PROUDLY ANNOUNCES THE PUBLICATION OF
FAIR & BALANCED
A Play in One Act
and other short works
by
BRIAN FLEMMING
THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK
The hubris of Bill O’Reilly
Fair & Balanced would likely never have come into existence were it not for the hubris of Fox News Channel on-air personality Bill O’Reilly, host of FNC’s most popular show, “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Bill O’Reilly is incensed that satirist Al Franken, in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, exposes very public lies, exaggerations and distortions committed by the conservative talk-show host.
O’Reilly vaguely claims that Franken’s accusations are without merit. "It makes me sick to see intellectually dishonest individuals hide behind the First Amendment to spread propaganda, libel and slander," he has said, regarding Franken’s claims.
However, O’Reilly did not sue Franken for libel or slander. Instead, he encouraged Fox News Channel to file a lawsuit against Franken and his publisher, Penguin Group, for trademark infringement, using a statute intended to protect consumers from companies who misleadingly label their products with a rival’s trademark.
Fox News Channel’s lawsuit asserted that book consumers will be misled by the words “fair and balanced” into believing that Franken’s book is actually a product of the Fox News Channel, not an attack on it. By filing the suit, Fox News and O’Reilly clearly wished to hobble the release of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
On August 22, a federal judge in New York rejected Fox News Channel’s request for a preliminary injunction to block the release of the book, deeming the request “wholly without merit, both factually and legally.” Fox News subsequently dropped the entire suit.
A play is born
O’Reilly, who heard Franken’s accusations in person at a Los Angeles book fair in June, clearly knew he could not win a libel or slander lawsuit against Franken. There is a public record that generously backs up Franken’s claim that O’Reilly is a “lying liar,” and O’Reilly is all too familiar with that record.
By putting his employer, Fox News Channel, to the task of asserting its trademark rights to protect him from legitimate criticism, Bill O’Reilly caused playwright Brian Flemming to put pen to paper and write his first major work for theatre since the wildly successful Bat Boy: The Musical, which took New York by storm in its 2001 Off-Broadway production and, with subsequent productions all over the United States, was one of the top ten most-produced plays of the 2002-2003 season.
"I felt provoked," says Flemming. "Fox and Bill O'Reilly were begging to be taught a lesson about parody and the First Amendment, and I thought I might be capable of teaching it to them, or at least helping in that lesson.
"It wasn't enough that they lost the legal action. It wasn't enough that they ironically helped Franken's book sales. O'Reilly said from the start that the suit wasn't filed to win--it was filed to intimidate. That's a common tactic of powerful people and companies--they use the court system to hassle their critics, even when they have a case that is wholly without merit. With Penguin Group, which hired the top First Amendment lawyer in the country, that tactic didn't work, fortunately.
"But with regard to someone much smaller, in terms of resources to fight a legal action, this lawsuit could contribute to an overall climate of fear that Fox and other corporations are trying to create. They're trying to control our national conversation, by asserting that they own significant chunks of it. And, in this case, they're saying they don't care how much it hurts them, they'll fight tooth and nail if anyone dare criticize them."
The play
While current events in the political sphere motivated Flemming to write, he was cautious of the danger of writing political theater--mainly that didacticism and moralism can creep in. "Once I decided that the play would feature Fair, Balanced, Ampersand and Bill O'Reilly, I kept at the front of my mind that this had to be good theater. I tried to think of an audience 100 years from now. Would they still be able to enjoy the play, not knowing a thing about the events it is based on? I continued to make the play an analogy and a parody, but I used the real-life sources to inspire rather than control the play."
As Flemming did further research on the lawsuit, he became fascinated with Bill O’Reilly. “I soon realized that in Bill O’Reilly I potentially had one of the great antagonists of modern drama,” says Flemming. “He has the qualities of a truly complex villain—a self-delusion about his own greatness, an enjoyment of the suffering of others and, most of all, an inability to see how his own actions propel him toward humiliation and defeat. This last quality is what makes him nearly sympathetic. He's right out of Shakespeare--so blinded by his anger at a rival for exposing O’Reilly’s own past transgressions that he can’t perceive that efforts such as this lawsuit are only fanning the flames that will consume him.
"The play is a bit self-reflexive in that way, as it is intended to add gasoline to that fire.”
As Flemming continued writing, Fair & Balanced developed into not only a parody of O’Reilly and Fox News, but also a study of what Flemming feels is a dilemma that the right wing of U.S. has politics has thrust on the rest of the country. “The right wing has realized that it doesn’t have a majority of the people of this country on its side, so it has developed a clear strategy of fighting dirty—overturning elections, labeling dissent as treason, forcing the rest of us into a high-stakes game of chicken. We are left with a Hobson’s choice: Do we fight dirty, too, or do we give in? It’s a horrible quandary, because if we fight like them, we become them. I don’t want Bill O’Reilly to win, but I also don’t want to become Bill O’Reilly.”
The tone
As Flemming explored this theme, the tone of Fair & Balanced became increasingly vicious. Flemming says the change in tone was guided by a statement from Bill O’Reilly himself about Al Franken, which O’Reilly made in response to Franken’s accusations at the June 2003 book fair. O’Reilly said following about Franken on his nationally syndicated radio show:
Flemming was shocked that a news anchor who purports to be respectable would so openly fantasize about murdering a critic. Flemming says: “Listening to that excerpt on the Internet, I realized that O’Reilly knew no limits when it comes to taste, so I decided that I would not recognize any, either. I accessed the darkest part of my nature, and I simply wrote as if I, like O’Reilly in his Old West scenario, were suffering a bout of murderous insanity. I wanted to see what would happen if I took O’Reilly’s rhetorical tactics to their logical conclusion.”
The logical conclusion at which Flemming arrives …
WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS IN NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS…
The logical conclusion at which Flemming arrives is a brutal and darkly comic story in which the prisoners Fair and Balanced turn the tables on their tormentor, Bill O’Reilly, put him on trial, and then torture, rape and kill him. They then turn to the audience and sing a short song informing the audience that “You can rape and kill O’Reilly, too,” at which point the actors toss copies of the play into the audience, so that audience members can go out and keep telling the story of Bill O’Reilly’s rape and murder.
"It's technically a happy ending," says Flemming. "The heroes get what they want. But they also become Bill O'Reilly in the process, because he forces them to.”
…PLOT SPOILERS NOW OVER
The at-times shocking and profane play is written in the theatrical traditions of commedia dell'arte and Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol.
“Where the play ends up is not pleasant,” says Flemming. “But it is the logical end-point of the right wing’s tactics. The rest of us are not just going to sit down and take it. If they steal elections, well, we might have to steal them back. If they use the politics of personal destruction, we will become destroyers, too. If they kill rivals in staged fantasies, we will stage murder fantasies of our own. And, of course, if they use something as absurd as trademark law to attempt to silence the parody of a relatively mild critic such as Al Franken, then they can expect that someone utterly tasteless like me will instantly appear, knife drawn, and start slashing, to show them how deep parody really can cut."
Flemming plans to license the play to as many theaters as wish to perform it. The Off-Broadway hit he co-wrote, Bat Boy: The Musical, is ranked among the top ten most-produced plays of the 2002-2003 season, according to American Theatre magazine.
Fair & Balanced is a scathing attack on Fox News Channel and its claim of ownership to the words "fair and balanced." Playwright Brian Flemming, who co-wrote the Off-Broadway smash hit Bat Boy: The Musical, penned this dark one-act comedy in which "Fair" and "Balanced" are characters—they are prisoners held in an underground dungeon, and every night at 8 p.m. a foul character named "Bill O'Reilly" comes down into the dungeon to torture them.
But tonight is a special night. Tonight Bill O'Reilly makes a mistake, and Fair and Balanced turn the tables on him. Now that their tormenter is at their mercy, the former prisoners force him to stand trial. But will Fair and Balanced do to Bill O'Reilly what he has done to them?
In answering this question with a resounding yes, Flemming gleefully crosses just about every line with regard to taste and decency, crafting Fair & Balanced in the theatrical traditions of commedia dell'arte and Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol. By turns profane, eloquent, shocking and touching—and always hilarious—Fair & Balanced may just slice, dice and chop its way into theater history and create a lasting comic villain out of Bill O’Reilly. Or what is left of him.
This Fair Use Press high-quality Adobe Reader® edition of Fair & Balanced includes the full script to the play, the sheet music to its original song ("Ampersand's Epiphany") as well as the following additional works:
Photo essay: Pro-War Demonstrators: "Theoretically, We Should Be Able to Punch You in the Face"
This 35-page nonfiction photo essay is a revealing look at confrontations between pro-war demonstrators and anti-war demonstrators on Oscar night, March 23, 2003, outside the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. Using rhetorical techniques apparently inspired by Fox News and other fiery conservative news outlets, the fairly unbalanced pro-war demonstrators scream insults such as "You're a fucking faggot!," shout down all who disagree with them and carry signs reading, "Kill Them All" and "Without Us, You'd Be Eating Sand." Flemming, who protested the Iraq war, was in the fray and documents his experience in words and pictures. The subtitle of the photo essay is based on a flyer that military-garbed pro-war demonstrators handed out to anti-war demonstrators. The flyer read, simply, "Theoretically, we should be able to punch you in the face and get away with it." This photo essay is a rare insight into the right-wing subculture, whose true face is rarely displayed in the mainstream media.
Essay: Dementia Nine-Eleven
Flemming, who wrote daily commentary throughout the Iraq war at Blogcritics.org, published this short essay the day after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell in Baghdad. It takes as its premise that the United States has been driven to insanity by the September 11 attacks and the artful manipulation of the Bush Administration and its propaganda wings, and from there compares the United States with the tragic characters Hamlet and Othello, who were also debilitated by madness and obsession.
Speech: Stump Speech
Flemming briefly ran for governor of California in July and August of 2003 with a platform designed to subvert what he termed a "right-wing assault on democracy"--the attempted recall of Governor Gray Davis. He wrote this stump speech but never had the opportunity to deliver it to an audience. (See "About the Author" below for details on Flemming’s run for governor.)
Revised editions of Fair & Balanced are free to First Edition buyers: Purchase of this First Edition Fair & Balanced Adobe Reader e-book entitles the purchaser to free downloads of subsequent Fair Use Press e-book editions of the play.
Brian Flemming co-wrote (with Keythe Farley and composer Laurence O'Keefe) the off-Broadway hit Bat Boy: The Musical, which won two Richard Rodgers Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lucille Lortel Best Musical Award, the Outer Critics Circle Best Musical Off-Broadway Award, and eight Drama Desk nominations. Bat Boy is published by Dramatists Play Service and is currently playing in regional productions throughout the United States.
Flemming has a parallel career as an independent filmmaker. He most recently wrote and directed the feature film Nothing So Strange, a faux documentary about the assassination of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, which won the 2002 New York Times Claiborne Pell Award for Original Vision at the Newport International Film Festival and has played at film festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe. Nothing So Strange was produced by GMD Studios and will be released in theaters in Fall 2003. The film's debut at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, was covered by Time, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News Channel, CourtTV, Salon and dozens of other news outlets.
Flemming recently ran for governor of California, with the simple platform, "If elected, I will resign." Covered by National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," the Los Angeles Times and the San Jose Mercury News, Flemming's candidacy was intended to put Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante effectively on the recall ballot at a time when no major Democrat was in the running. Flemming, a Democrat, terminated his candidacy when Bustamante himself entered the race at the last minute.
Fair & Balanced would likely never have come into existence were it not for the hubris of Fox News Channel on-air personality Bill O’Reilly, host of FNC’s most popular show, “The O’Reilly Factor.”
Bill O’Reilly is incensed that satirist Al Franken, in his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, exposes very public lies, exaggerations and distortions committed by the conservative talk-show host.
O’Reilly vaguely claims that Franken’s accusations are without merit. "It makes me sick to see intellectually dishonest individuals hide behind the First Amendment to spread propaganda, libel and slander," he has said, regarding Franken’s claims.
However, O’Reilly did not sue Franken for libel or slander. Instead, he encouraged Fox News Channel to file a lawsuit against Franken and his publisher, Penguin Group, for trademark infringement, using a statute intended to protect consumers from companies who misleadingly label their products with a rival’s trademark.
Fox News Channel’s lawsuit asserted that book consumers will be misled by the words “fair and balanced” into believing that Franken’s book is actually a product of the Fox News Channel, not an attack on it. By filing the suit, Fox News and O’Reilly clearly wished to hobble the release of Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
On August 22, a federal judge in New York rejected Fox News Channel’s request for a preliminary injunction to block the release of the book, deeming the request “wholly without merit, both factually and legally.” Fox News subsequently dropped the entire suit.
A play is born
O’Reilly, who heard Franken’s accusations in person at a Los Angeles book fair in June, clearly knew he could not win a libel or slander lawsuit against Franken. There is a public record that generously backs up Franken’s claim that O’Reilly is a “lying liar,” and O’Reilly is all too familiar with that record.
By putting his employer, Fox News Channel, to the task of asserting its trademark rights to protect him from legitimate criticism, Bill O’Reilly caused playwright Brian Flemming to put pen to paper and write his first major work for theatre since the wildly successful Bat Boy: The Musical, which took New York by storm in its 2001 Off-Broadway production and, with subsequent productions all over the United States, was one of the top ten most-produced plays of the 2002-2003 season.
"I felt provoked," says Flemming. "Fox and Bill O'Reilly were begging to be taught a lesson about parody and the First Amendment, and I thought I might be capable of teaching it to them, or at least helping in that lesson.
"It wasn't enough that they lost the legal action. It wasn't enough that they ironically helped Franken's book sales. O'Reilly said from the start that the suit wasn't filed to win--it was filed to intimidate. That's a common tactic of powerful people and companies--they use the court system to hassle their critics, even when they have a case that is wholly without merit. With Penguin Group, which hired the top First Amendment lawyer in the country, that tactic didn't work, fortunately.
"But with regard to someone much smaller, in terms of resources to fight a legal action, this lawsuit could contribute to an overall climate of fear that Fox and other corporations are trying to create. They're trying to control our national conversation, by asserting that they own significant chunks of it. And, in this case, they're saying they don't care how much it hurts them, they'll fight tooth and nail if anyone dare criticize them."
The play
While current events in the political sphere motivated Flemming to write, he was cautious of the danger of writing political theater--mainly that didacticism and moralism can creep in. "Once I decided that the play would feature Fair, Balanced, Ampersand and Bill O'Reilly, I kept at the front of my mind that this had to be good theater. I tried to think of an audience 100 years from now. Would they still be able to enjoy the play, not knowing a thing about the events it is based on? I continued to make the play an analogy and a parody, but I used the real-life sources to inspire rather than control the play."
As Flemming did further research on the lawsuit, he became fascinated with Bill O’Reilly. “I soon realized that in Bill O’Reilly I potentially had one of the great antagonists of modern drama,” says Flemming. “He has the qualities of a truly complex villain—a self-delusion about his own greatness, an enjoyment of the suffering of others and, most of all, an inability to see how his own actions propel him toward humiliation and defeat. This last quality is what makes him nearly sympathetic. He's right out of Shakespeare--so blinded by his anger at a rival for exposing O’Reilly’s own past transgressions that he can’t perceive that efforts such as this lawsuit are only fanning the flames that will consume him.
"The play is a bit self-reflexive in that way, as it is intended to add gasoline to that fire.”
As Flemming continued writing, Fair & Balanced developed into not only a parody of O’Reilly and Fox News, but also a study of what Flemming feels is a dilemma that the right wing of U.S. has politics has thrust on the rest of the country. “The right wing has realized that it doesn’t have a majority of the people of this country on its side, so it has developed a clear strategy of fighting dirty—overturning elections, labeling dissent as treason, forcing the rest of us into a high-stakes game of chicken. We are left with a Hobson’s choice: Do we fight dirty, too, or do we give in? It’s a horrible quandary, because if we fight like them, we become them. I don’t want Bill O’Reilly to win, but I also don’t want to become Bill O’Reilly.”
The tone
As Flemming explored this theme, the tone of Fair & Balanced became increasingly vicious. Flemming says the change in tone was guided by a statement from Bill O’Reilly himself about Al Franken, which O’Reilly made in response to Franken’s accusations at the June 2003 book fair. O’Reilly said following about Franken on his nationally syndicated radio show:
“What this guy writes and says
does not matter to me, other than…he insulted me in a forum where I was
at a decided disadvantage, you know, he went over his time limit. It
was very, very sneaky, and you know, as I said at the top of the
broadcast, somebody calls you a liar to your face, you don't just laugh
that off. That's an insult. In the Old West, that woulda got you shot.
See in the Old West, and I woulda loved to have been in the Old West,
Al and I woulda just had a little, uh, a little shootout. You know? We
woulda went out, on Wilshire Avenue, and uh, six shooters, now he's a
much smaller target than I am, about four foot eleven, but he's wider,
and it woulda been you know, Clint Eastwood time. I woulda had the
cheroot, the serape, woulda given my squint, and I woulda put a bullet
right between his head. Woulda been wrong, woulda been wrong, but it
was the Old West, and I would not have known any better, so I wouldn't
have been held accountable because I would not have known any--now I
do, now in 2003 that would have been wrong.”
Flemming was shocked that a news anchor who purports to be respectable would so openly fantasize about murdering a critic. Flemming says: “Listening to that excerpt on the Internet, I realized that O’Reilly knew no limits when it comes to taste, so I decided that I would not recognize any, either. I accessed the darkest part of my nature, and I simply wrote as if I, like O’Reilly in his Old West scenario, were suffering a bout of murderous insanity. I wanted to see what would happen if I took O’Reilly’s rhetorical tactics to their logical conclusion.”
The logical conclusion at which Flemming arrives …
WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS IN NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS…
The logical conclusion at which Flemming arrives is a brutal and darkly comic story in which the prisoners Fair and Balanced turn the tables on their tormentor, Bill O’Reilly, put him on trial, and then torture, rape and kill him. They then turn to the audience and sing a short song informing the audience that “You can rape and kill O’Reilly, too,” at which point the actors toss copies of the play into the audience, so that audience members can go out and keep telling the story of Bill O’Reilly’s rape and murder.
"It's technically a happy ending," says Flemming. "The heroes get what they want. But they also become Bill O'Reilly in the process, because he forces them to.”
…PLOT SPOILERS NOW OVER
The at-times shocking and profane play is written in the theatrical traditions of commedia dell'arte and Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol.
“Where the play ends up is not pleasant,” says Flemming. “But it is the logical end-point of the right wing’s tactics. The rest of us are not just going to sit down and take it. If they steal elections, well, we might have to steal them back. If they use the politics of personal destruction, we will become destroyers, too. If they kill rivals in staged fantasies, we will stage murder fantasies of our own. And, of course, if they use something as absurd as trademark law to attempt to silence the parody of a relatively mild critic such as Al Franken, then they can expect that someone utterly tasteless like me will instantly appear, knife drawn, and start slashing, to show them how deep parody really can cut."
Flemming plans to license the play to as many theaters as wish to perform it. The Off-Broadway hit he co-wrote, Bat Boy: The Musical, is ranked among the top ten most-produced plays of the 2002-2003 season, according to American Theatre magazine.
DESCRIPTION
Fair & Balanced is a scathing attack on Fox News Channel and its claim of ownership to the words "fair and balanced." Playwright Brian Flemming, who co-wrote the Off-Broadway smash hit Bat Boy: The Musical, penned this dark one-act comedy in which "Fair" and "Balanced" are characters—they are prisoners held in an underground dungeon, and every night at 8 p.m. a foul character named "Bill O'Reilly" comes down into the dungeon to torture them.
But tonight is a special night. Tonight Bill O'Reilly makes a mistake, and Fair and Balanced turn the tables on him. Now that their tormenter is at their mercy, the former prisoners force him to stand trial. But will Fair and Balanced do to Bill O'Reilly what he has done to them?
In answering this question with a resounding yes, Flemming gleefully crosses just about every line with regard to taste and decency, crafting Fair & Balanced in the theatrical traditions of commedia dell'arte and Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol. By turns profane, eloquent, shocking and touching—and always hilarious—Fair & Balanced may just slice, dice and chop its way into theater history and create a lasting comic villain out of Bill O’Reilly. Or what is left of him.
This Fair Use Press high-quality Adobe Reader® edition of Fair & Balanced includes the full script to the play, the sheet music to its original song ("Ampersand's Epiphany") as well as the following additional works:
Photo essay: Pro-War Demonstrators: "Theoretically, We Should Be Able to Punch You in the Face"
This 35-page nonfiction photo essay is a revealing look at confrontations between pro-war demonstrators and anti-war demonstrators on Oscar night, March 23, 2003, outside the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. Using rhetorical techniques apparently inspired by Fox News and other fiery conservative news outlets, the fairly unbalanced pro-war demonstrators scream insults such as "You're a fucking faggot!," shout down all who disagree with them and carry signs reading, "Kill Them All" and "Without Us, You'd Be Eating Sand." Flemming, who protested the Iraq war, was in the fray and documents his experience in words and pictures. The subtitle of the photo essay is based on a flyer that military-garbed pro-war demonstrators handed out to anti-war demonstrators. The flyer read, simply, "Theoretically, we should be able to punch you in the face and get away with it." This photo essay is a rare insight into the right-wing subculture, whose true face is rarely displayed in the mainstream media.
Essay: Dementia Nine-Eleven
Flemming, who wrote daily commentary throughout the Iraq war at Blogcritics.org, published this short essay the day after the statue of Saddam Hussein fell in Baghdad. It takes as its premise that the United States has been driven to insanity by the September 11 attacks and the artful manipulation of the Bush Administration and its propaganda wings, and from there compares the United States with the tragic characters Hamlet and Othello, who were also debilitated by madness and obsession.
Speech: Stump Speech
Flemming briefly ran for governor of California in July and August of 2003 with a platform designed to subvert what he termed a "right-wing assault on democracy"--the attempted recall of Governor Gray Davis. He wrote this stump speech but never had the opportunity to deliver it to an audience. (See "About the Author" below for details on Flemming’s run for governor.)
Revised editions of Fair & Balanced are free to First Edition buyers: Purchase of this First Edition Fair & Balanced Adobe Reader e-book entitles the purchaser to free downloads of subsequent Fair Use Press e-book editions of the play.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Flemming co-wrote (with Keythe Farley and composer Laurence O'Keefe) the off-Broadway hit Bat Boy: The Musical, which won two Richard Rodgers Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lucille Lortel Best Musical Award, the Outer Critics Circle Best Musical Off-Broadway Award, and eight Drama Desk nominations. Bat Boy is published by Dramatists Play Service and is currently playing in regional productions throughout the United States.
Flemming has a parallel career as an independent filmmaker. He most recently wrote and directed the feature film Nothing So Strange, a faux documentary about the assassination of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, which won the 2002 New York Times Claiborne Pell Award for Original Vision at the Newport International Film Festival and has played at film festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe. Nothing So Strange was produced by GMD Studios and will be released in theaters in Fall 2003. The film's debut at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, was covered by Time, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News Channel, CourtTV, Salon and dozens of other news outlets.
Flemming recently ran for governor of California, with the simple platform, "If elected, I will resign." Covered by National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," the Los Angeles Times and the San Jose Mercury News, Flemming's candidacy was intended to put Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante effectively on the recall ballot at a time when no major Democrat was in the running. Flemming, a Democrat, terminated his candidacy when Bustamante himself entered the race at the last minute.
REVIEWS OF FLEMMING’S PREVIOUS WORK
About the stage play Bat Boy: The Musical:
"It's remarkable what intelligent wit can accomplish. A jaggedly imaginative mix of skewering humor and energetic glee."
--New York Times
"Smart, playful and funny. A giggling cult hit."
--The New Yorker
"Bat Boy soars. An instant classic."
--New York Post
"Wickedly funny."
--New York Daily News
"A tour de force. Immensely satisfying."
--USA Today
"The show is sick, twisted, over the top, and--if you like that sort of thing--possibly as entertaining as anything you've recently seen onstage."
--Boston Globe
"Bat Boy: The Musical easily ranks as one of the best shows of the year."
--Boston Herald
"A clamorous, thigh-smacking, groundbreaking musical."
--New Times L.A.
About the film Nothing So Strange:
"The film itself is more than just a novel premise, going off in myriad unexpected directions and setting something of a high bar for the mockumentary subgenre. It may be the ideal prototype film for the digital age."
--Variety
"Nothing So Strange is pitch perfect. See this film."
--Wired
"A brilliant, one-of-a-kind faux documentary."
--Boston Phoenix
"A genre-bending experience."
--Austin Chronicle
"Uncomfortably realistic."
--New York Post
"Chilling."
--Seattle Times
"Disturbing."
--CNN
"Eerily realistic."
--Drudge Report
"Is this art or junk?"
-- Fox News Channel
"It is very disappointing that a movie maker would do something like this."
--Microsoft spokesman
ABOUT FAIR USE PRESS
The mission of Fair Use Press is to publish works of comment, criticism and parody that ridicule, shame and attack those who attempt to subvert the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Fair Use Press believes that intellectual-property laws currently are being abused by powerful corporations and individuals as a means of coercion and control, to the detriment of our political and cultural dialogue. The publisher intends to continue subjecting these corporations and individuals to scathing mockery and critique.
Fair Use Press is located in the historic Westlake district of Los Angeles.
ABOUT ADOBE READER®
Adobe Reader combines a vivid, elegant reading experience with easy-to-use, intuitive software. Adobe Reader gives you all that e-books have to offer, including the ability to read e-books with the pictures, graphics, and rich fonts you've come to expect from printed books.
The high-quality Fair & Balanced Adobe Reader book is a standard PDF file compatible with Windows and Mac and has no digital-rights-management restrictions. It may be printed and copied.
Top Ten most produced plays of 2002-2003:
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2002/11/03/tem_jackie03side.html