We've mentioned previously that we have an international audience. Now EuroSeek™ has made it official. After only being listed with Euroseek™ for three months,
As we noted on our main page, Christopher Masterson came in first (by one vote!) over his brother Danny as your favorite star here, but we received so many write-ins for Ben Affleck, Ryan Phillippe and others that we had to re-set the survey counter to include them. If you want to vote for for yourfavorite actor here, go to the bottom of this page and click on the plea to the Muse to take you "Home" (ours, not yours!), then scroll down to the survey panel and recast your vote.
Note: 6 JULY 1999: Ben Affleck has slipped to a weak fourth place as the most popular star on our web site, preceded by Ryan Phillippe and by Ben Silverstone, who are jockeying for second and third place. We thought adding all of these major league movie stars would seriously affect the first place position, but with an astonishing 23% of the vote, Christopher Masterson has a commanding lead now. Either people really, really, got off on hearing Christopher sing with lungs filled with helium in My Best Friend's Wedding, and really liked Matthew Modine's short film Ecce Pirate, which stars Christopher and which the Sundance Channel recently replayed at our request . . . or SOMEONE out there has no life and just waits patiently to cast a vote a day for Christopher. . . . . Ya know . . . we've always wondered why we never hear from him; maybe he's glued to his computer waiting for the software to let him vote for himself again! Surprisingly, Christopher's enormously popular brother Danny (Steve Hyde on "That '70s Show") is in a very weak fifth position in this survey.
If you saw the MTV awards and were wondering who that guy was who was notMatt Damon, but whom Ben kissed so passionately in front of millions of people, it was Kevin Smith, Ben's good buddy and the director of Matt and Ben's movies Chasing Amy and the upcoming film Dogma.
OKAY, AFFLECK FANS, LISTEN UP: we are an unofficial site and we don't get paid anything by either Ben or Casey or any of their "people," nor do we get paid by any of the movie studios or television networks whose films and shows we promote. We run our website as a FREE public service for you, our visitors, and we hope to keep things that way. Unfortunately, that means that we cannot afford to buy a new scanner for transparencies (i.e., those stacks of wonderful COLOR pictures which we have piled up here, gathering dust) or a new video card to grab frames of your fave from movies or television shows, or a new high-speed modem so that we can update our web site constantly, instead of every other week or so, etc., etc.
In order to buy all of that neat hardware so that we can upgrade our page, we have caved in and gone commercial. That's right, folks, after almost two-and-a-half years without ANY ads on our web page, we have placed a few selected advertisements here and there within the actual text of our pages. These, unlike those annoying "pop-up" advertisements, are selected by us because we think that they offer goods and services of interest to you. If you "click through" to the businesses which we advertise (and especially if you BUY something), THEY will pay us -- not much, but we hope that if enough of you click through (and hopefully shop online) we will earn enough to buy the equipment that we want in order to upgrade these pages, add more color pics, video and audio clips, etc. If you like our web site, please patronize the businesses which we advertise here so that we can improve our pages.
Remember, the ads which actually appear in the text of our pages are placed there by us, not by Geocities or anyone else, and we have selected which ads go where as part of our own twisted design aesthetics. Clicking through to those ads helps us to help keep you informed of your favorite performers and the movies, plays, and television shows in which they appear. Please patronize these advertisers. (Or else send us lots and lots of money so that we don't need to accept advertisements.)
We recently recruited helpers from California to Québec to Kensington to Queensland (or maybe it was New South Wales) and took out a substantial loan to make some major hardware upgrades for our real work and in part so that we could keep upgrading this site (you may have some noticed some pages being updated several times a day!).
What did we ask in return? That you sign nice notes in our Guestbook (and thank you to the 300+ people who have) and that you click through to the advertisers whom we feature here so that we could earn enough money for this site to pay for itself.
Having earned less than US $5.00 because so few of you "clicked through" to our advertisers (and only one of you actually BOUGHT anything, we note), now that we have hit the Yahoo/Geocities 11 Megabyte wall, we have been faced with a decision: dig deeper into our pockets and lease more web space from Yahoo/Geocities, or add just enough files to take us to the 11 Megabyte limit and then stop updating this page.
(We COULD, of course, move everything lock, stock, and barrel to Fortune City and gain an extra nine megabytes of disk space, but our attitude is: if you don't care, why should we? We could also move some of our larger files to other servers, but that would make our page load even more slowly than it already does, and we have no intention of contributing to "the heat death of the universe.")
This is The Jaundiced Eye PRODUCTIONS Home Page -- we actually use our computers and video equipment and cameras to MAKE things, believe it or not -- and while this place has been "a hoot and a holler" to run, if you visitors don't care enough about it to let it even pay for its own upkeep, why should we divert our valuable time and resources from PAYING work to keep upgrading this site?
SO, The Muse With the Jaundiced Eye HERSELF has decreed that while His Nibs, The Grand Panjandrum, can finish filling up the 11 Megabytes of web space we have (probably for The Thirteenth Floor review, a final update to our "That '70s Show" page, Lion's Gate's Christian Bale flick, Metroland, and possibly something on Touchstone's upcoming The Thirteenth Warrior (which is only natural, since it is based upon Beowulf, and The Grand Panjandrum likes alliteration, with which Beowulf is fantastically and fulsomely filled), there will be no additional updates after the 11 Megabytes of server space is filled up. Decreasing the sizes of some of our larger photographs (which has already begun here on Ben and Casey Affleck's fan page), will gain us a little more space, and we may do some occasional updates after that, but, by and large people:
So that our loyal visitors are not left totally high and dry, we have added links on our main page to several other sites on the Internet which also devote themselves to pictures, at least, of young actors, and one or two have mirror sites for young actresses as well, for you fans of Jennifer Tilly, Reese Witherspoon, etc.
We started this little page almost two years ago, and, after all of that time Ben has finally set up an official web site. We highly recommend it . . . despite the fact that they have not bothered to create a link to OUR page. (Hint, HINT, Derek!)
The American Film Market finally being over, we have something resembling a review of Ben and Casey's film 200 Cigarettes posted. Unfortunately, we never received any pictures of Ben as the Bartender, but we do have a picture of Casey with Gaby Hoffman, Christina Ricci, and Guillermo Diaz.
Ben has recently appeared on "Politically Incorrect," being very funny and insightful, and did a two-part interview for ABC's morning show. (Hmmm. . . . "Politically Incorrect" is on ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, and most of Ben's recent movies have been released by Miramax and Dimension, which are also owned by The Mouse. Maybe there really is something behind the title of Ben's first directorial effort!) The official ben Affleck web site, by the way, has a RealMovie recording of all of the parts of the show with Ben.
Ben isn't totally owned by Disney, however, since Paramount released 200 Cigarettes and Dreamworks SKG is releasing Forces of Nature, apropos of which we must issue this warning: as our reviewer has noted for Ben's film Phantoms, when a studio won't send out press kits to reviewers, "it usually means that there is something seriously wrong with the picture and the studio knows it." As of 18 March, we haven't seen a press kit for Forces of Nature, which opens on 19 March. Let the ticket buyer beware. . . .
Many (many!) of you have thanked us for the pictures of Ben Affleck which we have loaded here, but there is something which WE are looking for: as we mention on our Esteban Powell page, we have no pix of Ben in Dazed and Confused with the Freshmen. If anyone can supply us with any, we would be very grateful.
We refer you to the IMDb listing for 200 Cigarettes which stars Ben and Casey. You know that we hate the title, but someone here has seen it and signed a confidentiality agreement, so we can't tell you anything about it! We can, however, refer you to what's already on the 'net. We're suggesting that you look up information on the film, but we're not commenting on it. Get it? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more. . . . (15 December 1998: here's what we can tell you: 200 Cigarettes has been finished; the producers haven't selected a distributor for it yet; they are hoping for a release date in the Spring of 1999; we may get to see it before it opens and give you the dirt on it.)
Kirk Honeycutt has announced in The Hollywood Reporter that Ben is in discussions with Universal to do a rewrite of the script for their upcoming project Project Zero. There is a part in the film that Ben might play, but he, unlike his brother Casey is not "committed" yet.
Ben has commitments to do screenplays for Castle Rock Entertainment and, of course, Miramax, which has been "beddy, beddy good" to the Affleck brothers.
Thom Geier has reported in The Hollywood Reporter that Casey Affleck, Luke Wilson and Heather Graham will be starring in Miramax's film Committed, about a woman whose husband leaves her in order to "find himself." She then goes across the country trying to find him, too! Casey plays the woman's brother; Wilson and Graham are the separated husband and wife. The movie is filming in Texas; we don't know how it will affect Casey's schooling.
Please check out our review of Chasing Amy and an interview with Ben about the film. (Of course, Ben's views are totally askew!)
Ben having finally obtained a job with a real pay check, he has made Armageddon, right on the heels of Phantoms. Ben must be doing well to be able to afford to play in such bad films. Oh well, at least he can now afford to do nothing but independent, art house films for the rest of his life. . . (Of course, after we posted this nasty little jibe, Ben immediately went on to do Shakespeare in Love, and 200 Cigarettes, which . . . oh, sorry, we can't tell you any more about that one!)
Chasing trivia: For the benefit of you skeptics who NEVER believe us when we say that we know who is going to succeed in Hollywood, we refer you (again) to our review of (early) 1997's Chasing Amy. See? We were fans of Ben back when he was still "C. T. Granville" to most people (as he always, to some degree, will be for us). Just to prove it, here's a link to a picture of Ben in London; we know who he was calling; do you? Answer below.
Confidential message to Benjamin: thanks for the autographed photos you sent following up the letter to your accountant last year. They arrived a few hours before the '98 Oscar-cast. The pic signed as "C. T. Granville" won't be going up on the wall with the Nobel Prize winners, as expected, though -- it was bumped by the first periodic table showing Seaborgium as an element . . . autographed by Glenn T. Seaborg; rank hath its privleges. Instead, that pic is hanging on the wall with the Academy Award® winners, just above the jointly autographed photo of Bette Davis and her double from Dead Ringer. Lawdy, boy, do you still remember back to when people had to contact you through your accountant because you were considered such a nobody?! BTW, tell yer Mum her mail forwarding has expired.
(Sad follow-up to the above: Glenn Seaborg recently died of natural causes. Anyone who didn't get his autograph before is not likely to get one in the future!)
O Muse With the Jaundiced Eye, take me home!
