Calvert DeForest has passed on. You know him as Larry ‘Bud’ Melman.

Via Tom, Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision.

Fuck, we miss you, Hunter.

Fox buried his new movie, and the Guardian’s John Patterson would love to know why. (The story’s from September, but it’s worth reading.)

So, Wal-Mart has entered the movie download business. Great. However, they’ve got a few problems to sort out:

• The site doesn’t work with Firefox. Seriously, how do you justify building for IE-only in 2006? Are you on crack?
• The price for movies is $20, or about what most DVDs cost at Best Buy.
• The resolution is a paltry 240×320.
• The files are DRM’d out the wazoo.
• The files will only play on Windows; Macs and Linux need not apply, nor should Zunes or iPods.

Yeah, we’re sure that’s gonna take off like, well, a metal dirigible.

So, as you have certainly noticed (some of you more verbally than others), Heathen enjoys the college football, especially bowl season. We’re by no means alone, obviously, given the ratings these games get; chief among them are the major BCS bowls: Fiesta, Rose, Orange, and Sugar, plus the championship game.

These games are also, for the most part, the biggest things on TV during bowl season, since most network programs are on holiday hiatus until early to mid January.

However, this year, there was a collision at Chez Heathen. We went upstairs yesterday to start watching the Sugar Bowl only to discover the Tivo already capturing, on another channel, one of the very small number of those network shows enjoyed in our household (Mrs. Heathen, natch). It wasn’t a repeat; it was the first new episode of this program in over a month, scheduled opposite the Sugar Bowl.

This struck us as really dumb, and we’re sure you agree. What makes it cross the line into absolute stupidity is this: the program in question is Friday Night Lights, a show about big-time Texas high school football. Just exactly WTF was NBC thinking?

(For the record, we’re gentlemen here at Heathen; we went to a bar for the first half.)

“Have you seen Harry Lime?”

David Simon‘s The Wire wrapped up its fourth season last night. If you haven’t seen this, you’ve missed the best goddamned thing to ever be on television, and we say that knowing full well how strong contenders like Deadwood and the Sopranos are. They’re not even in the same league; in a real sense, they’re not even playing the same game.

You can’t start the Wire in the middle, though. If you haven’t seen this, get ye to Netflix and put the first season in your queue. You won’t be sorry.

If you’re hip, though, go read Heather Havrilesky’s column on the final episode and the fourth season in general over at Salon. Havrilesky’s a damned fine TV writer — she’s the one who did a column all in Milchian Deadwood-speak, brilliantly. Don’t read it if you’re not caught up; it’s full of spoilers. If you’re watched, though, it’s a great reverie.

There is one more season of the Wire coming. We have no idea when it’ll air — 2008, probably, which gives you all plenty of time to catch up on the world of the Barksdales and Stanfields; the Greek, the port, and 13 dead girls in a can; Royce and Carcetti and Davis; the collapse, rise, fall, and resurrection of Prez; McNulty and Bunk; Omar and Brother Mouzone; and the sad tale of Bubbles. Do yourself a favor. Seriously.

(The Wire ran June to September in 2002 and 2003, but slipped to September to December in ’04 and ’06. Since HBO is already running promos for what’s happening on the network this year, and said promos have no Wire goodness in them, smart money says to look for the final installment of Simon’s opus in June or September of 2008.)

A recent episode of Law & Order: SVU included an RFID subplot; basically, a geeky character established as a bit of a tinkerer with the technology (he’d set up keyless entry on his house) turned out to have surreptitiously implanted a chip in his wife’s shoulder to ascertain whether or not she was having an affair (she was).

When the arrangement came to light, Detective Stabler referred to it as a “HoJack.”

We like this more than we can say.

Robert Altman died last night. He was 81.

Altman gave us a huge body of amazing work, including such icons as MASH, Nashville, The Player, and Short Cuts (based on the work of another 20th century giant, Raymond Carver), among many others.

There are no more like him.

A flash, while viewed by some as an invaluable tool, is sometimes the cause of odd coloration or other strange artifacts in photos, and for this reason is sometimes eschewed by more serious photographers in some situations, particularly at night.

Chief Photography Analyst Triple-F has done some research into this phenomenon, and points out a very useful comparison illustrating the differences between night photography with and without flash. Enjoy.

We know you must be curious about the Deadwood fuck count — which turns out to be 2,980 over the run of the series — so it’s good that these folks have done the math. Bonus: they also track fucks-per-minute (FPM; 1.56 for the whole show) as well as the all-important fuck-to-cocksucker ratio on a per-episode basis. Whew!

JWZ found what purports to be a lost draft of the Alien novelisation written by J. G. Ballard rather than Alan Dean Foster, from a script to have been shot by David Cronenberg instead of Ridley Scott.

A sample:

As the ovipositor sought out and probed the hollow of her solar plexus, the cat’s hiss framed the moment, a Polaroid of the Hieros Gamos of the once and future predicates of sentience. Reaching out, Ripley, the Madonna of the New Flesh, stroked the elongated head of the creature, her fingerprints in the mucus tracing in an unknown alphabet the names of the children of the dead.

Awesome. Brilliant. But the Venn diagram illustrating the portion of the Heathen audience likely to get the joke is absurdly small.

The 15th anniversary edition of Reservoir Dogs is now available.

The DVD slipcase looks like a gas can.

Rod Serling shills for Tandy. All hail YouTube.

Ahmet Zappa is developing a movie based on Fraggle Rock.

And what do we find? Law and Order: Special Letters Unit. We love that the detectives actually resemble Stabler, Benson, and (most obviously) Richard Belzer‘s John Munch (whose name is actually Munch in the skit).

Munch-being-Munch in the skit makes the character the most crossed-over one in TV, with appearances on 8 different shows. Wikipedia suggests that Belzer only played him in 7 of those, which is a record on its own. Belzer as Munch appears in 122 episodes of Homicide, 158 and counting on L&O:SVU, plus crossovers on “regular” Law & Order, L&O:Trial By Jury, The X-Files, Arrested Development, and the something called The Beat; someone else voices the muppet.

(With this many crossovers, obviously Munch plays into the Tommy Westphall Hypothesis.)

We’d really like to test software now.

The first rule is, of course, not to talk about it.

So, you’re probably aware of Stephen Colbert’s green-screen contest, right? We’ll wait if you’re not.

Well, “George L.” at ILM submitted an entry.

Actually, you should start at the beginning, with DVDs, but that’s beside the point. If you’re caught up through season 3, check out this excellent essay about the opening credits. Yeah, that’s right: this show is so excellent you can write meaningful analysis about the opening credits.

We don’t mean Ozzy’s ersatz urinal; we mean the kickass theater in Austin. Rents, taxes, and insurance are eating them alive, but they’ve got a plan we think you’ll like. In short, their scheme is to become a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing the kinds of film and film-related entertainment for which the Alamo Drafthouse has become justifiably famous. Check it out.

(Thanks to Mrs. Heathen for pointing this out.)

We’ve seen bits of the satirical short “Truth in Advertising” before, but today Consumerist has what appears to be the entire first 12-minute chapter. We know there’s additional footage with another, perhaps subsequent storyline, but we’ve seen samples of that far less often than this one.

BoingBoing points us to The Biology of B-Movie Monsters, which is completely fascinating, though it starts a bit slow. Stay with it until he actually gets to the movies.

Some enterprising fans found the Lost set in Hawaii and took a bunch of pictures.

“Deadwood Pancakes,” a short film by Justin Schlegel.

Go watch.

Born in a laboratory! Forged in pain! A thirst for blood . . . and rape!

JWZ points us to Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers. FanTAStic.

All good Heathen know the proper use of $240. Happy 4th.

Calder’s Circus is on YouTube.

The original Powers of Ten film is on YouTube. Enjoy.

Very late tonight, we look forward to this classic:

Una mujer psicopata amenaza con destruir la vida de un abogado casado, tras pasar un fin de semana de pasion juntos.

Screenhead has a great pair of Andy Kaufman videos up; the first is an 8-minute interview, and the second his performance of “Rosemarie” on Letterman. Enjoy.

For your amusement, we present one of the unaired pilots for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There are apparently two floating around; we’ve been told this is the second, later one. Both feature most of the right cast, with two major exceptions: Principal Flutie is played by Stephen Tobolowsky (“Ned Ryerson” from Groundhog Day) instead of Ken Lerner (Star Trek actor Armin Shimerman doesn’t take over as Principal Snyder until the 9th episode), but the biggie is that Willow isn’t Alyson Hannigan.

You can tell Joss wrote this, but the snappy dialog associated with the show (and with Angel and Firefly) apparently developed after it got picked up.

Sue us. We’ve been busy.

The Bicycle Ride is a short film (3:46) commemorating the 100th birthday of LSD inventor Albert Hofman, who took the most interesting bicycle ride ever in 1943.

Enjoy.

The late Dr. Gene Scott blows up real good. Totally not work safe.

In this trailer for Mel Gibson’s new film APOCALYPTO, wait for the monkey to scream, then pause and roll back 5 to 10 frames. (It’s about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way in.)

The upcoming third season of Deadwood will be its last.

“They’re Made Out of Meat” is now a short film.

You remember that SNL commercial for “Bad Idea” jeans, where the actors just kept having terrible ideas? Some were “Even thought he affair’s over, I think I’ll tell my wife about it” and “I thought about wearing a condom, but when am I ever gonna be in Haiti again?”

Add to this “How about a film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged starring Brad and Angelina?” Seriously, there’s no way this won’t make “Snakes on a Plane” look like “Citizen Kane.”

Shiman strikes again.

Yes.

1. That this Amex commercial exists; or
2. that Mrs Heathen called us in Florida to tell us about it.

From Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point:

Part of the appeal of Jim Henson and the Muppets to the show’s creators, in fact, was that in the 1960s Henson had been running a highly successful advertising shop. Many of the most famous Muppets were created for ad campaigns: Big Bird is really a variation of a seven-foot dragon created by Henson for La Choy commercials; Cookie Monster was a pitchman for Frito-Lay; Grover was used in promotional films for IBM. (Henson’s Muppet commercials from the 50s and 60s are hysterically funny but have a dark and edgy quality that understandably was absent from his Sesame Street work.) (p. 117, paperback edition)

WHERE CAN WE SEE THESE COMMERCIALS?

“You gonna bark all day, little bunny?“