Radiodrome's Josh Hadley; what's the point?

The show is fun to listen to, don't get me wrong, but there is something about Josh Hadley that hits my nerve. Granted, I'm not the only one to bring up a mixed/negative view on Hadley, but I think I haven't heard one on this. For me, it sounds like Hadley is going through a mid life crisis; he is living in the past, doesn't understand why things change and evolve (for the better), and it's almost like if something was great back in the day, what made it great should be the case today and still be used, no excuses or replacements/changes. There's some more things, like why things are the way they are, or work the way they do, whether its by audiences, studios, directors, etc. I'm not saying he's wrong when what he's saying is right, but he's not right all the time, y'know. He just doesn't understand, and he needs to accept change.

I like the movie talk. I miss having Brad there to help "call him out" on his bullshit. But yeah everyone is fully aware of "Faggot" Josh. If you want a good laugh look up fake Josh on Twitter.

The good thing is that it seems as though the guy from Good Bad Flicks is finally settling in. At first he didn't seem really up on calling Josh out on his BS, but seems to be more willing to do so now.

I say if you don't like it then just don't listen. For me I've got a thick skin and can listen to him be an idiot no problem. I listen the archives a lot at work when I am doing B.S. work. lol...   

Never letting go, and the refusal to accept change.... well, isnt that the whole idea of Josh Hadley? That is his persona, and why I love to listen to Radiodrome now and then.
When the first cave-man invented the wheel, im sure Josh Hadley was there with his long beard and yelling at inventer that his invention was stupid and the old ways of carrying rocks with your hands was much better.

Never accepting change is what puts the Hadley in Josh Hadley.

Dropping Radiodrome would lose the site page views though. Hadley has fans (I am not one of them) and there's plenty of people who click just to hate on him in the comments, because people are kinda jerks that way. At any rate, there's no rule that you have to listen to it.

Personally speaking I find the Spoony alum cameos in the vids more annoying, but that's probably just me.

i'm a fan of his actually. i agree with some shit he says and other shit i don't agree with. lost in the static is a show i just love. he normally has his ass handed to him anyways. and i will say this, he doesn't mind it but encourages it. not everyone is like that. he knows he's full of shit and admit it. so i don't mind listenig to him rant on say what the fuck? for example cause if anyone listens to that both him & Jillian do make great hosts on that show.

I don't think Josh spouts BS unless he gets, really REALLY pedantic. Which happens quite a bit but not as often as is commonly thought.

In fairness, to give just one example of Josh getting things right, I think Brad and Marquis de Suede kind of missed the point in the "Based on a True Story" episode when they kept saying "That doesn't mean that [movie] wasn't any good!"

On the other hand, I honestly don't know WHAT Josh was smoking when he said that the second season of the War of the Worlds TV series was better than the first.

Want to hear Josh go on a fairly epic rant? On one of Brad's last Radiodrome appearances the topic was movies based on true stories. No one agreed with Josh's points and you could tell he was a bit frustrated. Fast forward to 1/6/14 on Lost in the Static's "The Death of Live Radio?" he brings it up again and once again things don't go his way...and he gets pretty pissed but without complete boiling over. Its epic...If you want to just hear that then go over to 1201beyond and find Lost in the Static #174 - The Death of Live Radio? and jump to the 36minute mark & enjoy.

  

OK, I've just listened to Josh's rant on episode 174 of LiTS.

I'm basically in agreement with Josh with one caveat. Namely, I think it's pretty obvious that people have cottoned on to the trend of "based on a true story" films deviating from the truth of the events they were based. Nevertheless I think they still ethically expect such movies to cleave fairly close to the true events, and would be pissed off if such a film were, say, only to be like 30% accurate. When you're at THAT level of fabulation, you might as well just outright fictionalize it, by changing the names and what not. The Count of Monte Cristo, for example, is a a fictionalization. There really WAS a case in France where a guy was jailed on trumped up charges over a love triangle, escaped, acquired a fortune, and embarked on a campaign of revenge, which was in fact really tawdry and didn't end well for anyone.

There is such a thing as artistic license, but there has to be a limit. In every work of entertainment, there's a certain pact between author and reader, or director and audience. For example, you can't have a detective story, told straight all the way through, up until the ending, when suddenly, the detective solves the case by drawing up astrological charts of the suspects and finds the killer that way. The principle is the same with some of these based-on-a-true-story films. There has to be some sort of line where the creator isn't straight-shooting with the viewer anymore. Only it's a lot easier for a director to break the pact in that case, since you basically have to take the filmmaker's word on trust until you can research it yourself, which is basically never. It's not like we're talking about stuff like the Shakespeare conspiracy film Anonymous, which nobody would take for real history anyway.

I don't think anyone really cares that Miklos Forman had Larry Flynt's sole attorney be Edward Norton throughout the film, since the work as whole ought to be judged as a whole, and that was only one thing among many in it. As long as the story was basically gotten straight it doesn't really matter. When they change a ton of things just for the sake of spicing things up, to create more conflicts and drama, it basically defeats the point of the exercise (why adapt something unless it was exciting to begin with?), and when overused, just becomes a crutch for a screenwriter who's clearly taken on an assignment beyond his faculties. It just confirms that real life and real history are boring and the usual fictional fare is what they should be producing, since that's the kind of bed of Procrustes they seem to insist the content has to fit in. Apollo 13 proved that you CAN make an excellent movie that's substantially faithful to truth of what happened (like 95%+ in this case), that you don't have to delve again and again into that bag of tricks just for one screenplay; though that point was kind of lost on Ron Howard given that he also made A Beautiful Mind, about which he said that he really didn't "set out to make a biopic".

The go-to book on this phenomenon is - appropriately enough - John Whalen and Jonathan Vankin's Based On A True Story, which compares the reality to what made it on screen for fifty or so movies, including Braveheart, Gandhi, Monster, Schindler's List, and so on. The biggest offender in their catalogue has to be Norman Jewison's film The Hurricane. If there was ever a based-on-a-true-story film that was completely indefensible, this one's it. Apart from the sanitizing of Hurricane Carter's character, it implicitly libels a dead cop as a racist, rewrites the outcome of the Giardello-Carter fight, and completely makes up the altered phone logs that supposedly "proved" Carter was innocent. To quote Vankin and Whalen, "If the filmmakers had to bullshit their way through the plot point, how strong can their case be?"

Ethically, that sort of thing is a betrayal of what the audience and the truth are entitled to, since these are real peoples' lives we're talking about here. And sometimes, of course, it can get you sued, as Josh pointed out with Domino. Also, after Boys Don't Cry Came Out, Lana Tisdel sued Fox Searchlight Pictures for having depicted her being at the scene of the murders in the film. (There was also a third murder victim who apparently was omitted entirely.)

There is also one thing I have to add in this discusion. And that is about the fake Josh Hadley twitter account, which we assume was taken down by the real Josh Hadley.

To be honest I was also pissed when I heard this, because I thought of it as censorship, since I had laughed about the fake posts from Josh Hadley.
But then I gave it some thought, and now I have the opposite view. Mainly because I applied the situation to my own perspective.
If someone used my real name to post shit online which I could not approve I would really try to take that twitter account down. I really would. I am looking for a job right now, and I would really be pissed if someone googled my legal name and found a bunch of shit posted in my name, by someone who tried to troll me. Because that could really ruin my chances in that case. Eventhough the fake Josh Hadley mostly posted innocent brewsky stuff, and that Josh, Brad and alex even laughed about it in a radiodrome episode, then im sure it is the kind of thinking ive done that made Josh Hadley change his mind about someone impersonating him online. Im sure he thought it could hurt him in a profesional way.

jaltesorensen wrote:

There is also one thing I have to add in this discusion. And that is about the fake Josh Hadley twitter account, which we assume was taken down by the real Josh Hadley.

To be honest I was also pissed when I heard this, because I thought of it as censorship, since I had laughed about the fake posts from Josh Hadley.
But then I gave it some thought, and now I have the opposite view. Mainly because I applied the situation to my own perspective.
If someone used my real name to post shit online which I could not approve I would really try to take that twitter account down. I really would. I am looking for a job right now, and I would really be pissed if someone googled my legal name and found a bunch of shit posted in my name, by someone who tried to troll me. Because that could really ruin my chances in that case. Eventhough the fake Josh Hadley mostly posted innocent brewsky stuff, and that Josh, Brad and alex even laughed about it in a radiodrome episode, then im sure it is the kind of thinking ive done that made Josh Hadley change his mind about someone impersonating him online. Im sure he thought it could hurt him in a profesional way.

The fake josh twitter account says it's a parody right on the main page, it even states "The Home of Fake Josh." Josh Hadley is not above being parodied, if that account had to be taken down, so should all of the other parody accounts that openly advertise as being parody. I'm glad Twitter re-opened the account, it was ridiculous that it was taken down in the first place.

Want a deep insight on Josh..? Check out the weirdly uncomfortable and thus hilarious Lost in the Static episode School Nonsense (#179) up on 1201beyond.com

Enjoy...   

I am a relatively huge fan of Hadley's stuff. I love his podcasts and his Trailer Park-rants on Geek Juice Media. If there is one thing I really hate about him, it's that every time he wants to show how stupid an american is, he goes redneck-mode with the "MERCA!" etc. I'm not offended by it, but it got old really fast and gets on my nerves now.

I listened to episode 152 of Radiodrome the other night, which discussed Art versus Commerce. I think that's another good example of something where people are going to be awfully fast to label Josh as an "idealist" and Cecil and Alex as the "realists". Frankly I found myself agreeing with Josh. Art doesn't breed in a captive enviroment, whether or not the bars in the cage are profit-driven or an explicit ideology. Even the films that are undoubtedly terrible but simultaneously watchable were created by people who were guided in the last analysis by considerations that can only be called artistic, or something comparable. Bad films resulting from studio interference are so terrible that there's no life in the finished product. And that's beside the fact that half the time a studio exec thinks "Do X and it will get more asses in seats" he doesn't know what he's talking about. If these guys think they know so much about what puts asses in seats, maybe they should not even rely on the hired guns but write and direct it themselves.