Word: bande
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Frank Portman had to grow up. The punk pop band he founded in the '80s--the Mr. T Experience--had the kind of long-term niche success that leads to self-doubt and massive credit-card debt. Plus, the band had fallen apart. Portman, 42, was on the verge of becoming that old guy working at a record store. And record stores don't much exist anymore...
Although the thought of Johnny Rotten writing the next Catcher in the Rye seems weird, Portman is punk's best-educated tone-deaf singer. An excellent student at Berkeley, he deferred a Ph.D. program in history at Harvard to play in a Bay Area punk band. Not only that, but he knew the teen genre because in high school he worked as a children's librarian, and as part of the job he downed all the young-adult classics. The Mr. T Experience's teen anthems were surprisingly literary: a breakup song, Checkers Speech, is based on Nixon's television...
...this thing that most people suffered through terribly or like to think they did." His impossibly brilliant 14-year-old character, when taking a break from getting beaten up and riddling through confused if well-meaning lectures from his righteous Bay Area stepfather, works on his rock band, which exists only in his mind: "The Nancy Wheelers, [with] me on guitar, Sam Hellerman on bass and Ouija board, first album: Margaret? It's God. Please Shut...
...your first sexual experience," Henchy says. "Do you know how far you will ride on your bike for your first sexual experience? There is no answer. Because you will just continue to go." And the video clip that Portman, experienced at self-promoting from years in an indie band, put on YouTube to publicize his book helped Ferrell's company see it as a film. But not a film for teens, says Ferrell's writing partner Adam McKay. "I wouldn't want my 14-year-old reading King Dork," he says. "It's pretty severe...
DIED. Betty Comden, 89, sophisticated, witty wordsmith who, with rumpled collaborator Adolph Green, helped create stage musicals like On the Town, Bells Are Ringing and The Will Rogers Follies and wrote screenplays for such seminal MGM films as Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon; in New York City. Throughout a 60-year career, the pair, who were not married to each other, worked every day, mostly in the living room of Comden's Manhattan apartment, composing stories and lyrics for the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne and seamlessly adapting them to music that ranged from bouncy...