as big as Masone’s if not bigger?
Todd couldn’t decide if Marianne Winters was a hot seductive movie star or an insecure little girl who lived with her mommy and was ready to hurl herself to her death from the Hollywood sign after a Twitter accusation that she was a boyfriend-stealer.
She’s basically a one-dimensional Susan Smith clone, so naturally she’ll be falling in love with Less and then attempt to hurl herself to her death from atop his towering ego.
Interesting to me that we’re months into this mess and we still haven’t gotten the first opinion from a woman yet… I’ll say it — This movie is clearly a chick flick and if it’s going to be a success it’s because women flocked to see it, perhaps dragging their boyfriends to the theater as well…
It’s odd that for a solid month all the conversation about this project has been centered around the wrong things and not once has Les tried to steer this ship which means either he’s really passive or he doesn’t know his source material at all?!
In typical TomBa fashion, we’ve somehow jumped from the project’s undesirability to prospectively casting Lisa. The one consistent feature of this strip over the past couple of years has been its inability to maintain a coherent storyline. While he’s at it, maybe TomBa can free associate Cliff Anger and Vera into the production. Could there be a role for everybody’s favorite murder chimp?
You know, if Jupiter Moon married Starbuck Jones, she’d have the same first and last name as Mila Kunis’ character in Jupiter Ascending. If this were any less imaginative, it’d be clinically brain dead. I can’t wait to meet the other characters in this movie: Flash Rogers, Ender Atreides, Darth Zoidberg, and Doctor What.
Hey, remember last Sunday?
“Those Mixmaster guys are idiots!”
“I agree with them. “It’s not like Lisa turned into a cancer superhero.”
“Hee hee! That’s a great idea!”
“SHUT UP THATS NOT FUNNY HOW DARE YOU”
And today we get:
“Your movie sucks, Mason. What do you think Les?”
“Yeah, it sucks. And Lisa was never very good with a ray gun.”
So not only is Les siding against Mason for the second time, he’s making jokes for the second time that he ordered Mason not to make. And, he’s embarrassing Mason in front of the prospect.
Sunday’s strip should be an exterior shot of Mason’s garage-door house, with Les’ luggage being thrown out of it, and an angry word balloon telling him to fuck off back to Ohio.
He might as well throw that self-centered golddigger Cindy out while he’s at it…