Sorry

Simps has a boy-crush on Clint.  Oh, wait, I've spoiled your lunch with that image, haven't I. Sorry.  

Update:  G. B. Shaw was a Fabian asshole who advocated what the Nazis did decades before the Nazis did it and his fellow Fabians didn't see much wrong with it.   Really, mass murders in gas chambers.   I find that I can't find him amusing anymore because I read too much of what he had to say.   Thornton Wilder was funnier. 

Update 2:  Well, for a guy who thought "Shakespeare in Love" was a bio pic, it's no surprise to find out he thinks Shaw wrote My Fair Lady.  Um, Simps, Lerner and Loewe?   And here you think you're Mr. Broadway.  I'll bet you don't even know they changed the ending to make it more box office friendly.

Update 3:  So obvious that even the Telegraph got it:

In his lifetime, Shaw had resolutely rejected any attempt to turn Pygmalion into a musical. In 1921 he learned that Franz Lehár was basing an operetta on the play, and fired off a salvo warning the composer not to infringe his copyright. Shaw insisted that Pygmalion possessed its own verbal music, but he must also have been wary of the conventions of musical comedy which would demand a romantic union at the conclusion.

This was precisely the scenario that was eventually used in My Fair Lady. Eliza returns to find Higgins in his study, disconsolately listening to her voice on his recording machine. ‘If he could but let himself’, the stage directions read, ‘he would run to her.’ Instead, he leans back and says softly, ‘Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?’


This is a crowd-pleasing travesty of the original, which defies the story’s own internal logic. Higgins has produced a woman with a soul to call her own. Initially, he deprived Eliza of her independence as a flower seller, and in effect enslaved her. But by the end, Eliza has the power to exist without Higgins. Why should we wish her to stay with him, as his perpetual slipper-carrier? Eliza, as Shaw never ceased trying to explain, should be well shot of him.

I rather like Pauline Kael's comment that the movie was, "Rotting on the screen".  

As it is, Shaw, himself, probably predicting the eventual bastardization of his story by musical comedy wrote about what happened to the characters, Eliza, Freddy, Higgins, and, most interestingly, Freddy's sister Clara.  But I'll let Simps NOT read that.  

I wrote a post about it way back when I was writing for Echidne's blog.  But that was back before I read many of Shaw's Fabian writings advocating things like mass extermination of those he figured weren't worthy of life, pretty much like the Nazis only with a slightly different list.  Of course they agreed on the disabled being offed, the pseudo-left is really not that much different from the all too real far right. 

Update 4:  Oh, and what a shocker, Simps figures he's more of an authority on Shaw than Shaw was.  I think he must have read something about it in the Village Voice or something.  

OK, he's bored me now.  Back in the box with him.