This past Sunday night, like every Sunday
night for the past couple of months, I watched
HBO’s Big Love. Thus, I missed the hour of
the Academy Awards that was going head-to-head with my all-time favorite show about
polygamists. (My other favorite polygamist
show was Leave It To Beaver—back in the
’50s, only Utahns knew what polygamy was,
so Mr. Cleaver never let on to a sleepy nation
that the Haskell kid was really his.) Thanks
to me still being curious about polygamy
and unable to resist Bill’s second wife, Nicki,
somewhere in that lost hour, I missed a
really cool City Weekly moment.
A few weeks ago, my good friend Katherine Topaz sent me a Facebook message from Portland, Ore. Kat did a stint here at City Weekly—then, Private Eye Weekly—as art director in the early 1990s. Since that time, she’s become one of the finest and best-known art directors in our industry, thanks in no small part to the one or two drinks we would down at Port O’ Call where, behind a screen of tobacco smoke, we both sort of launched our future paths. Kat’s Facebook message was a link to the animated short movie called Logorama. She asked if I were aware they’d used our logo in it.
It was the first I’d heard of Logorama. It was a nominee in the Best Animated Short Film category, and the film itself is comprised of the most recognizable corporate logos in the world serving as backdrops or in cameo roles. Look—there’s Microsoft. AOL. Oscar Mayer. IBM. Xbox. Icons like Ronald McDonald, Mr. Pringles, the Jolly Green Giant and the Michelin Man have the speaking—and swearing— roles. Then, right at the 11:04 mark of the movie, as Ronald McDonald (depicted in the role of an evil clown, of course) emerges from a Los Angeles earthquake chasm, wreaking havoc all over LaLa Land, the City Weekly logo takes the form of a wall just behind him.
It’s glimpsed again at 11:08 when a speeding
car in pursuit of Ronald rushes by.
No one here knows why or how the
directors chose our logo, especially since
it’s an older one that we retired in 2009
and since the movie is French-made. And
more inexplicably, since the movie is
clearly based in Los Angeles, why does
Salt Lake City Weekly appear plain as day
(assuming you have freeze-frame, that is)
in the same fashion as iconic names like
Pizza Hut, Paramount, Avis and Eveready.
No matter—we’re in the movies.
We were so pleased, to say the least, to
be a part of the film that we posted a link
to Logorama on our
Website and shared
it with our Facebook
followers. Besides
serving as affirmation
that our influence
is above that of
the Los Angeles Times,
the L.A. Weekly and
every other paper in
Southern California
(all missing from
Logorama, it seems),
we basically got a
real kick out of it and just forgot about it—
until Sunday night, when it won the Oscar
for Best Animated Film, that is. Thanks to
Big Love, I missed the acceptance speech
by Logorama producer Nicolas Schmerkin,
which set off a bevy of messages to me. (At
least five, anyway, and I briefly wondered
if Meryl Streep’s hubby doesn’t feel both
proud and ready to slit his wrists annually
on Oscar night.)
I’d already missed the speech, so I
stayed tuned to Big Love. Later that night,
I watched Schmerkin’s acceptance speech
online and it was a complete joy, just like
his film. He said there were “3,000 nonofficial
sponsors” of Logorama, and he assured
that “no logos were harmed in the making
of the project.”
Hey, not only were we not harmed, we’d
like him to do it again. I’ve since learned
that Logorama played at Sundance, so
maybe that’s how we came to be a part of
a winning movie, but for now it’s still a mystery. Hell, any old newspaper rack can
serve as a backdrop in any old movie, as we
have here and there, but to share the silver
screen with Bob’s Big Boy? We’re thrilled.
And so is Bill Henrickson. In Big Love’s
season finale, he was elected to the Utah
State Senate (partially helped by exposing
his opponent as a Catholic) upon which he
promptly announced that he is a polygamist.
Each of his three wives, with varying
degrees of willingness and self-interest,
joined him at the Capitol for the
big announcement—which he should have
saved until he was sworn in, I think. Or
maybe he just wanted
to make a point and
never really intended to
serve.
Either way, the world
now knows that Bill is
a polygamist and that
mainstream Utahns
had better make room
for him and his kind.
I’m thankful that Big
Love made it OK to
use the phrase “mainstream
Utahns.” I didn’t
know until now there were any except the
ones employed at City Weekly (and Coffee
Garden). If you missed the final episode
of Big Love, just know that if you thought
your life was out of the mainstream, you’re
Jesus compared to Bill Henrickson.
Judging by how the 2010 Legislature
went—with the complete neutering of the
Democratic Party and an insistence that
Utah lead the way in a national revolution
for states’ rights (education and
roads can wait), Bill just might find plenty
of Republican allies in the Utah Senate,
even though he was born in a warped
socialist-polygamist compound. After all,
those Republicans don’t care much for
your needs; they only care about their personal
crusades. Bill will be right at home,
wasting our time and money with the rest
of them. And he might not be the only
polygamist on the Hill, anyway.