Yeah yeah yeah. Even the nicest Hollywood movie stars are vapid phonies who exchange air kisses and “do lunch”. Point made…and made…and made…and made…and made yet again. At least Dick Facey finally approves of something, albeit in that annoying non-committal way of his. My God do I need a Les break, the guy just wears on you like a rock in your shoe. A smug bearded rock. There were five named characters in this arc and not one of them is even remotely likeable in any way whatsoever. Even Cassidy is getting on my nerves right now.
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Son of Stuck Funky · The web's premiere source for Funky Winkerbean snark
Son of Stuck Funky 
Tomorrow, Mason sneaks into the alley behind the studio, where the rejected “actresses” have lined up. He hands each a hundred dollars, and says “My personal assistant was right–you ladies all know how to blow it!”
1. I don’t know what the hell “Craig’s” is, but I’m pretty sure from the endless stories I’ve heard that absolutely *nothing* in Los Angeles traffic is “just” 20 minutes away… Nevermind the fact that when we last saw Marianne SHE DIDN’T EVEN OWN A FUCKING CAR(!)
2. Was she *really* the best actress, or did she merely have the inherent advantage of ALREADY knowing Masone and working with him before as an on-screen love interest; and getting an opportunity to kiss the author’s ass??
2a. So this sham audition and Masone’s dumbassed sojourn to Ohio were complete wastes of time? God, I miss the days when comic stories didn’t take an entire year to tell… Pre-Covid lockdown it didn’t seem to matter so much, but now it looks so much worse.
3. So now we get to spend the next three months seeing Marianne in Westview as she pores over every single artifact of Saint Lisa’s life while TomBa reprints all his flashback panels again?
“Lunch at Craig’s”…a cursory glance at the website shows they don’t open until 5 on a daily. Now maybe when the dialogue was written for this it was different, or these are new COVID 19 hours. Or maybe Tom is just being lazy and dropped the first restaurant name he remembered from a trip out there.
Seeing it touted as the “Olive Garden for celebrities” and it being in WeHo almost makes me want to give it a go during my August sojourn to the Golden State. But after seeing the menu, if I’m dropping that much coin for a dinner, I’m sticking with my original plan of going to Musso & Frank and getting some authentic old school Hollywood vibes.
You could always just plunk down $45 for a trucker hat with the word “PARM” on it.
https://craigs.la/shop/g4-parm-hat/
Hold on there Baba Louie! Isn’t Marianne so destitute that she lives with her mom, who makes her dresses? Never mind. All that parsimony pays off with a forty dollar plate of spaghetti.
Just a guess: Craig pronounces it “spa-geetee,” like Giada DeLaurentiis, hence the exorbitant price.
Marianne has never been destitute. Marianne has never lived with her mom. Marianne has always been at war with Eurasia.
All of this fuss and bother, and what comes of it? Only the things that makes this strip what it is. Les gets to take a cheap shot at Cindy and Marianne. Different women look foolish in different ways. Bratiuk will do anything to avoid adding new characters when he can re-use an old one (really, Batiuk, would it have been too much trouble to create a new actress to play Lisa? One who would have her own unique set of feminine flaws?)
Maybe she’s turned into the costar-devouring creature that she was in the beginning, before Batiuk decided she had to be a wide-eyed innocent.
Man, check out those comma eyes. Intense.
When she signed onto the Starbuck Jones movie, she already had a reputation that Cindy knew of.
But that “reputation” was sourced by no-name random weirdos on the internet’s… And I don’t want to know why Cindye is doing fuckin’ background checks on her husband’s co-stars like she’s an informant for the HUAC or something…
Cassidy thinking everyone, much less anyone, is going to like what we’ve just seen is the most absurdly incorrect thing to appear in this strip in… well, days, probably. But that’s saying something when it comes to Funky Winkerbean.
An actual “writer” who for some unfathomable reason found themselves stuck with this premise might have had Mason deliberately bring in a few really terrible actresses, as the whole thing was a ruse anyway. It might have been at least a little funnier than making fun of the actresses’ looks, which is the approach BatYam landed on. “Ugh, she’s too young. Ugh, get a load of that hair”…uh, yeah.
And speaking of regressive approaches to female characters, all Les saw Marianne do was engage in some wry foreplay banter with an actor she knows, it wasn’t like she just nailed Hamlet or anything. Yet watching her fake flirt with Mason was all it took to sway him into allowing her to play Lisa. I don’t know what any of this means, but I do know that I don’t really want to know, if you know what I mean.
And then there’s Cassidy. Mason and Les had to pitch the idea to her, which means she wields all the power and the checkbook, which is believable enough. But what’s not really believable is that Mason somehow convinced this major Hollywood player that she needed to be present when they put together a phony casting call for a part they’d already cast just to soothe the delicate feelings of the annoying asshole who wrote the goddamned book in the first place. Why would Cassidy have agreed to this? Seems sort of unlikely to me.
I’m hoping against hope this is a flop that crushes Les.
That would be nice, but I would rather have the H from the Hollywood sign fall and crush him.
Bring on Wile E. Coyote and an Acme Pile Driver. One swift blow and Les turns into a Montoni’s pizza, with extra grease. Lisa would have liked that.
“She is the best actress we’ve seen…”
And on what do you base your assessment, Les? The fact that she willingly allowed Mason to snake his tongue down her throat for your benefit? The fact that she stroked your ego by praising your cancer porn? Or did you perhaps take note of her other qualities? In panel one, you appear to be gazing directly at her boobs. In panel two, you (along with Mason AND Cassidy) seem to be oggling her hinder.
The implication with all these Hollywood arcs is that movie-making is pretty much a joke, something that any moron could fake his or her way through because it’s all a huge sham anyhow. Unlike writing cancer books, which is the only true art form.
Thus Dick Facey, who knows absolutely nothing about acting at all, is qualified to make career-altering assessments, as he’s schooled in a REAL art form, not this phony Hollywood nonsense. Or at least that’s what I take away from it.
“Inside The Assholes Studio”
Sounds like some kind of project whipped up by a proctologist who’s been convinced of the artistic merit of colonoscopy footage.
“Marianne, how far did you immerse yourself in the role of Lisa Moore?”
“Well, I felt it was imperative to experience everything Lisa experienced, so I moved in with the real life Les Moore for two months prior to shooting. I needed to experience what Lisa experienced, feel what she felt, saw what she saw, smelled what she smelled. In fact (laughs) I even started calling him Spanky, which Lisa used to…hey, where’d everybody go? Is someone getting sick back there?”
ED is cleverly parodying the name of a long-running program which interviews actors about their work.
https://www.ovationtv.com/inside-the-actors-studio/?video=6097186919001&season=1
The thing of it is that Batiuk doesn’t even realize that he has a problem with the way he depicts women. He never has and never will.
Indeed. If asked, Batty would claim he is elevating women and that he was the first to feature one in such a dramatic ,,,blah blah blah…rich, deep, …blah blah… I should have won that Pulitzer.
Point.
To be fair, he has an equally swinish problem with men. They’re either oblivious to their families (cf. Dullard and his son, not to mention the year when the baby and Messica vanished while moving to California), Funky and his sons, Bull Bushka and his daughter, Dead Skunkhead John and the boy or girl or whatever he produced, and of course Les and Season) or they’re insanely possessive of their family, the way Les is with Lisa’s ghost and Lisa’s son Dullard.)
Why is Cassidy standing behind Les? You know, Batiuk, she’d quite possibly be the most important person in this room.
Anyway, since Les is apparently going to slink away like the loser he is, and not even offer a token defense of his months-long whining about how Marianne was absolutely wrong for the part of Lisa, I figure Batiuk needs to dive head first into Crazytown for this strip to redeem itself.
Les slinks back to Ohio and tells Cayla what happened. Cayla hauls back and punches Les dead in the face.
“YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO DEFEND HER, YOU LOSER! NOW LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID!”
With Les turning into his typical pussy self, it stands to reason that we need a better Lisa Crusader to underscore just how insane this all is.
“But it gave me a chance to make Cindy all unhappy and jealous! Lisa would have liked that!”
Will Les give Marianne lessons in the way Lisa made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?! Will she be allowed access to the sacred videotapes?! An anxious world wants to know!! (Well, not really…)
My bet is that Marianne won’t be given any briefing other than the script. For all the potential awkward and interesting stories there could be in her turning out to be a Method actress, remember that this movie is not about Lisa. It is about Les’s Manpain, so the relevant briefing was what he gave Mason in NY – the Stations of the Cross of Dead Saint Lisa, the signifiers of Les’s enormous sacrifice and loss.
Really, as long as Mason can be sufficiently reverent in his portrayal, Lisa could be played by a cardboard cutout.