Wednesday, August 23, 2006

David & Jeffrey = Bette & Joan

Have any of you been following this bizarre exchange? Seems that Jeffrey Wells' site Hollywood Elsewhere went without updates and it turned out he was in the hospital (he's OK now). David Poland at The Hot Blog wished him well ...sort of. And then Wells questioned the way in which he was wished well with some pretty hilarious word choices of his own.

They seem uncomfortably close to me --inextricably linked somehow as entertainment writers. They don't like each other but also can't stop talking about the other. At least that's my perception. It's very Bette & Joan. I love this reader comment to Wells.
Was it the great twentieth-century philosopher Cosmo Kramer who suggested that when two people bicker constantly they're really in love but are afraid to admit it?
LOL.

I'm glad to hear that Jeffrey's well. I think both of them are good reads even if they sometimes infuriate me with their politics (Poland) or sexism (Wells). But these are just my perceptions. I know you can't really know about someone's character by reading them. You just get hints and extrapolate from there.

2 comments:

Kris said...

People do tend to make their minds up about writers without knowing them "off the net." What you get in a person's writing is largely a charicature of who they are, and regardless of my "issues" with Poland in the past, I now consider him a friend and vice versa.

Hell, I finally met Tom O'Neil last week (many know that history), and he's a hell of a guy. Ditto Pete Hammond.

So yeah, difficult to gauge who and what someone is by their writings, but the Poland/Wells exchange is kind of standard now. It's a definite love/hate thing, and it's interesting because both of their persoectives are always so opposed it's interesting they were ever friends at all. But that gets back to the whole "you are not what you write" stuff.

Anonymous said...

They've always struck me as more like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, those Hollywood "columnists" (ie gossips) whose heyday lasted from the 1940s to the 1960s. Though of course Wells and Poland have much less power and influence (their most avid readers are eachother).