Winnipeg Free Press - October 29
Gawker Exclusive: I Helped Richard Heene Plan a Balloon Hoax
IN case you aren’t totally sick of reading about the Balloon Boy and his family, Gawker has obtained information from 25-year-old researcher Robert Thomas on how he helped Falcon’s dad Richard Heene come up with a plan that would help promote a reality show he was developing. “This will be the most significant UFO-related news event to take place since the Roswell Crash of 1947, and the result will be a dramatic increase in local and national awareness about The Heene Family, our Reality Series, as well as the UFO Phenomenon in general,” wrote Heene, an amateur scientist, in an email exchange with Thomas as they worked on ideas for the show that Heene was obsessed with selling to any network that would take it. Heene wanted to parlay exposure from his family’s appearance on ABC’s Wife Swap into his own reality show in the hopes he could make some quick cash so he could build a bunker and prepare for the end of the world which he believed was coming in 2012. Too bad little Falcon couldn’t keep a secret. I have a funny feeling this isn’t the last we are going to hear about the Heene family. I bet Jon Gosselin is happy Falcon spilled the beans — it has taken some of the media’s attention away from his split with Kate, his social life and the Octomom’s apparent crush on him.
FlashForward: The Plot Thins
AIRING on Thursday nights on ABC, FlashForward had the most intriguing plot of the fall TV season. Loosely based on the science-fiction novel by Robert J. Sawyer, FlashForward started out with a bang, but has been treading water ever since. Centring around a worldwide event in which most people on the planet lost consciousness for just over two minutes and saw a flash of their future six months down the road, it was hard not to get drawn to the show. But all that promise seems to have been wasted, as the show slowly struggles to move the plot forward. “Fantasy plots require fantastic details, but the show, rolling steadily downhill from a compelling premise, is utterly casual about the particulars of its speculative time-tripping and post-catastrophe atmospherics,” Troy Patterson wrote on Slate.com. “Where it should be riddling, it is merely opaque. Where it should be eerie, it is contentedly bland. In the gentle acoustic-guitar moments, I hear the sounds of artistic compromise.”
Scene It? Online
ONLINE games and quizzes are nothing new. If you are a fan of the DVD board game Scene It? or even if you have never played it, this new online version of the popular entertainment trivia game can easily become your number-one time-waster on the web. Tough enough that you feel challenged, easy enough that you won’t feel frustrated, Scene It? lets you challenge your friends, create online personas and move up the Hollywood status ladder. While this new online version will draw new fans to the game, if Scene It? really wants to dominate online, they need to create a Facebook application and integrate the game directly into social media networks.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 29, 2009 E3
