The Wrap‘s Sharon Waxmanreported last night that William Morris toppers Jim Wiatt and Dave Wirtschafter announced to staffers Thursday morning that the rumors about an Endeavor merger were true.
“They said they were sorry they had not been more communicative, and that they still don’t know if it’s going to happen,” Waxman writes, quoting “[a] person who spoke to someone who’d been in the room. “It was idiotic not to say anything before now.”
Waxman is understandably perturbed because, as she writes, “I recently wrote that I believed that a merger wasn’t in the offing. It’s what I had been told by senior sources on each side, despite the acknowledgement that talks have proceeded on and off for the past many months. A senior person at one of the two agencies told me that he knew of the talks, but didn’t think it would be completed because the culture of the two agencies were so very different.
“A merger is still not guaranteed” and yet “talks are underway. Joe Ravitch of Goldman Sachs is apparently representing Endeavor, and Ron Olson of Munger Tolles is apparently representing William Morris.
“‘I know enough only to believe that they would really like this to happen,’ said one individual who will be affected by the merger. ‘I’ve no clue about the Ari (Emanuel) of it all, or Patrick (Whitesell) or Adam (Venit). If they’re talking, they’re serious. Yet there has to be some degree of difficulty.’
“Many degrees, in fact — some psychological, some legal. Much has been written, and more will be, about the clash of cultures that will ensue should bowties-please William Morris consummate its union with testosterone-heavy Endeavor.
“‘There’s the wedding,’ said one wag, ‘and then there’s the marriage.’
“Everyone in Hollywood remembers that Ari snuck files out of ICM in the dead of night, part of starting Endeavor back when Jim Wiatt was at ICM. “They were never close,” one former colleague recalled today. A senior film executive who was once an agent said he thinks that a merger will result in a period of turmoil, and lots of opportunities for competitors to poach clients and gain market share.
“‘If I were still an agent, I’d be thrilled,’ said this executive. ‘Lots of partners, egos, people who want their name on the door. If I were an agent I’d be very happy. I’d make mincemeat out of them in a week.’
“I think you should call out Sean Penn and his reps for their blatant lie in the New York Post over how he didn’t demand to be cut out of Crossing Over and some shit about the role being ‘experimental.’
“All lies, all cover-up. Penn demanded that Harvey cut him out of the film because he had issues with the honor-killing storyline (which , in the film, isn’t even an honor killing). It should also be mentioned that once he was out Penn refused to refund the $1 million fee for five days work and [that] Weinstein forced director Wayne Kramer and producer Frank Marshall to pay $50 grand for half the cost of a reshoot day.
“I hate the idea that Penn’s behavior is being whitewashed by his reps. Even Harvey is pissed off that Penn put him in the position of having to choose between leaving him in the film or ending their professional relationship. By cutting Penn out, Harvey created the perception that Crossing Over was damaged goods (along with Harvey’s other butchering of scenes) since almost every critic has mentioned Penn’s involvement at one point in their opening review. Some have even drawn conclusions that Penn wanted out of the film because it allegedly sucked so bad.
“Make no mistake — Penn’s role in the film was important, and the film lost a lot of depth and emotional resonance (and a more spiritual ending) by cutting Penn out — not to mention a beautiful Alice Braga performance and the entire backstory to her character.
“Harvey Weinstein should be pressured into reinstating the Penn storyline in the DVD release. Clearly, there has been no controversy over the supposed ‘honor killing’ storyline, so there will be no heat on Weinstein if he does so. No one seems to care about it. What matters now is that on its own terms, as Peter Travers in Rolling Stone has said, ‘the scene, as it now stands, condemns a misguided individual, not an entire culture.’
“Penn knew exactly which Crossing Over script he was signing on for. The truth is that he suddenly ‘found religion’ when he got lobbied by the National Iranian American Council, an Iranian image watchdog group, and decided he didn’t want to contribute to the negative image Americans have of Iran.
“Maybe Penn should donate the million bucks he pocketed from Crossing Over to Amnesty International and help stop the actual honor killings that do take place in Iran, as well as executions (many of them stonings) and other human rights violations taking place on a daily basis.”
I’ve been waiting to see Gerald Peary and Amy Geller‘s For The Love of Movies: A History of American Film Criticism for a long time. It’s been in the works for years. So many, in fact, that one of the talking heads appears as a young, lean-faced guy with a shock of dark hair (in footage that was shot around 2000) and as an older, fuller-faced guy with less hair. Happens to all of us, but this may be a first. Same interview subject, two biological incarnations.
Anyway, For The Love of Movies — directed and written by Peary, produced by Geller — is finally here and it does the job nicely. Which is to say intelligently, competently, lovingly and, after a fashion, comprehensively. Meaning that it tells the story as thoroughly as the budget and running time have allowed. For those who don’t know much about the lore of the realm, it’s nutritious food and then some.
It’s a hell of a subject — a chronicle of magnificent obsessions and magnificent dreams, and a rise-and-fall story covering scores of critics, the entirety of the Hollywood film culture from the ’20s to the present, and hundreds if not thousands of movies.
Ideally (and this is no slag on Peary or Geller) For The Love of Movies should have been a well-funded, six-part American Experience series on PBS, shot on 35mm by Emmanuel Lubezski, and including a vast smorgasbord of film clips donated by their copyright owners as a gesture of thankfulness. (Today’s production and marketing community may resent critics, but they owe them big-time.)
But Peary and Geller’s low-budget, hand-to-mouth approach will do for now. I’m very glad it was made, glad that I saw it. I hope others follow suit when it has its big debut on Monday, 3.16, at South by Southwest, and more particularly at the Alamo Ritz at 8 pm. And then on Wednesday, 3.18 at the same venue. And again on Saturday, 3.21, at the Alamo Lamar 3 at 4 pm.
Gerald Peary (l.) and Amy Geller (r.) with unknown female.
You can’t watch this film and not acknowledge that Peary and Geller are fully up to the task of providing a clean and cogent history lesson. Could they have made a snarkier, trippier excursion piece? A more poetic and probing cultural epic or tone poem…whatever? Yeah, probably, but they were budgetarily constrained and wanted to reach the not-very-hip (or moderately hip) crowd.
So they’ve thrown together an easy-to-digest, chapter-by-chapter saga of the last 90 years of American film criticism, starting in the mid-to-late teens with the emergence of Frank E. Wood, the first “cricket” to earn his stripes by investing a modicum of personal passion and a writerly point-of-view, and hiking all the way through Vachel Lindsay, Robert Sherwood, the great seminal trio of Otis Ferguson, James Agee and Manny Farber, the 20-year reign of Bosley Crowther, the fall of Crowther over his Bonnie and Clyde review, the influence of Cahiers du Cinema and the auteur theory, the resultant reign of Andrew Sarris and The American Cinema, the huge influence of Pauline Kael and the writings of Stanley Kaufman, Vincent Canby, Richard Corliss, Richard Schickel, Molly Haskell, Roger Ebert, Stuart Klawans, etc.
This feels like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Stop the Fire.” I’m hearing a film-critic spoof version of the lyrics. Come to think, a mock music-video interlude would have been a great thing for Perry and Geller to run with — seriously.
Gleiberman, Hoberman, Harlan tell-it Jacobson.
John Powers, Elvis Mitchell, Leonard Maltin, mumblecore.
Titanic, Janet Maslin, Wesley Morris, David Sterritt.
Ain’t-It-Cool, Rex Reed, Nesselson and junket whores.
Lisa Schwarzbaum, Orson Kane, Indies in the ’90s.
Wilmington, Weinberg, Siskel and Szymanski.
Ruby Rich, Kenny T., tits and zits, Anthology Film Archives.
I’ve lost the rhythm, can’t get it right, haven’t the time. Anyone?
For whatever reason Perry and Geller don’t mention the great French critic Andre Bazin. (Or at least not that I remember. He’s not listed in this cast roster.) Nor do they mention John Simon, whom I always regarded as a brilliant (if occasionally cruel) critic and one of the major go-to guys of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. Or Todd McCarthy, Dwight McDonald, Bertrand Tavernier, Andy Klein, Armond White, Ty Burr, Glenn Kenny, Anthony Lane, Scott Foundas, etc.
There are a lot of holes and gaps — let’s face it. The doc only runs 80 minutes. A longer length (115 or 120 minutes, say) would have obviously allowed for a more comprehensive summary.
For those who know a lot about the American film-critic monastery, For the Love of Movies is a tidy and agreeable canoe ride down memory creek. With a tinge of melancholy, I should add, although this comes more from my own feelings.
Peary and Geller, to put a point on it, have chosen not to emphasize the dominant reality facing established film critics in the 21st Century — i.e., the extinction of the monk-like film critic cabal as it was known and defined from the late 1930s and ’40s to the beginning of this century, and the drop-by-drop decline and diminishment of the power and prestige of the traditional film critic. Which is due, obviously, to the winding down of the Gutenberg era, blah blah. With some critics and columnists adapting to the new technological climate (ahem) and some not so much.
Peary and Geller acknowledge that it’s currently a sink-or-swim, do-or-die reality out there. They begin by saying that “film criticism is a profession under siege” and that “according to Variety 28 film critics have lost their jobs in the last several years.” That, of course, is dated information and isn’t the half of it. Sean P. Means‘ disappearing film critic list is currently at 49. MCN’s Last Film Critics in America list has the names of 121 who are still collecting a check.
Clearly we’re looking at the end of the road here, certainly for the elite culture portrayed in the film.
The prime kiss-of-death factor is a diminished interest among today’s tweeting, texting, 24/7 digital-feed generation in being passive recipients of the views of learned, brahmin-like, know-it-all film critics dispensing ivory-tower insights. Economic issues aside, the firing of film critics is rooted in today’s common-currency belief that everyone and anyone with a computer or hand-held device knows as much as those snooty-ass critics do. Or certainly that their opinion is just as valid, and that they prefer a more democratic, interactive bloggy-blog conversation as the dominant mode of dissection and discussion.
In short, there’s a whole current of lament than runs underneath this story that probably should have been explored with more frankness and feeling.
For The Love of Movies is narrated by Patricia Clarkson. I don’t want to be a crank, but I would have preferred to hear a raspy, whiskey-tinged male voice tell the tale. The voice of someone who sounds like he might have personally lived through some of the history. Michael Wilmington would have worked in this respect.
In February’s Conde Nast PortfolioAmy Wallace wrote about last year’s decision by 20th Century Fox to rewrite Stephen Schiff‘s Money Never Sleeps, an allegedly sturdy Wall Street sequel with Michael Douglas again playing Gordon “greed is good” Gekko. Stephen Frears (The Queen) wanted to direct Schiff’s script and everything looked good.
But after last fall’s financial collapse Fox decided Schiff’s script “suddenly felt out of touch,” according to production co-prexy Alex Young, so they hired another writer, Allan Loeb (21), to make it more reflective of today’s meltdown vibe. Frears was no longer interested, but Wallace reports that Sleeps will roll sometime in the spring for release later this year. Why don’t I believe that?
Nor do I believe that Martin Scorsese will ever direct The Wolf of Wall Street, a drama about Wall Street skunk Jordan Belfort that Terence Winter has written drafts of.
Why? Because people don’t want to pay good money to see slick scoundrels revel in ill-gotten gains. The mood out there is clearly one of anger and revulsion at all the wheeler-dealers who got us into this mess. I therefore suspect that any portrayal of greedy thievery among young or middle-aged hotshots (a la Wall Street and Boiler Room) would be die of loneliness. Because the zeitgeist has reconstituted and the New Puritanism is upon us.
What might work, in terms of addressing the current anger and panic, is some kind of remake of Gregory La Cava‘s Gabriel Over The White House (1933). Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny reminded me of this morning, and the more I think about it the more here-and-now it sounds.
The story, based upon a book by Thomas Tweed and clearly focused on the crisis posed by the Great Depression, is a fascinating reflection of our current crisis. Just go to 1:20 in a speech given by President Judson Hammond (Walter Huston) and listen for a couple of minutes. The totalitarian powers that Hammond demands reflect what the Limbaugh crazies are afraid could happen today, and what some of us feel may be the only way out of the current malaise. We’ve got to get mad and forceful and slap down the righties and straighten this country out….or else.
The story is about Hammond, a fairly thoughtless and corrupt go-along politician upon his election, having a kind of religious revelation after getting into a car accident early in his term. A vision of the angel Gabriel comes to him and tells him to radically change tactics and proclaim himself a dictator in order to save the country from business-as-usual meandering. Describing himself as a kind of Jeffersonian fascist, Hammond comes off as an earnest and conscientious President who tackles unemployment, crime and the economy in the manner of of take-charge Abraham Lincoln. And then once Hammond has fulfilled his agenda and set the country on the road to recovery, he dies.
I spit on the idea of another bullshit Wall Street saga about bad guys in $2000 suits getting away with it until they don’t. But some kind of variation of Gabriel Over The White House….that speaks to me. It could connect if done right.
To commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the death of Stanley Kubrick , I’m going to run a March 2000 trash piece called “Stanley Was Slippin’,” which I re-posted last June. It’s not that I don’t love and worship Kubrick’s films (with the exception of Fear and Desire and Eyes Wide Shut); it’s just that this is the cleanest and tightest thing I’ve ever written about him:
“I [once] referred to Eyes Wide Shut as a ‘perfectly white tablecloth.’ That implies purity of content and purpose, which it clearly has. But Eyes Wide Shut is also a tablecloth that feels stiff and unnatural from too much starch.
“Stanley Kubrick was one of the great cinematic geniuses of the 20th century, but on a personal level he wound up isolating himself, I feel, to the detriment of his art. The beloved, bearded hermit so admired by Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg (both of whom give great interviews on the Eyes Wide Shut DVD) had become, to a certain extent, an old fogey who didn’t really get the world anymore.
“Not that he wanted or needed to. He created in his films worlds that were poetically whole and self-balancing on their own aesthetic terms. But as time went on, they became more and more porcelain and pristine, and less flesh-and-blood. Eyes Wide Shut is probably the most porcelain of them all.
“The lesson is simple: If you want your art to matter, stay in touch with the world. Keep in the human drama, take walks, go to baseball games, chase women, argue with waiters, ride motorcycles, hang out with children, play poker, visit Paris as often as possible and always keep in touch with the craggy old guy with the bad cough who runs the news stand.
“Kubrick apparently did very little of this. The more invested he became in his secretive, secluded, every-detail-controlled, nothing-left-to-chance lifestyle in England — which he began to construct when he left Hollywood and moved there in the early ’60s — and the less familiar he became with the rude hustle-bustle of life on the outside, the more rigid and formalized and apart-from-life his films became.
“Kubrick’s movies were always impressively detailed and beautifully realized. They’ve always imposed a certain trance-like spell — an altogetherness and aesthetic unity common to the work of any major artist.
“What Kubrick chose to create is not being questioned here. On their own terms, his films are masterful. But choosing to isolate yourself from the unruly push-pull of life can have a calcifying effect upon your art.
“Kubrick was less Olympian and more loosey-goosey when he made his early films in the `50s (Fear and Desire, The Killing, Paths of Glory) and early `60s (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove). I’m not saying his ultra-arty period that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey and continued until his death with A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, resulted in lesser films. The opposite is probably true.
“I’m saying that however beautiful and mesmerizing they were on their own terms, these last six films of Kubrick’s were more and more unto themselves, lacking that reflective, straight-from-the-hurlyburly quality that makes any work of expression seem more vital and alive.
“So many things about Eyes Wide Shut irritate me. Don’t get me started. So many others have riffed on this.
“The stiff, phoney-baloney way everyone talks to one another. The unmistakable feeling that the world it presents is much closer to 1920s Vienna (where the original Arthur Schnitzler novel was set) than modern-day Manhattan. The babysitter calling Cruise and Kidman ‘Mr. Harford’ and ‘Mrs. Harford.’ If there is one teenaged Manhattan babysitter who has ever expressed herself like a finishing school graduate of 1952 and addressed a modern Manhattan couple in their early 30s as ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.,’ I will eat the throw rug in Dave Poland‘s apartment.
“The trite cliches that constitute 85% of Tom Cruise’s dialogue. The agonizingly stilted delivery that Nicole Kidman gives to her lines in the sequence in which she’s smoking pot and arguing with Cruise in their bedroom. That absolutely hateful piano chord that keeps banging away in Act Three.
“The ultimate proof that Kubrick was off his game in his final days? He was so wrong in his judgment that the MPAA wouldn’t hit him with an NC-17 rating for the orgy scene that he didn’t even shoot alternative footage he could use in the event he might be forced to prune the overt nudity. He was instead caught with his pants down and forced to resort to a ridiculous CGI cover-up that makes no sense in the context of the film. (Would Cruise’s sexually curious character be content with just seeing the shoulders and legs of the sexual performers as he walks through the mansion? Wouldn’t he make a point of actually seeing the real action?)
“No one has been blunt enough to say it, but Kubrick obviously played his cards like no one who had any serious understanding of the moral leanings of the culture, let alone a good poker player’s sense of the film business, would have. He played them like an old man whose instincts were failing him, and thereby put himself and Warner Brothers into an embarrassing position. I wish things hadn’t ended this way for him, but they did.
“I hope what I’ve written here isn’t misread. I’ll always be grateful to have lived in a world that included the films of Stanley Kubrick. He’s now in the company of Griffith, Lubitsch, Chaplin, Eisenstein and the rest. Prolific or spare, rich or struggling, lauded or derided as their artistic strivings may have been, they are all equal now.”
Jeffrey Wells to William Friedkin: The French Connection was obviously your film when you were developing, shooting and cutting it, and certainly your film when you were promoting it in ’71. And you were most responsible for winning the Best Picture Oscar, clearly. But those days are over, pal, and while you may feel some form of residual parental ownership rights today, you’re out of line. At least as far as revisionist futzing rights are concerned.
Frame capture from David Lean’s revised version of Lawrence of Arabia.
Whatever your attorney has told you or the contracts may say, you do not own The French Connection, Mr. Freidkin — the moviegoing public does. The fans who’ve been watching and worshipping this film for the last 38 years do. Your ownership rights went out the window, sir, once that legendary New York crime film became a huge hit, and they sure as shit were null and void after it won the Best Picture Oscar of 1971. And you can’t just stroll into a post-production house on Highland or Seward and re-visualize it and put out a snow-bleachy version on Blu-ray and say, “This is it — the best version of this film ever made!”
Well, you can because you have. But you have no legitimacy in doing so.
I’m referring to what cinematographer Owen Roizmanstrongly stated last week, which is that you’ve desecrated The French Connection with a new high-contrasty, snow-grained, color-bleeding, verging-on-monochrome digital transfer that is now watchable on Blu-ray.
The word on the street is that you intend to do the same thing to The Exorcist down the road. I got the idea from listening to you speak the night before last that if you had a chance you’d probably do the same to upcoming remasters of Sorcerer and To Live and Die in L.A..
I’m writing to tell you, sir, that this has to stop because in the eyes of the Movie Gods you haven’t the right to do this, despite what your pallies at Fox Home Video and others in the film-cultivating community may have told you.
You can’t mangle what belongs to the public and to history, Mr. Freidkin. Art belongs to the artist until he or she creates it, and then it belongs to the world. Period. That means forever. That means no retroactive whimsical messing-around rights can kick in. And that means no Greedo-shoots-first revisionism of any kind unless the intention is to try and bring genuine (i.e., nonrevisionist) improvement to the original vision. Richer, fuller, crisper, cleaner…fine. But no “atrocious” and “horrifying” revisions.
That means if Pablo Picasso comes back from the grave he can’t go to Spain and decide that “Guernica” works better in color because he had a recent vision in heaven that painting it in black and white in 1937 was the wrong way to go. That means that the ghost of David Lean can’t come back to earth and decide to reimagine and remaster Lawrence of Arabia as a black-and-white period movie in the vein of John Ford‘s The Lost Patrol (1934).
The same thing goes for The Exorcist, Sorcerer and To Live and Die in LA.. You don’t have the right because they’re not your films, buster. You made them, obviously, but they have a life and a culture and a spirit of their own now. And I am telling you, speaking for myself and I suspect for many others, to back off and leave those movies alone. I mean it. Stand aside, sheath your sword, holster your pistol and find some other way to be creative.
You can do what you can to improve the appearance of these films on DVD, Blu-ray and hi-def digital downloads feeds. You can help to make sure they look precisely as they did when they were shown as brand-new prints in first-run theatres, or help make them look even sharper and cleaner and more vivid than they did back then if you so choose, but that’s all.
Otherwise you’re a brilliant and accomplished filmmaker, and an excellent fellow to discuss the ins and outs of the movie business with. And Bug deserved more attention and acclaim than it got. And all hail Michael Shannon!
In some of his films director Jonathan Demme has revealed a profound affection for Caribbean culture and music, and occasionally for African-American characters and subject matter. Examples include his two Haiti docs — 1988’s Haiti: Dreams of Democracy and ’03’s The Agronomist. His 1998 adaptation of Toni Morrison‘s Beloved. That Hannibal Lecter-in-the-Bahamas scene at the end of The Silence of the Lambs. The end-credit singing of “Wild Thing” at the close of Demme’s Something Wild by Jamaican singer “Sister” Carol East.
Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt
So it feels very Demme-ish that the union that’s endlessly celebrated in Rachel Getting Married, his latest feature, is between a very alabaster lassie (Rosemarie DeWitt, playing Rachel) and a handsome Afrique-ebony guy (musician Tunde Adebimpe, playing Sidney the groom). It’s also a very Demme thing that nobody so much as mentions this.
You can say “well, why would anyone mention it?” and I’d take your point, of course. We all like to see ourselves as color-blind. My point is that in real life someone in the wedding party would at one point or another throw some kind of slider ball — something anecdotal, flip, netural, whatever– into the proceedings. In the same way someone would say “oh, it’s raining” if a cloudburst were to happen. My other point is that such a remark (which wouldn’t necessarily be coarse or gauche ) is verboten in a Demme film because it doesn’t reflect his values or sensibilities.
You may have noticed that movie critics haven’t come within 20 feet of mentioning this in their reviews. That’s because it’s not cool, dude. If you do you open yourself up to being called a subliminal racist of some kind. Just wait — someone is going to say this about me in the comments.
But if the blunt-spoken alcoholic played by Howard Duff in Robert Altman‘s A Wedding (1978) had been invited to Rachel and Sidney’s wedding, he would have said something or other, trust me. Because he was the kind of wealthy middle- aged guy who didn’t give a shit because he was always half in the bag.
Tunde Adebimpe, DeWitt
I was hoping that Demme had decided to include one character like this in Rachel Getting Married. Someone who wouldn’t necessarily say the wrong thing, but who might say the right thing in a slightly wrong way. Someone who doesn’t quite fit the sensitive mold. Demme doesn’t, of course. It’s not in him.
Rachel Getting Married, written by Jenny Lumet, is mainly about how Rachel’s older sister Kym (Anne Hathaway), a longtime alcholic and drug-user now living in a rehab facility, screws things up by being her natural attention-grabbing self, scheming to make most of the conversations about her, only sometimes letting the happy couple have the spotlight. Me, me, me, me. me.
It’s wonderfully shot in a darting, hand-held, Dogma-like way, making everything feel very loose and random and catch-as-catch-can. It’s also magnificently acted by Hathaway and De Witt.
But a friend has observed that the way Demme portrays the African-American and Jamaican characters — Sidney, his Army-serving younger brother, his parents and the various musicians and guests who float in and out — is a form of benevolent reverse racism. He does this, my friend argued, by making certain that only the white characters — Rachel and Kym and their parents, played by Debra Winger and Bill Irwin — are the screwed-up ones. Antsy, haunted, angry, nervous, gloomy. But the darker-skinned characters are all cool, kindly, radiant, gentle, serene.
Jonathan Demme
I was a little surprised when I first heard this view, but I’m starting to think she may have a point. It does seem a little phony. I would have invested myself a little bit more in Rachel Getting Married if, say, Sidney has been a wee bit obnoxious or an obsessive-compulsive or a relentless pot smoker — anything but the dull block of wood that Demme, Lumet and Adebimpe have created. Everyone everywhere has conflicts, problems, insecurities, regrets. Except in films like this one.
All to say that I never really believed Rachel Getting Married. I enjoyed the craft and random energy of it, but I never believed that I watching real-life people. Every step of the way I felt Exiled in Demmeville.
“Why are MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow so biased?,” HuffPost columnist Eric Burnsasked last Friday. “Because the Republicans are providing them with so much material that their bias is, at its core, a form of objectivity. They are not partisan so much as perceptive.
“I do not reveal my own choice for president when I state that, several days ago, John McCain made the most eye-popping comment I have ever heard uttered by a candidate for the White House.
“The topic was the economy. ‘My friends,’ he said to a gathering in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on 9.19, ‘this is the problem with Washington. People like Senator Obama have been too busy gaming the system and haven’t ever done a thing to actually challenge the system.
“We’ve heard a lot of words from Senator Obama over the course of this campaign. But maybe just this once he could spare us the lectures, and admit to his own poor judgment in contributing to these problems. The crisis on Wall Street started in the Washington culture of lobbying and influence peddling, and he was square in the middle of it.”
“Uh…yes he was, Senator McCain. Senator Obama was square in the middle of it for less than three years! But you have been square in the middle of it for 22 years! If Senator Obama is too inexperienced to be President, as your campaign has many times suggested, how could he possibly have made such a powerful contribution to the plundering of the American marketplace?
“Nobody in McCain’s audience laughed when the candidate charged Obama with being an economy-wrecking Washington insider. Nobody snickered when the Washington insider accused the relative outsider of maliciousness beyond his years. Or his ability. Or his record.
“I take it back. Somebody snickered. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were among them. So was I.
“And so now I ask myself, how hard is it these days for news programs be objective when the material on which they report sounds as if it were produced by writers for Saturday Night Live, and then rejected on the grounds of its being too preposterous to be funny?”
On last Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, Andrew Sullivan offered perhaps the most perceptive thought I’ve yet heard about the racial fears shared by the 55-and-over crowd about Barack Obama. I can’t find a transcript, but he basically said that it’s not Obama’s latte-ness per se that turns them off, as much as the fact that he represents a shifting racial-cultural paradigm in this country.
Where almost all under-40 GenXers are completely accustomed to and cool with the day-to-day realities of a multi-cultural society and work force, Obama’s ascendancy is being interpreted by the 55-and-overs as a symbolic confirmation that the largely white-bread country they grew up in as kids and teenagers — the Brady Bunch ’50s and ’60s culture in which WASPs pretty much ruled socially, economically and in the media, and in which racial minorities primarily lived and worked on the sidelines — is gone, and this is making them feel insecure and threatened.
To this out-of-it group (i.e., the aging Mickey Mouse Club crowd), the prospect of Obama in the White House is an unmistakable sign that their “world”, in short, is coming to an end, and they’re afraid of being left out in the economic cold as a result.
The reptiles running the McCain campaign, being no fools, are naturally doing what they can to exploit this. As this Brent StaplesN.Y. Times “editorial observer” piece, dated 9.21 and titled “John McCain, Barack Obama and the Politics of Race,” points out.
“In the Old South, black men and women who were competent, confident speakers on matters of importance were termed ‘disrespectful,’ the implication being that all good Negroes bowed, scraped, grinned and deferred to their white betters.
“In what is probably a harbinger of things to come, John McCain‘s campaign has already run a commercial that carries a similar intimation, accusing Barack Obama of being ‘disrespectful’ to Sarah Palin. The argument is muted, but its racial antecedents are very clear.
“The throwback references that have surfaced in the campaign suggest that Republicans are fighting on racial grounds, even when express references to race are not evident. In a replay of elections past, the G.O.P. will try to leverage racial ghosts and fears without getting its hands visibly dirty. The Democrats try to parry in customary ways.
“Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement — or a phrase — that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone.
“These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.”
“John McCain‘s is not the resume that a presidential candidate wants to advertise as America faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” writesN.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich in the 9.21 edition. “That’s why the main thrust of the McCain campaign has been to cover up his history of economic malpractice.
“McCain has largely pulled it off so far, under the guidance of Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove protege. A Rovian political strategy by definition means all slime, all the time. But the more crucial Rove game plan is to envelop the entire presidential race in a thick fog of truthiness.
“All campaigns, Barack Obama’s included, engage in false attacks. But McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates keep repeating the same lies over and over not just to smear their opponents and not just to mask their own record. Their larger aim is to construct a bogus alternative reality so relentless it can overwhelm any haphazard journalistic stabs at puncturing it.
“When a McCain spokesman told Politico a week ago that ‘we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say’ about the campaign’s incessant fictions, he was channeling a famous Bush dictum of 2003: ‘Somehow you just got to go over the heads of the filter.’
“In Bush’s case, the lies lobbed over the heads of the press were to sell the war in Iraq. That propaganda blitz, devised by a secret White House Iraq Group that included Rove, was a triumph. In mere months, Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein had aided the 9/11 attacks and even that Iraqis were among the hijackers. A largely cowed press failed to set the record straight.
“If you doubt that the big lies are sticking, look at the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll. Half of voters now believe in the daily McCain refrain that Obama will raise their taxes. In fact, Obama proposes raising taxes only on the 1.9 percent of households that make more than $250,000 a year and cutting them for nearly everyone else.
“You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on The View. Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falsehoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word ‘lies’ to his face. The McCains are so used to deference from ‘the filter’ that Cindy McCain later complained that The View picked ‘our bones clean.’
“In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow.”
A Los Angeles-based collector of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia named Mark Bellinghaus is claiming that photographs and descriptions of various stored-away Monroe letters, jewelry and keepsakes in this month’s Vanity Fair are to some extent bogus, particularly in the matter of a letter sent by W. Somerset Maugham to Monroe in January 1961.
A scan of an allegedly authentic January 1961 letter sent by W. Somerset Maugham to Marilyn Monroe.
Bellinghaus is calling the Monroe article and photo spread a “hoax,” although he told me this morning that some of the materials, all of which are from a collection owned by another Southern California collector named Millington Conroy, are authentic and legitimate. But many or most of them aren’t, he claims. Vanity Fair spokesperson Beth Kseniak wasn’t up to speed on the matter and said she’d get back to me tomorrow.
An article by Sam Kashner called “Things She Left Behind” and an accompanying photo piece called “The Marilyn Papers” reviews all the Monroe materials found and recently revealed in two filing cabinets.
I also wrote Kashner about this, to no response.
Vanity Fair‘s photo of an identically-worded January 1961 letter, also allegedly sent by W. Somerset Maugham to Marilyn Monroe. Bellinghaus claims the pink Somerset letter is a fake.
“I’ve read the claims by Bellinghaus about the VF Marilyn Monroe article,” I wrote, “and without getting into a whole big rigamarole he has made a legit-sounding claim that the pink Somerset Maugham letter printed in the magazine (and on the VF website) is bogus and that the white-colored one he owns (including the envelope), which he says he purchased at a legit auction and has been somehow verified as the real deal, is legit.
“Leaving aside the tons of material that Bellinghaus claims is illegitimate, what do you and VF have to say about the Maugham letters? I’m publishing something on HE about this very soon. Do you mind getting back quickly?”
I told Bellinghaus that he isn’t helping his assertions any by misspelling the name “Somerset,” which he spells in his letter with two “m”s.
The people who will make Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, 10.3) a hit when it opens are are not “bad,” but their support of this film, which I see as a metaphor for the shopping-mall plasticity and icky phoniness that has taken over this country’s middle-class culture, will signify a kind of spiritual tragedy in this country. Just as you can look at, say, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and say, yup, on some level that was America in 1937, Beverly Hills Chihuahua is a kind of reflection of us.
Because the indications are that this movie is the worst. The trailers are giving me a kind of celluloid Cancun vibe, and I’ve been to Cancun and seen the dead expressions in the faces of the people staying in those awful swanky hotels, so don’t tell me.
I used to take my young boys to every crappy kiddie movie that came along back in the ’90s, and so I obviously get why today’s parents will be doing the same with Chihuahua. It’s just a movie and who cares…right? But the grotesque attitude and sensibility behind this film, to judge by the trailers, is wretched and stupefying. A spiritually healthy country — one with its head and heart in the right place, and its communal soul connected to something other than the latest cheap consumer high — would pay it little mind. And here I am sounding like a grouch for saying this.
But there’s another grouch who will benefit, I strongly suspect, from the people who will love this film, and I mean John McCain. Fairly or unfairly, delusional or dead-on, I have come to believe that the mentality that supports McCain draws water from the same well that will “heart” Beverly Hills Chihuahua. You have to be a little bit dumb and lame of spirit to not be appalled by the Chihuahua trailers, just as I believe that a significant slice of McCain’s support (though obviously not all of it) is coming from the easygoing, sandals-and-white-socks-wearing clueless class.
The racial-minded, low-information, 55-and-over whites who react to media-cycle spasms and shift allegiances at the drop of a hat are moving away from the skinny mulatto guy and shifting towards the old white guy. It may as well be faced. The election could go the wrong way, and the wrong people — led by a curmudgeonly old coot who doesn’t know from computers and gets details wrong left and right and who will surely bog us down in the muck of the Middle East and add an attitude of smug belligerence to foreign policy, and who will surely allow the climate-change situation to worsen, and who will almost certainly serve only one term — could take hold of the reins next January.
The latest Zogby-Reuters poll suggests it could happen. The last best chance this country has to turn things around could be lost, and the sentiments of the dug-in rural dumb-asses could indeed turn the tide. Barack Obama has the older women and men against him and isn’t making the headway that he should, and people like me are seriously scared. It could even be over as we speak, as N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd has sardonically suggested. I feel grim as hell. Especially if the feared Bradley Effect means than Obama may lose 5% of his lead in the polls (if he has such a lead come Election Day) when people actually go into the voting booths.
If I were Obama I would swallow my pride and self-emasculate by choosing the hateful, hollow and thoroughly demonic Hillary Clinton as his vice-president. Then, at least, he’d have a real scrapper on his team, and he’d pull in a good portion of the resentful Hillary hold-outs, and his numbers would kick up. It’s hard to suggest this with a straight face, but at least, then, he’d have a decent shot at winning. And isn’t that better than losing to the white-haired guy and ushering in the same old instincts and syndromes that have taken this country down?
A major turning of the page — an historic cultural turnover, a generational changing of the guard — would happen with an Obama victory. I wish there was some way to analogize this without comparing Team Obama — a fairly unradical bunch with moderately progressive ideas and intentions — to 20th Century communists, but the fact is that the “reds” in this country — dominated by the insufficiently educated rurals over 55 — are opposed to Obama in much the same way that the counter-revolutionary “white” Russians were opposed to the Bolsheviks, the conservative, plantation-owning Cubans were opposed to Castro, and the friends and allies of Chang Kai Shek were opposed to and tried to undermine the Chinese Communists after they took over in 1949.
In each case the Russian, Cuban and Chinese socialists went after the counter-revolutionaries like gardeners go after crab grass and dandelions, and it wasn’t pretty. Acts of political vengeance never are. All I can say is that as horrible as any act of political repression is and always will be, there’s a part of me that at least understands why the Russians, Cubans and Communists Chinese acted as they did. Because I despise the American “reds” as a cultural pestilence. They stand for and support everything that is regressive, selfish, racist, shallow, corpulent and hee-hawish in this country. They are the Chihuahua-embracers, the WALL*E tele-tubbies — and God save us if their boy wins.