User talk:Peterstrempel/Baldwin-draft

Team America
I played around with your draft a bit; the following is what I ended up with so far (quitting for the night). I don't present this as the "right" way (especially reference formats – except "retrieved" is pretty standard instead of "accessed" – just a first pass at how I would do it. If you like anything, that's fine; if you don't, that's OK too, Fat&amp;Happy (talk) 07:15, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

Baldwin's activism was lampooned in the 2004 political satire Team America: World Police, a film featuring marionette puppets. He is portrayed as a spokesman for the Film Actor's Guild (FAG), representing "the activist liberal Hollywood crowd", according to the film's co-director Matt Stone. Stone explained: " ... we wanted to have Alec Baldwin as kind of like Darth Vader, with acting being the force you could use for good or evil". Slate's David Edelstein suggested the effect was to ridicule "left-wing peacenik anticorporate sanctimoniousness". Baldwin himself found the film funny, being quoted as saying he thought it was "hysterical". According to Stone, when Baldwin first heard about the film being made, he wanted to dub his own voice, but "We said 'Thanks, but that's ok.


 * An elegant edit that reads better than my version. I have three observations:


 * Baldwin did indeed use the word 'hysterical', but I chose his mention of 'funny' because it is less ambiguous. 'Hysterical', taken out of the context of the entire quote, might be interpreted to imply a hysterical overreaction, particularly when considered by English-speakers outside North America, who might regard 'hilarious' as more common epithet for funny than 'hysterical'.
 * That Baldwin 'had been turned down' implies a neutral causality that doesn't exist in the Stone quote. He was specific about: 'We said "Thanks, but that's ok".'  Taken in the context of the whole interview, the 'we' was Parker and Stone, not an anonymous agency, and the decision not to cast Baldwin was precisely that rather than, say, the existence of a better talent, remuneration considerations, etc.  In choosing my wording I decided that readers were entitled to the extra information because it is factual and reveals auteur intention.  Paradoxically, in being neutral about the rejection of Baldwin, the article might raise the legitimate question of why he was rejected, and why that information isn't available.
 * My use of the word 'accessed' was motivated because it implies general access to the information, whereas 'retrieve' could imply the 'recovery' or 're-acquisition' of something proprietary and/or concealed or lost. I'm not, however, particularly wedded to 'accessed', since the reference itself isn't changed by the reference to it.


 * Thanks for the valuable work and guidance. Hope to hear from you again soon.


 * --Peter S Strempel (talk) 10:15, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I had some qualms about "hysterical" for the reason you mention, but preferred it to "funny" because the latter can imply reserved approval "(shrug) Meh. It was funny, I guess." whereas "hysterical", for a comedy, is a much more unreserved compliment.
 * Understood. The main reason for the phrasing there was that, since Trey Parker had not been quoted anywhere earlier, I was trying to avoid bringing him in for a cameo appearance at the end.
 * Point. But the common usage for web pages on Wikipedia is "retrieved". Interestingly enough, the parameter which generates the phrase in the various templates to generate citations is "accessdate=". Go figure.
 * I know it's considered poor form, or a breach of etiquette, or some such thing, to modify one's earlier comments on a talk page, but I went ahead and tweaked the draft above a bit since it's a work in progress, and those miserable awful strike-thru formats diminish readability (IMO). In addition to copy edits based on your comments, I fixed a couple of errors I made in the ref formats in the middle of the night last night. I also converted the first ref to use the Cite news template. I see you've been around a while, but not made many edits. After I got used to them, I found the templates much more convenient to use. (Of course, I set up an Excel worksheet to play fill-in-the-blanks, which helps.) Note that in the example above, the parameters "|separator=,|postscript=|" are purely my personally preferred options for format control.


 * Two minor points/questions. I barely skimmed the references, since I was concerned with editing, not content, but I get the impression from the UGO interview that "Film Actors Guild (FAG)" may be a real organization, not purely the pun implied. Did I misinterpret something? And I wonder if "creator" might not be a better word than "producer", indication as it does artistic involvement rather than just a bankroll. Oh, and a third; isn't "marionette puppets" somewhat redundant? I left it only because I wasn't sure if "marionettes" alone was technically accurate.


 * Later. Fat&amp;Happy (talk) 19:05, 5 March 2011 (UTC)


 * Your latest version looks good to me. Etiquette be damned if it interferes with progress or results.  The only reason I ever got involved with the Baldwin page was because it took me some time to track down the background to Baldwin's appearance in Team America (Wikipedia was my first point of contact, and the detail was missing), and I thought it appropriate to share the results of my idle research, motivated entirely by personal curiosity.  In other words, I don't want to get too caught up in ego-driven 'proprietarism', and am therefore grateful for the guidance, though I will always make up my own mind about what seems appropriate.


 * I could find no mention of FAG anywhere else. I believe it's a satirical dig at the Screen Actors' Guild (SAG, not a bad acronym in itself).  I had assumed that Parker and Stone invented FAG for the acronym, which is why I included it in parentheses.


 * What's next? Will you place the copy in the article?  Thanks again for time and effort.
 * --Peter S Strempel (talk) 05:14, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
 * OK, never mind on the FAG thing; I just looked at the interview again, a bit more awake this time,and saw my mistake. The quote "I know that most of the actors that we use in the Film Actors Guild are going to think it's funny..." misled me to think it may have been made outside the U.S., and the local equivalent of SAG was the Film Actors Guild. Oh, well.
 * I'm going to try to get to bed a bit earlier than last night, so if you want to go ahead with the add, that's fine since you did all the development work. If you do, I still recommend deleting " puppet" and changing "director" to "creator". If you don't get to it for some reason, I'll grab it tomorrow, standardize the refs (either all templates,if I'm feeling ambitious, or all free-form if I'm not) and put it in chrono order in the political views section (unless you had another place in mind?). Fat&amp;Happy (talk) 05:54, 6 March 2011 (UTC)