Creepy American Stuff: Clowns & The Bitter Ghost of Andrew Breitbart

Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King's 'It'

Well it's the end of August and Labor Day is a mere five days away but the Halloween decorations, along with absurdly large bags of discounted candy, are already on display in my local ACME so fall is truly upon us.

Artfully displayed orange and black Halloween streamers strewn across the aisles along with the obligatory cutouts of witches and black cats hanging from the ceiling?

It reminded me that there is some seriously creepy stuff going on in America.

Have you read about those weird reports of clown sightings?

Last night before bed I made the mistake of reading a New York Times article about the strange reports the Greenville County, South Carolina sheriff's office has received from terrified locals of groups of clowns seen in different parts of the area; some reportedly offering children candy to follow them into the woods.

According to the Times article, one woman claims to have seen a large clown waving at her from under a streetlight as she was driving by at night.

Whether all this clown business is some kind of elaborate hoax or not is still not clear, but it's possible it could be some kind of weird underground guerrilla marketing campaign designed to build up buzz for the 2017 theatrical film adaptation of Stephen King's truly creepy 1987 novel 'It' .

It's not a short read by any means (the original hardcover copy on my shelf comes in at a whopping 1,138 pages...), but if you enjoy a well-layered novel with plenty of back story 'It' will creep you the %$#! out if you've never read it.

Warner Bros. is preparing to release the 1990 two-episode television miniseries on DVD on October 4th, which featured the brilliant Tim Curry as Pennywise the Clown (pictured above) and which was quite well done in my humble opinion.

Funeral for 6 family members killed in Chicago in February

On a more serious note, nothing is creepier than the alarming headlines coming out of the city of Chicago revealing that there have been more than 400 people shot and 78 homicides in the Windy City during the month of August.

And sadly, there are still a few hours to go on this final day of the month so those shocking numbers are sure to rise before the night is through.

As the beleaguered African-American SNL cast member, comedienne and actress Leslie Jones has learned the hard way in recent weeks, there's some serious creep-factor happening on the internet as well.

The trolls who have mercilessly hounded her recently hacked her personal Website and turned it into a toxic platform of racist, denigrating hatred by not only posting her personal information like passwords, they also reached into the Jim Crow playbook and posted a photo of a gorilla meant to represent her and even posted nude photos of her as well.

Online harassment of her has gotten so bad the Department of Homeland Security has launched an investigation into the hack.

Back in July the unmistakable aroma of misogynistic hatred accompanied the tide of negative fanboy feedback leveled at the four female actresses tapped to play the title roles in Sony's remake of the classic 1984 comedy Ghostbusters.

SNL cast member Leslie Jones

To the degree that the highly anticipated release of the film on July 15th was overshadowed by media reports of the vicious Twitter campaign against Jones; a truly vile social media campaign which was engineered by unhinged conservative Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.

The disturbing mix of racist and misogynistic Tweets aimed at Jones by many of Yiannopoulos' 338,000 followers led her to close out her Twitter account in a highly publicized statement in which she leveled criticism against the social media site for not doing enough to put a stop to the trolling.



Her departure prompted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to release a public apology to Jones and on July 20th Yiannopoulos' Twitter account was finally shut down.

After all that drama, reviews of the Ghostbusters remake were unsurprisingly lukewarm; typified by critic David Rooney's July 10th review in The Hollywood Reporter in which he gave some praise to Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon for their performances, but savaged the writers who came up with the mediocre screenplay for what could have been a hysterical comedy.

Former Sony Pictures studio head Amy Pascal was the one who developed the Ghostbusters remake, but I'm not even sure she could have envisioned the level of resentment that would come from the notoriously prickly fanboy community over casting women in the original roles.

Andrew Breitbart

It's a pretty sad comment on the current state of media that the mainstreaming of the type of irrational, divisive, anger-fueled hysteria slung by conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter who influence the broader Republican message, now seems to have seeped into mainstream social media platforms.

(Where it's now Republican gospel.)

Online platforms where the anonymity of the internet inspires people to feel comfortable uncorking the racist and misogynist views that so clearly still simmer below the surface of this nation.

Breitbart.com creator Andrew Breitbart may have died in 2012, but four years later the kind of skewered, attack dog, sleazeball "reporting" he tried to peddle as journalism has metastasized like a cancerous growth to the point that Breitbart News now basically pumps out a slightly more polished version of white supremacist views recast with the more digestible moniker of "Alt-Right."

Little surprise that Donald Trump hired the former Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon to run his rambling train wreck of a presidential campaign.

Regardless, the creepy online hate campaign against Leslie Jones stoked by Milo Yiannopoulos is a reminder that the devisive tone of intolerance and bigotry that characterizes and permeates the current Republican party is not the exclusive domain of Donald Trump.

Ghostbusters Character Flap & Real Rocket Science

SNL writer/performer and Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones

With the American film industry under such increased pressure to expand quality on-screen roles and opportunities for both women and people of color in mainstream studio releases, one of the most hotly anticipated Hollywood films is the new Ghostbusters remake which updates the franchise with an all-female team of ghost hunters.

The new release stars an A-list roster of talented female comediennes including Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones (pictured left).

Jones is a comedienne with over 25 years experience on the comedy club and festival circuit.

She made headlines back in 2014 when she joined Saturday Night Live as a full-time cast member in the wake of  controversy over the lack of racial diversity on the show.

As you may recall, SNL writers famously made light of the lack of a black female cast member during a November 3, 2013 show when Scandal star Kerry Washington hosted and played so many black characters in sketches that writers penned a funny apology for making her work so hard and not having enough black cast members to play black female characters.

Black SNL cast-member Kennan Thompson also used humor to publicly express his getting tired of having to play all the black female characters (including Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey) in drag - it put pressure on creator Lorne Michaels and in May 2014 he announced Jones would join the cast full time in fall 2014.

Last week Jones was once again back in the media spotlight over her being cast, this time in the new Ghostbusters film scheduled to be released this July 15th.

Jones, McCarthy, Wiig & McKinnon as Ghostbusters 

Martin Reese wrote an interesting piece on his blog Martin's Theory of Relativity examining some of the recent social media feedback / reaction from films fans to the screenwriters choice to make Jones' African-American character a subway transit worker rather than a scientist; as the three other white female characters are.

Reese's blog always offers insightful commentary on topics related to comic books, graphic novels, television and film with science-fiction/fantasy/ horror themes.

For me personally, as a self-professed sci-fi and fantasy geek (and writer), Reese's observations strike a particular chord with me as he writes specifically from the perspective of the black American creator/ artist and fan base.

So I think his questioning why the filmmakers couldn't have made the lone person of color in the group of ghost chasers a scientist on equal terms with her white counterparts, is a valid observation.

Particularly given the complex range of factors related to why the computer industry and science in general struggles to attract black females as coders, programmers, mathematicians or scientists.

NASA mathematician Katherine Jones

One of the reasons is that American history has unfortunately tended to obscure the incredible contributions of black women like NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, one of the people responsible for calculating the flight path trajectory of astronaut Alan Shepherd's historic Mercury space mission in 1961 (America's first) and later the Apollo 11 moon mission amongst her many NASA space flight contributions.

In no way am I suggesting that Ghostbusters screenwriters Paul Feig and Kate Dipplo are responsible for using their comedy film as a platform to positively portray black female scientists.

But as Martin Reese observed in his blog, there was an opportunity to shape Leslie Jones' character differently in a way that might've inspired young girls of color to actually see an African-American female scientist in a major film release.

Hollywood has such an immense power to influence and shape culture through casting, roles and story lines.

I'm a huge fan of the 1983 Oscar-winning film The Right Stuff directed by Phillip Kaufman (based on Tom Wolfe's 1979 book of the same name) which chronicles the early development of America's space program, including Alan Shepherd's first space mission; how many young girls of color might have been influenced to study math or science if Katherine Johnson's contribution to the Mercury flight program had been even briefly mentioned or portrayed on screen?

Now I'm not saying the film was politically incorrect, not historically accurate, or in any way "racist" for not mentioning Katherine Johnson; but there are any number of white male scientists who were portrayed in the movie.

I'm simply making the observation that Alan Shepherd's historic flight was shown in great detail in the film.

Alan Shepherd's Mercury space flight May 5, 1961

The fact that a female African-American mathematician who went to college at age 15 played an important role in the planning of the suborbital parabolic 300-nautical-mile flight path, which ensured Shepherd's safe return back to earth, might have added a different dimension to the film.

It might have inspired a young black girl or boy somewhere to imagine mathematics as a vocation or career path.

But as reported by Huffington Post and other media outlets, Leslie Jones herself was quick to use her Twitter account to dismiss disgruntled fans' concerns by reminding people that Ghostbusters is only a fictional comedy film.

As she pointed out, none of the actresses who play the Ghostbusters are actual scientists, and as Jones observed about negative comments about her Ghostbusters character's job on Twitter:

"Why can't a regular person be a Ghostbuster. I'm confused. And why can't i be the one who plays them i am a performer. Just go see the movie!"

Those are obviously fair points, particularly given that none of the people on social media who were troubled by Jones' character's job have actually seen the movie yet.

Who knows? Perhaps a seeing an average working woman be a member of the Ghostbusters will be just as influential on a young impressionable mind.

But I can't help but think that as rare as it is to see a black woman playing a scientist in a Hollywood movie, Ghostbusters was a good opportunity to do that given the subject matter.

To be fair, I'll withhold my judgement until I see the film later this summer.

But if Melissa McCarthy plays a paranormal researcher, Kristen Wiig plays a physicist, and Kate McKinnon plays a nuclear engineer, I can't help but think there was room for the African-American character to be a scientist too.

As Katherine Johnson's remarkable NASA career reminds us, black women can be rocket scientists; and they certainly have The Right Stuff.