Day: April 6, 2009

This being a fairly dead day, I thought I’d pass along a story about working for the Del Monte bean and pea plant in Markesan, Wisconsin. Fresh out of Wilton high school, five or six of us drove out to America’s heartland to earn a little money and have an adventure. It was fairly miserable work all around. Back-breaking, tedious, soul-killing. We wound up working different jobs and different shifts — pushing cans, operating fork lifts, doing end-of-shift cleanup, hosing down freshly picked peas and beans. Migrants did the actual picking in the fields.

For a week or two some of us were working the 8 am to 5:00 pm shift. We’d clean up, eat and head out for a night of beer-drinking at a local tavern. We’d sometimes go to a place in Fond du Lac called the Brat Hut. And when we got back to the plant around midnight or so we got into a habit — for a couple of weeks, I mean — of taking out our rage at Del Monte.

A friend worked the evening shift atop a wooden chimney-like structure. His job was to clean freshly-picked beans and peas. Every night they were unloaded off trucks and sent up to his area on electrically-powered conveyor belts set at a 45 degree angle. The vegetables were then dropped into huge spinning cylindrical containers made of chicken wire. Our friend operated sprayers that bathed them in steaming-hot water.

The beans and peas were then dropped into tall metal chutes that fed them straight into a stream of open-topped, label-free cans about 20 or 25 feet below — constantly moving, spotless and gleaming. It would take no more than a second or two to fill up each can, maybe less. It went on like this all night, every night, and with a fairly deafening sound.

Each and every night for about two weeks, my beered-up friends and I would climb to the top of the tower, say hello to our friend, and piss right into the chutes that fed the beans and peas into the cans. We figured we hit maybe 200 to 250 cans each night, minimum.

We were anarchic, fuck-all middle-class kids, but we’d been raised by good people in well-to-do homes and weren’t psychopaths. If guys with our backgrounds had the rage to piss into cans of vegetables every night you can bet others have done this since. A lot. Pissing into prepared food containers is what powerless people do to give them the feeling that they’ve somehow evened up the score. Think of this the next time you buy Del Monte.

This story feeds, by the way, into a piece I ran four and a half years ago called Near-Death Trip. Here it is again:

Has a movie or more precisely a DVD ever gotten into your dreams and resuscitated an old nightmare?

This happened to me last weekend after watching James Marsh‘s Wisconsin Death Trip, which came out on DVD last Feburary. It’s an adaptation of Michael Lesy‘s cult book about an ugly-vibe plague that descended upon the Wisconsin town on Black River Falls in the 1890s. Economic depression and a diphtheria epidemic brought about all kinds of horrors — murders, insanity, infant deaths, etc.

Marsh does a decent job of bringing the book to life (so to speak), although I didn’t like the re-enacted footage as much as the old photographs.

A day or so after watching it, I had a nightmare about something that happened to me in Wisconsin when I was just out of high school. It’s funny how memories of this or that trauma sometimes tap you on the shoulder and say, “Hey.”

The scariest thing about this nightmare wasn’t the fact that myself and two friends came close to dying in a car crash that almost happened…but didn’t.

The freaky part was re-living that godawful horrifying feeling as I waited for the car we were in — a 1958 Chevrolet Impala convertible — to either flip over or slam into a tree or hit another car like a torpedo, since we were sliding sideways down the road at 70 or 80 mph.

It happened just outside Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. A classmate named Bill Butler was driving, another named Mike Dwyer was riding shotgun, and I was in the back seat. It was 1 am or so, and we were coming from a beer joint called the Brat Hut. We’d all had several pitchers of beer and were fairly stinko.

We were five or six miles out of town and heading south towards Markesan, where we had jobs (plus room and board) at the Del Monte Bean and Pea packing plant. To either side of us were flat, wide-open fields and country darkness.

Butler, a bit of an asshole back then, was going faster and faster. I looked at the speedometer and saw he was doing 90, 95, 100. I was about to say something when the road started to curve to the right, and then a lot more. Butler was driving way too fast to handle it and I was sure we were fucked, especially with nobody wearing seat belts and the top down and all.

But thanks to those magnificent Chevrolet engineers, Butler’s Impala didn’t roll over two or three times or slam into a tree or whatever. It just spun out from the rear and slid sideways about 200 feet or so. Sideways! I remember hitting the back seat in panic and looking up at the stars and hearing the sound of screeching tires and saying to myself, “You’re dead.”

The three of us just sat there after the car came to a halt. There was a huge cloud of burnt-rubber smoke hanging above and behind us. I remember somebody finally saying “wow.” (Dwyer, I think.) My heart began beating again after a few seconds.

Maybe some 17 year-old kid with issues similar to Butler’s will read this and think twice the next time he’s out with friends and starting to tromp on the gas.

Beware of any youngish mainstream director of “big inclusive” family comedies whose films have made mountains of money, who seems fairly satisfied with his life and his work, who giggles and guffaws when he watches his work, who graduated from Yale at age 20 and who seems to be “genuinely excited all the time,” and who believes that making good comedies are “about doing what you love, with people you love, for the fun of it…that’s the point.”

Okay, you needn’t beware, but I hate guys like this. Guys with lovely supportive wives and big homes and a couple of kids and a nice flagstone patio and several wise investments. I despise people who’ve figured out how to get rich (and make their corporate employers rich) by jiggering their movies just so and then covering them with kid-friendly family sauce. I hate pat. I hate nice easygoing movies that look a little bit too attractive. I hate carefully key-lighted hair.

And so I hate movies like Night at the Museum, Just Married, Cheaper by the Dozen,The Pink Panther, etc.

Films like this have their place. They entertain people who aren’t looking for much. They pay for other kinds of movies. And guys who crank them out are not Beelzebub. But they give me the creeps all the same.

I don’t really hate Night at the Museum. I saw it for the first time on a plane, and I was marginally entertained. I watched it without sound, though. It may have played better that way.

I was going to mention this yesterday, but I was driving around Long Beach Island and doing a Lebowski thing.

Few things in movies make an audience think “fake!” as much as fake-looking blood. By this I mean the wrong shade (the blood in the original Dirty Harry looks sort of orange-red) or blood with the right shade but with too much intensity. Most makeup people go with a kind of subdued fire-engine red with a little burgundy or brown thrown in.

I’m mentioning this because real life has recently taught me that real blood (the kind that bleeds from wounds) is significantly more intense than the movie kind. Within the past week or so I’ve seen two older guys lying on Manhattan streets with fairly major head cuts, and both times their blood has looked almost digitally intense.

Both times people were kneeling alongside and offering comfort and whatnot so the good samaritan stuff was covered. All I did both times was lean over for a good look and say to myself, “Wow, that blood color is striking. I mean, it almost looks fake. Except it isn’t.”

I’m off to a film set today with the understanding that I won’t write anything or post photos or anything along these lines. It’s basically “Moscow Rules” — a John LeCarre term that was used in Smiley’s People. Maybe I’ll try to do some writing while I’m uselessly hanging around on the set. Later tonight is a screening of Is Anybody There?, a relationship film with Michael Caine and Bill Milner (Son of Rambow), followed by a small party. I missed it at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival. Big Beach has a limited theatrical opening set for 4.17.

Reportedly whacked Fox News entertainment columnist Roger Friedman has been quoted by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Kilday as saying that “reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated“?

I took this to mean that (a) Friedman sees himself as a cat who always lands on his feet, and (b) that he plans to keep rolling with another job or a new self-launched website. It certainly doesn’t seem to contradict a statement put out late Saturday by News. Corp., wo wit: “We, along with 20th Century Fox Film Corp., have been a consistent leader in the fight against piracy and have zero tolerance for any action that encourages and promotes piracy. When we advised Fox News of the facts they took immediate action, removed the post, and promptly terminated Mr. Friedman.”

How can the owner of 20th Century Fox and Fox News put out a statement like that and then backpedal? That’s not an option. (Here’s the HE rundown on what happened last weekend. And another story that appeared on Saturday.)

So why isn’t Friedman saying something more particular? He’s handling this thing like Soviet apparatchiks dealing with reports of food shortages in the 1950s. If he hasn’t formulated his next move, so what? No doubt he’s huddling with this and that party, but where’s the upside in freezing out people who’ve reported what’s happened fairly and evenly?

In reporting about Tim Gray‘s de facto replacing of Peter Bart as Variety editor, Anne Thompson alluded to the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” line — “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Except she re-phrased it as “Good-bye to the old boss — hello to the new boss.” I think she had the Who’s meaning in mind anyway. There’s a difference between Gray and Bart — the former seen as being less prickly and more in tune with 21st Century currents — but not a huge one.

To tens of thousands in the entertainment industry, Variety is a comfort blanket. It’s a community gathering place, a church, an old friend, a reassurance of normality and stability. Not just an entertainment-industry Bible and paper-of-record but a kind of guidance counselor, preacher, accountant, community agent and next-door neighbor saying “hi” over the fence.

Reliability, constancy and general alertness aside, what I love about Variety is the secular mentality of it. A kind of members-and-followers-only attitude that the schmoes in Cape May, Bangor and Fayetteville aren’t supposed to understand. There’s a kind of beauty in that.

It’s going to have to maintain that 45,000 copies-per-day print presence that the older GenX and Boomer crowd value so highly. But of course the necessity of this will fade down the road.

David Poland wrote last night that Gray “will keep the machine running and running with less personality issues than Bart, but he will surely be managing someone else’s idea of the future. Gray is a good man and a very good company man…but I don’t see him as the visionary of the paper’s future either.” Probably not, but “the future” has never been all it’s been cracked up to be. It’s never been that hard to figure what’s coming ’round the bend and to make your move before it gets here. And even for the slowpokes life has a way of making everyone fall into line sooner or later. So strategy matters, obviously, but a paper don’t have nothin’ if it ain’t got that old soul. That’s all I’m saying.

So Gray’s the top dog but Bart isn’t out the door. He’ll continue to blog and knock out his weekly column as Variety‘s vp and editorial director.