"
Robin Williams resented having to work on films such as the second Mrs Doubtfire but felt compelled in order to keep money coming in, a close friend of the actor has told the Telegraph."
Williams, who had been working on four projects when he was believed to have taken his own life this week, was said to have been dreading making more films as they "brought out his demons".
According to
reports, Rush Limbaugh made allusions to Robin Williams money troubles, on yesterday's show, drawing some pushback from both the left and the right.
Limbaugh then refers to a news story that addressed Williams’s humiliation at having to take television roles and movie gigs that were beneath him to pay off his debts and costly divorces.
“He had it all, but he had nothing. He made everybody else laugh but was miserable inside. I mean, it fits a certain picture, or a certain image that the left has. Talk about low expectations and general happiness and so forth,” says Limbaugh.
Were I 'am now, in Florida, I can't get a good reception of the Rush Limbaugh show. On Monday, as a matter of fact, I downloaded the android app, but, when I went to join, I had a change of heart. I thought $6.95 a month was too much. I got to get a job first.
48 comments:
What is this place now, Drudge-lite?
As for that story - bullshit.
One thing is certain - we will never know why he did it, and perhaps Robin Williams himself didn't know.
So bullshit on that story, on Drudge for running it and you for repeating it.
And, you forgot the "b".
Am I pissed? Yes I am - my sorrow is changing into anger.
I'll get back to you once I reach acceptance - I think that will be after I drink a bottle of whiskey, snort a few lines, shoot a couple of speedballs and smoke a couple of fatties, all in honor of Robin's death. He would have wanted it that way.
There was a break in the anger?
A tribute to reaching our own Princess Diana moment:
"And it seems to me you lived your life
Like suspenders in the clearance bin
Never knowing who to cling to..."
Thanks for the spelling correction.
Well, unless you were referring to a deer, "hart" should be "heart".
Occasionally, I do check out what's happening at TOP.
The host and her clever husband have just about conceded their comments thread entirely to that raving racist black SOB.
That SOB is, of course, a "nice guy" and "clever performance artist."
Mr. TOP assured me of that.
Lem - download the free I Heart Radio app. Rush is on many of the stations on that app.
Thanks Hazman.
I don't look for deeper meaning in the passing of celebrities.
Despite what the media has been saying, Williams' career was on a pretty dramatic downslide from what he was accustomed to.
I imagine that his depression and suicide can be explained by that.
There is an hour podcast with Robin Williams where he lets on, in not so definitive terms, that after being cut open via heart surgery, the comedy, his comedy was not the same.
Maybe he came to the conclusion that to get that comedic magic back, so he could make the money, he would end up succumbing to the booze and the coke again.
The interview is very revealing, one comic to another. I highly recommend it for RWilliams fans.
At one point Williams references the story of the suicide of a comic who set himself on fire.
Williams follows it by doing a bit on it.
Didn't realize Williams had open heart surgery.
I know several men who underwent same. Changed everything about their outlook on life.
There's more than one reason why the British style of acting encourages a healthy distance between self and character.
In the podcast Williams also talked about the instant offence machine; the internet with people blowing jokes out of proportion.
Williams had the foreign minister of Australia and some Alabama politician going at it over a poorly interpreted joke he said on Letterman.
He was funny in his recent show. The trouble was they had really unfunny supporting cast and bad writing. The times Robin Williams was set loose to do his thing, he was great.
The trouble was that there was "show by committee" in every other respect, with stock Hollywood sitcom characters and situations, rather than good writing. I really tried to like the show, but there wasn't enough of him featured to put up with the rest of it.
One of his ex-wives got $50,000 a week for life. What, she couldn't go out and do waitressing?
Here's the thing gang: you're either dying of boredom or you're terrified. And everyone has to get used to that state of affairs. Even big hollywood muckamucks. Naps help.
I'm in overdrive today. Calm down. Calm down.
Wasn't it Lem who used to post like ten posts in a row over at TOP. Usually late night or early morning posts. Unanswered. Or was that someone else?
That was me.
Didn't realize Williams had open heart surgery.
I didn't either. And apparently that can cause depression, both short and long term.
Sounds like the guy had a triple-whammy going on: depressed by nature, addiction, and depressed due to heart surgery. Maybe the big surprise is how long he held on.
From the Open Heart Blog at ChicagoNow:
I remember Williams appearing on Letterman, comparing notes with Dave about their operations. They were members of “The Brotherhood of the Zipper Chests,” he joked, because of the ten-inch scar that now ran down the middle of both their chests. Everything was light, fun. Although when Dave asks Robin how he’s feeling physically and mentally, Williams replies: “Mentally, that’s the big question.”
Williams devotes a ten-minute segment in an HBO special to his procedure. He cracks jokes about pig valves versus horse valves and admits to his audience, in passing, how he breaks into uncontrollable crying fits. “I thought instead of a valve,” his act goes, “they gave me a tiny vagina.”
ST at 2:54. Larry McMurtry had open heart surgery and wrote about the aftermath. He really has never recovered from it. It's as though he suffered a permanent blow. I think mentally as well as physically there's a loss of vitality.
In the trailer for the movie Insomnia (2002) Williams delivers the line...
"Don't worry Will, you can sleep when you are dead."
A couple of movies came out that year where he played against type. Insomnia and One Hour Photo.
Obviously, they didn't do as well as the ones where he had to be funny.
Insomnia trailer youtube comments...
Dainius G 1 year ago
seriously, Robin Williams as a villain?
TheLeeman32 1 year ago
When Robin Williams showed up, I had to laugh really, really hard.
The experiment didn't work.
It's very amusing to me Paddy that you had the opposite reaction the "The Crazy One" that I had when I heard Robin Williams was in a sitcom. I thought he would dominate it with his improv bullshit and it would be unwatchable. This show seemed to integrate his talents seamlessly since it was set in an advertising agency where they had to pitch ideas and get all manic to make the sale. So when he spun off like a deranged top it had a purpose. The other stock characters were simply sitcom tropes. But the interaction between them seemed warm and they seemed believable friends where in some sitcoms you know that the supposed friends would never hang out with each other.
Unfortunately I followed a link in the story to the New York Times. They stated that he was very upset at the cancellation of this series. They also said he committed suicide because he was a middle aged white man.
Personally I blame Bush.
I was creeped out by Insomnia. I rented it to see Pacino ham it up in Alaska ("I'm in the dark, here. Hoooah.") but Robin Williams's child molester/killer character held me. Great performance. Now I have to see this One Hour Photo.
I saw him explain how he viewed his surgery - said "They open you up, it's like your heart is exposed. Aw, a kitten - aw" then he starts crying.
Well duh, your heart was exposed. Then it wasn't. You have been given another chance at life. A rebirth.
How could I know such things? Because it happened to me 9 years ago. I was very emotional for a time afterwards. But one hardens one's heart and keeps on keeping on.
So I chose to look at my surgery as an opportunity to accomplish things I had not, previously, to work as hard as possible and to be alive, today, because I have been given a gift.
Clearly, not everyone takes it that way. Sure, some things are lost - that's life, but if one focuses on what has been gained, you can keep on moving forward.
And for me, anyway, I am willing to fight for my life, not just lie down and give up.
We can talk about financial motivations for living or dying, but if money can fix your problems, then they aren't real problems, right?
I'll send you some money, my friend.
Sixty is right when he says that heart surgery makes you think about life and reevaluate how you are living it. What I took from it was that I had to clean up act and eat healthy and try to not load on the stress. One way we add stress to our lives is to try to be something we are not. So I just try to be more of myself....to act as I am genetically, psychologically and emotionally hard wired to be.
Unfortunately it means I have to be even more of an asshole. But waddayagonnado?
I wouldn't refuse money. Even from an enemy.
Or should that be especially from an enemy?
Trooper, don't get me wrong, I liked the idea of it. It seemed a great balance as an idea.
And the one guy character who would riff with Williams, was good.
But the follow through was painful. I wanted to like it but at the end the parts I laughed at were the parts where Williams was featured. The rest of the sitcom seemed far too much like a commercial that was using sitcom tropes to sell something else.
The Michael J Fox show had the same problem.
The Seth Green/Giovanni Ribisi show Dads seemed like it was only made to serve as some tax shelter, intentionally horrible to cover assets.
Thanks AllenS.
Man, this really hit people right where they live, didn't it?
Sometimes it seems the rational way to go. You see your present as pure crap and you see your future even crappier. Supporting 2 ex wives expensively based on present earnings and a family, forced into a future of doing things you do not want to do. Locked into a kind of slavery. Check out. It is a rational decision, made by an apparent manic/depressive, but rational nonetheless, and after a good deal of rational though, no doubt.
Think of this next time your impulse is to glom onto someone -- what you are doing to them, how you might be killing them despite appearances to the contrary. Don't be so facile in attributing to them strength they might not possess.
As to the drunks who have more courage facing life; aren't they also knowingly killing themselves? In slow motion? And isn't that true for all like self-destructive behavior, smoking, drugs, risky behavior, driving race cars, motorcycles, engaging in purposefully dangerous things, hang gliding for one, for the rush of it, etc.?
[The Giver: "When people have the freedom to choose, they choose wrong."]
Including choosing adjectives where adverbs belong.
Think differently
Some kids mistook this suicide and thought that Robbie Williams had died. Singer/songwriter/actor, member of pop group Take That, and solo artist. Singer of "Angels" They were tweeting "He's wiv da angels now"
Some comedians do have real courage. Like her or not, Joan Rivers is such. I just saw some of her earlier work. Booooor-ring. On Ed Sullivan when she was young and un-remade by surgery, she talks about differences between men and women aging -- a 80 year old unmarried man, "playboy", an unwed 80 year old woman "spinster." Ha ha ha ha NOT.
The older she became, the more tragedy she endured, the rougher her life, the rougher her edge, the more hilarious her work.
She says something about deafness or hard of hearing. It's funny. Somebody in the audience takes umbrage and yells something sanctimonious. His mother became deaf. Not funny, says he. She snaps back something about getting over himself. To save her routine, but she's secretly mortified. Then responds in interview immediately after, her own mother became hard of hearing. If you cannot acknowledge things and deal with them and poke fun at them back, then we're lost. Then there can be no humor.
I can never forget that blond woman I mentioned with the mechanical arm and opposite leg. Laughing like hell when I said the electric forklift hurt my toe so badly the pain nearly caused me to pass out. She was right there when it happened. She found that hysterical. There was a woman who faced a rough life. Not necessarily fought, but faced her challenges. Did deal with depression. Worked when she didn't have to. She thought my pain was funny. No apologies for laughing at me either. That was another thing she faced straight on, her own innate cruelty at laughing.
It was funny but the relationship Williams had with Buffy in that show sort of rang true. He talked about his substance abuse on the show and I think he was talking to his own daughter in some of his monologues.
Some comedians can continue to do it for a long time, like Chip said, Joan Rivers, there is also Bill Cosby and what's his name that died? seven words you cant say on TV George Carlin.
Carlin had heart surgery in 82. He went on to have a long career after that.
There goes my theory.
That blob can't get you good reception for his show in Florida? I thought that was where his high holiness was based out of. What a cheapie. Roll some of those millions into local affiliate upgrades, dude.
I think Carlin had an angioplasty procedure done, not major heart surgery.
Thanks Lydia for the informative and entertaining reading.
It could be old radio I have.
But thanks to M.H. i wont have any problems picking up Rush.
The quote from "The Giver", brought this, which is long but works in part with what is being expressed:
Ms. Lowry published her first children's novel in 1977, having written it at the behest of an editor who had spotted one of her adult short stories in a magazine. She had divorced her husband around the same time and needed to find a way to support herself. "Suddenly this book was published, and I realized that it was perhaps a way I could make a living," she says. "So I sat down to write a second one. And I began to hear from the readers and began to perceive what I should have known, having been a young person who read, that at that age level books really, really change kids. They affect them profoundly."
The creative impetus behind "The Giver," the most successful of Ms. Lowry's books, came during a difficult period in her life. "My parents were both alive but very old," she recalls, "and my mother was in a nursing home. She was blind and on oxygen. And my father . . . was aging and clearly could no longer manage on his own."
Ms. Lowry would regularly visit her parents' nursing home. "On one particular visit," she recalls, "I went to see my mom first. Her mind was intact, and she always loved to talk about the past. And she'd be lying there in this hospital bed with this oxygen in her nose, but she wanted to reminisce and tell anecdotes from the past. And she often talked about my sister, who was three years older than me. My sister had died young. And so my mother was recalling things that were very sad but were an important part of her past."
Her father was a different case. "I then went as I always did to visit my dad," Ms. Lowry says, "and I was turning the pages of a photograph album with him when I realized that he had forgotten my sister. There were pictures of the two little girls, and he said, 'Oh, there's your sister, but I can't remember her name.' And I told him her name. I said, 'Her name was Helen, dad, she was named for her grandmother.' And then he asked, 'Whatever happened to her?' And I had to tell him about her death. It had happened years before, but to him it was as if it had just happened. And then it happened again, turning the page—another picture of the two girls. And he said again, 'There's Helen—what happened to her?'"
Her writer's mind went to work: "When I was driving back to the airport that day I began to think about that, the way a writer does: Well, what if you could manipulate human memory, so that people didn't have to remember bad stuff that had ever happened? Wouldn't that be nice—and comfortable? By the time I got home, I had formulated the beginning of a book."
The totalitarianism of "The Giver's" community, in other words, isn't the work of a vicious ruling elite bent on exercising power for its own sake; it's the product of perfectly good intentions. Who wouldn't want to forget the death of a young child?
"That's the irony of it," Ms. Lowry says. "In talking to people about censorship, and the fact that there've been attempts to censor this book . . . the people who bring the challenges, they do so with the best of intentions. They really want to protect their children. I have children. I have grandchildren. I would love to protect them from everything as well.
"But it's the wrong way of going about it. The best way to prepare them for the world that they face is to present what the possibilities are and to let them be scared of what might happen." She adds: "I think that's really what literature does in every realm. You rehearse your life by reading about what happens to other people." Sohrab Ahmari, WSJournal
In the face of celebrity tragedy, I try to be as superficial and uncaring as possible. Some too soon thoughts about Robin Williams: Everyone is saying nice things about him. Even Mother Theresa had a Christopher Hitchens, but, to date, not a single unkind word has been said about Robin Williams. He may very well have been a fine man, but no addict goes through wives, coke binges and rehab stays and damages only himself in the process.....I'm not knocking his grand talent, but I get the sense that many people are mourning a large shadow that a much smaller man cast upon the wall.......I deeply mourned the Kennedy brothers. Their deaths affected me in a lot of ways. It turned out that the men I mourned were not the men who died. The Kennedy brothers were good men and deserved a longer life, but they were not the men people ought them to be.
He killed a beloved artist, husband and father, and destroyed a family. Lots of people are depressed and virtually all of them deal with it with a fraction of his resources and support without resorting to suicide. I do not excuse him because he was depressed. Nobody here excused the jerks who shot up schools or theaters because they had struggles and issues. And very few sympathise with less attractive souls who choose suicide. You don't hurt people just because you hurt inside, and you don't get a pass because you are famous, funny or rich. We should sympathise with depression, but not this way of handling it. Those who kill often feel justified because our culture does this coddling dance with some people's personal struggles especially when they act out. Maybe we should stop that. How many people have offed themselves because they think - rightly so - that finally someone will "understand them". I suggest we start telling them to stop it, because we don't sympathise destroying lives for any reason, let alone a selfish one.
I don't think anyone has shown sympathy for what he did. What we sympathize with is the profound suffering he must have experienced to have gotten to that place where he put a belt around his neck and destroyed himself.
And I think we might also be feeling it even more because he gave us joy, and, irrationally, we're sort of thinking where were we when he needed help.
Where were we?
We were buying his work, giving him accolades and awards. His family was loving him and supporting him. He had many wonderful people as friends. He had therapists and counselors, but nobody else can do the job of a man controlling himself, of taking responsibility for his most basic duty to those he loves - not hurting them.
I did use the word "irrationally".
Yes you did, and I'm just explaining why you're right about that.
I think the whole "poor Robin" thing is irrational and a double standard. Usually there is mostly disdain for someone who hurts people or commits suicide just because he's unhappy, depressed, or delusional, especially around here. Suddenly, we're all very understanding and can relate.
Baggy's suicide help line - how may we help you?
Caller: Uh, I'm really down and thinking of hanging myself with my belt...
BSHL: At least get one that matches your shoes, you putz. Thank you, and please call again.
My advice would be:
Read
watch tv
cook something
play an instrument
take a shower
do your nails
masturbate
draw
build a birdhouse
do whatever
But absolutely make sure you go to sleep (without a bottle of pills)
Repeat
Or if you don't give a fuck about anyone or anything, then kill yourself, but don't make a mess.
Is there some better advice?
Nope, we agree on that, but we aren't depressed to the point of wanting to commit suicide.
Naps and sleeping fix a myriad of ills. Problems arise when one cannot sleep. So, while the advice is sound, there are cases where it can't be applied.
I have no idea what was going on with Robin Williams, I am merely stating what I have experienced.
These days I work until I am exhausted - hard physical labor is a good thing, at least for me.
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