Word: hbo
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Chris Rock just got his butt whupped by a woman. It's midafternoon at the Chelsea Piers boxing facilities, and Rock is shooting a taped piece for his eponymous HBO talk show. The idea: Wouldn't it be funny if Rock went around New York City gyms looking for the next Great White Hope? The twist: he runs into female boxing champ Christy Martin, and in a staged fight, Rock gets knocked around the ring as if he's a shoe in a clothes dryer. Now Rock is seated on some bleachers, catching his breath. After a few minutes, Martin...
...Rock and Joyner hit the road. Rock was interested in playing smaller stages, black clubs. He wanted to reconnect to audiences, to the street-level reality that had made his act funny to begin with. The result was Bring the Pain, his landmark HBO special. "He opened up his material, and it allowed a larger audience to be receptive to it," says Tim Meadows, a fellow SNL cast member. "Chris started talking about things onstage that he talked about in personal life--social and political issues...
...something more interesting was going on: the bit was significant in part because it wasn't aimed at the ears of whites. Blacks have long complained about being ignored by the larger community, unheard, unseen. Rock's riff aired on HBO, not BET, but it was about black folks, for black folks. He didn't care what whites thought or whether they were even listening. Suddenly whites were the ones rendered invisible, inaudible...
...videos but also permits the makers to protect their movies from piracy. If Bain is able to reach 5% of that potential audience, he could easily recover his costs and turn a handsome profit. From there, the film could travel the traditional distribution route: video, pay-per-view, hbo and finally free TV. Says Bain: "This reverses the distribution chain. We can be in the revenue stream first and exploit all the nontheatrical opportunities ourselves. We can cut out that whole middle layer...
...prove a big test. It's got notice for bringing pay cable's profanity to broadcast, but another risky import is the deep-insider view that worked for Larry Sanders' select, limited audience. (Creator and executive producer Chris Thompson, who was executive producer of Sanders, originally intended Action for HBO.) While Action could be the best fall comedy in an anemic field, and Mohr plays Dragon with an intriguingly baby-faced venom, looming over the show is the ghost of the short-lived Buffalo Bill (1983-84), which also portrayed a loathsome media figure (Dabney Coleman as a TV talk...