The Shepcat Chronicles

2012-01-16T19:20:00.000-08:00

HE’S GOTTA SIGN IT
Or: Money, It’s Gotta Be the Shirt
In late summer of 1996, a year before I would move to Los Angeles, my best friend, Andre, and I attended a wedding there together. During our visit, one of our destinations was Spike’s Joint on Melrose, the West Coast retail outlet for Spike Lee’s then-burgeoning production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks. We were fans — particularly of School Daze, Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X — and we came seeking swag. This was in the days before e-commerce as we know it today, so it was a rare opportunity to shop for official 40 Acres gear like that we’d seen Spike modeling in interviews and at public appearances.

Truth be told, what I really wanted was an X cap, but despite the sincerity of my intentions — I had in fact read The Autobiography of Malcolm X a few years earlier and was moved to a deeper understanding of and a profound admiration for the slain civil rights leader — I didn’t want to be seen as the white guy from the Midwest attempting to appropriate an aspect of the black experience to which I bore no rightful claim. So at gut-check time, I chickened out and settled instead for a perfectly respectable navy blue cap displaying the 40 Acres logo in red and a 40 Acres logo T-shirt whose back reads “Make Black Film By Any Means Necessary.”¹

Over time, I stopped wearing my T-shirt as often, and to my chagrin my head has grown two or three hat sizes over the years, effectively rendering my cap unwearable. But Andre had gotten years of wear out of the gray fleece pullover with embroidered logo that he bought that day. So much so that the fleece lining had all but worn away over hundreds of washings. Naturally it was one of the most comfortable articles of clothing he owned.

And then it vanished.

The pullover had been packed among a few boxes of clothes and other personal belongings that had not arrived with the rest of their household when Andre, Michele and their daughters moved to Seattle. Of all the belongings lost among those errant boxes, I imagine that the pullover was one of the first things Andre missed, so often, so reflexively did he pull it from his closet when dressing for recreation and relaxation.

They’re in Seattle about five years now, and over time they had replaced anything necessary, anything that could be replaced. (One would hope there hadn’t been anything truly irreplaceable, items of great personal significance, sentimental value or family history, among the lost.) Life goes on.

Then one day the boxes turned up.

I can’t remember all the particular details of their reappearance, but they had been relatively accessible and close at hand all that time. Perhaps not properly or accurately labeled. Perhaps hidden just out of view.

In any event, Andre now has his gray fleece pullover back, and like a toddler reunited with his blankie, he will rejoice in the fact and the feel and the reassuring comfort of it after all this time apart. Never mind that three or four years spent crushed inside a box has left a permanent, shadowy crease down the front of the pullover, just off center, that no amount of laundering or ironing can repair. That’s not enough to prevent Andre from wearing that pullover until the rest of the fleece is worn from its lining like the plush of a much-loved teddy bear.

As any respectable wife would be, Michele is mortified by Andre’s insistence upon wearing the pullover. To her mind, it was lost once; he knows what it’s like to live without it; it shouldn’t be so hard to let go of it one more time, gently unto that good night. She’d prefer that it were donated, discarded, or perhaps immolated.

Which brings us up to the present.

Andre invited me to be his guest Monday at Microsoft’s annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And that is how we both happened to be wearing our now 15-year-old 40 Acres gear when we met the day’s keynote speaker: Spike Lee.

I had no expectation that we might actually meet Spike, even in passing, but after Andre said he was wearing his 40 Acres pullover, I decided, just for the hell of it, that I’d wear my 40 Acres T-shirt under the quarter-zip pullover I was wearing to the occasion.

It was a nice event, attended by a few hundred people who braved the snow, and featuring presentations by Microsoft officers about various diversity initiatives and charitable programs in which the company engages, in part to recognize and honor the legacy of Dr. King in the daily life of the company. Then Spike took the stage, and after he reveled in the Giants’ victory over the Packers Sunday, he spoke eloquently and passionately about what Dr. King’s life and legacy means to him. Then he challenged us all to not just treat the occasion as a day off from work but to go home and read Dr. King’s speeches or his letters from the Birmingham jail and to think about how we can put Dr. King’s example into practice every day of the year.

Had that been the end of it, it still would have been a great day spent with my best friend, making the most of the opportunity to celebrate the life of Dr. King, whose dream has, to a great, if not yet complete, extent, come to fruition in our lifetime.

But that wasn’t the end of it.

It is my particular gift, cast over me as though by a fairy godmother’s spell, to attend an event as a friend’s plus-one and end up taking home swag like I’m George Clooney’s Golden Globes date. (Case in point: I once attended a MINI Cooper function with my friend Todd and ended up winning a set of new wheels and tires, valued at upward of three grand, to a car that I didn’t own. No, really.)

And so it was that I found myself holding a specially marked raffle ticket that made me one of 50 attendees invited to meet Spike after the event and receive an autographed copy of an impressive coffee-table book about the making of Do the Right Thing. And so it was that Andre, who had so graciously invited me to be his plus-one for the occasion, became my plus-one.

When we finally reached the front of the receiving line, we said hello, and Andre explained quickly that Michele wanted him to get rid of the shirt. He asked if Spike would mind endorsing his pullover, as it were, which Spike did, inscribing it around the logo, “Nice shirt. Spike Lee.”

I stepped up next, and as Spike signed my book, I said, “We really didn’t think we’d get to meet you today, but we’re really glad now that we wore our 40 Acres gear,” and I held up the front of my shirt enough for him to see the logo on my own T-shirt underneath. At which point he rose again, with his pen held aloft.

“Oh, no,” I cut him off. “You don’t have to sign it.” I had only wanted him to know we were big fans from way back; I imagined that signing my T-shirt would be a much more unwieldy operation than Andre’s had been.

“Are you kidding?” Spike said. “I gotta sign it. That’s vintage!”

Spike motioned to my collar, so I unzipped the top of my pullover, and he Spike Lee’d me right along the neckline. We shook hands and I thanked him for the honor of having met with him. Andre and I exited feeling self-consciously giddy about how our day had transpired.

So now I have a vintage 40 Acres T-shirt that can never be washed again, as I can’t account for the permanence of the marker Spike was using. But perhaps best of all, Andre has a lovingly well-worn gray pullover that Michele can never throw out.

¹ It’s almost quaint now to remember a time when Spike virtually propelled himself by force of will, marketing savvy and remarkable talent to the forefront of his generation, that rare African-American filmmaker who was getting his films produced, distributed, and seen by mainstream audiences. So much has the cinematic landscape changed during his quarter century of prominence that now we can’t get rid of Tyler Perry no matter how hard we try. That, brothers and sisters, is progress.

2012-01-01T19:39:00.000-08:00

NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS
1. Write more than 420 characters a day.
2. Edit better so that posts don’t always run to 5,300 words.¹
3. Throw more punches.
4. Heal left elbow so I can stick more jabs.
5. Get out of the house more often.
6. Love Adriane even more than I already do.
7. See #1.

¹ I hope you can appreciate, though, how necessary that is sometimes.

2011-12-25T00:47:00.000-08:00

ALTMAN CAN DIE BUT HE CAN’T HIDE FOREVER:
THE LONG GOODBYE
Director Robert Altman enjoyed a long career on the fringe of Hollywood, working mostly outside the studio system, regarded as an iconoclast, and winning the respect and admiration of legions of actors who lined up for the honor of inclusion in his overstuffed casts.

But while I will admit to having liked McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Gosford Park more than I anticipated, I have always found Altman’s oeuvre to consist mostly of pretentious, slapdash exercises in improvisation with little or no regard for narrative coherence or structure. It’s no wonder actors loved Altman — often he let them run rampant, encouraging them to “make choices” and “take chances” in the moment, then Cut! Print! Next setup! “I don’t direct,” Altman said. “I watch.” If the screenplay is a blueprint for a motion picture, on Altman’s sets it was more like a scavenger hunt: If we collect enough of these story beats along the way, by the time we reach the end it’ll look like we’ve told a whole story.

Rather than pick the man apart with sweeping generalities, though, I have long put Altman on notice for one sin in particular: his adaptation of my favorite novel, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. I have carried this festering wound since I first saw the film several years ago and had said many times that if I ever passed Altman on the street, I’d punch him in the face for shitting on something I love. I didn’t care that he was an old man with a heart condition. In my mind, there is no statute of limitations.

Then the bastard died in 2006, and my opportunity slipped away without ever having presented itself. In the grand scheme of things, I’m much more distraught about never having met Billy Wilder while I lived in L.A., but that doesn’t mean it’s over between me and Altman.

The subject of Altman’s The Long Goodbye has surfaced in print and in conversation in recent years — I am aghast at how often someone says they like the film¹ — and I recently re-read the novel for maybe the seventh or eighth time, so I thought I should take another pass at the film while the book was again fresh in my mind. It would be pretty to say that I was giving the film a second chance, but I believe the preceding two paragraphs make it clear that I sought only kindling to throw on the fire of my righteous rage. Let’s not make me out to be a diplomat or a peacemaker here.

There’s an old saying about film adaptations, something along the lines of You don’t always have the luxury of being faithful, so instead you must be ruthless. What this actually means is that you’re going to have to throw out a lot of a 400-page novel if you want to get to the heart of a story that you can distill into 120 minutes (or less) of screen time.² The travesty of Altman’s adaptation is that it is all ruthlessness, with no faithfulness to be found anywhere, except perhaps in the names of the main characters.

It is particularly unsettling that the credited screenwriter here is Leigh Brackett, who co-adapted Chandler’s The Big Sleep for Howard Hawks in 1946. (Her collaborators were Jules Furthman and another fellow whom you may have heard of: William Faulkner.) That film is quintessential to the private-eye genre, and if it is more an exercise in letting Bogart be Bogart than a pure interpretation of Philip Marlowe, it is still closer to the essence of the man than many other portrayals of the detective.³

Watching the DVD extras, one gets the impression that Brackett might have delivered a more or less faithful adaptation of The Long Goodbye, only to have Altman dismantle it brick by brick on the set. It is said that she was asked at one of the screenings whether it was OK with her that they had taken “so many liberties and gone beyond boundaries.” She is said to have replied that she was “more than OK” with the result and that her work was “more than validated” by the film, which in my courtroom makes her an accessory after the fact, if not in fact complicit to the murder itself

For his part, Altman seemed to think that Brackett died before the film’s release, which he said was “disappointing to me.” In fact, she lived another five years, so unless he was talking about the release of The Empire Strikes Back, which was her last screen credit (shared with Lawrence Kasdan, who completed the screenplay), we’re presented here with one more exhibit to reinforce Altman’s disregard for writers. (I don’t care that he shot the interview nearly 30 years after the film.)

Altman’s film stars Elliott Gould as Marlowe. Elliott Gould! Don’t get me wrong — he’s a fine actor at least half the time and a very likable guy, but the mere idea of Gould as Marlowe inspires in me a variation on Sen. Lloyd Bentsen’s vice-presidential debate takedown of Dan Quayle.

The only way Gould makes sense in the role at all is to think of him as the perfect actor to play a character whom the filmmaker views with disdain at best, contempt at worst. To wit, when we first see Gould as Marlowe, he is sleeping off a drunk, unshaven and fully dressed in rumpled clothes and Gould’s rumpled hair.⁴ Chandler’s Marlowe is a rather fastidious bachelor and sharp-witted professional, but Gould plays the detective as a slurring, mumbling, drunken slob, virtually a vagrant. Altman pointlessly devotes the film’s first 11 minutes to a late-night trip to a grocery store and Marlowe’s going to great extremes to trick his cat into eating some off-brand cat food.⁵

The story actually begins when the fugitive Terry Lennox arrives at Marlowe’s apartment, in need of a ride to Tijuana, which Marlowe obliges, driving him down in a 1948 Lincoln Continental that is the movie’s only period effect. We are essentially told that Marlowe and Lennox are good friends who’ve known each other for years, when in fact (read: in the book), they have known each other several months at most. Even if this relationship is being established quickly in the interest of moving the story along, why waste the first 11 minutes on the cat?

In the film’s first bit of stunt casting, the role of Lennox is played by Jim Bouton, the onetime major-league pitcher whose memoir Ball Four is, for my money, the best book about baseball ever written. As an actor, however, Bouton is strictly bush league, an inexplicable, indefensible choice to play the film’s most pivotal character, even if he is largely absent throughout the story. And truth be told, Altman’s Lennox, who is supposed to be such an old and dear friend of Marlowe’s, is really a thoughtless, self-absorbed asshole with none of the qualities that make Chandler’s Lennox a sympathetic, even occasionally admirable, character.

This first act sets the tone for Altman’s full-scale abdication of both the immediate story and the Marlowe myth writ large. In the book, Lennox is helplessly drunk (but unbelievably polite) outside a restaurant when Marlowe first encounters him, and both the parking attendant and the woman Lennox is with (his wife, it turns out) can’t toss him into the gutter fast enough. Marlowe doesn’t like the way Lennox is being treated, so he takes Lennox home and sobers him up enough to find out where he lives. Later Lennox invites Marlowe out for a drink to express his gratitude for looking out for him when he didn’t have to, and the two men bond over gimlets in a Hollywood bar in the late afternoon.

Theirs is at once a tenuous friendship — they have met on only a handful of occasions as the novel’s plot unfolds — and yet the most meaningful friendship the lone wolf Marlowe enjoys over the course of a half-dozen novels.⁶ It is based on nothing more than a shared understanding between men about the world they inhabit. Each is without illusions about themselves and each other, but when Lennox has his back against the wall — his rich, beautiful, promiscuous wife, Sylvia, has just been bludgeoned to death — he knows instinctively that Marlowe is the only man he can count on. He is not taking advantage of Marlowe’s friendship; he is relying implicitly on the code of honor that is at the core of Marlowe’s being.⁷

That code, much more so than his feelings for Lennox, is why Marlowe clams up under questioning and allows himself to be tossed into the tank for a few days. He’s released only after the cops get news out of Mexico that Lennox has killed himself in an Otatoclán flophouse.

Altman, however, plays this situation for cheap comedy, as Marlowe is booked in a police station that uses a coin-operated photo booth to take his mug shots (no, really), and Gould improvs his way through an interrogation scene by smearing fingerprint ink all over his face when the cops refuse him a means of cleaning his hands. It is the shambling-drunk routine all over again instead of an opportunity to reveal — or reinforce — Marlowe’s true character.

His stint in the clink earns Marlowe some press and the attention of a number of interested parties. These include Sewell Endicott, the lawyer for Harlan Potter, the wealthy, publicity-averse father of Terry Lennox’s dead wife; a gangster named Mendy Menendez, who shared a foxhole with Lennox and another gangster, Randy Starr, in the war; and Howard Spencer, the representative for an East Coast publishing house. Endicott believes Marlowe looks to make a buck off the Lennox murder case (he doesn’t); Menendez wants Marlowe to accept the official account of Lennox’s confession and suicide and let Lennox rest in peace (he won’t); and Spencer wants to hire him to locate one of his best-selling authors, Roger Wade, a blackout drunk with a tendency to disappear to a fly-by-night sanitarium to detox (Marlowe’s gotta eat).

As we enter Act II on-screen, the Law of Economy of Characters decrees that most of these people are unnecessary to the plot. These include Endicott and, by extension, his client Harlan Potter; Potter’s other daughter, Linda Loring (more about her later); and her husband, Dr. Loring, the personal physician of Mrs. Eileen Wade, who renders Spencer irrelevant by hiring Marlowe herself. Menendez, Starr and their back story with Lennox are replaced by a different gangster altogether: a racketeer named Marty Augustine, for whom Lennox was allegedly holding (or perhaps just owed) a few hundred thousand dollars, which Augustine believes Marlowe is now in possession of.

As the wayward drunk Roger Wade, whom Marlowe is employed to first locate, then ostensibly babysit, Altman cast Sterling Hayden, a towering figure but an incredibly insecure actor — a man who won a Silver Star and other commendations for gallantry in World War II, then spent an entire career making a lot of money doing something that he reportedly hated because he couldn’t believe he got paid so much for doing something so frivolous. Some damn people just can’t be happy even when everything goes their way.

The Internet Movie Database informs us that Hayden was allowed to write his own scenes, which, given the information in the previous paragraph, seems like precisely the sort of thing Altman would do to placate a pathological ego like Hayden’s, the bonus being that he’d get to throw out just that much more of the screenplay for which Brackett is credited.

Our introduction to Wade, then, is one hastily improvised scene loosely based on a sequence from the book — his liberation by Marlowe from shady Dr. Verringer’s sanitarium — followed by his homecoming, a noisy shouting match between Wade and his Doberman pinscher while Marlowe attempts to mumble a conversation with his client, Eileen. One need spend only a couple of minutes of screen time with this version of Roger Wade to wonder why anybody — his wife included — would believe he’s worth rescuing.

Back at his apartment, Marlowe is braced by Marty Augustine and his men. Played ridiculously by film director Mark Rydell, Augustine is less a convincing gangster than a flashy, insecure poseur with an entourage. Rather than just order any number of his men to rough up Marlowe to extract what he came for, Augustine smashes his own mistress’s face with a Coke bottle to demonstrate … I’m not sure what he’s trying to demonstrate. Even for a burgeoning psychopath, it seems counterproductive to brutalize someone you purport to love when you’re surrounded by a roomful of guys you pay to brutalize people you don’t. (A roomful of guys, I might add, who are just as horrified as the rest of us by what we’ve just witnessed. So how tough can they be, really? See also: superfluous.)

In this respect, Altman is posturing just as much as Augustine, demonstrating the lengths he will go to in his rapacious mistreatment of the source material specifically and narrative logic in general. As a result, the whole lot of them come off as comically feckless throughout the rest of the movie, whereas in the book Mendy Menendez (a homophone for menace?) and his henchman Chick Agostino (for which Augustine is itself a homophone) make for a much more interesting standoff — an ongoing battle of nerve between two sides who each know better than to underestimate the other.

Immediately thereafter, Marlowe tails the Augustine party to the Wades’ place in Malibu, where he spies Augustine in an animated confrontation with Eileen. It’s a throwaway scene whose only purpose is to establish that all these characters know each other without having to do any serious character development or offer any foreshadowing.

The following day, Marlowe pays a return visit to the Wades, ostensibly to see how Roger is doing, and here Altman commits his next inexplicable crime against storytelling. As with the novels, the entire movie is told from Marlowe’s point of view; we are in his shoes every step of the way … except for this one scene, in which Marlowe takes a walk down to the beach so the Wades can have a private conversation. Instead of going with Marlowe, we stay with the Wades and are forced to sit through another ham-fisted improvisation, another indulgence Altman allows his actors, a scene of marital discord that tells us nothing we don’t already know about these defective people and, worse, does nothing to advance the plot. It’s as pointless as the 11-minute quest for cat food that opens the movie, though mercifully more brief, even including the rambling conversation that follows between Wade and Marlowe, which is also so much hooey except that Wade claims to be owed money by Augustine and admits that he knew both Terry and Sylvia Lennox. Great. Everybody knows everybody.

Now things begin to happen very fast. Which is to say that things finally begin to happen. Perhaps Altman realized that he had wasted a great deal of screen time up to this point, because now he starts cramming in plot points right and left.

We cut to Marlowe riding the elevator up to his apartment, reading his mail, specifically the letter from Lennox containing the portrait of Madison — a $5,000 bill. In the book, this happens much earlier in the story, and it’s a much more significant moment than it is allowed to be here; the portrait of Madison even takes on a life of its own, as a curiosity, an amusement, but mostly a conundrum, another encumbrance at odds with Marlowe’s code. He never wanted any money from Lennox, and Lennox’s grand gesture is virtually unspendable anyway. Lennox’s letter takes up a page and a half of the book — a literal sort of long goodbye in which he explains somewhat the corner he has backed himself into and apologizes for making so much trouble for Marlowe, even as he reinforces what Marlowe has always believed: that Lennox could not have, and in fact did not, murder his wife. Not that anyone but Marlowe cares.

Certainly Altman doesn’t. The movie’s version of the letter, in its entirety, reads:

Good Bye Phil
I’m sorry
Terry
Again, you don’t have to sell me on the Law of Economy in screenwriting, but this scene could have at least hinted at much greater depth and an actual sense of, you know, friendship, seeing how Altman wants us to believe that these guys go back years together and not just since last October. We don’t even have to read the whole letter or hear it in voiceover, but we could at least be shown that some thought and feeling went into it. As it stands, this moment exists only as a setup gag to a literal payoff arrived at later like a line drawn in a child’s connect-the-dots coloring book.

Next we cut to Marlowe getting off a bus in Mexico. Pan past a couple of dogs humping each other in the street (no, really), then dissolve to Marlowe’s meeting with the Otatoclán chief of police and the coroner who examined Lennox. The latter shows him some badly developed, not entirely convincing photos of Lennox’s body. The three men pause to pay their respects to a funeral procession in the street below and …

We cut back to Malibu. A large party is in full swing as Marlowe threads his way to the back of the Wades’ house, where Roger is wildly drunk and holding court. In the book, the party is a set piece, attended by, you know, characters, flesh-and-blood people with agendas and attitudes and motivations, and Roger is sober as a bishop; in the movie, it’s just a bunch of extras, random groovy Malibu types standing around to be an audience for another of Roger Wade’s drunken meltdowns.⁸ Creepy Dr. Verringer (played by creepy Henry Gibson⁹) appears out of nowhere to demand the balance of Roger’s bill, and more bad improvisation ensues until Roger yells at everybody to go home and finally surrenders a signed check to Verringer before passing out in his study.

Eileen cooks dinner for Marlowe while Wade sleeps it off, and a pleasant couple of hours or more pass before Marlowe finally confronts Eileen about Augustine’s appearance at their house a few nights earlier. Wade owes Augustine money, she says, not the other way around. Marlowe presses her about whether she knew Terry Lennox and if so, how well, but before he can get any real answers out of her, they look out to see Roger Wade walking into the Pacific Ocean. Marlowe and Eileen give chase but to no avail, as Roger, yes, literally wades to his death.

As the Wades’ strip of beachfront becomes a scene of search-and-recovery efforts and rubbernecking neighbors, a soaking-wet Marlowe is drunk (read: Gould is improvising) as he gets in the face of Detective Farmer — who threw Marlowe in jail earlier for his Tijuana taxi service — demanding that the Terry Lennox case be reopened, to account for Wade taking his own life, perhaps out of guilt, even though he’s never uttered a single intelligible phrase that could support such speculation.

Now we jump to the big reveal, because time is fleeting and Altman still has to connect all those dots I alluded to earlier.

Marlowe is dragged up to Augustine’s office, where the latter says he apologized to his battered mistress by appearing in her hospital room completely naked. He thinks Marlowe should come clean the same way, and with his mummified mistress there to witness the ridiculous scene, decrees that not only Marlowe but also Augustine and all his men will strip naked. This lunacy seems to exist only as an opportunity for more stunt casting: a preliterate, pre–Pumping Iron Arnold Schwarzenegger as a member of Augustine’s entourage. The future Terminator and Governator appears nowhere else in the movie, speaks no lines, and was apparently cast just so the ladies in the audience wouldn’t rue the 110 minutes of their lives they’d never get back. He stands out among this group, as Chandler would say, like a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

The scene also exists for the deus ex machina, which fortunately arrives before anyone in the room actually makes it down to the full monty. As Augustine and company try to wrestle Marlowe out of his clothes, the portrait of Madison falls from Marlowe’s pocket, and Augustine identifies it as having been among the stash that Lennox was “holding” for him. Just as Augustine is ordering one of his half-naked lackeys to circumcise Marlowe, cue another lackey who re-enters the scene with important news: Unto us this day a satchel is delivered, containing the missing 350 large. And so joyously are these glad tidings received that Augustine cuts loose a fully clothed Marlowe and lets him keep the portrait of Madison as a souvenir of their time together.

Where’d the money come from? Why, from Eileen Wade, whom Marlowe runs after on foot as she drives away from the scene in her Mercedes convertible. And he might have caught her too, had he not run out into traffic and been hit by a car. By the time Marlowe releases himself from the hospital on his own recognizance, the Wade house is cleaned out and being prepped for sale by a real estate manager.

So, to recap: Dot (newly widowed Eileen Wade) was holding dot (Augustine’s money) all along for her lover, dot (the fugitive Terry Lennox), whom she has now dot (blown town to be with). See how simple that was? And it was all accomplished in about 10 minutes of screen time, freeing up the other 100 for the ridiculousness described herein.

So Marlowe’s off to Mexico to locate Terry Lennox, who is very much alive, thanks to an assist from the aforementioned Otatoclán coroner and chief of police. Marlowe bribes them with the portrait of Madison to learn Lennox’s precise whereabouts.

Lennox, it turns out, is no friend at all and has no regrets about either killing his wife or leaving his supposed friend Marlowe on the hook to deal with the fallout and possibly take the rap. He explains the whole plot in less than 30 seconds and is every bit as dismissive of Marlowe as Altman himself is, so much so that Marlowe takes out a gat and shoots him dead on the spot.

The end.

So there you have it. I, who ordinarily wouldn’t dream of spoiling a movie for you, wouldn’t dignify this one by allowing you to sit through it. You may have noticed that I haven’t said much about the end of the book. That’s because it is infinitely better, more thoughtful and complex, and deserves to be read someday when you have the time and the inclination. Of course, I’d recommend that you first read one or two of the earlier Marlowe novels so you’ll have a more fully developed sense of the man and can appreciate what it all means in the end. It will not be a waste of your time.

I’ll say this much more: By dispensing with Menendez and Starr, and turning Terry Lennox into an irredeemable asshole, Altman strips the story of its themes of friendship, sacrifice and honor. By casting aside Linda Loring, he eliminates a midnovel flirtation, some dramatic tension involving her rich and powerful father, and a coda that invests Marlowe with romance, a sense of longing, and the possibility of a life beyond his dusty office in the Cahuenga Building and his lonely nights in whatever apartment or house he’s renting that year. By excising any number of other key characters and compelling subplots, he frees up 11 minutes for the freaking cat.

Everything meaningful that elevates the book above even the best of Chandler’s previous output is disregarded and discarded by Altman, who shot Marlowe’s reflection in a funhouse mirror because it was easier to tear down something great than to create an original commentary on or deconstruction of film noir and the detective genre, as he so disingenuously claimed to be doing. Writing is hard work, not that Altman would have known anything about that.

Raymond Chandler published The Long Goodbye 14 years before I was born and died six years later. I was 6 years old when Altman perpetrated his travesty against the novel. Another 10 or 11 years passed before I discovered Chandler in my high school’s library during study-hall period and had my world and my writing style forever changed. I was in college by the time I caught up with The Long Goodbye. Hence my dismay when I finally caught up with the movie.

Put another way: All those millions of fanboys worldwide who grew up entranced by J.R.R. Tolkien, the ones who would have torn Peter Jackson limb from limb then set fire to the dismembered pieces of him if he’d screwed up the Lord of the Rings trilogy? I am them, except I’m Chandler’s guy, and though there aren’t nearly as many of us, I contain multitudes. I’m essentially the rage of millions crystallized in one being, representing anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand like-minded souls who don’t work a heavy bag as often as I do and might never have thought the whole thing through like this. And if they have, I’d like to think they’d nominate me to be the guy they live through vicariously, the guy who’d make Altman’s mug go all Cubist with an overhand right and then, standing over his prone figure like Ali over Liston, say, “That was for Marlowe.”

It won’t happen in this lifetime, but neither will forgiveness.

¹ These include the noted film critic Roger Ebert, with whom I am ordinarily simpatico but who included Altman’s film in his Great Movies collection for reasons that surpass my understanding no matter how many times I re-read his review.

Mining an Internet so jam-packed with people fellating Altman’s corpse in their praise of the film, the only vein of reason I’ve located so far is found in excerpts of a Time review by Jay Cocks, onetime film critic and a frequent collaborator of Martin Scorsese’s:

“The movie opens with a rasping fanfare, a blast from an old record of ‘Hooray for Hollywood.’ It very neatly sets the tone for this travesty of Raymond Chandler’s superb novel about honor and friendship, two subjects among a great many that Robert Altman cannot bring himself to take seriously. …

“… Altman’s lazy, haphazard putdown is without affection or understanding, a nose-thumb not only at the idea of Philip Marlowe but at the genre that his tough-guy-soft-heart character epitomized. It is a curious spectacle to see Altman mocking a level of achievement to which, at his best, he could only aspire.”

Sounds familiar. And my hand to God, I had never read those quotes before beginning this endeavor. Travesty has long been my go-to descriptor of this film. Abortion is always close at hand as well.

² One filmmaker who embodied that ethos — among the very best at capturing the essence of a novel even at the cost of omitting much of its specific content — was the late writer-director Anthony Minghella, a lovely man who had a particular gift for absorbing the story, then throwing out the book and writing the movie he had envisioned. He was equally successful adapting both a book I loved (Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient) and a book I disliked (Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley) into movies that I greatly admire.

³ Among them: Robert Montgomery in 1947’s The Lady in the Lake is too goofy and self-aware, overselling every wry throwaway line to ensure that the people in the back row of the theater get the joke, and the film’s conceit of being filmed through Marlowe’s eyes (we see him only when he’s reflected in a mirror or a window) is too clever by half.

James Garner more closely embodies the spirit of the detective in 1969’s Marlowe, an adaptation of Chandler’s The Little Sister, but the film’s contemporary setting and late ’60s sensibility undercut the sense of Marlowe being a man of his time, aging and evolving as he does over the course of Chandler’s six original novels, from 1939 to 1953. (Playback in 1958 was something of an afterthought, cobbled together from an unproduced screenplay of a non-Marlowe story.) Garner would go on to become the best — and in many ways the most Marlowesque — of the TV private eyes in The Rockford Files a few years later.

Perhaps the truest portrayal of Marlowe is perpetrated by Dick Powell in 1944’s excellent Murder, My Sweet. Powell had first made his name as a song-and-dance man, but he wears the role of Marlowe nicely, playing him with great understatement and a innate feel for the detective’s wry sensibility. I seem to remember Powers Boothe being awfully good too, in a period-faithful HBO series based on Chandler’s short stories from the Black Mask days.

⁴ Altman says in the DVD extras that they developed the idea of “Rip Van Marlowe” — that is, the idea of Chandler’s Marlowe waking up 20 years later and essentially sleepwalking through the 1970s. But this is a specious excuse for a premise that isn’t fully committed to. I’m not saying that Marlowe has to be thawed out of cryogenics like Fry on Futurama (another Philip, incidentally), but if that were the case, then his pre-existing relationship with Lennox and the fact that everyone else knows who he is means that the whole justification for Marlowe to be the way he is here is a ruse born of laziness and sloppy storytelling, as well as an excuse to give Marlowe a houseful of stoned, stupid, frequently naked hippie chicks as next-door neighbors.

⁵ Someone named Mark Edmundson recently wrote in something called The American Scholar: “In The Long Goodbye, the detective’s ridiculous affection for his cat, and his drive, against all opposition, to get precisely the right cat food is surely more affecting than all the giant crowd scenes that Cecil B. De Mille ever put on the screen.”

This is typical of the kind of fawning over Altman that I’ve never understood. He is essentially being given a pass here for wasting roughly 10 percent of the film’s total running time on something that has absolutely nothing to do with the story. There is in fact an affecting story right there in the pages of Chandler’s book, if only Altman had bothered to read it before wiping his ass with it.

⁶ One could make an argument for the recurring character Det. Bernie Ohls, a former colleague of Marlowe’s, but Ohls tends to turn up only in an official capacity — as he does again in The Long Goodbye — and if there is no obvious friction between the two men, there is certainly nothing like warmth or affection. Ohls is always as likely to arrest Marlowe as to take him out for a beer.

⁷ “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”
— Chandler in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder,” The Atlantic Monthly, November 1945

⁸ The party represents a perfect microcosm of the movie as a whole: Altman didn’t invite to the story anyone who is even remotely interesting or dramatically compelling, and as if inviting only uninteresting people isn’t bad enough, he got everyone else drunk who might otherwise have been interesting or compelling enough to spend time with.

⁹ I hate Illinois Nazis.

2011-11-18T15:13:00.000-08:00

THE JERRY SANDUSKY DECISION-MAKING MATRIX
Fulfilling the Chronicles’ mission to serve the public good whenever possible, I have created, for Jerry Sandusky and others like him, this helpful and, I hope, instructive flow chart to address at least one of the thorny moral and ethical questions that have brought the erstwhile Penn State defensive coordinator, his colleagues, and the institutions they serve to this explosive moment on the national stage.

Please consult it as necessary.

(Click to enlarge.)

2011-08-08T00:47:00.000-07:00

A ROOM AT THE END OF THE WORLD

TYLERIf you could fight anyone, who would you fight?

JACKShatner. I’d fight William Shatner.
— Fight Club

It was, for all intents and purposes, a spur-of-the-moment decision. Adriane and I had briefly discussed going someplace out of town for my birthday weekend but hadn’t zeroed in on any details apart from the possible destinations of Santa Cruz and Monterey.

It was around 1 p.m. Friday when the idea began to take hold and our scramble for accommodations began. After a couple of failed attempts to bid for a room on Priceline.com, Adriane spotted a “featured deal” that was within our desired price range and in close proximity to those places we were interested in visiting.

Salinas, California, is the birthplace of the Nobel laureate John Steinbeck, and the Travelers Hotel, which was offering us a room at $70 a night, is located downtown, a block and a half away from the National Steinbeck Center. It was pure coincidence that this weekend should also mark the 31st Annual Steinbeck Festival, which may in part explain why the Travelers was the only place in town that could offer us two nights instead of only one.

When we first entered the lobby around 9 p.m., we were met by a smell of chlorine so strong as to be off-putting. My first impression was that it might be necessary to cover any of myriad other odors that lay in wait, but Adriane observed that it was coming from the adjoining Mexican restaurant, which, having closed for the night, had just had its floors mopped.

An older Indian man greeted us with a smile when we arrived at the registration window. This was not the desk clerk but a handyman who was just making a call on the office phone. He gestured to us that the clerk would be with us shortly.

The clerk was a younger, 20-something Indian man, Americanized and without much of an accent. A cautious, nervous sort, he seemed somehow apologetic, explaining his math as he wrote out our registration by hand and looking up at us with eyes that were giving us every opportunity to cancel right then and there and make a run for it. As he checked us in, he explained where we might find dinner nearby at that late hour, told us of some of the events taking place in Monterey County that weekend, then volunteered to guide us up to our room.

We could have found the room on our own, but admittedly the layout of stairwells and rooms resembled more or less a rabbit warren designed by M.C. Escher. The carpet running throughout the hotel corridors was dark brown with an orange crisscross pattern. One imagines that it might have been selected for its ability to hide all manner of unpleasantness.

By the time the desk clerk opened the door to our guest room, we were already screwed. Adriane’s Visa card had been swiped and processed, and to back out then would likely have meant a $155 donation to the management and a three-hour return drive to whence we came, given the improbability of another vacancy nearby.

The walls of our guest room were painted mint green, while the doors and trim were dark brown. Banish from your mind this instant the stylish, Martha Stewart Collection connotations this color combination implies. In any event, the paint clashed with the navy blue carpeting and the flammable bedspread and matching curtains of many colors.

While our guest room contained a sink, a medicine cabinet, and a bag-lined 5-gallon bucket in lieu of an actual trash can, there were no private bathrooms in the building. Rather, on each floor were two community bathrooms with shower and sink¹ and two community toilets — one each for “gentlemen”; one each for “ladies.” As we were not warned in advance that the management did not provide toilet paper in any of these facilities, my larcenous beloved took it upon herself to liberate a roll from the ladies room of the restaurant and brewery to which we repaired for dinner after check-in.

The wall-mounted television did not work. Neither, presumably, did the other four televisions that the management was apparently storing in our closet. However, the room did contain a full-size refrigerator, which, remarkably, was operational.

The closet itself was a walk-in, but there was not a single hanger in sight. If we wanted to hang anything, it would have to hang from one of four coat hooks. The room’s lone dresser either was intentionally designed to have two drawers under a cubby that could double as a bookshelf, or it was simply missing its top drawer. One drawer contained a small ashtray, the other a Gideon Bible.

Our street-facing windows had a broken latch and were held shut only by inertia. One need not be a particularly agile or graceful cat burglar to have accessed our room from the fire escape a few feet away. (One saving grace, perhaps, was the streetlight that stood sentry directly across from our windows.) Furthermore, our curtains could not be drawn completely closed, so we had to pin them together in the middle with one of Adriane’s hair clips.

Saturday night, Adriane and I went to a late movie up the street just so we wouldn’t have to return to our room any earlier than necessary. Upon exiting the theater, we were crestfallen to discover that it was only 11:13 p.m.

In all fairness, I should note that Adriane and I once stopped to sleep a few short hours at a Motel 6 in Meridian, Idaho, which charged us the same $70 rate and failed us in just about every way imaginable.² Here, then, in the interest of equanimity, I will say a few nice things about the Travelers Hotel:

Despite the general skeeviness of the room itself and a mattress on which one could feel pretty much every individual spring, our sheets were clean, and I did not experience even psychosomatic itchiness by imagining an infestation of bedbugs in the hotel.
Despite a slow login process, the hotel’s Wi-Fi signal — its only truly modern amenity — was consistent whenever we needed to access it.
Despite the total inability of the bathtub in the gentlemen’s community bathroom to drain, leaving me ankle deep in water after only a few minutes under the shower nozzle, the water itself was blessedly hot.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got. And I’m afraid it’s not enough to save the Travelers from a date with a wrecking ball if I’m ever elected mayor of Salinas, California.

The Travelers Hotel is the sort of place for which words like “dump,” “fleabag,” “squat” and “flophouse” were originally coined. It no doubt served as a boarding house at one time — perhaps it still does — and one can easily imagine so-called lives of quiet desperation being eked out, drowned in cheap liquor or cut-rate heroin, and eventually snuffed out in those squalid mint-green rooms. If I hadn’t been on an unplanned weekend adventure with the woman I love, whose company makes everything brighter, I might have started feeling such dark impulses myself.

¹ For the record, I have twice before stayed in so-called “European-style” or “tourist class” hotels in which guests shared bathrooms: at the Belleclaire Hotel on New York’s Upper West Side and at the Ace Hotel in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood. Any misgivings I may have had about the arrangement were quickly forgotten, thanks to the cleanliness of the facilities and the complete sense of privacy I enjoyed at both hotels. Travelers Hotel, on the other hand, illustrates perfectly why “hostel” and “hostile” are homophones.

² You may read Adriane’s review of that 1-star experience here, under the headline “Absolutely Heinous.”

2011-07-27T07:35:00.000-07:00

VERY OLD BONES
“Obey my commands,” the third man in the ring routinely tells the combatants before the first bell, “and protect yourselves at all times.”

I’m learning the hard way that I’ve got to respect that second directive.

The heavy bag is by its nature an instrument of physical activity, at once a stationary and moving target, a monolith of resistance and an absorber of kinetic energy, an object to be acted upon with varying degrees of physical force.

But for all its self-evident physicality — its weight, its heft, its density, its mass — I have for so long imagined it as a salve to soothe the savage psyche and soul that I may have taken its true raison d’être for granted.

In short, it’s tougher than it looks.

And even though I bought bag gloves nearly as well padded as a pair of ring gloves, there is only so much impact against which that padding can protect you. It can only cushion the blow — not diminish the force of the blow. It cannot save you from yourself. It cannot stand between you and the ravages of time.

I used to drink a lot more milk. Chocolate milk — the colder, the better — was practically a vice of mine at one time. I can make a quart of milk disappear in about the amount of time it will take me to type this paragraph. When I last lived in Kansas City, I became obsessed with the local Shatto Dairy and its banana whole milk¹ sold in glass quart bottles. I had to limit myself to one quart a week (Fridays, at lunchtime) because I was afraid that too much of a good thing would be, you know, too much of a good thing.

Now that I’m slinging leather in earnest, though, it has occurred to me that I need to increase my calcium intake. When I threw my first couple of big left hooks to “the body” — the patented Irish Micky Ward punch behind which I’d like to develop more power — I felt the impact acutely in my wrist. A few evenings later, I was going at the bag pretty hard, throwing great looping right hooks to “the ribcage,” and when I finished I had to ice my right hand because of what I feared was either a mildly strained tendon in the butt of my palm or, worse, a potential hairline fracture of my fifth metacarpal.

Hence, the milk. Some people are lactose-intolerant. I’m lactose-insistent.

It is perhaps apocryphal, but one influential story as I remember it goes like this: Tommy Morrison — grandnephew of John Wayne and onetime WBO heavyweight titleholder — was cast by Sylvester Stallone in the role of Rocky Balboa’s protégé in the 1990 sequel Rocky V. So Morrison would strike a lean, cut, magnificent figure onscreen, he stopped drinking milk while in training for the film, to reduce body fat. Then, when filming wrapped and Morrison resumed training, he promptly broke one of his hands because the bones were weakened from the lack of calcium in his diet.

The other influential story — most assuredly not apocryphal — I have told here before: about the time I punched a countertop at work and my hand, inexplicably, did not shatter into a hundred little pieces. I can’t help but believe that dairy consumption played some significant role in that episode.

Because of that latter experience, I had every reason to believe that a canvas bag full of sawdust would be much more yielding and forgiving to what are essentially the same hands I had seven years ago.

Except that they’re not. And the heavy bag? Not exactly a pushover just because it doesn’t hit back. And for the last year or so, I haven’t consumed milk in the volumes I once did. Plus, if my hands feel the way they do after a routine recreational outing, I must account for their potential condition after a particularly angry therapy session with Dr. Everlast. Therefore, the hand having sent its electrical impulses to the brain, I am heeding those communiqués by shoring up these very old bones against catastrophe, one way or another.

¹ You have no idea. Never mind that I have peeled and eaten precisely two actual bananas over the course of my 44 years (a texture, or mouth-feel, issue that I can’t get past). For some reason I love banana-flavored foods, even if they’re artificially flavored.

2011-07-13T21:10:00.000-07:00

POPPY RUTHERFORD LIVES

Thirty-three years is a long time to wait for a reunion. Some old friends never change, though.

Our long and winding road began in a white house on Bird Street in Joplin, Missouri, when I was about 9 years old.

My grandfather, Howard Rutherford — Poppy — had trained young Golden Gloves fighters in the low-ceilinged basement of that house, the house he raised my mother and uncles in. My uncles, Don and Jerry, were among the young men he coached in the sweet science of hitting and getting hit. He would begin to train me in that house, at least on the first subject; we never got around to the getting-hit part, though.

Sometime during the summer of 1976, I was staying with my grandparents for a few days, and one evening Poppy came home from the furniture store and told me to come outside with him. He popped open the trunk of his blue Chrysler Newport — an enormous trunk, built for carting golf bags to the course and bodies to isolated dumping grounds; a mobster’s trunk — and there it was: a brand-new, 60-pound canvas Everlast heavy bag.

At first, I was taken aback — my 9-year-old imagination couldn’t see the possibilities in a big ungainly bag of sawdust. If I was going to learn to box, why not give me a nice pair of bright red gloves — eye candy — so that I could learn by actually hitting another person? Poppy was taken aback — he couldn’t believe I was shitting on his gift before he could even take it out of the trunk. Sensing this, and not wanting to disappoint Poppy, ever, I came around over the course of the evening and decided to give it a chance.

The heavy bag would go home with me. My training would commence without it. First things first.

After dinner, we retired to the living room, and as my grandmother sat watching from her gold brocade wing chair, Poppy produced a couple of new rolls of ACE cotton bandage and proceeded to wrap my hands. I don’t know when he would last have wrapped a pair of hands — surely a dozen years or more, since my uncles had stopped fighting — but he did it as quickly and expertly as though he’d done it just the night before. Soon my hands were tightly swaddled and amply reinforced.

Poppy probably held up his hands and had me punch at them for a bit, but the evening became the stuff of legend for me when he opened the heavy, solid front door of the house and braced it for me, telling me to punch it squarely as he had been instructing me. My grandmother was apoplectic — “Stop it, Howard! He’s going to hurt himself!” — but Poppy kept drilling me in his gruff trainer’s voice, commanding me to punch harder. Again. Again. Again.

Thus did I learn by repetition to throw a punch with purpose and authority. Not a flailing, haymaking, windmilling of the arms in the vain hope of hitting more target than air. A punch. With a tight, squared fist. And another punch after that. And another. And a combination. Then a punch again. Always aiming for the target. Always looking to score points. Always looking to make contact.

The lesson ended, and Poppy unwrapped my hands, which were neither bloodied nor broken nor bruised. Grandma was relieved. Poppy was proud of me, which was the most I could ever have hoped for. I was exhilarated.

The heavy bag went home with me, to Neosho. We hung it in the garage of the house we rented on Benton Avenue. I marvel now that we found a beam sturdy enough to support it and to weather the abuse it absorbed. Not necessarily from me, but from my older brother, who could attack the bag with a lot more power than I had and who had apparently discovered the therapeutic value of the bag a lot earlier than I would.

I came about the getting-hit portion of my education the hard way.

The first blow landed when Poppy died the following January. His health had long been in decline — not that you’d have noticed that night he wrapped my hands for the first time. His fourth heart attack had been the one he couldn’t fight back from, and he died at age 63.

I love my father beyond measure, but as male role models go, Poppy was larger than life to me, loud and fearless and profane, an outsize character like something out of literature (inasmuch as I understood the concept at that age). He was the first person in whom I invested emotions much more complicated than mere love. The way he carried himself, the way he treated others, the way others regarded him — I sensed innately that he was someone to be respected, enthralled by, even feared. Toward the end I understood that he wasn’t well, but even as he became smaller, weaker, he was still a giant to me. I couldn’t imagine how he could actually be brought down. Until he was.

The next blow landed about a year and a half later, when my family picked up and moved to suburban Kansas City, away from the only life I had ever known.

The emotions of that time comprise another story altogether. For the purposes of this one, I shall say only that the Everlast bag came down from its moorings, was loaded onto the truck, and made the journey north with us. There was no properly sturdy place to hang it in our new duplex, though, so it was summarily dispatched to a corner of our garage to sit unused, its purpose made moot, its potential unfulfilled.

Had Poppy not died so soon, he could have taught me so much more. Had the bag not been relegated to a corner, I could have worked it to develop my skills. At the very least, maybe I wouldn’t have had my ass handed to me by that sociopathic little freak Bobby Hill that November day in our front yard.

The summer before my sophomore year at KU, my family moved again, into a house across town, where the Everlast bag took up residence in the basement, first propped in a corner, out in the open, then eventually under the stairs. It remained there as I moved out on my own after college, living in apartments even less suitable for it than our homes had been. It remained there when I relocated to L.A.; neither did I live anywhere in that city that would have accommodated the Everlast bag. It was still waiting in my parents’ basement when I returned home from L.A. after eight years and it stayed there for another five as I romanced Adriane from afar and worked toward the two us being together in one place, under one roof.

When we merged our lives and converged upon Sacramento in May 2010, I brought the Everlast bag with me.

Together at last.

Absence and asshats make the heart grow fonder.

If my 9-year-old brain couldn’t wrap itself around the notion of a heavy bag, my 20-something imagination could see nothing but upside. All I needed for a come-to-Jesus moment was to enter the American work force and hold down a steady job among customers and co-workers.

As a highly evolved social creature and a productive member of so-called polite society, I knew I couldn’t actually hit people when they pissed me off. Suddenly the Everlast heavy bag came alive to me as the ultimate absorber of anger and frustration, like a clinical psychologist for my fists.

An irate customer berates you. Take it out on the bag.

A boss belittles you. Take it out on the bag.

Surrounded by idiots and jerks. Take it out on the bag.

In the early ’90s, around the time I was working as a bank teller, often dealing with snotty people who were particular about their money, I read about how the Japanese incorporate into the workplace quiet rooms and other refuges to which employees can steal away for five or 10 minutes to escape stress, if only briefly, to calm their spirits, restore their sanity and help them better engage their responsibilities, clients and co-workers for the rest of the day.

I became obsessed with the improbable dream of a small gym with a heavy bag, a short walk from my work space, to which I could duck away when necessary, during certain opportune windows of downtime, to rain savage blows upon a yielding inanimate object. In short, to obtain some semblance of satisfactory payback, if only against a surrogate, for having endured the most recent of many indignities and grievances. Then to return to my post, cleansed of rage, drained of tension, at least for the moment, to re-engage and, in the dubious parlance of Col. Saito, “be happy in my work.”

Those who know me well, however, would argue that I’d spend a lot more time in the “serenity room” than at my work station.

That no such haven has existed in any of my places of employment means suffering through the day, accruing anger and frustration over the course of eight or nine hours, letting it build up inside and eat away at me like a cancer, then arriving home at 5 p.m. and making Adriane stand in front of the blast furnace while it all pours out of me in torrents. (Always as a patient audience, I hasten to add; never as an unwitting surrogate herself.)

It was on an evening such as this a week or so ago, after a thoroughly infuriating day in the trenches, when I offhandedly remarked, “It’s times like this when I really wish I had the heavy bag to take it all out on.” To which my wise and wonderful beloved replied, “Well, maybe we should go buy you a stand tonight. Would you like to do that?”

It’s been more of an investment than I was counting on. That the two-station stand with speed bag platform was on sale, costing only $20 more than a stand for the heavy bag alone, didn’t necessarily translate to a great bargain. The $70 I saved on the retail cost of the stand — and then some — has since been reinvested in 70 pounds of barbell weights to secure the stand so it doesn’t inch across the floor like an old washing machine; a chain and swivel that I had to order from Everlast to hang the bag; some hand wraps; and a new pair of bag gloves. My beloved hasn’t even blinked. I think she knows the investment will pay dividends over the long term.

And it needn’t stop there. When I move beyond the mere need of an outlet for my aggression, my potential wish list includes the speed bag (once I’m sure I can insulate my neighbors from the sound of it: ratata-batata-ratata-batata-ratata-batata…); a double-end bag with weighted base (which I can attach to the speed-bag swivel; two birds, one stone); some of those fancy, newfangled gel wraps for my hands; a digital round timer, perhaps. There’s a version of this story in which it becomes a hobby as expensive as my father’s healthy obsession with golf.

At the center of it all, however, hangs my white canvas Everlast bag, practically an antique now, a relic of its time. (These days they make them out of durable leather or ballistic nylon or space-age synthetic something-or-other.) That it has weathered years of neglect and indifference without becoming a chew toy, domicile or urinal for rodents is somewhat miraculous, and the bag’s structural integrity has lived up to its brand name.

Most importantly, it is, for all intents and purposes, the last thing my grandfather ever gave me. Even as it sat unused and unseen all those years, it was always present in my imagination as a symbol of the life my grandfather led and the wisdom, intel and basic equipment he wanted to pass down to me — to stand up for myself, to be a man, to take on the world. The heavy bag has endured. It is, as the saying goes, a gift that will keep on giving. Because every time I hang it, and with every jab I stick and every punch I throw, I will think of Poppy, I will hear his voice in my ear, and I will remember that he is still and always in my corner.

2011-07-04T17:11:00.000-07:00

SHINE A LIGHT
The following is the adapted text of an e-mail I sent today to the Reading Cinemas theater chain and our local Tower Theatre regarding my and Adriane’s repeated experiences with dim projection at the Tower:

To Reading Cinemas and the management of the Tower Theatre:

Saturday evening, April 16, 2011, my fiancée and I attended the 7 p.m. screening of Tom McCarthy’s Win Win on Screen 3 at the Tower Theatre in Sacramento.

We both enjoyed the movie very much. Our experience, however, was made less pleasant by obviously dim projection. Even during daytime exterior scenes, it was as though we were watching the film through smoke-tinted glass. (We had a similar experience at a recent screening of Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre in the largest of the Tower’s three screening rooms, although that film is marked by much bleaker production design, making the nuances of projection less immediately apparent to the eye.)

Roger Ebert has written often on his Chicago Sun-Times website (see here, here and here) about the common misconception among theater owners and some projectionists that they are somehow conserving power or bulb life, saving money, or protecting the film stock by projecting films with the lamp turned down to a dimmer (or, erroneously, “cooler”) magnitude. In fact, none of these assumptions are true, and by doing so, all you ensure is a diminished viewing experience for your paying audience of a film that deserves much better presentation.

Fast forward to Saturday, June 25, when we attended the 9:30 p.m. screening of Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life on Tower’s Screen 2. Here is a film which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes, whose director is widely acknowledged as a visionary of the cinema. Because his last film was released in 2005 and the one before that in 1998, a film by Malick should be treated as an event. The director himself even went so far as to send a letter imploring projectionists screening The Tree of Life to follow certain specific guidelines.

Admittedly, I don't know the particulars of film projection well enough to argue Malick’s letter point by point, but I know dim projection when I see it. I saw it again on Screen 2 that Saturday evening, and it was enough like watching a movie projected through smoked glass that I am fairly convinced the Tower Theatre disregarded most if not all of Malick’s instructions. I have now seen dimly projected films on all three of Tower’s screens over a span of two months and have begun to believe that I should expect such a presentation to be the rule, not the exception, whenever I lay down my $9.50 at the Tower.

We had enjoyed the Tower on a number of previous occasions since we moved to Sacramento last year and had looked forward to coming back often. Because the Tower is an art-house theater, it is in many cases the only venue that offers Sacramentans certain indie or foreign films with necessarily limited distribution — a public service in itself. The opportunity to watch these films is not enough, though, if we can't also see them as they were intended. And so we find ourselves on the Fourth of July, eager to see Mike Mills’ new film Beginners but unwilling to squint through dim projection at a film worthy of better treatment, even if the Tower is our only local option.

While I appreciate that the cost of replacing a Xenon projection bulb is vastly greater than, say, my swapping out the headlamp on my Volkswagen (I priced the former recently via Google, and believe me, I sympathize), the mere act of projection is the first and foremost service your theaters perform that bring us all to your doorstep when we'd otherwise just stay home and watch TV or, God forbid, read a book.

Yours truly,

Brent Shepherd

This is the second such missive I’ve been compelled to forward to a movie theater over the years. I wrote the first — a sort of template for this letter — in December 2004 in response to a distressingly dark screening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s period drama A Very Long Engagement at the Regent Showcase theater in the middle of Hollywood, of all places. I had gone to see the same film projected beautifully at the Laemmle’s Royal in Santa Monica two days later and wanted to see if I could get some satisfaction from the management of the Showcase. I never received a response, not even a screw-you for my trouble and effort.

I don’t expect to receive one from Reading or the Tower, either. But I also want them to know that they stand to lose business once filmgoers make the connection between projection quality of the films they’re seeing at the big multiplexes and that of the films they’re seeing at the Tower.

No one appreciates more than I the economics of movie theaters in general and marginalized independent theaters in particular, which earn virtually none of their revenue from the ticket sales of the films they screen. They are kept in business by those advertisements they screen before the movie, by leasing their theaters out for other uses during the day, and by the increasingly exorbitant prices they charge for concessions.

But let’s face it: When those advertisements a theater screens before the movie are projected more brightly and crisply than the films you have paid to see — they are almost always projected using a separate projector that throws up images at a much lower resolution — we now have a breach in the contract between the service provider and the consumer.

You don’t have to be a cinephile like me to know when something you’re watching isn’t projected brightly enough to be worth your two hours and your 10 dollars. If something doesn’t look right to you, you’ll know it, in which case you should take the matter to the management by threatening to take your business elsewhere.

NOTE: The above applies to theaters that still project film prints. For information about the issues inherent to the more modern digital and 3-D equipment being installed in the larger multiplexes, you can do no better than Ty Burr’s excellent May 22, 2011, Boston Globe article “A movie lover’s plea: Let there be light” and the aforementioned Roger Ebert’s May 24, 2011, blog entry “The Dying of the Light.”

2011-04-10T19:31:00.000-07:00

STRANGERS ON A TRAIN OF THOUGHT: SOURCE CODE
In all of cinema, the time-travel movie is perhaps the one subgenre that asks the most of its audience in terms of suspending disbelief. It’s not enough for us to want to be entertained or to want to believe that time travel is possible. The most successful time-travel movies must meet the audience at least halfway, by doing two things:

1. As preposterous and scientifically impossible as the idea is in reality, it must be cinematically plausible — i.e., the rules by which it is possible in the movie you are watching must be watertight and must be delivered with a straight face.

2. The movie must be wholly committed to the premise it supposes and play strictly by the rules it has established to govern that premise.

Duncan Jones’ sophomore feature, Source Code, supposes time travel with a twist, its premise being that, after a person dies, the last eight minutes of that person’s life remain imprinted on his or her brain. By connecting a living subject to the memory receptors in the decedent’s brain, that subject can repeatedly access those eight minutes, not merely to relive them but to construct an alternate, parallel reality, interacting with the physical surroundings in the dead person’s memory instead of being a passive observer.

Ridiculous? Of course. Confusing? Certainly. Cinematically plausible? Surprisingly, yes.

Our subject, Capt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), is a soldier who wakes up on a Chicago-bound commuter train with no idea how he got there. Christina (Michelle Monaghan), the beautiful passenger seated opposite him, seems to know him, although he’s never seen her before. Their first eight minutes together don’t go so smoothly, because Stevens is unaware that he is inside the memory — and the body, as it were — of a teacher named Sean Fentress, who died with Christina and everyone else aboard that train when a bomb exploded onboard.

The explosion jars Stevens back to consciousness, inside a capsule that he believes is a simulator of some kind. His handler, Capt. Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), doesn’t have time to explain what he’s doing there because she needs urgently to know everything he saw onboard the train before the explosion. It’s the calling card, Goodwin says, of a bomber who has something much bigger planned for downtown Chicago. Stevens can’t do anything to save the people on that commuter train, but he can gather information about the people on the train, locate the bomb and perhaps identify the person who planted it in time to stop the next attack. So back he goes, into the titular “source code” that allows him to relive Sean Fentress’ final eight minutes.

At first, the movie seems in danger of dragging us through an infuriating, never-ending loop, but after the first few abortive attempts — and one humorous, obligatory nod to Harold Ramis’ Groundhog Day — Stevens finds his footing and commits to the mission like the good soldier he is, piecing together information and weighing all the likely scenarios eight minutes at a time.

Meanwhile, Stevens is also making the most of those eight minutes with Christina, and here the movie again accomplishes the improbable: drawing us into and making us root for a truly doomed romance. Over the course of their repeated encounters, Stevens begins to care for Christina, and her attraction to Sean becomes more apparent as she sees this new, more assertive side of her colleague and fellow commuter. Make of this complicated love triangle what you will; as an audience, we are drawn to the chemistry of our leads, and fortunately, Gyllenhaal and Monaghan have it.

In service of this high concept, the acting is generally solid: Gyllenhaal is much less wooden and one-dimensional than I have found him to be in previous films. Monaghan is typically appealing in a necessarily redundant and underwritten role. Back at the command post, Farmiga and the excellent Jeffrey Wright (as the source code’s developer, Dr. Rutledge) don’t move around a lot, spending most of their screen time in close-up, but still manage to convey the urgency, authority and, occasionally, deceit necessary to propel both a mission and a plot in which information must be meted out on a need-to-know basis.

The movie falters only at the very end. I will tell you only that, for all its impossible science and improbable leaps of logic, Source Code culminates in a very satisfying ending that makes perfect sense within the rules established at the outset by Ben Ripley’s fast-paced screenplay … after which it tacks on an utterly ridiculous epilogue that I believe to be the “contribution” of one studio executive or a roomful of them who, adhering to the prime directive of all studio executives, refused to leave well enough alone.

Duncan Jones and Ben Ripley should be rightfully proud of the smart, engaging popcorn thriller they’ve made. Neither of them should stoop to participate in the sequel this epilogue so flagrantly promises.

2011-02-24T21:30:00.000-08:00

CUT TO THE CHASE: BULLITT
Back in September, after I wrote about 1968’s The Thomas Crown Affair, a friend and frequent reader of these all-too-infrequent dispatches requested that I follow it up with a piece about Steve McQueen’s signature film, released later that same year: Bullitt.

It was an excellent suggestion. I immediately scheduled a viewing of Bullitt and made some notes as I watched, but it became evident during that viewing that a closer examination of the film would be required. Alas, daily life intervened, and I didn’t get around to another viewing.

Then on January 9 of this new year, the film’s director, Peter Yates died, leaving behind a legacy that includes not just Bullitt but also Breaking Away and the excellent The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Finally, my cinematic guilt has driven me to follow through on my promise. With a bit of a vengeance.

Mention Bullitt to even the most casual film fan, and almost invariably, their immediate, somewhat Pavlovian response will be something to do with The Chase. Possibly McQueen. Possibly the Mustang. But almost certainly The Chase.

What no one ever seems to remember when you say “Bullitt,” though, is how badly written it is. And boy, is it ever.

Co-writer Alan R. Trustman’s first three screenwriting credits are The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt in 1968 and They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! in 1970. McQueen, McQueen, Poitier — that’s nice work if you can get it. It’s a shame Trustman didn’t do more with those opportunities, though, because after Tibbs his filmography slides into relative obscurity, and it becomes obvious that he peaked with this lazy bit of writing hanging sloppily like saddle bags off either side of the car chase against which all others are measured.

The story is adapted from Robert L. Pike’s 1963 novel Mute Witness (pretty badly written in its own right), about a decidedly un-McQueen-like New York City detective named Clancy. It was apparently being developed as a starring vehicle for Spencer Tracy, who died two weeks after he wrapped 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In reworking the story for a star 30 years Tracy’s junior, the script’s principal flaw is that it persists in being a character study and a procedural and doesn’t realize until it’s too late that what it really wants to be — what it had every right to be once McQueen signed on — is an action movie.

According to the invaluable Internet Movie Database, Robert Vaughn initially turned down the role of Walter Chalmers in Bullitt because he thought the plot was too thin. He was absolutely right.

He was also absolutely right for the part, and thank God that McQueen talked his Magnificent Seven co-star into doing it — and the producers threw a lot more money at him — because without Vaughn, the movie would have no compelling antagonist to speak of.

Sure, there are bad guys, but they’re cardboard stand-ups in a shooting gallery, too vaguely defined to achieve true villain status in the mind of the audience. There’s a bad guy whom Bullitt is enlisted to protect, and there are two other bad guys trying to kill the first bad guy on behalf of a lot of other bad guys, and the only reason we care at all is because we’re invested in Bullitt, whose pride and work ethic are at stake.

But casting Vaughn as Chalmers turns up the heat under our hero. Vaughn, to me, has always exuded untrustworthiness, with his precisely clipped diction and his slightly beady eyes and — let’s face it — his uptight banker’s hairline. If he had a mustache, he would twirl it. Vaughn is cast perfectly to type, and he plays Chalmers to the hilt, even though Chalmers, as written, is nothing but a lot of hot air in a suit and tie.

For starters, we only ever hear him called Mister Chalmers, but every other character in the movie snaps to attention at the mere mention of his name. One might get the impression that he was a district attorney or attorney general¹ — these would seem to be the most likely offices for someone who claims to “have a star witness who needs protection” — but one would be wrong.

I’ll stipulate that the film’s Chalmers likely possesses a law degree of some kind, but the primary source of his considerable influence is his wealth, judging by his ostentatious Pacific Heights manse and the massive gathering there of what appears to be a ladies’ garden society, in the scene in which we — and Det. Lt. Frank Bullitt — first meet him. Upon this introduction, Chalmers lays out the preposterous plot of the movie:

“Once and for all, the top men in law enforcement are united. We’re going to expose the Organization.”

“I read your speech,” Bullitt says. “Why San Francisco?”

“Ross is safer here. That’s your province. Keep him out of reach for 48 hours.”

Johnny Ross is a mob functionary from Chicago, now on the lam after embezzling $2 million. He is slated to testify against “the Organization” before a “Senate subcommittee hearing” that, inexplicably, has been convened in San Francisco. Not Washington, D.C., where the Senate is, mind you, but San Francisco, where Frank Bullitt works. Chalmers enlists Bullitt to babysit Ross over the weekend and deliver him to the hearing Monday morning.²

“A senatorial hearing has a way of catapulting everyone involved into the public eye,” Chalmers tells him. “With a subsequent effect on one’s career. It’d be a pleasure to have you along. … Have him in court on Monday, Frank.”

After this meet-cute, Bullitt asks his captain, Sam Bennet (Simon Oakland), if he knows why Chalmers asked for him. Bennet replies, “He’s grooming himself for public office. And you make good copy. They love you in the papers, Frank.”

While this last exchange confirms that Chalmers is nothing more than a well-to-do dilettante with nebulous political aspirations, it is also the only indication, aside from the casting of McQueen, that there is anything special or noteworthy about Bullitt. To this point, we have been shown nothing, except for his partner, Det. Delgetti (Don Gordon), waking him from a dead sleep (in some of the most awful brown paisley pajamas you ever saw) to drag him to the Friday-morning meeting with Chalmers.

Later, after Bullitt leaves Delgetti — and, subsequently, young Sgt. Carl Stanton (Carl Reindel) — at the Hotel Daniels to guard Ross, there’s some typical ’60s hipster nonsense set in some tony restaurant with a jazz combo playing, solely for the purpose of making Bullitt appear to have a life of his own. I will forgive this sequence only because it establishes Jacqueline Bisset as Bullitt’s love interest, Cathy, and if a story that already makes no sense must grind to a complete screeching halt, it might as well do so for Jacqueline Bisset, who is 24 years old here, achingly beautiful to begin with but even more stunning in high definition.³

What these scenes achieve, however, is to make Bullitt appear to have taken his eye off the ball after he was personally assigned by Chalmers to guard Ross. Bullitt’s delegation of authority translates in Chalmers’ mind to dereliction of duty when the shit hits the fan.

And hit the fan it does. Two gunmen appear at the Hotel Daniels at 1 a.m. After they claim at the night desk to be “Mr. Chalmers and a friend,” Stanton phones Bullitt, but before Bullitt can get there, the gunmen burst into the room with a Winchester pump-action shotgun, seriously wounding Stanton in the leg and blasting Ross against the wall, gravely wounding him in the chest and neck.

As Bennet tells Bullitt, “Now [Chalmers] can’t produce the big surprise he promised everyone. He may try to make up some mileage by layin’ it on us.” Well, that’s exactly what he’s going to do, because the dialogue in this script, as in the book, is so on-the-nose that it could be melanoma.

Chalmers is a typical politician, instantly seeking to assign blame and blustering past the one direct (and perfectly legitimate) question Bullitt asks him — “Who else knew where he was? … They knew where to look for him, and they used your name to get in” — to skirt any accountability of his own. It’s only the force of Vaughn’s will as an actor that allows him to appear formidable even as he threatens Bullitt with such overwrought, melodramatic ultimatums as this one:

“Lieutenant, I shall personally officiate at your public crucifixion if Ross doesn’t recover during the course of the hearing so I can at least present his deposition. And I assure you I shall not suffer the consequence of your incompetence. And even if there wasn’t any, I’m rather certain I can prove negligence on your part. … There may be another attempt on his life. I’ll be back in the morning … with my people.”

Next Chalmers pointedly insists that the young African-American surgeon, Dr. Willard (Georg Stanford Brown), be removed from the case because he’s “too young and inexperienced.” Never mind that Willard has already operated on Ross and so far kept him alive, nor that Chalmers instructs a supervising nurse to have the surgeon replaced — when Walter Chalmers speaks, apparently all of San Francisco shudders and obeys.⁴

We now enter a sequence that deserves its own chapter in Screenwriting for Simpletons:

Having predicted that there may be another attempt on Ross’ life, Chalmers and his men exit the hospital at the exact same time and via the same street entrance by which the gray-haired shooter from the Hotel Daniels (Paul Genge) — who is indeed coming to make another attempt on Ross’ life — arrives.

The shooter stands scanning a hospital directory. Bereft of anything resembling nonchalance, he asks as passing doctor where they might be keeping “his relative” who was admitted with “a gunshot wound.” The doctor helpfully directs him to the second-floor ICU but has the presence of mind to call upstairs and warn Bullitt that a suspicious man is in the hospital and that he instructed him how to find Ross.

A nurse screams when she stumbles upon the shooter in a stairwell as he removes a cork-capped icepick that he’s taped under his pant leg. He runs; Bullitt chases him through the basement of the hospital; and sometime during all the excitement, throughout which he is unconscious and undisturbed, Ross goes into cardiac arrest.

There are so many missed narrative opportunities in that sequence that I need an abacus to count them.

Having lost the shooter, Bullitt gets back upstairs just in time to see Ross flatline. It’s a great excuse for a close-up of McQueen making his best “That’s my career hooked up to that heart monitor” face, although we still haven’t been persuaded that Chalmers has enough actual authority get a dog catcher fired.

In a daring bit of subterfuge and collusion, Bullitt persuades Dr. Willard to misplace Ross’ chart as Bullitt has Ross’ body admitted to the morgue as a John Doe. This may be the first smart, logical thing the movie allows any of its characters to do, not least because it solidifies the chess match between Bullitt (and his captain, Bennet) and Chalmers (assisted by his own oddly deferential police captain, Baker, played by the terrific Norman Fell) that has become, by default, this movie’s ‘A’ storyline.

At about the 48-minute mark, we pause for more pointless filler (and a giant continuity error, because Bullitt is wearing clothes that we see him put on several minutes later after getting out of the shower): Outside the corner grocery near his apartment, Bullitt steals a newspaper from the machine because he doesn’t have any change on him. (Oh, that Bullitt — he bends the rules to suit his brand of justice!) Inside he grabs some produce, including a bunch of green onions (“Fresh today!” the grocer tells him) — the implication being that he might actually cook something back at his apartment — but then he goes to the freezer case and indiscriminately grabs the top half-dozen Swanson TV dinners.

If that scene is intended to cement Bullitt’s lone-wolf status, all that hard work is undercut around the 53-minute mark: Enter Jacqueline Bisset, parading around Bullitt’s apartment wearing only a blue pajama top. She offers Bullitt breakfast but he wants only coffee, which she brings to him as he’s pulling on a blue turtleneck and strapping on his low-slung shoulder holster. Mark it down: This quiet little scene of domestic bliss is the moment the modern era of cool was born.

It is now Sunday morning, and Bullitt and Delgetti re-examine the crime scene and lean on the night clerk at the Hotel Daniels, after which there’s an extended bit of business with Robert Duvall as Weissberg, the cab driver who chauffeured Ross around town before depositing him at the Hotel Daniels, retracing that day’s stops for Bullitt.⁵ Meanwhile, having discovered that his star witness is missing from the hospital and been stonewalled by Bullitt on the phone, Chalmers delivers a writ of habeas corpus to Bennet outside church.

Their fact-finding mission complete, Weissberg drops Bullitt off where they first met, reuniting him with the film’s other most vital co-star, ready now for its close-up: the highland green 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback.

As plots go, the first 65 minutes 30 seconds of the film amount to little more than a protracted setup for The Chase, like a hastily assembled Rube Goldberg device designed primarily to deliver Bullitt in his Mustang and the gunmen in their black 1968 Dodge Charger R/T 440 (piloted by stunt driver Bill Hickman) to their fateful intersection.

The chase sequence is by no means perfect. There are improbable insert shots of the white-haired gunman appearing in the rearview mirror, even though Genge is in the front passenger seat — literally riding shotgun — and the camera is shooting just over Hickman’s right shoulder. The chase cars pass the same dark-green VW Beetle and white Pontiac Firebird multiple times as they careen down the vertiginous streets of San Francisco.

But for all its minor flaws, it is the birth of the chase sequence as we know it today, spanning 10 full minutes of screen time, and it would seem to at least acknowledge a small debt to the crop duster sequence in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in terms of its structure, its mounting suspense and its dramatic conclusion.

A game of cat-and-mouse ensues: Bullitt is followed. Bullitt disappears in a residential neighborhood. The gunmen see no sign of him, select as likely a street as any to turn down. Cresting a hill, Bullitt’s Mustang reappears in the Charger’s rearview mirror. The hunted becomes the hunter. The filmmakers could even have prolonged this part of the chase, adding a few more turns, a little more hesitation, another nervous glance or two — to heighten the tension, to tighten the vise around the audience, but mainly to show off a little more of Lalo Schifrin’s über-cool jazz score. (Who among us has never wished he had his own theme music? Who among us would not place Bullitt’s in his top five?)

And Schifrin himself is credited with one of the smartest decisions in the entire film: When Hickman clicks and cinches his seat belt, then peels out to begin the high-speed chase in earnest, the music abruptly stops, because as Schifrin rightly pointed out, the sounds of revving engines, rattling suspensions, squealing tires, car horns and assorted collisions is the only soundtrack you need.

Not only are Hickman, McQueen and stunt drivers Carey Loftin and Bud Ekins driving at speeds of 80 to 110 mph, but in most shots the camera car has to be going at least as fast, shooting through traffic to capture the action. A helmetless Ekins (“Paging Busey, party of one…”) also executes a spectacular motorcycle stunt by laying his bike down and sliding it headlong into oncoming traffic and between the two chase cars, precipitating a particularly excellent spinout in the dirt by the Mustang.

Next we have about 55 seconds of just McQueen and the Mustang, opening it up on the winding back roads, playing catch-up. There’s some business with Genge loading shells into his Winchester. There’s Hickman weaving through oncoming traffic, barely squeezing between a freight truck and a guardrail. Bullitt pulls alongside the Charger — paint gets traded; doors and quarter-panels get dented. Genge climbs into the back seat of the Charger to open fire on Bullitt. Bullitt backs off. Bullitt speeds up. Bullitt acts decisively to bring the battle to its inevitable conclusion.

The genius of what I’ve just described — the brainchild of Yates, McQueen, their drivers and stunt coordinators — is not merely the thrill of the chase itself, a pure invention of nerve and adrenaline and velocity inserted into the middle of a story otherwise devoid of real action. If you break it down as I just did, you see that those 10 minutes are a perfect three-act movie within the movie, told so well, so precisely, so much more effectively than the rest of the picture it’s in that it stands alone on its own merits. And in a movie that insists on making its hero a flat, mirthless automaton, a skeleton on which an archetype might be draped in a better-developed picture, the chase is perhaps more effective at revealing Bullitt’s character than the rest of the plot.

I will spare you another 2,000 words or so and, in case you’ve never seen Bullitt, the inevitability of spoilers about the second half of the movie. Suffice it to say that inconsistencies continue to pile up and Chalmers continues to be imbued with the kind of power and influence usually accorded to the likes of Voldemort. Hell, he may actually be Voldemort, seeing how he keeps turning up wherever the action (or inaction) is, day or night.

Bullitt preceded the modern blockbuster era of motion pictures by seven years, and while it misses — and often resists — so many opportunities to be a tighter, leaner, faster, grittier police story, it nonetheless sets the bar for the coming generation of crime dramas.

Without Bullitt, there certainly would be no Dirty Harry Callahan, but the film might also have paved the way for the more thoughtfully crafted, fact-based police stories of Sidney Lumet, such as Serpico and Prince of the City. We wouldn’t have the exquisite oneupsmanship of William Friedkin, who directed two certifiably great car chases of his own in The French Connection and To Live and Die in L.A.⁶ We wouldn’t have Pacino and De Niro’s LAX showdown at the end of Michael Mann’s Heat. As cold and unemotional as McQueen’s performance is, without Frank Bullitt, there would be no colorful, loose-cannon franchise detectives like Martin Riggs or John McClane. And that’s just on the big screen — the knockoffs Bullitt inspired on television comprise a list as long as your arm.

Selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in 2007, cited as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” Bullitt probably holds the distinction of having the most tenuous, dubious qualification of any film on the National Film Registry. If less is indeed more⁷, it is a movie whose best 10 minutes left a greater impression on the public imagination than many films achieve with their entire two-hour running time and catapulted Steve McQueen from stardom into legend.

¹ In the book Mute Witness, Chalmers is in fact an assistant district attorney, so it’s anybody’s guess why the filmmakers elected to make him an ambiguous figure with apparently unlimited influence and sway but with no specific office or title, as though he were a baron or feudal lord plunked down in the middle of modern-day San Francisco.

² The film includes a prologue that could have been given ample screen time to explain the story better, but it’s buried behind slick camera moves, the floating titles of the opening credit sequence, and a very literal smokescreen that enables Johnny Ross’ flight from the Organization he is double-crossing. This group appears to include his brother and business partner, Pete Ross (Vic Tayback), who helps Johnny escape but whom Johnny apparently leaves holding the bag in Chicago. When Pete informs the capos that Johnny has gotten away, they inform Pete that he’ll be paying for the contract they’re putting out on his brother.

Even if you watch this sequence closely, it is deliberately devised to obfuscate the plot until you arrive at the dramatic third-act twist that clears up the whole story in a manner just this side of the most egregious dei ex machina. In the end, we’re told an awful lot of things that we are never given the benefit of seeing with our own eyes.

³ Beautiful as she is, though, Bisset does absolutely nothing to advance the plot. Her character, Cathy, is an architectural designer of some kind, working out the water-flow rate for a public fountain when we first see her at work. (If Bullitt were being produced today, she might at least happen to be a nurse or doctor in the hospital where so much of Act II takes place. And she would likely be threatened or endangered at some point.) She provides some relationship angst in Act III, wading with McQueen through some painfully ham-fisted dialogue, but their dynamic is never really developed in a way that elevates her importance to the story.

⁴ Incidentally, principal photography for Bullitt took place — and the story itself is approximately set — in April 1968, the same month that Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis. At that time, apparently, a Negro surgeon still counted as only three-fifths of a white nurse. In any event, making Chalmers appear also to be a racist is merely a bonus at this point.

⁵ It’s remarkable to see Duvall relegated to a bit part here, several years after Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird — during which time he had done a lot of guest-starring roles on television — and a year away from Lucky Ned Pepper in True Grit, then Maj. Frank Burns in M*A*S*H, then Tom Hagen in The Godfather, after which he was once and forever, indelibly, Robert freaking Duvall as we know him today.

⁶ Friedkin also deserves credit for filming a San Francisco car chase that might best be described as “the anti-Bullitt” and which is for me the lone highlight of the perfectly atrocious 1995 thriller Jade: A typically nail-biting chase sequence, involving star David Caruso behind the wheel of the chase car, becomes an almost tongue-in-cheek meta-chase, when the lead car drives into the midst of a crowded Chinatown parade route — complete with dragon — and the chase grinds to a 5 mph crawl. Having directed great chases in New York and L.A., it’s as though Friedkin was acknowledging that he couldn’t out-Yates Yates in San Francisco, so why bother.

⁷ And boy, don't you wish it had been for this post?

2010-12-05T16:44:00.000-08:00

OUR INGLORIOUS PAST: HOLIDAY INN
Up front, let me just say that I’ve never liked Bing Crosby to begin with, have never seen what was supposedly so great or winning or charismatic about him, this cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking icon of mellow middle age, who seemed prematurely embalmed even when he was young. People of a certain generation have such warm memories of his voice and his public persona and his road movies with Bob Hope, but no one has ever gone farther in Hollywood with such a face made for radio, and by all accounts the man was an abusive son of a bitch who treated his own children like shit.

For those reasons and others, I’ve never gone out of my way to see any of his movies. This weekend, however, I was tasked to write a calendar item about upcoming matinee screenings of 1942’s Holiday Inn, so I thought I should check it out. Crosby co-stars with Fred Astaire in a story built tenuously around the songs of Irving Berlin, the most notable of which is, of course, “White Christmas,” which won Berlin the Oscar for Best Original Song and with which Bing is synonymous.

The conceit of the movie is that Bing’s character, Jim Hardy, is tired of the eight-shows-a-week showbiz grind, so he plans to leave it behind to become a gentleman farmer in the Connecticut countryside. But when farming turns out to be too much work, Jim falls back on what he knows best and conceives an inn that’s open only on holidays, with themed entertainment 15 days a year and easy living the other 350.

This is all well and good during the Christmas sequence that introduces Bing’s signature song and makes the audience feel warm all over, but the chill is soon to come.

After New Year’s Eve, the next holiday celebrated is February 12, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. At which point I must pause to ask, Really? Was there actually a time in this country when we recognized Lincoln’s birthday with something more than just department-store and auto-dealership sales promotions? That’s OK, though, because I’m nothing if not willing to suspend my disbelief at the movies. Up to a point, that is.

Jim and the ingénue Linda Mason (Marjorie Reynolds), an aspiring singer and dancer, meet cute when he falls off the roof of the inn and lands on her in the snow. Whether she actually auditions or merely charms Jim, she quickly cements her role as Jim’s co-star at the inn, and it takes less than a month for Jim to decide that he’s in love with Linda.

Now it’s February 12, and a resplendent Linda sits in her dressing room, preparing for the evening performance, when Jim enters and announces that he’s given it some thought, and he thinks that his big number will work better in blackface. The pretext here is that Jim doesn’t want his old partner, Ted Hanover (Astaire), to recognize Linda. You see, a drunken Ted danced with Linda at the inn on New Year’s Eve, and now Jim is afraid that if he finds Linda, Ted will steal her away, just as he stole Jim’s previous girl, Lila, who co-starred in their nightclub act.

That pretext is shoddy enough, but the subtext is even worse: As the besotted Jim lovingly applies the greasepaint to Linda’s face, he is essentially, but not exactly, proposing to her; Linda has to connect the dots herself. (Ordinarily one might describe such a scene as “eroticized,” except that Holiday Inn is pointedly, painstakingly naïve about matters of romance, let alone sex. As it is, the scene is just creepy.) Reynolds is certainly a beautiful actress, and the character Linda here expresses some disappointment about “how pretty I was going to look tonight,” but she willingly submits to Jim as he dabs the greasepaint on her face and speaks to her in that soothing, mellifluous tone that was Crosby’s only attractive feature.

Though we’re persuaded that Jim has devised the blackface plan at the last minute to foil Ted, when we cut to the big room, we note that the house band and the backup singers are all in blackface as well (though the women, for the most part, are given a lighter-skinned, Lena Horne-like appearance).

Enter Bing, hobbling onstage in period costume, with a gray Afro wig under his stovepipe hat and gray muttonchops applied to his face, looking like the stereotypical “wise old Negro” as he launches into the big number, a swinging spiritual saluting Abraham Lincoln. I’ve always hated hearing white people “sing black” when performing a Negro spiritual, and “Abraham” is of course composed and performed in that style here — a shame, as it wouldn’t otherwise be a half-bad tune, if sung straightforward and without theatrics.

The performance veers sharply from awful to horrific on the third verse, when Reynolds makes her entrance as a wide-eyed, jazz hands–waving pickaninny, her blond hair spiked in a dozen multidirectional pigtails, her white mouth encircled in the even more exaggerated style of minstrel blackface. It’s three minutes of excruciating musical atrocity from which it’s almost impossible for the film to recover, except for the saving grace of Astaire, who performs some typically amazing dance numbers throughout the film, none of which qualify as cinematic hate crimes.

“Abraham,” which comes near the film’s midpoint, doesn’t constitute the film’s first instances of race-baiting, though. Very early on, we’re introduced to Jim’s housekeeper, Mamie, and her two young children, Daphne and Vanderbilt. The children are exploited about as carelessly as you might imagine — note their appearance as Father Time and Baby New Year during the New Year’s Eve sequence — but special recognition is due here to the venerable character actress Louise Beavers, whose self-evident dignity cannot be hidden behind the mammy-fied dialogue she’s given. Every so often, you can hear in Beavers’ voice just the slightest little catch that signifies that she’s delivering a line dutifully as written, not as she’d speak it off camera, off the set.

Beavers even manages to maintain that dignity in the second-verse cutaway during “Abraham,” when she’s enlisted to sing the line, When black folks was in sla-ve-ry/Who was it set the darkies free?/A-bra-ham! A-bra-ham!

Louise Beavers appeared in more than 160 movies and television programs over a 37-year career during which she was credited as “the maid” no fewer than 50 times, “the cook” five times, and variously as “housekeeper,” “washroom attendant,” “beautician,” “laundry woman,” “black woman wanting a divorce,” “prisoner,” “prison inmate,” “black convict” and, in 1927’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “slave at wedding.” Holiday Inn marked one of three times she played a “Mamie,” and she was straight-up “Mammy” six times, amid a CV that includes Ophelias, Magnolias, Pansy, Hyacinth, Petunia, Opal, Pearl, Ivory, assorted Matties, Hatties, Gussies, Cleos and Nellies, Cornelia, Delia, Bedelia, Clotilda and Anastasia, to name just the standouts.

Holiday Inn is one of those classic movie musicals that is so dear in the hearts of so many, and yet, even if I could get past the flimsy narrative structure and “hey, kids, let’s put on a show” gee-whizzery, I could never abide by its racist overtones, whose presentation here can only be described as “merry and bright.” If nothing else, I am pleased to note that Louise Beavers emerges with her remarkable grace intact.

That’s more than I can say, though, for Bing Crosby, whose films I now have one more excuse not to watch, and Irving Berlin, that patriot and American institution, whose work, in my imagination, is now saddled with bewildering subtext: One hopes, after all, that there was no more nefarious sentiment behind the line and may all your Christmases be white.

2010-11-14T00:59:00.000-08:00

WHAT WE’RE TALKING ABOUT WHEN WE TALK “POUND FOR POUND”
See if you can follow the math with me on this one:

Friday a naturally small man who spent what many fighters would consider their prime fighting at 130 pounds weighed in at 144½ pounds to fight for a 154-pound title at a 150-pound catch weight.

Saturday night that same man showed up for work weighing only 148 pounds, but he thoroughly overwhelmed a natural welterweight who entered the ring fully hydrated at 165 pounds.

Get all that?

Manny Pacquiao, 4½ inches shorter, 17 pounds lighter and with 6 inches less reach than his opponent, didn’t merely overpower Antonio Margarito — he took him apart like a cheap watch. It wasn’t like watching a smaller man hit a bigger man — it was like watching Jerry hit Tom with a frying pan for 36 minutes, with regular rest breaks. If it wasn’t the most dominant performance I’ve ever seen in the ring, it’ll do until I remember which one was.

I do not make such declarations to demean Antonio Margarito, who was fighting for much more than a title Saturday night in Texas and who demonstrated as much heart as you could ever hope to see in a fighter. I make them to support the essential, inalienable truth that not only is Manny Pacquiao pound for pound the best fighter in the world today, he is the best on a par with Sugar Ray Robinson, about whom the phrase “pound for pound” was first popularized.

Never mind his three losses. Never mind his two draws. I have long believed that the true greatness of a fighter cannot be measured or understood until he has lost and fought his way back. And fight back Pacquiao has — with a vengeance — having now won titles in eight different weight divisions.

Meanwhile, Floyd Mayweather Jr. performs the most acrobatic verbal contortions to protect the unblemished record that he believes gives him claim to the pound-for-pound title, but the facts are these: He hasn’t fought Miguel Cotto, whom Pacquiao defeated at a 145-pound catch weight on a night when Cotto entered the ring over 160 pounds. He hasn’t fought Margarito (see above). He avoided Oscar De La Hoya until the Golden Boy was past his prime. He put off Shane Mosley until Mosley was 38.¹ And he has done everything in his power to avoid fighting Pacquiao himself.

Come January, however, Mayweather might find himself headed to prison, the state of Nevada having saved him from ever facing Pacquiao.

I honestly expected Margarito–Pacquiao would be a much closer affair, having predicted a majority decision for Manny (meaning at least one judge would score the fight a draw). I was thinking not only of Margarito’s size advantage but of his reputation as a relentless action fighter.²

I needn’t have hedged my bet.

Round 2 was the only round I might have scored for Margarito. However, as HBO’s Jim Lampley noted, that’s the round during which Pacquiao seemed to learn something about his opponent: namely, how to stick that straight left hand through Margarito’s guard. Which he did repeatedly for the next several rounds.

By the end of Round 4, Margarito was already effectively blind in his right eye, which was enormously swollen, with a sizable gash beneath the swelling. Once, between later rounds, referee Laurence Cole came to the corner to ask Margarito how many fingers he was holding up. You can’t convince me that one of Antonio’s corner men didn’t surreptitiously tap him twice to elicit his answer: “Dos.” Later still, Cole interrupted a round to hold more fingers up in front of the swollen eye; that time had to be a lucky guess.

Having blinded an opponent so, a fighter will ordinarily continue to circle in the direction of that blind side. Not so Pacquiao, who just as often would move to his own right, creating openings whenever Margarito would open up to punch. Thus, by the time the fight entered the championship rounds, did Pacquiao begin to exact similar damage to Margarito’s left eye.

Were it any other fighter but Margarito, I’d have been astonished that an official, the referee, the ringside doctor, or the fighter’s own corner didn’t intervene to stop the fight and prevent their fighter from suffering a severe injury. In fact, Pacquiao himself seemed to wonder why Cole didn’t intercede to stop the fight at any time after the 10th round.

However: a) Margarito has one of the best chins in the middle classes; you’re not likely to knock him out. b) He never stopped giving his best effort, even when it was clear that he was not going to win the fight. c) He was a man fighting to redeem himself, and on some level, even the most conservative, by-the-book officials probably wanted to afford him the dignity of finishing the fight on his own terms.

That said, a more compelling option is: d) On some level, those same conservative, by-the-book officials might have reveled in Margarito’s comeuppance. Here, after all, was a man bearing the stigma of a dirty fighter being beaten with relentless abandon and surgical precision by a fighter whose hand wraps weren’t hardened with plaster.

In this instance, the punishment is commensurate with the crime. I believe Margarito deserves a second chance, and now that he’s had his ass duly handed to him, I hope he continues to make the most of the opportunity, fighting cleanly and providing us with more excitement in the ring in the years to come.

Will he eventually call out Pacquiao for a rematch? That remains to be seen. But I hope he does, because it would look very bad for Mayweather if Margarito — who has actually been pummeled by Pacquiao — volunteers to meet him again before Floyd deigns to climb down off his high horse to sign for a fight that should have happened two years ago.

Until that happens, the pound-for-pound conversation is over.

Pacquiao. Full stop.

¹ In fairness, Mosley is in excellent physical condition, still trains as well as much younger fighters, and shows no signs of a letup yet.

² After all, I once watched Margarito average 130 punches a round on a night when he nearly tore Sebastian Lujan’s ear off the side of his head — a grotesque display that now requires further consideration in light of the hand-wrapping scandal that exiled Margarito from the sport for over a year.

2010-09-19T22:04:00.001-07:00

OUR INGLORIOUS PAST: HIS GIRL FRIDAY
In the annals of screen comedy, Howard Hawks’ 1940 classic His Girl Friday is that rare example of a remake of a screen adaptation that somehow manages improve upon the source material on which both are based. Hawks’ decision to turn the newspaperman Hildy Johnson into a woman (Rosalind Russell) and also the ex-wife of editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant) was pure genius — as was screenwriter Charles Lederer’s mile-a-minute adaptation.¹ One imagines Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur kicking themselves — and each other — for not having thought of it in the first place when they wrote The Front Page back in 1929.

As brilliant a foursome as those names comprise, they each deserve as much shame as can be passed around for having perpetrated one of the most sadly gratuitous and shameful instances of racism I’ve ever seen in a popular entertainment — Hecht and MacArthur for having written it in the first place; Hawks and Lederer for seeing fit to include it 11 years later.

I’m not so naïve as to imagine that those 11 years should have made any real difference in terms of the national consciousness. His Girl Friday in fact preceded Rosa Parks and Brown v. Board of Education by a decade and a half; only then might most filmgoers’ sensitivities toward African-Americans have been stirred to the point of discomfiture if not complete moral outrage.

“Colored” was a word tossed around so matter-of-factly in those days that here, tossed around a half-dozen times in 91 minutes, its use seems relatively tame alongside the one brief scene that most grievously pulls the rug out from under the entire picture. Here, the rival newspaper reporter McCue (Roscoe Karns) rushes into the press room of the criminal courts building to phone in a “late-breaking” update to the day’s biggest story (click to enlarge):

The saddest point of all is that the racist content of the joke — a “colored” woman giving birth to a “pickaninny” — is, comedically speaking, completely unnecessary. The punch line — that the rifle squad examined the baby closely to ensure that it wasn’t the fugitive Earl Williams, who was known to be in hiding somewhere — is funny entirely on its own merits. That three certifiably brilliant writers and one of our greatest American filmmakers couldn’t see the comedy intrinsic to that one line is a devastating indictment on both their talent and their character.

In addition, I’m saddened personally, not only because His Girl Friday is one of my favorite comedies but also because it took my fourth or fifth viewing of the film before I caught the scene. If it does not immediately leap out and slap the viewer across the face, one must credit, as it were, the film’s breakneck pacing and overlapping dialogue, for the latter of which Lederer’s screenplay is a pioneering achievement.

Such camouflage is no excuse, however, for the casually gleeful mean-spiritedness of the scene, its direction and its delivery. (A reference to an unseen associate named “Polack Mike” also made it into the adaptation, while the play’s “wop” reference did not.)

If you’ve never seen His Girl Friday, I hope none of what I’ve written here will discourage you from seeing what truly is one of the greatest and funniest screen comedies ever made. For 90 of its 91 minutes, it is also one of the smartest.

UPDATE, 9/30/10: Just for my own peace of mind, I pushed Billy Wilder’s 1974 adaptation of The Front Page, starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, to the front of my Netflix queue. I’m happy to report that Mr. Wilder and his longtime collaborator, I.A.L. Diamond, rewarded my faith with a streamlined, inoffensive version of the gag that illustrates their own sterling character and comedic credentials. As delivered by the terrific character actor Dick O’Neill (called McHugh here, instead of McCue), the gag now unspools as follows:

During a shootout, Mrs. Phoebe DeWolfe, age 33, watching from a window across the street, gave premature birth to a five-and-a-half-pound baby boy. Sheriff’s deputies immediately examined the infant to make sure that it wasn’t Earl Williams, who they knew was hiding somewhere.

Bing! Bang! Boom! and out. It’s snappy, it’s economical, it does only what it needs to do to set up the punch line, which is still funny 80 years after it was written, and best of all, it isn’t dripping with ugly racist contempt.

The things writers could learn if they’d just watch a Billy Wilder film once in a while.

Script image courtesy of The Internet Movie Script Database.

¹ A quick cinematic lesson for your edification: In filmmaking terms, one page of a screenplay equals roughly one minute of screen time. Therefore, a 90-minute film will ordinarily have a script about 90 pages long, give or take a page or two. In the case of His Girl Friday, however, Charles Lederer’s script clocks in at more than 170 pages, meaning that the picture, with its chaotic collision of subplots and the overlapping dialogue of two, three, even six or more characters at once, moves along twice as fast as virtually any other movie you or I could name.

2010-09-15T17:22:00.000-07:00

A BRIDGE TOO FAR? NOT FOR ME
What are the greatest lengths or extremes you’ve ever gone to just to see a movie?¹

I’m reasonably confident that I win this round, but I invite you to take your best shot. My Tuesday evening by the numbers:

Two hundred miles round-trip in eight hours.
A ticking clock counting down to a 7:30 p.m. showtime.
Arriving in San Francisco amid bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic.
A $6 toll just to cross the Bay Bridge into the city.
Making the 100-mile trek with no promise that I’d find convenient parking, if any at all.
A $10 general-admission ticket.
A $5 toll just to get out of the city at evening’s end.
Only four hours of sleep on a weeknight (though, by my standards…).

On this occasion, I was richly rewarded for the pains I took: I arrived with a half-hour to spare, even after a wrong turn several blocks ahead of my destination, as I was traveling in the wake of a streetcar. After arriving and circling the block once in futility, I chanced the small lot directly behind the theater and scored the last available (albeit quite tight) parking space; though metered, parking there is free after 6 p.m.

The historic Castro Theatre, built in 1922, is a magnificent showplace, with balcony seating (though it was closed Tuesday night); a high, domed ceiling (directly under whose intimidating lighting fixture I sat, ninth row center); plush, comfortable red-velvet seats; wall frescos, faux opera boxes, gilded trim and other architectural magnificence in a mishmash of styles and cultural motifs; and an honest-to-God vintage pipe organ that rises from the floor to stage level for a 10-minute performance prior to curtain.

The evening’s entertainment, my principal objective, was a brand-new, digitally remastered print of Sir David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, foremost among a number of POW movies that I hold in special regard.² Those of you not as fortunate as I will benefit from its imminent transfer to Blu-Ray disc (coming November 2). But I win — not only because Bridge shines like a diamond on the big screen, the way God and Lean intended it to be seen, but because the print was so new and pristine as to have not even a scratch on it yet. (Trust me: One would have noticed, the way one notices the first door ding on a new automobile.) In many ways, it was like seeing the movie for the very first time.

The star of the new remaster is Jack Hildyard’s cinematography, always grand in scope but now more alive with color than ever before in the dozen or so times I’ve seen Bridge, whether on DVD or in theatrical exhibition. In particular, the variegated greens of the Ceylon jungle are so lush and luminous that I found myself mesmerized by them on one or two occasions when there were characters in the foreground who would ordinarily demand my attention. (Those greens are reminiscent to me of John Toll’s almost monochromatic color palette in Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.)

More noteworthy still is the blood — what little is actually spilled onscreen, that is — which is more vividly crimson than ever before. While this enhancement might appear gratuitous in other, lesser films (spoiler alert!), in Bridge it is especially beneficial in story terms. All these years, one of my minor bugbears with the film has been the extent of the injuries sustained by Col. Nicholson (Alec Guinness) during the film’s climax. After the mortar shells explode near the shoreline, Nicholson, to my eyes, has always appeared more disoriented by the concussion of the blast than actually injured by it. Now, in one telling shot as he turns his back to the camera, one can clearly see the blood of multiple shrapnel wounds in his hair, making it more obvious that he is mortally wounded and making more poignant the insistence of Maj. Warden (Jack Hawkins) that he had no choice but to fire the shells that would seal the fates of Shears (William Holden) and Joyce (Geoffrey Horne). It is a detail that, for me, elevates what was always a great film to the status of near-perfection. (End spoiler.)

Never mind that San Francisco is one of the greatest, most vibrant cities on earth, nor that I hadn’t been there in over 18 years. I went for a movie — and only a movie. That said, the experience exceeded my expectations, even as it fell a little short of the mark. (My bad, not the city’s.)

After the movie, I walked around the neighborhood a bit, although now I wish I had explored it a little more. I was starving by the time the end credits rolled, so I found a terrific, if overfurnished, little New York pizza place a block and a half away, where I scarfed down a couple of slices to sustain me on the drive home.

On the way there, I was ambushed by a homeless man — a white man, I should state up front — who emerged from between a couple of parked cars and said, “Excuse me, sir, would you help out a nigger?” (I was too startled to have noticed what was written on his cardboard sign and wish now that I had.) He employed this off-putting approach with the next few passers-by before I was out of earshot, and as he bore a passing resemblance to Harry Dean Stanton, I was inclined to write him off as being more mentally unbalanced than necessarily racist. After all, a little unanticipated local flavor never hurt anyone (although I’d be very interested to watch him try out that line on an African-American).

I discovered only the next morning — and kicked myself for having not investigated it more thoroughly beforehand — that had I walked another half-block beyond the pizza place, I would have seen the building that once housed the camera shop and campaign headquarters of slain city supervisor Harvey Milk, “the Mayor of Castro Street.” I knew, of course, that I’d be on Castro Street, but distracted as I was by the mission at hand, it hadn’t actually occurred to me that I’d be on Castro Street. Rest assured that No. 575 will be a definite stop on my next visit — which might be a couple of weeks from now, when the newly restored “complete” version of Fritz Lang’s landmark silent film Metropolis stops at the Castro for a weeklong engagement.

Anyway, that’s the new benchmark for my own commitment to great cinema. What’s yours?

¹ And no, “I flew all the way from L.A. to New York just to see Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail” because it (or some other such form of cinematic waterboarding) was the airline’s in-flight movie doesn’t count. One movie — or perhaps a double-feature if applicable — and it has to have been the primary objective of your mission. That I hope it was a great movie goes without saying.

² Depending on the day of the week, I’d say it’s a photo finish between Bridge and John Sturges’ The Great Escape, with Mr. Wilder’s Stalag 17 (also starring William Holden) running a very close third. Honorable mention goes to Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion and Mark Robson’s Von Ryan’s Express.

2010-09-06T00:52:00.000-07:00

ON SECOND THOUGHT: THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (1968)
A frequent experience I’m having of late is revisiting a movie that I haven’t seen in a long time and finding it to be much different than I remembered.

Often this takes the form of my screening films I like for Adriane in the hopes that she’ll like them too. We’ve had the occasional success — our recent Barbara Stanwyck double feature, for example — but just as often the movies I show her will land with a resounding thud, not only for her but for me as well. On some level I find myself watching the film through her eyes, which in turn opens my eyes to flaws I may have forgiven or overlooked on previous viewings.

Nonetheless, as Adriane is a fan of John McTiernan’s 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, starring Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, it was only natural that I show her Norman Jewison’s 1968 original, which I have always liked for a couple of strong, if obvious, reasons:

1. Steve McQueen. Even though he looks entirely out of place in the three-piece blue windowpane-plaid suit we first see him in — Hilts the Cooler King in a three-piece? — there is a point early on when the McQueen we know comes to the fore:

After the success of the first heist and the subsequent money drop, the impeccably tailored Crown drives home, parks his Rolls on the cobbled drive in front of his manse, gives his butler the night off, and retires to his study, where he pours himself a brandy—

You: Wait a minute. This is still McQueen we’re talking about, right?

Me: Correct.

—pours himself a brandy, lights a cigar, and lapses into a fit of hysterical laughter at his own audacity and the caper he’s just pulled off. From which point forward he more clearly resembles the McQueen we expect, which is good timing, because now he has to go to work on

2. Faye Dunaway. I’ve been told firsthand of Dunaway’s repellent, prima donna behavior by a perfectly lovely woman I met in L.A. who’d had some industry-related legal dealings with her, and none of her story was hard to believe. That said, from 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, through Chinatown and Three Days of the Condor, right up to 1976’s Network, Dunaway was just about the sexiest thing on two stems. The wheels probably started to come off around the time of Eyes of Laura Mars, though, and once Mommie Dearest hit the fan, that was pretty much the end of Faye as anything other than a camp icon. But here, for the time being, Dunaway continued to pose a pretty compelling case for her own nascent stardom.

Which brings us to this most recent viewing of Thomas Crown and a few things that stand out to me now as being to the film’s detriment:

1. Right from the very top, that damned “The Windmills of Your Mind” playing over the opening credits isn’t doing anybody any favors. Never mind that it won the Oscar for best song and became so iconic that the producers of the remake couldn’t resist enlisting Sting to record a cover of it (for the end credits this time, thank you very much). The bottom line is this: If your movie is predicated on the incalculable cool of Steve McQueen, a maudlin, instantly dated weeper from the syrup reserves of Alan and Marilyn Bergman is not how it’s done.

(Later, during perhaps my favorite sequence, in which Crown cleverly disposes of a detective parked outside his house on surveillance detail, composer Michel Legrand gallantly rallies for the save with a selection titled “The Boston Wrangler” — download it on iTunes; you’ll thank me later — but alas, most of the musical damage has already been inflicted and seared upon one’s cerebral cortex.)

2. Jewison employs the then-groundbreaking technique of split-screen storytelling, which here does not merely split the screen but rather fragments it into multiple shards of action and movement as well as the occasional disco ball of squint-defying editing-bay trickery. Adriane was instantly annoyed by it, and I have to admit that it could have been curtailed and refined for more effective narrative use than the “look at me!” factor that takes over at a certain point. And no matter how much I admire Jewison, I shouldn’t let him get away with techniques that would have me foaming at the mouth when Tony Scott employs them.

3. On this occasion, I was also more alert to the incredible quickness and ease with which Dunaway’s insurance investigator, Vicki Anderson, solves the fairly elaborate how of the heist, after which the remaining pieces of the puzzle — including the identity of Crown himself — fall into place with alarming speed.

I am well aware that this is done because the filmmakers want to bring Dunaway and McQueen together onscreen as soon as possible. Sparks cannot fly until they do. But it is hard to take Vicki seriously as a seasoned investigator with a sharp, analytical mind when she jets into Logan International Airport looking like a fashion model, with supplicant skycaps and airline personnel (whom she addresses by name) trailing behind her, as though she’s come to town to solve a major crime before posing for Avedon, then getting a little shopping done.

Vicki infuriates the Boston P.D.’s lead investigator (Paul Burke) but soon enough proves her mettle by explaining the entire heist in such perfect expository detail that it’s as though she sat right there beside us, sharing our popcorn as we watched the whole thing unfold in the first place.¹

4. Another bugbear is the aforementioned casting of Steve McQueen against type. As I noted earlier, after establishing him as an affluent, take-no-prisoners business titan, it more or less works out the way we want it to, with that old McQueen magic eventually taking over the show. But if it hadn’t, then what? In either outcome, we’re forced to grapple with this question: Did Jewison and company hope they could credibly transform Steve McQueen into Thomas Crown, or in the name of box office, did they settle for letting Crown expediently morph into Steve McQueen?²

Ultimately, it is this last point that perhaps makes the case for McTiernan’s remake being considerably more credible than Jewison’s original: Knowing who the character Thomas Crown is supposed to be, which casting makes more sense: rugged, rambunctious, streetwise Steve McQueen or dapper, intelligent, sophisticated Pierce Brosnan?

In the end, my enjoyment of the McQueen-Dunaway version dims somewhat but doesn’t diminish entirely — only enough to make me count this as one of those rare instances when the remake is actually superior to the original.

Don’t feel bad for McQueen, though, because four months after Crown’s release, Bullitt arrived in theaters, cementing his legend once and for all.

¹ A lesson for screenwriters: Always look for other ways to bring characters up to speed on information the audience already knows. As good as it often was, the television series 24, particularly in later seasons, was awful about padding time by having a character in the know explain something in painstaking detail to a character in the dark long after the audience had already watched it unfold with their own eyes.

On the flip side, there’s a neatly executed scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest that achieves this purpose about as well as I’ve seen it done anywhere: When the head of the intelligence agency, known as the Professor (Leo G. Carroll), finally catches up to the fugitive Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) in Chicago, he has him brought to the airport, where they must catch a plane about to depart for Rapid City, South Dakota. In order to talk the reluctant Thornhill onto the plane, there is a vital piece of information that the Professor must deliver to him within a certain context. The audience already knows the context — we’ve watched two full acts of it up to this point — so instead of listening to the Professor recount the entire plot to us, we watch him recount it to Thornhill as they cross the tarmac, drowned out by the drone of airplane engines until the moment when he springs on all of us — you, me and Cary Grant — what we need to know to get him on that plane.

Same thing with Vicki and her revelation about the bank heist. I don’t need to hear again what I already know. I only need to know that she knows it. And I’d like to see her and the cops break a sweat before arriving at their conclusion so that the next step in their case doesn’t seem so rushed and transparent.

² The invaluable Internet Movie Database provides some additional perspective: “Sean Connery had been the original choice for the title role but declined, a decision he later regretted.” Imagine that: They wanted James Bond to play Thomas Crown.

2010-08-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

OH, THE HUMANITY: MEET JOHN DOE
Try as I might, I’ve always found the films of director Frank Capra hard to swallow. Not that they aren’t invariably thoughtful, well-made, well-cast pictures with a distinctive and consistent narrative throughline (each in its own way glorifying the American Everyman). It’s just that Capra’s expressions of can-do optimism, civic pride and patriotism — born of his status as a first-generation Sicilian immigrant who came to our shores at age 6 — are just as consistently too corny by half, as though he’s projecting with a bullhorn to the back row of the theater, to ensure that his particular cinematic evangelism nails the audience right between the eyes. There is little, if any, nuance in a Capra film.¹

Yet, Capra’s excessive tendencies have detracted neither from his enduring popularity — certain of his films are more well regarded now, in fact, than they were upon their initial release — nor the widespread use of the adjective Capraesque to describe stories told in his fashion. Certainly Capra’s unabashed earnestness had greater appeal during the hard times that coincided with his ascendancy, but it’s still easy to imagine some incredulity and eye-rolling in theaters exhibiting his films during their initial release.

I must admit I’m impressed, though, when I point out that two of Capra’s films — with uncharacteristic cynicism, however briefly indulged — make serious overtures toward the attempted suicides of their protagonists: his most popular film, 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life (whose very title reeks of Capra’s pie-eyed optimism) and the film I watched Sunday evening, 1941’s Meet John Doe, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck.

The picture opens with fired newspaper columnist Ann Mitchell (Stanwyck) turning in a final assignment in which she invents a phony John Doe who rails against the inequities of society and announces that, as an act of protest, he’s going to leap from the roof of City Hall.² It ends with Cooper — as the newspaper’s made-to-order populist hero, John Willoughby — ascending to that very roof, prepared to follow through on a promise he never made in the first place. Interestingly, Capra shot and screened multiple endings for test audiences, including one ending in which Cooper actually jumps.³

Wouldn’t you love to see what that test audience wrote on their comment cards? Can you imagine the collective gasp that went up in that theater? Or the outrage of moviegoers incensed at Capra for offing Gary freaking Cooper in order to make his point?

Meet John Doe arrived in theaters on May 3, 1941, making it just barely a prewar film and, for that matter, just barely, if at all, a post-Depression film. It was Capra’s follow-up to 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and despite a difference of only two years, one almost feels that the films were shot out of order — that Doe’s emphasis on the downtrodden would have been more resonant than Smith’s political idealism in its time, and vice versa.

As it stands, though, Doe doesn’t acknowledge the Depression so much as delineate the sharp divide in America between the haves and the have-nots (though it preaches, via Walter Brennan as John’s traveling companion, the Colonel, of the inherent integrity and honor of the latter). The film is essentially a fanfare for the common man, trumpeting those virtues of hard work, honesty, fair dealing and basic decency that today we ascribe to the American middle class and illustrating how those virtues can be upended by the ambitions of the powerful and wealthy figures who control both the purse strings and the puppet strings in America.

All of which lends Meet John Doe an air of timelessness, even 70 years hence — especially given the remarkable coincidence of my having selected the film for viewing⁴ on the same day The New York Times published Frank Rich’s column about the billionaires bankrolling the populist Tea Party movement. (Rich points back to the du Pont brothers’ creation of the American Liberty League in 1934 with an eye toward taking down F.D.R. and his New Deal “socialism,” illustrating that Capra had at hand his own tailor-made template for the shadow figures who pull the strings in Doe.)

In this respect, honorable mention is due the venerable character actor Edward Arnold, who, as newspaper tycoon D.B. Norton, gives one of the most understated performances I’ve ever seen, particularly given its time and the tone and pacing of the story that surrounds him.

There has been a pinballing urgency in the setup — Ann scheming her revenge, then enlisting her managing editor, Henry Connell (James Gleason) in the hoax — and a giddy momentum that takes hold after Cooper emerges as their John Doe. But the mayhem subsides for the introduction of Norton, who sits unperturbed, Sphinx-like behind his great desk, measuring his responses, choosing his words thoughtfully, carefully, making his subjects wait for his decrees, letting the air around him grow almost perfectly still before finally breaking his silence in the calmest, deepest, most sonorous tones, like a man who has just blown a smoke ring and doesn’t want to disrupt it with his own bluster. Norton lulls our protagonists and us into a false sense of security, setting up an Act III reversal that we feel foolish for not having seen coming down Main Street, all horns and cymbals.

It’s a shame, then, that Capra undermines the best of his storytelling by weighing it down with the worst of his tendencies. Arguably the finest moment in the entire film is a barroom scene in which a drunken Connell tells John Willoughby why he loves America by way of describing how he and his father enlisted together to fight in World War I and served in the same platoon. It is a lean, effective piece of writing devastatingly delivered by Gleason.

On the other hand, the picture comes to a screeching halt in a sequence in which Willoughby meets with one small town’s “John Doe Club,” comprised of citizens inspired by his example. A dozen or so card-carrying members stand in a clump around earnest, big-hearted soda jerk Bert Hanson (Regis Toomey) as he explains in agonizingly explicit detail how he and his wife made the effort to know their neighbors better and cast aside their prejudices and learned what they all had in common and lent a helping hand to those who needed it and on and on until I thought the entire movie had just given up on narrative structure altogether in favor of characters delivering exposition directly to the camera. I wasn’t watching the clock, but in screen time it was an eternity, the equivalent of dead air on a radio station.

Ultimately, the film’s saving grace, the glue holding it all in place, is Stanwyck, who over a long career tackled so many different roles excellently and effortlessly. Even here, with Capra’s shmaltz machine dialed all the way up to 11, she somehow manages to sell the director’s agenda without ever damaging her own credibility.

I wish I could say Cooper was a match his leading lady, but there are straight men and there are stiff men, and here, as in Howard Hawks’ Ball of Fire, the trouble with Cooper’s being the strong silent type is that he lacks the necessary charisma not only to make a strong impression alongside Stanwyck but even to stand out among a much more colorful supporting cast. We don’t wonder why Ann loves John Doe, and we root for him because he’s Gary Cooper, but a part of us still wishes he were James Stewart, who would at least wring some emotion out of us in exchange for the price of admission.

You’d think Capra of all people would wish for that, too.

¹ Among Capra’s more popular titles, the exception is 1934’s It Happened One Night, as intelligent, polished and watertight a romantic comedy as has ever been committed to film.

² Never mind that there’s a whole other film to be made here about the horrendous breach of journalistic ethics Ann — and, subsequently, her bosses — commits by inventing a story out of thin air. (Ask Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass how well that worked out for them.) The picture glosses over such legalities as it steamrolls toward its overarching theme, effectively dismissing the audience’s suspension of disbelief as a foregone conclusion.

³ I don’t believe I’m spoiling anything here.

⁴ We chose it strictly on the basis of Adriane’s having liked Barbara Stanwyck in the previous night’s entertainment, Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve. (To wit: What’s not to like about Barbara Stanwyck?)

2010-08-26T07:31:00.000-07:00

WITH AN ACE UP ITS SLEEVE: THIS GUN FOR HIRE
There are two kinds of great old movies: those into which a great deal of care and detail and passion were invested by filmmakers, cast and crew — think Citizen Kane or Notorious or The Philadelphia Story — and those which somehow rise to greatness despite being made under the old studio-system directive “They don’t want it good; they want it Wednesday.” If the latter kind of film succeeds, it is carried to success on the shoulders of star power, pure and simple, because if we truly judge it on its merits, if we pause long enough to contemplate the mechanics of its plot, we might find ourselves astounded that the picture ever made it into the can.

Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire, adapted by Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett from a 1936 novel by Graham Greene, is just such a picture.

Released May 13, 1942, This Gun for Hire is a legendary and important film noir chiefly because it made a star out of Alan Ladd, who holds our attention from the moment we first see him: cool, confident, laconic, magnetic. One would like to believe that he was an amazing discovery, an overnight sensation who appeared out of nowhere, but Ladd had already appeared in 43 films in 10 years before being billed here as “and introducing Alan Ladd.”

The class of this operation, however, is the terrific Veronica Lake, who received top billing and would have carried the entire picture on her slight shoulders had Ladd not made such an impression.

Lake is an anomaly among leading ladies: a confounder of expectations, the girl next door in the packaging of a femme fatale, daintier than Barbara Stanwyck but every bit as tough. And while her trademark peek-a-boo hairstyle makes her appear a bit high-maintenance, the girl behind it is anything but. She’s a gamer, a player, one of the boys. Wherever you’re headed, she’s going too, in heels and without bellyaching. (Witness her also alongside Joel McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels.)

This Gun for Hire marks the first pairing of Ladd and Lake, who would make another six films together over the next six years, most notably the crime dramas The Glass Key and The Blue Dahlia. Symbiotically, Ladd and Lake would each validate the other’s screen cred: Lake enabled Ladd to appear taller and more formidable onscreen than his real-life 5 feet 4 inches, and consequently the 4-foot-11-inch Lake was seen holding her own alongside not just Ladd but every other man in the picture. Not that she had to exert herself much or often.

Because these two are so good, together and apart, one finds oneself forgiving the faults of a film that bears every evidence of having been rushed through production.

To wit, at the scene of the murder that sets the story in motion, the hit man Philip Raven (Ladd) encounters a polio-stricken girl on the apartment steps. He’s taken aback and oddly drawn to her; he wasn’t counting on any witnesses, let alone a little girl. He lingers too long in the foyer and the stairwell, both coming and going, and even interacts with the little girl, letting her get a really good look at him. Here the filmmakers have established the most perfectly reliable eyewitness in the history of contract killings, and yet Raven’s departure marks the last we see of her. All that tension and foreshadowing wasted because someone didn’t cover all their bases during rewrites.

Next we meet Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), the effete, doughy, violence-averse middleman, who on behalf of his mysterious boss has hired Raven to execute the aforementioned murder of a chemist in order to obtain a secret formula. Gates is big on others doing the dirty work but blanches at the mere mention of the sordid details. He pays off Raven with traceable stolen bills that effectively make Raven a marked man, in turn setting Raven on a course for revenge. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Here the writers post their first entry in the suspension-of-disbelief sweepstakes, as we learn that Gates is a chemical-company executive by day and — wait for it — a nightclub impresario by night. Take a moment to let that sink in.

Hard on the heels of that reveal, we follow Gates to open auditions at a theatrical agency. He’s brought there by a talent scout named Baker so we can all have our first look at Ellen Graham (Lake), who performs a pretty nifty song–and–sleight of hand routine that makes one wonder how much of the magic was performed with a camera and a moviola. In any event, Lake is the best kind of misdirection — and frankly, I can’t imagine any of her contemporaries, except perhaps Stanwyck, not making an embarrassing hash of the singing-magician routine. Naturally she gets the job.

Next, Baker drives Ellen out to the freeway, escorts her to a car parked on the shoulder, and introduces her to Sen. Burnett, presumably of the great state of California and ranking member of some or other intelligence subcommittee, who enlists the newly booked showgirl to spy on Gates for the government.

You can’t make this shit up. And yet Maltz and Burnett did.

Remember that, though, because we’ll circle back to it shortly.

Ellen’s boyfriend, Lt. Michael Crane of the L.A.P.D., is portrayed by Robert Preston in the only pre-Music Man thing I’ve ever seen him in. If I concentrate real hard to suspend my disbelief, I can maybe buy Preston as a uniformed cop but not a detective — and there are no circumstances under which I can accept him as Lake’s boyfriend. He’s a little too starry-eyed and gee-whiz and aww-shucks, and with his soft features and cheesy mustache, he reminds me more of Bud Abbott than of the murder police I’m accustomed to. In the real world — my world — Veronica Lake would break him like a matchstick.

The story opens in San Francisco, where Ellen auditions for Gates and where Crane just happens to be cooperating with the S.F.P.D. on a case. This is established only because it allows Gates to put Ellen on a train bound for L.A., where his nightclub is. And it allows the vengeful Raven to board the same train, where he takes the last available seat … next to Ellen. Gates, who knows Raven is out to get him, comes out of his private sleeper just long enough to spy Raven and Ellen together and suspect that the two of them are co-conspirators.

Never mind that they soon enough will be. This little twist all but renders Sen. Burnett moot. Because according to the Law of Economy of Characters, we don’t need the senator to create a relationship that Raven and Ellen will stumble into on their own. It’s enough that Gates sees them together; now he must eliminate both of them, and he wires ahead to the authorities that Raven — the ruthless killer everyone already knows about because of the widely publicized stolen bills Gates paid him off with — is on the train coming into L.A.

Raven also has a badly deformed wrist that has been duly noted up to this point, so that’s presumably how the police will identify him coming off the train, but he manages to elude the dragnet with an assist from Ellen.

A lot of stuff happens after this, including another fantastic nightclub number by Lake, wearing what her act would dictate is black patent leather fishing gear (no, really), but which for all the world makes her look like a dominatrix. Not that I’m complaining.

In short order, Ellen is abducted by Gates, setting up an excellent bit of work by veteran screen heavy Marc Lawrence as Gates’ bodyguard and driver, Tommy. When Tommy explains in efficient, businesslike detail how he’d go about dispatching Ellen and arranging the whole thing to look like a suicide, Gates is as horrified as though he’s being told about his own imminent demise. Lawrence clearly is having as much fun in the role as Tommy is having at Gates’ expense.

Eventually, Raven rescues Ellen and the two set out together to get Gates. Ellen has warmed to Raven and is trying to persuade him to help bring Gates and his boss to justice instead of merely killing them in cold-blooded revenge. And here the film comes off the rails in the writers’ ongoing mission to cram too many ideas into a story that Graham Greene had probably pretty well nailed in the first place.

Remember: It was released in May 1942 — just six months after Pearl Harbor. It bears repeating that Lake is nothing if not a trouper of the first order, so good in fact that she sells the film’s ham-handed war propaganda (and rescues Sen. Burnett from irrelevance) about as well as anyone could hope to:

“You know, I’ve been figuring something,” she tells Raven. “That chemical formula — I bet I know what it is. … Gas. Poison gas. They’re selling it to our enemy. … Tomorrow they’ll ship it back in bombs. Japanese breakfast food for America. … Did you hear what I said? It’s important. This war is everybody’s business. Yours too.”

She may as well be speaking directly to the camera, ordering us all to run out and buy bonds.

Right after Lake knocks that impossible speech out of the park, Ladd fares much worse with some completely unnecessary business with a stray cat and a soul-purging monologue of his own in which he explains his entire back story (including how he got that deformed wrist) in a paranoid flourish of mounting hysteria totally out of sync with the stoic, calculating, remorseless killer we met in Act I. It’s another misfire by the filmmakers, following a moment in Act II when Raven all but admits to Ellen, at that point a complete stranger on a train (!), that he’s a hit man.

Letting Raven unburden himself to the one person who sympathizes with him is an obvious ploy to enlist the audience’s sympathy as well. Two problems with that: 1) Like the stray cat before it, it’s totally unnecessary, because we’re already on board with Raven’s vendetta against Gates and his boss for double-crossing him; and 2) because the cool, calculating character we’ve spent two acts getting to know has suddenly, if momentarily, morphed into a crazed, wild-eyed maniac.

After they’ve reached an understanding, united against a common enemy, there’s a neat exchange between Raven and Ellen regarding her intentions toward Crane:

“You gonna marry that cop?” he asks. She nods.

“He the right guy for you?” She nods again. Raven smiles at her. “OK.”

Because Raven trusts Ellen and is charmed by her — and because he already knows, as do we, how this is going to end for him — he’s more or less giving her his blessing to go be with the pasty, goofy flatfoot Crane. It doesn’t help matters, though, that Ellen, about to make a decoy of herself, is wearing Raven’s trench coat and fedora — and looking like 12 different kinds of adorable.

Clearly we are meant to want them to be together, even if it’s only for this moment. And while 1940s Hollywood was, for all intents and purposes, contractually obligated to crank out happy endings, even in crime stories, one imagines how much better This Gun for Hire would have been if they had made Crane a more flawed, compromised character whose true colors might be revealed in Act III, leveling the playing field a bit between killer and cop.

In any event, someone other than Preston would have to play Crane. Someone like Joseph Cotten or Glenn Ford or Dick Powell or Dana Andrews — whomever Paramount had under contract who fit that bill. After all, if we have to watch tough, brave, heroic Veronica Lake turn all sappy and vulnerable for some cop in the end, he should at least be someone we can believe in as much as we believe in her.

2010-08-15T02:03:00.000-07:00

A THIN LINE BETWIXT LOVE AND HATE: THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER
Actor Charles Laughton’s one and only directorial effort, 1955’s The Night of the Hunter, is a film that has greatness within its reach but fails on several fronts, its iconic performance by Robert Mitchum notwithstanding.

I say iconic because preacher Harry Powell, with his LOVE and HATE knuckle tattoos, usually makes the short list of roles that we talk about when we talk about Mitchum, but perhaps it is more accurately described as indelible, because while he makes a definite impression, he also serves up a little too much ham to be as chillingly effective as one would prefer.

Laughton’s direction is likely to blame here. I can’t imagine any director telling Mitchum anything more than “Hit your marks and be Robert Mitchum” — the man was already as big as he needed to be — but here he often seems to have been told, “Go bigger.” Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, but in all the years I’ve heard about The Night of the Hunter, that’s sort of how I envisioned Harry Powell: deliberate, methodical, menacing without having to emote or raise his voice.

It is terrifying enough to learn that Powell is not faking his fealty to God, that he is actually both preacher and killer in equal measure. He sings hymns when he is alone, not just for show, when he has an audience. (Mitchum has a sonorous singing voice well suited to the old standards.) He is sincere in all the ways he presents himself as a man of the cloth; it’s when he works too hard to persuade us that he’s not a killer that he appears disingenuous. More to the point, though, when he talks to God, Powell regards Him as much as a co-conspirator as his creator.

The cast as a whole is prone to overacting — notably Evelyn Varden as the ice-cream shop proprietress with the improbable moniker Icey Spoon and Shelley Winters as the doomed widow Willa Harper. (The great Lillian Gish escapes with some dignity intact, but only just.) This too has much to do with Laughton’s direction and a script by James Agee that is overpopulated with good, God-fearing, churchgoing characters and weighed down by parables and platitudes where there ought to be incisive, revelatory dialogue. There are no shades of gray in these characters, and by the time someone with an amoral streak (other than Powell, that is) finally appears in the story, it’s almost an afterthought. Furthermore, it’s unintentionally comic when these fine, upstanding citizens turn suddenly into a bloodthirsty lynch mob in Act III.

The two superior films I thought of while watching Hunter are Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt and Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird — the former for the way its villain wins friends and influences people with charm and charisma (as opposed to Powell’s heavy-handed piety and fierce moral certitude); the latter for its exceptional child actors and its deliberate pacing of a narrative that is not entirely dissimilar to Hunter’s. One sees in those films the ways Hunter could have been fine-tuned to be a coat of many colors instead of a ill-fitting garment hung on the shoulders of Mitchum’s imperfect but intense performance.

2010-08-06T22:48:00.000-07:00

PLAYING IT FAST AND LOOSE: THE HUSTLER
Thursday night Adriane and I watched Paul Newman in The Hustler, another fine example of a movie I waited far too long to see.

For one thing, it’s lousy with character actors. That’s a young Vincent Gardenia working behind the bar, confirming that, yes, even he was young once. Or younger, anyway. There’s Michael Constantine, briefly. There’s Murray Hamilton, hilarious as an effete Kentucky millionaire. Former middleweight champ Jake LaMotta even turns up as a bartender in one sequence. The standout among them, though, is one Myron McCormick, whom I had never seen in anything before and who was dead of cancer a year later, at 54. With a few movies and a lot of television to his credit, he’s marvelously affecting in the role of Charlie Burns, Fast Eddie Felson’s first handler and business partner. He’s one of those great discoveries: a guy you’ve never seen who’s so good and so real that he could just as easily be some guy they pulled in off the street.

As Minnesota Fats, it’s got Jackie Gleason in what must be his finest, least grating performance ever, the best evidence he could possibly present to defend the sobriquet “The Great One.” (I’ve always been an Art Carney guy myself.) It’s got George C. Scott — typically sharp and menacing and cynical and cool. And it’s got brave Piper Laurie, in exactly the second thing I’ve ever seen her in, with her smoky voice and that awful Aqua Net helmet of hair they made women wear in the late ’50s and early ’60s; somehow, though, she makes us see what Eddie sees in her.

But what The Hustler has most of all is the young Paul Newman. As we watched, I was celebrating my 43rd birthday, and I marveled that Newman then was seven years younger than I am now. Never mind that he aged better than anyone has a right to; then and there, in 1961, he was about as perfect a specimen of a movie star as you could hope to find. His energy and bluster and raw, unchecked bravado brought to mind, obviously, those of his apprentice Tom Cruise in Scorsese’s The Color of Money 25 years later (that being another reason that Thursday’s screening was a necessity). Except that not even Cruise had going for him what the young Newman did; you’re born with that, and Cruise wasn’t.

We were barely a half-hour into the tale of Fast Eddie Felson when Adriane announced, “I think I can’t stand him.”

To which I replied, “It’s early yet, darling. Give him time. That’s why they call it a character arc,” and here I waved my hand in an arc to emphasize my point.

But 20 minutes later Eddie was treating his girl, Sarah, shabbily and with disregard, and again Adriane chimed in: “I really sort of hate him.”

On and on this went, and Adriane did not shrink from her initial assessment of Fast Eddie. She eventually asked, “Do you promise I’m going to like him before this is all over with?” And while I certainly didn’t feel I could make such a promise, I felt entirely confident that my illustration of the character arc would hold true, that before the credits rolled, Eddie Felson would redeem himself somehow. At least I hoped he would, for Adriane’s sake.

For my own edification, I was reminded once more what was so special about Newman. He was genuinely likable, a man’s man who raced cars and gave a ton of money to charity and was married to the same woman for 50 years. He was matter-of-factly handsome and virile without having to force his sex appeal and those clear blue eyes on the moviegoing public, which meant he wasn’t a threat to the rest of us men even though, really, if we’re being completely honest with ourselves, he very much was. And he certainly played his share of characters who were just as likable as he was. (Butch Cassidy, anyone? Rocky Graziano? Henry Gondorff? Cool Hand Luke?)

But what made Newman special was that he defied the humming internal logic of the star-making machinery and went out of his way to cast himself against type. He was willing, in a way few stars are, to tamper with any semblance of a carefully crafted persona, to drag his stardom out on the most precarious of limbs and test our faith in and infatuation with him. He challenged us to see him as an actor, not a sex symbol, and he made us pay attention to the sorts of characters we don’t ordinarily wish upon our movie stars. Flawed, ruined, wounded, complicated men like Ben Quick and Brick Pollitt and Hud Bannon and, ultimately, Frank Galvin and John Rooney and, yes, even Fast Eddie Felson, who could spot an easy mark but was a lousy judge of actual character (his own included), who got way out in front of his talent and chased down his rightful destiny as a loser, who had the big time within his grasp and still wasn’t satisfied with it, who treated his girl badly and turned my own girl against him.

Rare is the star who’ll lean into the strike zone and take that one on the chin. That’s OK, though. Newman will win her back next time. He always does.

2010-07-15T16:07:00.003-07:00

THE INSIGNIFICANT DETAIL, #6 in a series

HAPPINESS MAY NOT, IN FACT, BE A WARM GUN

Warning: Spoilers lie ahead.¹

Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo claims, in its opening title card, to be based on a true story — that of a kidnapping-for-ransom scheme gone horribly awry. Except that it’s not. Or in any event, if it is, it is only very loosely based on a story the brothers heard one time that may have actually happened, and they just seized upon the broad strokes of the story and ran with them.

Point being, Fargo, a near-perfect film, is likely 10 times more interesting than the story as it actually, presumably, possibly happened. Such is the Coens’ particular gift as cinematic storytellers: the creation of specific worlds in which specifically rendered characters act and speak in specific ways to achieve very specific ends — and every word ends up on the screen precisely as written. Said gift won them the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay of 1996.²

I had read only yesterday the remark that even the greatest films are in some way flawed, and that’s no less true for Fargo, which, on this most recent viewing, caught my eye with the sort of insignificant detail that ordinarily wouldn’t slip past the Coens’ minute perfectionism.

In a scenario in which cooler heads will not prevail, simply because none are complicit, the mastermind of the abduction — and I use that term loosely — weak-willed car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), cedes control of the ransom drop to his wealthy and imposing father-in-law, Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell). Wade doesn’t want Jerry to screw up an exchange involving both Wade’s money and Wade’s daughter; what he doesn’t know is that he’s taking a million dollars to a drop that was only supposed to total $80,000.

Cut to the upper deck of the parking garage, where kidnaper Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) is outraged to learn that Jerry has deviated from the plan. When Wade insists that he won’t give Carl the money without first being given his daughter, Carl draws his semiautomatic pistol and shoots Wade in the abdomen.

So furious is Carl that, as he rants about what a bunch of imbeciles the extended Lundegaard-Gustafson clan are, he isn’t paying attention to Wade drawing the revolver from the pocket of his parka. Wade fires, and Carl walks right into the shot, which creases his jawline.

Reflexively, Carl squeezes the trigger of his pistol and fires an errant shot into the Minneapolis night. That’s two.

Now exploding with animal rage, Carl fires another shot into Wade, then five more in rapid succession as he stands over Wade.

According to the Internet Movie Firearms Database³, the movie prop or “non gun” employed by Carl and his accomplice, Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), is modeled after the SIG-Sauer P220, which generally features a seven- or nine-round magazine. We’re going to assume nine in this case because of the eight shots Carl discharges atop the garage and the one he fires into the parking attendant downstairs.

In particular, though, it’s the last six shots that Carl fires into Wade that grabbed my attention. Because no sooner does the fusillade subside than Carl very deliberately and forcefully — almost as though punctuating the murderous act — shoves the gun in the front waistband of his pants, in effect aiming it directly at his own most precious cargo.

Full disclosure: I’ve never fired a handgun. In my imagination, however, six shots in rapid succession will, to some degree, heat the barrel of the gun to a temperature at least as hot as, say, that of a household iron. Enough to sear human flesh, in other words.

That said, I’ll concede that there are other factors involved here:

1. Carl has just been shot in the face at close range, and it’s conceivable that that pain is pinballing through his neural receptors so violently that he doesn’t even register the heat of the gun next to his nethers.

2. It is well established that it is a bitterly cold winter in Minnesota. Therefore, one might reason that a) Carl is wearing enough layers to protect himself from both the cold weather and the smoking gun; and b) the night air is cold enough to sufficiently cool the barrel of the gun even in the short span between the eighth shot and the tucking of the gun into Carl’s waistband.

3. Although his waistline is not framed in the shot, when Carl first draws his gun, his movement clearly indicates that he is drawing it from his waistband and not the opposite pocket of his unbuttoned coat, which would be much more awkward. Because the waistband is where Carl is accustomed to concealing his weapon, it only makes sense that he would put it back there when he was done with it.

4. Carl, for all of the aforementioned reasons and others I may be overlooking, is no longer thinking rationally but acting on pure animal impulse.

Among my readers, any number of you may be more experienced with and enlightened about the physics and mechanics of handguns — some hasty Googling didn’t turn up the specific answers I was seeking — in which case your comments are welcome.

It is even entirely possible that I, over the course of my estimable cinematic education, have watched hundreds of action movies set in much warmer climates, from which sample possibly dozens of gunmen have thoughtlessly (or perhaps confidently — who’s to say?) tucked smoking guns into their waistbands without my even giving it a second thought. That I should consider the apparent dangers of doing so while witnessing a shootout in snowbound Minneapolis only goes to show that one never knows how or when the next insignificant detail will manifest itself.

In any event, I would favor the shoulder holster myself, especially under a jacket or coat. I’m just sayin’.

¹ If, for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom, you have not, in the last 14 years, seen Fargo — which is merely the winner of two Academy Awards, nominated for seven, and one of the very best movies ever made — then I can’t help you. Rent it, then get back to me.

² Notwithstanding the praise I’ve heaped on the Coens and Fargo in the preceding paragraph, I’d be remiss if I didn’t reassert my longstanding opinion that John Sayles’ Lone Star was the best film and screenplay of 1996. It’s a shame, then, that its only nomination was in the original-screenplay category, and Sayles went home empty-handed.

As long as we’re talking about hardware, though, I will take this opportunity to lavish praise upon the adjective-defying wonder that is Frances McDormand, who deservedly took home the Best Actress prize for her portrayal of seven-months-pregnant Brainerd, Minnesota, police chief Marge Gunderson, one of the warmest, wisest, most indelible characters in movie history.

³ Have I mentioned lately that I love the Internet in all its comprehensive glory?

2010-07-05T17:12:00.005-07:00

THE INSIGNIFICANT DETAIL, #5 in a Series:

BEER WITH BREAKFAST
My favorite L.A. movie, Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon, opens with its protagonist, Mack (Kevin Kline), staving off the predatory advances of a neighborhood gang when his Lexus breaks down in Inglewood late one night after a Lakers game.¹

As Mack’s worst-case scenario is about to unfold, the cavalry arrives² in the person of Simon (Danny Glover), who wastes no time in hooking up Mack’s car to his tow truck. Simon is so businesslike, so matter-of-fact, that by the time the thugs think to threaten him, he has already put them at a disadvantage. “Now that this car’s hooked up to my truck, it’s my responsibility,” he says in a vocabulary clearly unfamiliar to them, and he continues to reason with them until he talks himself and Mack safely into his cab and out of Inglewood.

One morning a few days later, Mack appears at the garage as Simon returns from his night shift, explaining that he wanted to be sure he did enough to thank Simon for saving his life. Simon downplays his heroics, but Mack insists, asking if he can buy Simon breakfast.

The scene and the conversation that follow contain the entire meaning of the movie and mark the beginning of one of the most beautiful cinematic friendships since Rick Blaine and Louis Renault strolled into the fog at the end of Casablanca. But what eventually caught my eye is what’s for breakfast.

The transition from garage to diner is handled with a single establishing shot that lasts about 10 seconds: A plate of bacon, potatoes, and two eggs sunny side up sits on a counter. A waitress enters the frame, sets a beer bottle beside the plate and uncaps it. She sets down her bottle opener, picks up the plate, and carries it away. It’s not even Simon or Mack’s breakfast we’re seeing in the shot — it’s just something to mark the transition along with the overlapping dialogue, and the camera follows the waitress just far enough to frame Simon and Mack at their table by the window. As she exits the frame, Kasdan cuts to his stars in a medium two-shot.

Ever since I first noticed that transition, I’ve been captivated by the idea that someone would — or even could — order a beer with their breakfast.³ So predictable have I become with my black coffee with one packet of sugar that it had never occurred to me how perfectly suited some breakfast foods are to be accompanied by a beer. And because the usual suspects of the breakfast-anytime crowd (e.g., IHOP, Denny’s, Waffle House) don’t list beer on their bills of fare, it’s easy to overlook the option when one finds oneself in an old-fashioned, non-franchise diner that flies in the face of Prohibition and family values.

Sometime back, when Adriane still lived in Wyoming, we found ourselves at our favorite local breakfast-anytime haunt, Bear Town Restaurant⁴, where I happened to note the availability of Budweiser on the menu. It’s not a beer I would order under ordinary circumstances, but for this purpose, one doesn’t want or need some fancy microbrew or highfalutin import — a decent American-made lager or pilsner will do.

I’m here to tell you that the pairing of a cold Budweiser longneck with a plate of corned beef hash and eggs is like kismet. So much so that I’m almost ashamed that I needed a movie to point it out to me.

That said, I wouldn’t put it past Kasdan to have intended this insignificant detail as a visual cue, a gustatory metaphor for Mack and Simon’s relationship.

¹ The film was released in 1991, when the Lakers still played at the Great Western Forum.

² The first time we lay eyes on Simon, the first shot is of his cowboy boots as he dismounts from his tow truck, another seemingly insignificant detail in a movie full of little details and rich with symbolism that I may someday write about at greater length. (It is perhaps an homage to the fact that Glover and Kline also co-starred in Kasdan’s Silverado. The scene, in fact, plays out like something out of a Western.)

³ Admittedly, though, Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski spring to mind.

⁴ We even have our own table there, where we have been seated, without ever requesting it, on all but one occasion.

Previous Insignificant Details:

#4: Sunset Boulevard

#3: North by Northwest

#2: Vertigo

#1: Rear Window

2010-06-27T13:13:00.004-07:00

PRINT THE LEGEND: STAGECOACH
Awkward confession: I’m nearly 43 years old, a professed lover of motion pictures and motion-picture history — cineaste, critic, screenwriter, for hell’s sake — and Friday night I watched John Ford’s Stagecoach for only the first time. Ever.

This is me we’re talking about.

I who have admired and championed Ford’s other collaborations with John Wayne — your Searchers, your Quiet Man, your Liberty Valance, et cetera. I who have forced my parents to sit through both How Green Was My Valley and Young Mr. Lincoln in a single evening. (Thank you, Robert Osborne). I who will drop everything if I find Mister Roberts playing on TV.

That John Ford.

It’s inexcusable, I know.

Stagecoach — ranked 63rd among the American Film Institute’s original Top 100 films and one of the very pictures they’re referring to when they argue that 1939 was the greatest year in film history.¹

Stagecoach — whose screenplay boasts an uncredited assist from Ben Hecht.

Stagecoach — which Orson Welles is said to have screened privately some 40 times during the production of Citizen Kane.

Stagecoach — from which Raiders of the Lost Ark pinched its most famous stunt.

Stagecoach — the first film Ford ever shot in Monument Valley, Utah.

That Stagecoach.

I know — right?

Before Stagecoach, the former Marion Morrison had appeared in an astounding 79 films in 13 years, and if you can name one of them off the top of your head, I’ll eat your hat. But John Ford made John Wayne a star with a single dolly push into a close-up — one of the best character introductions I’ve ever witnessed on film.²

The moment arrives just before the 19-minute mark, up to which point the Ringo Kid has been talked about as much as the story’s ostensible threat, the Apaches led by Geronimo. He’s built up in our imaginations as a man to be reckoned with, and with a single camera move, we are persuaded. Want to see the precise moment at which John Wayne became the Duke? Watch Stagecoach.

Wayne delivers the goods here, clearly having learned a thing or two about acting over the course of those 79 films. So why, one wonders, did it take John Ford to finally make the world notice him?

Because Wayne wasn’t yet a star, Claire Trevor merited the film’s top billing. Her character, Dallas, may not have been the first so-called hooker with a heart of gold ever portrayed on film, but Trevor’s performance sets a high bar for all ladies of ill repute to follow. In this regard, a lot of credit is due to both Dudley Nichols’ screenplay and Ford’s direction.

By 1939, the Hays Production Code was being enforced, and it is with sublime subtlety that Dallas’ character is established without anyone just coming right out and calling her a whore to her face. Her ostracism by the other townspeople — from the forthright campaigning of the local “women’s auxiliary” of old crones and battleaxes who run her out of town to the way others quietly but pointedly avoid, dismiss or disregard her — is so unspecific as to be unremarkable except for the flush of shame on Trevor’s face.³

More overt is her treatment in direct contrast to that of fellow traveler Mrs. Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt), the virtuous wife of a cavalry officer and magnet for the attentions of the gambler and gunfighter Hatfield (John Carradine). That this ignoble figure — alleged to have shot men in the back — ingratiates himself with and dotes upon Mrs. Mallory even as he disdains the outcast Dallas is a bigger slap in Dallas’ face than the townspeople’s derision.

More daring yet still more nuanced is the implication that Dr. Josiah Boone, who is also being run out of town, is not only the town drunk but also, perhaps, Dallas’ pimp. At the outset, one senses that these two share more than just circumstance, and the barest glimmers of the closer, more co-dependent relationship between drunk and tramp occur in moments so fleeting that the casual viewer might miss them altogether.

Having established such a pervasive moral tone, then, it is one of the film’s sly treats to observe how Ringo treats Dallas with courtesy and respect. Wayne at 32 appears so young and fresh-faced that it would be easy to read Ringo’s behavior as naïvete, and yet there is no doubt that a) Ringo knows exactly what Dallas is and why she is being shunned, b) he believes that she nevertheless deserves to be treated as a lady, and c) he enjoys the reactions he gets from the others, including Dallas (Trevor, again saying so much with her eyes, so effortlessly).

It is one of the great tightrope walks of Stagecoach that these simple courtesies form the basis of both a believable attraction and a developing relationship between Ringo and Dallas after only a two- or three-day journey together. It is not as though Hollywood has never asked us to suspend our disbelief about romantic couplings materializing out of thin air, but Ford works very hard here to keep things at a simmer. What we are watching is an actual courtship between two flawed people meeting each other on their own terms and moving forward despite the odds; that the courtship plays out over the course of 75 minutes, give or take (in a 96-minute film), without feeling forced or strained, is a remarkable feat of storytelling.

Another of the film’s great balancing acts is the aforementioned Doc Boone. Here, the character actor Thomas Mitchell, a favorite of Frank Capra’s, delivers one of the four or five best film-drunk performances ever (and won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in the process). Again, credit Ford’s direction as the two men create a character who walks right up to the line at which lesser actors would topple over into slapstick but instead becomes one of the movie’s redemptive figures. Boone sobers up when it becomes most critical that he do so, and knowing what kind of man he is capable of being — responsible, reliable, compassionate, even heroic — when he reaches for his next shot of whiskey, one finds oneself torn between believing he’s earned it and wanting badly to see him push it aside.

There’s so much more going on here — squeaky-voiced Andy Devine in another of his patented comic turns, as the stage driver, Buck; the subplot surrounding the corrupt banker Gatewood (Berton Churchill), including a gag or two that play very well 70 years later, in our present economic climate; the budding, one-sided “romance” between the drunkard Doc Boone and the whiskey drummer Peacock (the aptly named Donald Meek), traveling with his sample case; and the incredible stunts, including the work of the legendary Yakima Canutt — but I’ll let you discover those things on your own.

As I noted above, Stagecoach is the first film Ford ever shot in the location that is now called “John Ford’s Monument Valley” as often as, if not more than, it is attributed to the state of Utah. If the movie has a flaw at all, it could be that Ford was too smitten with the new world he had discovered. Because some easily recognizable features of the landscape — landmarks that Ford himself would make familiar to us — appear more than once in the movie, sharp-eyed viewers may wonder whether the stagecoach is just traveling in circles.

If you have to wander the desert, though, you couldn’t wish for a better Moses than John Ford to guide you. And wow — what a desert.

¹ Consider, if you will, that 1939 was the year of Another Thin Man, Beau Geste, Destry Rides Again, Drums Along the Mohawk, Gunga Din, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Intermezzo, Jesse James, Only Angels Have Wings, The Roaring Twenties, The Rules of the Game, The Three Musketeers, The Women and Young Mr. Lincoln — two of which were also directed by Ford, four of which also co-starred Carradine, and none of which were nominated for the Academy Award.

That year’s 10 Best Picture nominees were Dark Victory, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Love Affair, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Of Mice and Men, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights and the eventual winner, Gone With the Wind.

That’s some kind of year at the movies.

² The shot ranks alongside my favorite star close-up — David Lean’s framing of the golden, messianic Peter O’Toole (also in his first major film role) blowing up the desert railway in Lawrence of Arabia — a shot so powerful and magnetic that, even though it comes after the intermission, two hours in, it has always felt to me as though we’re seeing both O’Toole and Lawrence for the very first time.

³ That, and the fact that Dallas is the only woman in town wearing plaid, and prominently so. Who among us has ever thought of plaid as being the pattern that denotes slatternly promiscuity?

2010-06-24T13:25:00.003-07:00

IRON MEN
70-68.

That’s not tennis. That’s an arena football score.

But on Court 18 of the All England Club at Wimbledon, such comparisons — a six-overtime Stanley Cup playoff here, a 12-day cricket test match there — have been the only currency with which one could trade opinions and observations, because what transpired there this week between the American John Isner and the Frenchman Nicolas Mahut stopped feeling like tennis as we know it sometime Wednesday, even before the scoreboard shat the bed at 47-47 in the fifth set and people started tracking statistics on dry-erase boards and writing on their forearms.

The scoreboard quit. Isner and Mahut did not. Their fifth set alone stretched on past the eight-hour mark; the previous record for an entire tennis match was 6 hours, 33 minutes at Roland Garros in 2004.

Somewhere around, say, Game 110 of that fifth set, ESPN studio analyst Brad Gilbert compared the spectacle to a baseball game in its 34th inning with both starting pitchers still on the mound. Baseball, though — like the aforementioned hockey and cricket — is a team sport, a game played by nine, and one with a lot of standing and waiting, a lot of down time and mincing around between pitches and innings.

It wasn’t until Thursday that analyst Patrick McEnroe arrived at the more apt comparison: a no-limit bare-knuckle prize fight.

Our friend the Internet informs me that the longest boxing match of the Queensberry Rules era was contested in New Orleans in April 1893: Andy Bowen and Jack Burke fought for the vacant lightweight title in a bout that lasted 110 rounds, or 7 hours, 19 minutes, counting the one-minute breaks between rounds — still shorter than Isner and Mahut’s fifth set, though certainly more punishing. That fight was ruled “no contest” when the bell rang for the 111th round and neither man had enough strength, will or wits to come out of his corner.

That’s more like it.

Erase from your mind the simplification that tennis is a sport in which men in white shorts trade volleys over a net on a grass court. Picture instead Mahut seated during breaks with towels draped over both his lap and his shoulders, hunched like a fighter taking instructions from an unseen corner man.

If we must think outside tennis to draw a more apt comparison, then we must also throw out our timeworn adjectives — classic, legendary, historic; even epic has become trite and tired in modern sports parlance — and go scouting about for new ones to describe the dynamic battle of wills between Isner and Mahut. At one point Wednesday, ESPN’s McEnroe declared the effort to be “herculean.” I would add to that assessment Sisyphean and Homeric.

When after the second stoppage due to darkness Wednesday evening, deadlocked at 59-59, Isner remarked, “Nothing like this will ever happen again. Ever,” he wasn’t just slapping History in the face. He was bashing it upside its head with its own hourglass and throwing it down a flight of stairs. If anybody deserves the right to say never with impunity, it’s these two guys.

Just last year at Wimbledon, American Andy Roddick became a sentimental crowd favorite and eventually a sympathetic hero when he challenged Roger Federer, then ranked No. 2 in the world and argued by many to be the greatest ever, in a classic 77-game final whose fifth set was fought tooth-and-nail to a now quaint-by-comparison 16-14 conclusion and a sixth Wimbledon title for Federer.

With all due respect, Roddick has nothing on the solemn grace of Nicolas Mahut.

When the end finally arrived, with a backhand up the line out of the Frenchman’s range, the victorious Isner afforded himself only a moment’s elation before trotting to the net to embrace Mahut. After they strode off the court, Mahut afforded himself only a moment’s rest and reflection before quietly gathering up his gear and attempting to exit an arena and a spotlight that finally, under the ordinary circumstances of mere mortals, would have belonged to Isner.

But Mahut was collared before he even stepped off the grass and brought back for a seemingly hastily assembled midcourt ceremony at which the hackneyed phrase “They are both winners today” was dragged out of mothballs once more. It was then announced that the All England Club had “decided” to honor the two men and the chair umpire with “a special memento” marking the occasion.

A special memento, you say?

Let’s recap:

Isner defeated Mahut on the fifth match point out of 980 points contested — 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68.

The match spanned 183 games (roughly equivalent to four regular matches), lasting 11 hours, 5 minutes, over three days of competition. It was postponed twice on account of darkness.

The men combined for a record 215 service aces, with each shattering the previously held single-match record of 78. Isner won the edge (112-103) and stands atop the record book, though, with Mahut playing Sosa to his McGwire.

I came late to this party. It was already 52-51 in the fifth set before I arrived, and before midday Wednesday, I had never heard of either of these guys. Isner and Mahut could just as easily have been two random names I pointed to in a phone book while blindfolded.

But now, after watching only 35 games of that fifth set and waking at 4 a.m. Thursday (without cause, it turned out) to ensure that I didn’t miss the match’s conclusion, I’m personally invested in these men, and I have a list of demands to present on their behalf:

Any box of Wheaties on which John Isner and Nicolas Mahut appear together is a box of Wheaties I will purchase and eat. That’s a no-brainer.
If Sports Illustrated doesn’t unanimously declare Isner and Mahut its Sportsmen of the Year at the end of 2010, I may not pick up an issue of that sorry rag ever again. You simply cannot persuade me that anybody this year has accomplished or will in the next six months accomplish anything of this magnitude in the entire world of sports, nor do so in a truer spirit of sportsmanship than these two men have done.

In an era in sports that has grown cynical, corrupt, fueled by self-aggrandizing egos, and driven by bottom-line greed, Isner and Mahut have demonstrated that it is still possible to find rare moments of grace, dignity and the purity of competition. If SI won’t acknowledge that, then I will no longer acknowledge SI.
Its “special mementos” notwithstanding, the All England Club at Wimbledon needs to step up most of all.

First, the club should formally rename Court 18 after Isner and Mahut. Henceforth, then, there’d be Centre Court, courts 1 through 17, the Isner-Mahut Court, then Court 19. Listen: If Arthur Ashe can have center court in Flushing, Queens, named in honor of his life and achievements, then surely this pair deserves to have their names forever appended to some dinky outlying stadium on which they only waged the most ridiculously tenacious battle in tennis history.

Second, and most important, there should be a permanent monument along the center-line wall opposite the umpire’s chair. And I’m not talking some dainty little 12-by-16-inch bronze commemorative plaque affixed to the wall. The club needs to take its inspiration from Cooperstown or from Monument Valley at Yankee Stadium — a product of hammer and chisel and fiery forge, faces raised in bas relief like figures from antiquity.

The monument should be a feature of the landscape, a fixed point in the peripheral vision of every low-ranked qualifier who competes there, a constant reminder to them that once upon a time, two other relative unknowns walked onto the grass of Court 18, rendered it a groundskeeper’s nightmare, and strode off it three days later as giants among men.

That’s the Olympic ideal, the true spirit of athletic competition and achievement, and if you were fortunate enough, as I was, to tune in at the right time, you witnessed it again this week in Wimbledon, England.

2010-06-22T10:51:00.002-07:00

SO THAT HAPPENED … ALORS CELA S’EST PRODUIT …
ENTONCES ESO SUCEDIÓ
One of the problems with Netflix — and as a dedicated subscriber, I should assert here that they are few and far between — is of course that, by the time you’re sent a DVD from your queue, perhaps a hundred or more other subscribers have watched that disc, which has also passed through the hands of innumerable distribution and postal employees, transported in plastic bins and canvas sacks thrown from loading docks onto the payloads of trucks and back again, protected by nothing stronger than a paper envelope and a Tyvek sleeve, the latter of which is often grubby and worn from multiple reuses.

I have a disc or three in my own delicately handled library that have already been corrupted after scarcely a dozen or more viewings and have entire chapters that must be skipped altogether in order to continue viewing the film. So I can’t imagine what the average rate of turnover is for a Netflix disc or how many times a subscriber will report a scratched, corrupted or otherwise damaged disc before it’s finally pulled, discarded, and replaced in the distribution stream.

In any event, Monday night marked a first in my storied movie-rental history.

Adriane and I watched Meet the Robinsons in the wake of having seen Toy Story 3 at the theater and watched Wall-E at home over the weekend.

Robinsons, a Walt Disney Animation Studios release, is sort of the perfect movie to illustrate the chasm that separates the story geniuses at Pixar from everybody else in the film industry. While the movie has a certain charm and warmth, occasionally funny jokes and occasionally excellent sight gags, the plot is a train wreck whose course was mapped out by seven credited screenwriters who half-assedly employ a dodgy time-travel device to make the story go where they want it go.¹

For the purposes of our story today, though, all you really need to know is this: At one point in the movie, the mustachioed villain (known only as “the man in the bowler hat” or “bowler hat guy”) opens a notebook in which he has composed a checklist detailing the steps of his dastardly plan for revenge. With his pencil, he checks a box next to the third step in his plan, draws a fourth box below it and writes out a fourth step.

At this precise moment, the DVD froze.

Ordinarily one would end up having to arrow forward to the next chapter and let one’s imagination fill in the missing five or seven minutes of story. For some reason, though, I was able to fast-forward past the glitch, after which it seemed reasonable that I could rewind to a spot just before the glitch and try again. And while that trick actually worked, it somehow disrupted the interface between the disc and my DVD player so that the frozen moment, when arrived at again, got caught in a loop and kept repeating itself. But with a twist.

Each time the shot looped back to the beginning, the disc somehow signaled the DVD player to change the language track from English to French and then to Spanish. Because Meet the Robinsons is an animated film, the shot onscreen also changed: Each time the villain put pencil to paper, he was writing in a different language, and the text above, of course, had also changed.

Not only did the movie’s plot zigzag from the present to the future to the past and back again, but we got our passports stamped twice along the way, too.

There were other technical glitches to contend with — including menu screens that disappeared, leaving one to guess what selection the cursor had alighted beside — and probably I should report them to Netflix as a dutiful subscriber would. But that might spoil the multilingual fun for the next family who meets the Robinsons.

¹ I should note, however, the most pleasant surprise of the evening: happening to catch the names of a few of my friends and former co-workers — Ed, Tenny, Walt, Marie-Claude and Bob — listed in the end credits.

2010-06-21T12:48:00.002-07:00

ON SECOND THOUGHT: MY MAN GODFREY
It’s entirely possible that the first time I watched Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (Universal, 1936), I was so awestruck by the film’s star, the impossibly elegant William Powell, that I overlooked the film’s primary flaw: It’s too screwball by half.

That extra half might be attributed largely to Powell’s leading lady (and, by the time Godfrey was filmed, ex-wife), Carole Lombard, whom I recall being charmed by when I first discovered the film but who grates the nerves somewhat on subsequent viewing.

It’s not entirely Lombard’s fault, though: The script by Eric Hatch and Morrie Ryskind seems to count on Lombard’s near-universal appeal to sell a character who is not actually as lovable as the film wants her to be. Her performance, therefore, is the template for a character that would be perfected a couple of years later by Katharine Hepburn in Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby: the dizzy socialite who doggedly asserts her interest in a leading man who is otherwise engaged or preoccupied.

But while the latter film gains its headlong momentum from the pursuit of not one but two MacGuffins — paleontologist David Huxley’s (Cary Grant) prized intercostal clavicle and Susan Vance’s (Hepburn) runaway leopard, Baby — My Man Godfrey is primarily a drawing-room comedy in which the only thing being pursued is Godfrey himself: Spoiled socialite Irene Bullock (Lombard) is unaccountably infatuated with him from the moment they meet cute during an unlikely high-society scavenger-hunt foray to the city dump and thereafter hires him to be her family’s butler; the rest of the Bullocks are intrigued by the question of their new manservant’s true identity.

Because the plot seldom strays outside the Bullock home, most of the comedy is driven by the verbal antics of mother Angelica (Alice Brady); the brooding inanity of her protégé, the talentless composer Carlo (Mischa Auer); the gruff exasperation of father and benefactor Alexander (the great character actor Eugene Pallette); and Irene’s own petulant histrionics. One wishes that Lombard’s character were straighter and more obviously cunning (see Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night), both to balance the hysterics of the aforementioned supporting cast and to present a worthier foil to older sister Cornelia (Gail Patrick), who poses the greatest threat to Godfrey’s secret.

That Powell’s Godfrey — intelligent, urbane, witty, cleans up nicely — is the object of desire in this story is not surprising. That he should in turn desire the precocious, flighty and entirely too forthright Irene, notwithstanding his stated and implied affection for her, is the more problematic plot point. On the one hand a Depression-era entertainment that makes buffoons of the wealthy as it salutes the down-trodden, My Man Godfrey is clearly intended to be a romantic comedy, but Godfrey himself — motivated as he is by other, nobler objectives — appears not to have gotten the memo.

The film’s ending, then, has the curious effect of giving the audience exactly what it wants (or is led to believe it wants), of giving Irene exactly what she wants, even as Godfrey, having achieved exactly what he set out to do, holds himself at a remove from the movie’s romantic agenda. The film resolves the matter once and for all without having previously trafficked in the sort of sexual tension and chemistry that drives the best romantic comedies. Its only concession is a slightly open-ended fade-out that allows one to imagine Godfrey already plotting his escape from the amorous clutches of the dotty Irene. But we’re supposed to want them to be together, right?

Ultimately, the movie’s greatness — and it is still great, despite my diminished opinion of its mechanics and execution — lies mostly in the performance of William Powell, who walks into the midst of this bedlam and plays the straight man with such precise timing and effortless grace that, rather than disappear amid the chaos as a lesser actor might, he heightens the comedy and often earns the laugh simply by cocking an eyebrow or attempting to leave a room he has just entered. In some instances, Powell’s mere presence serves to make the comedy more sophisticated than it ought to be.

Given the current state of movie comedies, we could use a William Powell or two in Hollywood today.

2010-05-17T16:45:00.005-07:00

COFFEE: A LOVE STORY

Grandma brewed it in a percolator
I wouldn’t love the taste of it until much later
I just wanted to be like Poppy
Sitting at the breakfast table
Drinking our coffee

— a verse I wrote at Slimbolala’s behest
to his readers to sing their praises of coffee

I drank my first cups of coffee at the kitchen table in my grandparents’ house on Bird Street in Joplin. Grandma brewed freeze-dried Sanka or whatever other decaffeinated, pre-Starbucks aberrations they drank back then — before flavor, before nuance, before standards — in a dinged vintage aluminum percolator in which the electricity heated the water down below so that it bubbled up through the perforated basket of grounds and signified its transformation into coffee by turning the hollow glass knob at the top of the pot brown in the center with the occasional pop, bubble or spatter.

We drank from Bakelite plastic cups of a pale brown not far off from that perfect shade one creates in one’s coffee by adding just the right amount of milk or creamer or half-and-half (the latter being my grandmother’s ubiquitous creamer of choice).

In those days, I added whatever I could — milk and sugar — to make the taste more palatable. It didn’t matter so much then that I was weakening it — I was only 5 or 6, just dipping my toes in the warm, dark waters of that mysterious morning potion. The drinking was the thing: Poppy was a god to me back then, and if he was drinking coffee, then so too was I.

We would sit with our breakfast — which always included toast with apple butter or the little six-packs of powdered Hostess Donettes that my grandmother always seemed to have on hand — and perhaps pore over the pages of that morning’s Joplin Globe before Poppy left for the furniture store, and I would look forward to the day when I could drink my morning coffee without wincing at the taste, just as Poppy made the act of drinking coffee seem as effortless and elemental as breathing.

In the interim I developed an affinity for Pearson Coffee Nips¹, a coffee-flavored hard candy of which Grandma also maintained a steady supply. The idea being that I was priming myself for the inevitable: If coffee was to become my fix of choice, then Coffee Nips would be my gateway drug.

Probably I was enrolled at KU before I actually drank coffee again in earnest. The event that stands out in my mind is a study session for midterms or finals comprising me, my best friend, Andre, and some indeterminate, attractive girl from our residence hall whom we (read: Andre) had miraculously finessed into our orbit for the evening. We converged on the Perkins Restaurant on 23rd Street in Lawrence, knowing full well that if we hoped to study diligently into the night, we would require Perkins’ trademarked Bottomless Pot of Coffee to take us there.

I don’t think we actually got there. While Perkins may have been open 24 hours back then, we very likely gave up the ghost around midnight or else were shamed into leaving by the implication that we were loitering at a table at which some hardscrabble waitress could actually be serving paying customers.

In any event, the die had been cast. Coffee and I were now circling each other, onetime adversaries making diplomatic inroads — first détente, then peace, then a lasting partnership.

The road at times was rocky. I recall a night late in my college career when I pulled an all-nighter at my parents’ house to write a paper, probably for Prof. Carothers’ 20th Century American Novel class. I brewed a pot of coffee on whatever drip coffeemaker my parents owned at the time² and set to work.

I had knocked off the entire pot and was getting a lot of work done, when at about 4 a.m. or so I was laid low by searing abdominal pain. Not much more got accomplished after that, and my father likely found me curled up in the fetal position when he left for work.

Lesson learned: Eat something.

Then came the ascendancy of the coffeehouse, and destiny began to shape itself in my imagination. I was out of college by this time, but I was spending a lot of free time with friends in Lawrence, where we were drawn in by the tractor beam of La Prima Tazza near Sixth and Mass.

The baristas there introduced me to “coffee drinks” — the notion that you could do something more creative and flavorful with coffee than just brew it and pour it in a cup. Espresso was now part of my vocabulary, and La Prima Tazza did things with it and to it that made one completely unaware of how much caffeine was actually pinballing between one’s neural receptors. (They served, for example, a red velvet latté that tasted more or less like the cake that was its namesake and was a great conversational aid. If I had two in one sitting, all my ideas poured out of me at once in a Scorsesean staccato.)

I also can’t recall a time I visited La Prima Tazza when they didn’t play Coltrane over the sound system — a perhaps minor but serendipitous detail that nonetheless awakened my sense of the coffeehouse as an extension of one’s personality, a place that was comfortable because it felt like you had left some of your stuff lying around.

Over time, though, I would become less enamored of the cloying sweetness of those liquid confections and flavored coffees in general. (Interesting to note: This was also about the time I threw in the towel on drinking cleverly named, curiously concocted shots in bars — your Kamikazes, your Sex on the Beaches, your Mind Erasers, etc. — and got down to the heart of the matter: tequila, vodka, whiskey.) Another defining moment was right around the corner.

November 1993: Tagging along with my friend Todd on a business trip to Los Angeles, I experienced Starbucks for the first time. The Seattle-based chain hadn’t yet unveiled its blueprint for world domination, but to an evolving coffee drinker, it was like Lourdes.

We stayed at the Beverly Plaza Hotel at Third and Orlando, mere blocks from the Starbucks at the Beverly Connection, one of a select few Starbucks locations at which I would spend many long hours behind the cup after I moved to L.A. four years later. Our morning ritual on that trip, however, was to stop at the location on North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, where we’d grab coffee and a scone and observe that morning’s parade of the beautiful, buff and Botoxed from a sunny sidewalk table before embarking upon our day. There the latté would emerge as my drink of choice.

Over time, I have refined my preference:

I favor the 16 oz. (or grande) size, despite the allure of the insurgent 20 oz. (venti) cup, because I stand a better chance of finishing a latté before it becomes completely tepid.
For that reason, I also prefer lidded to-go cups³ over mugs, regardless of whether I’m staying or going, because I can take my time and enjoy a long, luxurious latté instead of slamming the whole pint like a frat boy while it’s still warm.
I added a third shot of espresso because — let’s face it — two shots is a kiss on the cheek, but three shots is like Grace Kelly waking up James Stewart in Rear Window.
Two packets of Sugar in the Raw. I like to imagine that some of it hangs in the foam at the top, like a built-in time-release mechanism for sweetening the drink.
Finally, I have an inexplicable preference for skim milk. I mean, who the hell am I kidding, right? I’d probably add bacon bits to my latté if they kept them at the stir station next to the sugar packets. Yet here is where I’ve decided to make a concession to healthy consumption. I mean, really.

In any event, the triple 16 oz. skim latté has become as much my calling card as a gang sign in South Central — so much so that the baristas in the haunts I frequent may never learn my name, but by the fifth or sixth visit they usually ring up my order without even asking.⁴ This being the case, it has become my dream that at least one of the coffeehouses I patronize will someday place the triple 16 oz. skim latté on their menu and call it “the Shepcat.”

After I moved to Los Angeles in August 1997, coffee became more than a beverage to me. In those depressing early days when I was mostly alone in the world and hating every minute of my short-lived tenure as The Worst Personal Assistant Ever in Burbank, coffee became the most important 20 minutes of my day.

I would wake, shower, dress, and make the harrowing, breakneck daily commute up the 101 and over the Cahuenga Pass — without any caffeine whatsoever in my bloodstream. I could park my car and have enough time to cross Riverside to the Toluca Lake Starbucks, order my morning fix, and sit for a few minutes, to sip, collect my thoughts, and come down from the morning commute before walking back into the frying pan of a job I hated.

You read that correctly: I required coffee to curb my adrenaline.

But it wasn’t about the caffeine at all. It was about the ritual. There was something comforting, soothing, almost Zen-like in the sequence — order, wait, receive, uncap, shake, rip, pour, stir, recap, sit, sip, think — that made the rest of the morning that followed seem somehow more doable, like the final preparations before being fired out of a cannon. And to this day, those individual steps are as essential to my coffeehouse experience as the coffee itself, a modicum of reliable order amidst whatever chaos the day might entail.

On days when I wasn’t at work, coffeehouses gave me a way to be out in the world. In addition to the aforementioned Beverly Connection, I became a frequent flyer at the Starbucks at Melrose and Stanley, which boasted a big, somewhat shaded patio area from which perspective I observed the great unwashed, the skate punks, the unmedicated state-hospital castoffs, the insufferable hipsters, the badly shod women and other fashion victims and fame-whores along that corridor of dubious taste. (I even saw Joey and Mary Jo Buttafuoco there once early in my residency.)

That patio was also where I first got serious about my fiction writing. (I had long been dedicated to keeping a journal, so much so that I was often “mistaken” for a writer long before I ever truly considered myself one.) In the days before I purchased my first laptop computer, my M.O. was to write out notes and dialogue longhand in whatever spiral notebook I happened to be carrying, then return to my apartment and transcribe everything on my desktop computer. I discovered that I was more productive when untethered from the temptations and distractions of my apartment (TV, Internet, bookshelf, bed), and the coffeehouse environment is where I would enjoy my greatest productivity.

In time I discovered the Bourgeois Pig on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood, a milestone not unlike Columbus discovering the new world. It became first my refuge, then later my neighborhood haunt. In the beginning I was more or less anonymous and generally left alone to my work. But spend enough time someplace and before long you become a regular, a patron, a piece of furniture; people strike up conversations, baristas learn more than just your usual, and before you know it, it’s the proverbial place where everybody knows your name.

It’s OK, though, because I met some good people there — particularly those I’ve dubbed the Counter Intelligentsia, as that’s where we congregated — people I’ve kept in touch with across the miles. I also met some real assholes there, execrable people I’m happy to be rid of, but they are thankfully outnumbered by the good. (Confession: I’d suffer them all over again if I could recapture the Pig’s particular lightning in a bottle.) In the meantime, those people — good and bad alike — respected my space issues just enough for me to become an accomplished, if not produced or paid, screenwriter. Of the three screenplays (and their various drafts) that I wrote while an Angeleno, I am confident that at least 80 percent of those pages were written under the influence of precious, life-affirming caffeine served to me by the Pig’s cadre of excellent baristas, many of whom I count among my good friends, none of whom I count among the assholes.

The Pig stays open until 2 a.m., which contributed to my productivity and accounted for the fact that I rarely fell asleep before 3:30 a.m. The words poured from my fingertips in a torrent on those nights, and while I enjoyed certain extravagances during those years, it’s likely that more of my disposable income ended up in the Pig’s till than at any other establishment in Los Angeles. Which is all for the best — after all, I wasn’t just getting a fix; I was renting office space from them.

A less expensive, more conducive work environment I will never find.

After I departed Los Angeles, it became harder for me to carve out that time to write, as there is no place in Kansas City analogous to the Bourgeois Pig. That and a litany of other disruptions of my routine do not add up to an acceptable excuse for anyone seriously calling oneself a writer, but there you have it.

Now I and my beloved live in Sacramento with a long-underutilized Capresso CoffeeTec — a serious coffeemaker for serious coffee drinkers, amigos — and a new neighborhood haunt that closes at 11 p.m. I don’t know what course of action will present itself, what revelations await, or whether I’ll ever again be as prolific as I once was (notwithstanding this post), but I know who’ll be co-writing this next chapter with me, and I know that coffee — sweet, dark, exotic, essential, illuminating, invigorating — will provide the ignition, fire the pistons and drive the engine of my creativity in whatever form it takes.

¹ The Pearson brand name was assigned to the dustbin of history by Nestlé in 2000. To the conquerer belong the spoils.

² My parents don’t actually drink coffee. I don’t know my father’s exact opinion of it, but my mother is adamant that she doesn’t like the taste of coffee, nor can she stand the smell — she often won’t even enter a coffeehouse with me to wait while I order a latté. I have always found this remarkable (not so much the drinking but the smelling), given that she grew up in the aforementioned kitchen where the seeds of my love of coffee were first sown. In any event, ever the gracious hosts, my parents have always kept a decent drip coffeemaker on hand “for company” and left it to said company to make the coffee themselves, the process being seemingly as alien to my parents as though they were keeping a RAND supercomputer in the spare bedroom on the off chance some analysts from the State Department should drop by for dinner.

³ I know it’s more environmentally conscious to choose the mug over the cup if you’re staying at the coffeehouse, but the lid really does retain a lot of a drink’s heat. Because I’m a volume drinker, I have always reused my cup and lid instead of getting a new cup with every drink; in this way I have always tried to reduce what I refer to as “my caffeine footprint.”

Recently, however, the proprietress of my erstwhile haunt Black Dog Coffeehouse shamed me into purchasing a Black Dog tumbler and bringing it back to receive an additional 25 cents off every latté I drank if only I would stop throwing coffee cups and lids into landfills. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse and a logic I couldn’t deny, and I still carry my Black Dog tumbler with me, representin’ Lenexa even in the far-flung coffeehouses of Sacramento.

⁴ Onetime barista, now my good friend, Daniel Joseph may in fact hold the record: three visits. He earned Rookie of the Year status for that; his bust today stands alongside those of his colleagues in the Cooperstown of caffeine.

2010-05-10T21:27:00.002-07:00

BRAVE NEW WORLD
After one week as a fledgling Sacramentan — a Sacling, if you will — I’ve observed the following about our new environs:

Recycling. Pay attention, townships and cities of America, and Sacramento will demonstrate to you how it’s done as a public utility. This city recycles virtually everything, which is to say that the photocopied list our new neighbors recently shared with us is comprehensively specific about the items that can be recycled and refreshingly brief regarding the items that can’t be. We have two large, wheeled receptacles parked in our driveway here, and it pleases me to inform you that our blue recycling receptacle is noticeably larger than our green trash receptacle.

In other disposal news…

Yard Waste. They pile it in the street here. But neatly. Whenever a resident’s lawn, garden or landscape gets a once-over, the resulting green waste — grass clippings, pruned twigs, gathered leaves, what-have-you — is piled curbside in front of one’s house, right there in the street. Eventually a city truck with a backhoe comes along, scoops it up and drives it away.

Here’s the really amazing thing about this practice, though: None of it ever seems to blow away. It’s as if Sacramentans (or their hired landscaping crews, at least) have collectively mastered the art — comparable, in its own way, to origami — of forming a pile impervious to wind and other disturbances. We’ve seen people drive over mounds of yard waste and barely scatter so much as a handful of grass clippings.

Basketball Goals. I’ve spotted a few scattered, traditional examples of goals standing in driveways and backboards mounted over garage doors, but the overwhelming majority of basketball goals here stand at curbside and face the street. Most of these are wheeled, movable goals left standing at the curb, but in one instance I saw a goal whose pole was cemented into the sidewalk pavement.

While I could find no provision in the Sacramento City Code that specifically addresses the use, placement and permanence/portability of basketball goals, I like to think that an enlightened approach to their widespread acceptance has been encouraged during the administration of our first-term mayor, Kevin Johnson — former three-time All-Star guard of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns (también conocido como Los Suns de Phoenix).¹

Public Transportation. Ever since I rode the El in Chicago and the subway in New York, I’ve been a fan of public transportation. Sacramento boasts a light-rail system whose natural hub is the city center and Capitol area, as well as an extensive bus system. I wasn’t crazy about buses when I lived in L.A., and I generally don’t have the patience to travel at their pace, but because the No. 34 bus stops right next to our house, I’m likely to climb aboard someday and see where it takes me.

That said, who needs public transportation when you’ve got…

Bike Lanes. Do this:

Google “Sacramento, CA” and pull up the satellite map of the city.
Under the tab labeled “More” in the upper right corner of the map, select “Bicycling.”
Watch the grid light up in green like you’ve just entered the Matrix.

Seriously: Rare is the major thoroughfare in Sacramento that doesn’t have a dedicated bike lane. And not just some little strip of pavement, either — I’m talking about a lane so wide that, if it wasn’t clearly marked every 100 feet or so, you’d mistake it for another lane of traffic.

Adriane last week dropped off her old Schwinn for a much-needed overhaul at our neighborhood bike emporium, and I’ll be taking in my Trek for a tune-up as well. In addition to taking advantage of the tens of miles of bike trails along the city’s riverfront, we’re looking forward to exploring the city at large on two wheels.

On the other hand…

Walkability. As jazzed as I was to discover how bikeable the city is, I soon realized that there are times when it’s not even worth the trouble of dragging one’s bike out of the garage. To wit: We live less than a mile from both my neighborhood coffeehouse and the barber shop that, as of this writing, is my go-to.²

Additionally, for all the emerging models, theories and trends that city planners, zoners and architects bandy about for creating safe, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, it’s worth noting that Sacramento has managed to do so very effectively without dropping those damned traffic roundabouts in every single intersection.³

My sense is that even the more commercial neighborhoods feel so characteristically residential that drivers are naturally encouraged to drive slower in the first place, eliminating the necessity for unwieldy concrete obstacles while acknowledging neighborhoods that already are both pedestrian- and driver-friendly.

Which brings us to…

Bumps, Humps, Lumps and Undulations. No, this paragraph will not cover the city’s, ahem, gentlemen’s clubs, but rather traffic stoppers of a different kind. Apparently not satisfied with only one classification of traffic-control device, Sacramento’s residential neighborhoods boast no fewer than four street-spanning impediments to speeding. By my reckoning, they break down as follows:

Speed bumps are the narrow ones we’re all familiar with from streets and parking lots;
speed humps are as much as three times as broad as speed bumps and peak a bit higher;
speed lumps are perforated speed humps, if you will — a hump broken into three distinct, smaller humps, divided by street-level grooves (which I assume are there so cyclists need neither slow down nor go all Knievel just to cruise down a residential street); and
undulations, as nearly as I can figure, are merely a fancy, polysyllabic way of saying “Any of the above may exist in this neighborhood, so slow the hell down because children might be playing in the street.” Or legalese to that effect.

Neighborhoods. Of Sacramento proper — downtown and midtown — and East Sacramento, where we now live, I will say that rare is the neighborhood or individual house about which my first impression is “I wouldn’t want to live there.” It’s not creepily Stepfordesque by any stretch of the imagination, but all things being equal, there is a nearly uniform niceness to Sacramento that both seduces me and leaves me wondering when the other shoe is going to drop.

However, Sunday we toured West Sacramento, the area, not far from Adriane’s office, where she first entertained housing options for us. And while it’s not without its charms, it also possesses a certain skeeviness factor that was enough to put Adriane on alert and send her looking elsewhere for habitation. Still, it isn’t so crime-infested and pestilence-ridden as to deter us from exploring Discovery Park or attending River Cats games at Raley Field.

Our neighborhood, meanwhile, more suburban in feel and in fact than I generally prefer, also offers close access to the goods and services we need to get us through our days without resorting to chain restaurants and Wal-Marts as our sole means of survival. It’s possible to support (and be supported by) local businesses and mom-and-pops (groceries, pharmacies, bakeries, cafés, etc.) without going too far out of one’s way.

Farther downtown, naturally, there is even more activity and a stronger commercial presence, but those are exactly the sort of neighborhoods I would have sought out had I landed in Sacramento as a younger, single man: vibrant, colorful, packed with restaurants and shops, yet still inviting, offering at least the illusion of privacy and seclusion in well-tended houses and apartment buildings. Even the urban core here doesn’t feel threateningly urban; there is a homogeneity here that blurs the lines where you would most expect to find them demarcated.

… And that’s just the first week. More observations will follow as we immerse ourselves in our new surroundings, and sooner or later I have to find a job, so, you know, there’s that. Adventure is out there, as Ellie reminds us. Keep watching this space.

¹ Certainly it’s by no means a qualification for the job, but did your city’s chief executive dunk on Hakeem Olajuwon in the 1994 Western Conference semis? I’m just sayin’.

² After a strong, if imperfect, debut performance — all clippers, no scissors; a little too close, too high up the sides; an assured, if somewhat indelicate, hand with the straight razor (I seriously thought for a moment that he was going to go all Sweeney Todd or Mr. Blonde on me) — the barber as yet known only as “Barber” at the barber shop identified only as “Barber Shop” will be granted two more opportunities to cement his status as my headcutter of choice.

³ I have encountered a few roundabouts in midtown Sacramento, mostly around the busy J Street corridor and its neighboring streets as they transition from more commercial to strictly residential zoning and back again, but the roundabouts are few, far between, and are not such impediments that their judicious placement doesn’t seem justified. Compare these to the roundabouts in my erstwhile neighborhood in downtown Overland Park, where instead of clearly designating the right-of-way, the city placed ungoverned roundabouts in every other intersection and effectively gave the right-of-way to everyone.

2010-04-30T14:39:00.002-07:00

IT’S AS IF I NEVER LIVED THERE
Now that the arduous work is behind me; now that the truck has come and gone and taken all my furniture, my appliances, my files and my voluminous (read: heavy) library with it; now that I have cleaned out the apartment and vacuumed the floors, done the walk-through and handed over my keys, I am already distancing myself from the last 13 months I spent at my erstwhile apartment complex, The Park.

This is not denial. It is not a coping mechanism. It is a refrain, a recurring theme.

In Los Angeles I lived at Serrano Tower for five and a half years. It had been a decent enough habitation for an aspiring Angeleno starting from scratch and reaching for the stars — “a very fashionable hovel,” to borrow a line from Elvis Costello — but I moved out after a couple of plumbing catastrophes pushed my patience past its limit. Two weeks later I returned to Koreatown to get a haircut. (My barber was one block down, one block over.) I parked right in front of Serrano Tower’s green-awninged entrance, and as I both exited and later returned to my car, I felt no instinctive pull toward the building.

It was as if I had never lived there.

I don’t know whether I’d feel the same way if you parked me in front of the Riviera, the greener pasture for which I abandoned Serrano Tower. I haven’t been back to the new old neighborhood since I departed L.A. for the Midwest four years ago, and it’s anyone’s guess what emotions would surface.

It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but it does seem to apply to those places I’ve departed for a place deemed better or a situation imagined as a bold step forward.

My parents have owned their house since 1986, during which time it has always been — and will always be — home to me, whether I’ve lived there or not. But I have driven past the duplex on Switzer that was our home for the first eight years my family lived in Kansas City, from sixth grade through my freshman year at KU, and it’s as if I never lived there.

I can’t forget the experience of my first rental apartment, the one I shared with mi hermano de otra madre, a mere two buildings down from my friend Melissa, but the edifice itself, overhauled somewhat in the intervening two decades, would likely mean nothing to me today. Next came the house on Belleview in front of which Melissa and I were robbed at gunpoint — certainly I’ll never forget that night, but can I even fathom today that I occupied the top floor of that house for three years? Not really.

I left the former for the independence of the latter, the latter for the adventure of Los Angeles. When the time came, I left L.A. to return to K.C. and eventually found myself at The Park.

The best thing about The Park was its location in a nice, walkable downtown neighborhood, close to a coffeehouse (read: office), with barbershops and good restaurant options, two sports bars and a post office. The best memories I have of it are those times when Adriane came to visit and shared that space with me — the closest it ever came to feeling like home. As I sit here now, a couple of days removed from my tenancy, the most charitable and accurate description I can summon for the apartment itself is that it was a place where I kept my stuff, watched movies, slept fitfully, and spent long hours on the phone and on webcam with Adriane, dreaming together of the day that is finally at hand.

Tomorrow I will take to the road once more, bound for Wyoming to meet the moving truck and supervise the loading of Adriane’s household, then onward to Sacramento. Before I even arrive at that better place — both my new street address and the arms of my beloved — before the truck arrives to turn our two households into one, before we take that bold step together into the future that we’ve dreamed of for nearly three years, The Park will have faded into the distance of memory. Already it’s as if I never lived there.

Will I feel the same someday about our white duplex with its neatly trimmed lawn, its wide white hearth, its butter-yellow bathroom, its spacious kitchen with the retro copper wall clock, its ample back porch and patio and our own personal orange tree in back? Time will tell, governed somewhat by the magnificence of our next better place or the magnitude of our next bold step forward.

Or perhaps Adriane and I will fill that house with so many memories of our own that someday we’ll return and it will feel as if we never left.

2010-04-16T22:43:00.004-07:00

CLOCKING THE WIRE
Since mid-January of this year, I’ve been taking care of some unfinished business: catching up on all five seasons of the acclaimed HBO series The Wire, a landmark in television drama whose excellence shames me for having missed, neglected or otherwise ignored it during its original run, back when I actually subscribed to HBO.

I can offer no reasonable or acceptable excuse for my offense. After all, The Wire’s creator, onetime Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, literally wrote the book that became one of my favorite TV series of all time, NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street. Simon wrote for that series after being downsized by the Sun, and his education in the creation of television drama — facilitated by some of the best writers, producers and directors working in the medium — fused seamlessly with both the reportorial style of storytelling Simon mastered in his previous life in that other, slowly dying but still tenacious medium and the novelistic approach of such esteemed series contributors as George Pelicanos, Dennis Lehane and Richard Price, crime-fiction authors all. Combine those styles with Simon’s and writer-producer Ed Burns’ intimate knowledge of the series’ main character — the city of Baltimore itself — and you have nothing less than a perfect storm of narrative fiction.

The Wire is an American tragedy on a grand scale — the slow, systemic death of a once-great city, one person, one neighborhood, one establishment at a time. It is goodness outnumbered, righteousness outgunned, innocence unprotected and progress underfunded to the point of bankruptcy and defeat. It is the truth beaten, bloodied and left for dead in the street because the lies are too big not to be believed. It is the road to hell made manifest by the cumulative wreckage of good intentions scattered along its path. It is the devil buying up real estate one corner at a time. It is the lowering of standards to accommodate the bottom line. It is David running out of stones and getting the shit kicked out of him by Goliath.

Which is not to say that The Wire is without humor. On the contrary, it is often slyly, matter-of-factly, darkly, even laugh-out-loud funny, without ever going for the cheap, easy joke. Its humor instead reveals character, underscores theme, relieves tension and, most importantly, respects the intelligence of its audience, directing our attention to a moment’s absurdity with a nod instead of a Klieg light. As a writer, I can say that rare was the episode in which a beat or a throwaway line didn’t fill me with professional jealousy.

As I neared the end of the series, its particular genius — but one example of it, anyway — became clear to me: Like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather before it, The Wire made me identify with its criminal element on a deeply personal level.

The difference being that, in all my countless viewings of the Godfather saga, I have never stopped feeling sympathy for Michael, whose tragic failure to make the Corleone family a legitimate enterprise is the engine that drives his and the saga’s dramatic arc. On the contrary, there was rarely, if ever, an instance when I didn’t want justice duly administered to the criminals of the Wire’s Baltimore. That is, after all, what we, the audience, traditionally desire most from a crime drama: a resolution in which the cops prevail over the robbers, right prevails over wrong, good prevails over evil. And yet I can name off the top of my head a half dozen figures in The Wire’s criminal underworld — though I won’t spoil them here — whose death at the hands of other criminals affected me in ways I hadn’t anticipated.¹

Simply put: It was often at the moment of each character’s demise that I discovered that I cared for them, that they had ceased to be archetypes or caricatures in my imagination. They had become real to me, and I mourned the sudden, all too poignant loss of their unrealized potential.²

On the side of quote-unquote good, the tragedy lies in the flawed natures of the characters and institutions representing good. Unusually for the genre The Wire both occupies and defies, death rarely befalls a Baltimore street cop, detective, politician or city official, yet they all find themselves, one way or another, on the receiving end of tragedy’s bitch slap. As often as not, they bring it on themselves — Det. Jimmy McNulty, the show’s de facto star as portrayed by Dominic West, being the standout among them.

Over the course of the series, this futile inability to prevail — over the system, over the enemy, over paralyzing inertia or hellbent momentum, over corruption, ambition and hubris, over one’s own personal demons and shortcomings — emerges not as a free pass from the writers that allows characters to cheat death but as an ineluctable path to fates more pointed, personal and illuminating than death.³

In the world of The Wire, everybody gets precisely what’s coming to them.

In the midst of this rich tapestry of characters, two figures in particular stand out for me:

The first is the confidential informant known as Bubbles, who begins his arc as Det. Shakima Greggs’ eyes and ears on the street and evolves into nothing less than the series’ greatest example of redemption. Portrayed with warmth, pathos and humor by Andre Royo, Bubbles is the Wire equivalent of the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold: a scheming but sweet-natured heroin addict, adrift in the Baltimore underworld, beset at every turn by his own weakness, vulnerability and powerlessness over his addiction. His transformation over the course of the series — a body of work in itself, if you will — his every moment onscreen marked by struggle, stands as one of the most remarkable performances I’ve ever watched. I defy you to watch the series and point to a scene in which Royo is guilty of acting.

The second noteworthy figure is stickup man extraordinaire Omar Little, portrayed by the insanely charismatic Michael K. Williams. Unlike Royo, Williams may in fact be guilty of acting, but that is only because Omar is swagger personified, bravado incarnate, audacity made flesh and walking among us. He is a curious combination of Robin Hood and Anton Chigurh, an inexorable force, an instrument of vengeance hovering over the streets, corners and alleys of East Baltimore like a malevolent mist. Preying only on drug dealers, never on civilians, Omar is patient, methodical, ruthlessly efficient, fiendishly clever and bound by his own strict moral code — the archangel Michael with a sawed-off shotgun instead of a sword. (That Omar is, incidentally, revealed to be a) a homosexual, generally monogamous, and b) deeply devoted to the churchgoing grandmother who raised him adds unexpected depth to a character who was already one of the most complex and colorful antagonists ever written for the medium.)

Remarkably, over its five season run (2002-08), The Wire earned a grand total of only two Emmy nominations — both for writing — and no wins, overshadowed by its HBO stablemate The Sopranos, which, during the same period, racked up 55 nominations and 12 wins.⁴ Notwithstanding all that hardware, I would argue that The Wire is the superior series, broader in scope, truer to its vision, more fully realized, and smart enough to quit while it was ahead.

Is The Wire, as some have claimed, the best series ever? Having only just watched the series finale, I am still turning it all over in my head, and this entry is by no means comprehensive or conclusive. That said, it has definitely earned a spot on my own short list.

Because it is both a master class in dramatic writing and a virtual graduate-level syllabus of dissertations on criminology, business administration, political science, public education, social reform, and journalistic ethics,⁵ I will almost certainly circle back, watch again, peel away more layers, and continue to learn from and be surprised by The Wire.

¹ As actor Wendell Pierce, who portrays Baltimore Homicide Det. Bunk Moreland on the show, very astutely noted on a DVD commentary track, no one who watched the show will ever be able to drive past one of those street-corner drug dealers without imagining his back story and seeing his basic humanity.

² Except Marlo Stanfield. I was just itchin’ to see that stone-cold motherf—r get got, yo.

³ Witness, for example, Ziggy Sobotka (played by James Ransone) — stevedore scion, hapless schemer, wannabe smuggler, thug and big shot, easily one of the four or five most annoying characters in the history of television and a living exemplar of the phrase “stupid should hurt.” Rarely have I waited with such breathless anticipation, from episode to episode, for a character so destined to have a cap busted in his ass to be summarily dispatched and put out of everyone’s misery, dramatis personae and audience members alike. In typical Wire fashion, however, Ziggy’s fate is one of devastating self-realization in the aftermath of becoming that which he most wanted to be. A brilliant dramatic reversal, totally worth the price of admission to season two.

⁴ All told, The Sopranos received 111 Emmy nominations and 21 wins.

⁵ No joke: Professors at a number of major American universities presently teach courses in which The Wire is used as a textbook, as it were.

2010-04-02T10:12:00.002-07:00

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
A reverie, shared by the incomparable Mr. Wilder:

“Do you remember my telling you earlier about that rooming house I lived in when I first was trying to get into the movies in Berlin? Well, next to my room was the can, and in it was a toilet that was on the blink. The water kept running all night long. I would lie there and listen to it, and since I was young and romantic, I’d imagine it was a beautiful waterfall — just to get my mind off the monotony of it and the thought of its being a can.

“Now we dissolve to 25 years later, and I am finally rich enough to take a cure at Bad Gastein, the Austrian spa, where there is the most beautiful waterfall in the whole world. There I am in bed, listening to the waterfall. And after all I have been through, all the trouble and all the money I’ve made, all the awards and everything else, there I am in that resort, and all I can think of is that goddamned toilet.

“That, like the man says, is the story of my life.”
(Playboy, June 1, 1963, via Shooting Down Pictures)

2010-03-23T03:32:00.007-07:00

FINDER OF WAYWARD POETS
Sunday afternoon, as I sat sifting through a trove of old paperwork, clippings, correspondence and miscellanea, sorting the essential from that to be shredded or recycled, I came upon a typewritten letter, which I had fielded in September 1996 during my stint as staff editor for a national gardening publication. I have re-created it here as faithfully as possible:

April [redacted]
[address redacted]

Dear Flower and Garden, and publishing,
My name is April [redacted], I am twelve years old, Ilive in [redacted]. I am a semi-finalist in a poem contest.
Would you be interested in publishing any of my writings.
I am submitting the poem I entered in the contest.Please look it over and tell me what you think. If you are not interested in any of my writings, please write me and tell me what I could do to be a better writer. Or any information would be helpful.
This is my poem.

LIFE IS PAINFUL
Life is painful I should know,
As I stand on the edge I watch the river flow,
I outstretch my arm to hold the air,
I stick my leg out and yell lifes no fair,
As I hit the water I feel the cold,
Now I don’t feel so brave or so bold,
Life is different for everyone,
Now I know death is no fun.

April [redacted]
[address redacted]

P.S.
Please Respond as soon as possible
This is very important to me.

Why April should have singled out our magazine to send her query to, I cannot say. It’s possible that she sent a similar letter to other publications, but based on the evidence at hand, she likely would have typed each individually. I was duty-bound to inform her that it was not our editorial policy to accept poetry submissions, but I admired her forthrightness, and as I happened to be mentoring another young writer at the time, I decided to respond to her, though perhaps overstepping my bounds a little and perhaps sidestepping the notion that her letter, with its urgent postscript, and her poem — which we all can agree is a Plath-tastic bag of downers, right? — may well have been a cry for help.

I wrote her a letter of encouragement, identifying those things about her poem that I felt showed promise, then expounding at length about those habits and practices that make us better writers. And while I might have been in danger of talking out of my ass at the time, I’m happy to report that I still hold all those truths about writing to be self-evident. Those four-plus pages possibly overwhelmed her, but I hoped that they were also exactly what she had wanted to receive. I could only guess, though, as I never heard from April again — not so much as a “thank you” or a “screw you, mister.”

Anyway, fast-forward to the present: I’m sitting there Sunday looking at this long-ago letter, and it occurs to me to wonder whatever became of April and to what extent she may have pursued the writing life.

Naturally, I Googled her. It’s fascinating what you can learn these days with the click of a mouse.

April doesn’t appear to have strayed far from her tiny, rural hometown, even though it stands right alongside Interstate 95, which spans the East Coast from Woodstock, New Brunswick, to Miami, Florida, and is as good a jumping-off point as any for one seeking escape. In any event, she graduated from an area high school in 2001 and appears to have stayed put, more or less, taking up residence a couple of towns away.

There, according to the local paper’s police blotter, April was arrested in July 2006 on a charge of aggravated assault.

More interesting is April’s December 2009 arrest on a charge of domestic assault, preceded (nine minutes earlier, according to the report) by the arrest on a warrant of a man I’ll call “Mark,” who resides at the same address as April (though both arrests took place a few blocks away from said residence). It is unclear whether April and Mark are in a relationship or merely rent apartments in the same house, but Mark’s name turns up in police reports on two other occasions: an October 2008 arrest on a probation hold and charges of domestic violence, assault and “operating after habitual offender revocation”; and a January 2009 arrest for criminal mischief, for which he paid partial restitution of his $200 fine in a district court the following April.

It turns out that two other residents at that same address were arrested on warrants just two Sundays ago, while a third was arrested in April 2009 on a charge of “theft by unauthorized taking or transfer” at a local clothing store.

All of which paints a compelling, if incomplete, picture of the woman that thoughtful 12-year-old girl grew up to become. That April made a couple of mistakes along the way or may have fallen in with the wrong crowd doesn’t answer the original question so much as pose others.

Does she still write? Does she still aspire to poetry, or has she explored other means of expression? Does she at least keep a journal, as I once advised her to do? And what might one find in its pages? Is there any joy or wonder to be found there, or is it all just as bleak and lonely and troubled as that young girl contemplating the raging waters below?

Her transgressions of the last few years certainly point back to that supposed cry for help, a snapshot of a young girl in distress, a possible harbinger of things to come.

Then again, for all I know, April is perfectly content today in those little towns of her youth, a responsible, upright citizen despite her occasional brushes with law enforcement, and a shrewder judge of character than the rap sheets of her fellow tenants would imply.

At least, as Hemingway wrote, isn’t it pretty to think so?

2010-03-08T19:44:00.003-08:00

OSCAR 2010: THE LOOSE ENDS

In my annual run-up to the Academy Awards, I managed this year to see 20 of the 21 films nominated in the nine major categories I follow — picture, directing, four acting, two screenwriting, and cinematography. The one that got away: Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, for which both Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon earned nominations.
Of the nominated films I finally caught up with on DVD, I am perhaps sorriest that I did not see Armando Ianucci’s whip-smart, deliciously profane Best Adapted Screenplay nominee In the Loop sooner.

The film is to back-stabbing policy wonks what Dr. Strangelove is to the chest-pounding warmongers themselves, and while it certainly deserved a much wider audience during its theatrical run, I will repeat here that the voluminous deleted scenes on the DVD were themselves funnier than any other movie I saw in 2009, with the possible exception of Todd Phillips’ The Hangover.
On the last night before the Academy Awards, I caught Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, which last year won the Palme D’Or at Cannes and which was nominated for Best Cinematography and Best Foreign Film.

About the former nomination, I will say that, notwithstanding eventual winner Mauro Fiore’s seamless integration of live-action photography with James Cameron’s motion-capture CGI in Avatar, there is a breathtaking in-camera artistry to Christian Berger’s black-and-white photography that filmgoers are increasingly hard pressed to distinguish and appreciate among today’s highly technologized film offerings (see also: Bruno Delbonnel’s work in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince). To wit, I challenged myself this year to pay particular attention to each cinematographer’s mastery in the lighting of scenes and shots (which is the D.P.’s true stock-in-trade, more so even than mere composition and camera operation), by which measure I found Berger’s use of natural light — and, in some cases, candlelight or next to no light at all — to be quite remarkable and worthy of recognition.

About the latter nomination, I can offer no informed opinion, having missed this year’s other foreign-film entries. I will say, however, that in terms of narrative storytelling, The White Ribbon was one of the bleakest, most grueling exercises I’ve sat through in a long time — even compared to my recent triple-header of The Lovely Bones, Precious and Crazy Heart — a parade of unsympathetic or downright despicable characters whose motives and actions are as base and unaccountable as those of the unknown villain or villains who perpetrate the truly awful crimes that form the film’s backbone. While I have recently become aware of Haneke’s work and will attest to his undeniable skill as a filmmaker, I am trying very hard to warm up to his rather off-putting treatment of his protagonists and, by extension, his audience.
I celebrate the excellence of Jeff Bridges, at long last awarded for his performance in Crazy Heart, which stands as only the latest example of his ability to disappear into the roles he plays. He has always been that rare star who approaches his above-the-title performances with the craft and commitment of a character actor. That Bridges is himself a musician of honky-tonk country and blues only enhanced his immersion into the skin of the worn-down alcoholic crooner Bad Blake. I only hope that more is written about those qualities that have served him as the most under-appreciated actor of his generation than the notion that his Oscar is some kind of lifetime-achievement award. We have not seen the last great work of Jeff Bridges. (See also: Christopher Plummer, who at 80 years of age continues to show up for the heavy lifting and not just the piece work.)
Notwithstanding Bridges’ achievement this year, however, I might well have cast my vote for Colin Firth, who delivered one of the year’s most poignant, studied and nuanced performances in a film that I didn’t like as much as I wanted to: fashion designer Tom Ford’s debut feature, A Single Man. At the heart of Ford’s “look at me” exercise in visual style, Firth exudes the stillness, substance and gravity that prevents the film from coming unmoored altogether. It is a performance you can’t tear your gaze away from, even when the film itself is testing the limits of your patience.
Ever since I began writing screenplays myself, knowing how hard it is to write and to write well, I find it harder and harder to play favorites in the writing categories. And while I might have leaned toward Nick Hornby’s An Education or Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner’s Up in the Air for Best Adapted Screenplay, I have to admit that it was hard not to cheer for Geoffrey Fletcher after he accepted his Oscar for Precious.
Re: my earlier point about not wishing the curse of an Oscar on a young actress, I would nonetheless have had a hard time not voting for Anna Kendrick’s performance in Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air. In stark contrast to the frank and fearless brutality of Mo’Nique’s award-winning turn in Precious, Kendrick’s young go-getter, Natalie, is a tightly wound bundle of nerves, ambition and misdirected idealism striving to prove her mettle alongside the more experienced Ryan Bingham, an apt analogy for Kendick herself, holding her own alongside her veteran co-stars George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Jason Bateman. It’s disappointing that the next thing we’re likely to see Kendrick in is the next Twilight film, as I look forward to seeing her tackle more challenging roles in the future.
Terrifically gifted and intelligent filmmaker that she is, it cannot be stated often or ardently enough that Best Director honoree Kathryn Bigelow is also a tall, elegant, delicious drink of water. The way she towered over that glad-handing pipsqueak Ryan Seacrest on the red carpet, like Yao Ming dominating a point guard who strayed into the low post, is a sight I want to witness every year until she finally, accidentally steps on him, then daintily scrapes him off the sole of her Manolo Blahnik pump as she makes her way into the Kodak Theatre.

Seacrest out, indeed.

2010-03-08T13:55:00.002-08:00

OSCAR NIGHT 2010: A HALF-HEARTED RECAP
I cannot emphasize enough what a horrendous idea it was for the Academy to nominate 10 films for Best Picture this year. There is a circular logic behind that edict that doesn’t compute for me.

The other day, I heard a radio commentator saying that the chief purpose of the Oscars is to promote the movies. But which movies did he mean exactly? The movies honored last night? Because many of those have already been pulled from theaters, especially here in Flyover, and are awaiting, if not presently undergoing, their respective DVD releases.

Will that many people really rush out and see The Blind Side who haven’t already? Does Avatar need to make any more money? And will anyone want more urgently to see it after it was shut out in all the major artistic categories? Is The Hurt Locker poised now to be a bigger winner in DVD sales and rentals than it was in box-office receipts?

Or did the commentator mean that Oscar Night promotes The Movies? I mean, he realizes it’s March, doesn’t he? Are people really going to watch an evening of lavish excess and artistic merit, then be inspired to run out and see whatever’s been dumped in theaters at this most dubious time of year? Cop Out, anyone? Or the two most-advertised movies of the evening — fading diva Jennifer Lopez’s The Back-Up Plan or the Gerard Butler-Jennifer Aniston, um, product The Bounty Hunter? Is anyone going to see Dear John based on Amanda Seyfried’s inability to read a teleprompter? Will any more Twilight DVDs be sold because Taylor Lautner and Kristin Stewart appeared on the telecast? Will people rush out to see The Crazies because of Oscar’s tribute to the horror genre?

Because, truly, those were the moviegoers the Academy was pandering to attract this year: the ones who eschew the elitist sensibilities of critics and the nuanced storytelling of passionate artists. The kids, with their limitless troves of disposable income from allowances, lawn mowing and baby-sitting. The people who can’t tell the difference when they’ve paid to watch television projected onto a big screen.

Furthermore, by angling themselves to nominate a few popcorn films among the serious art being recognized and honored last night, did the Academy really believe more people would tune in to the telecast than normally do? And if one night of ratings is so critical, shouldn’t the presentation of those films be more, I dunno, interesting? If not, shouldn’t the producers have rushed Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin onto the stage more frequently to keep things lively?

That said, I love that the entire evening seemed to be set up as the delivery mechanism of one giant bitch-slap to James Cameron. Take that, king of the world.

I think it’s marvelous that Cameron has committed his career, his ingenuity and his seemingly bottomless resources to revolutionizing the way films will be made and watched for the next two decades and beyond. And true to the spirit of the award’s title — “Best Achievement in Directing” — I really couldn’t have argued if he had won in that category; as with his work on Titanic, his creation of Avatar certainly stands out as a monumental filmmaking achievement.

Cameron and George Lucas inarguably occupy the high ground as the two most technologically visionary filmmakers of the last 25 years, and cinema owes a debt to their contributions in sound and vision. But the two of them put together couldn’t tell a story that didn’t end with me jamming No. 2 pencils in my ears just to make it stop. They each possess the sort of might-makes-right hubris that makes them believe everything they do is an act of genius, when that quite simply ain’t the case. Stick to your strengths, boys, and outsource the rest. Particularly the writing.

The award about which I was most conflicted last night was Best Actress. I adore Sandra Bullock — as do a great many of us, I believe — despite her disastrous inability to choose good scripts and truly seize the mantle of America’s Sweetheart, even after Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts just left it lying there on the ground for the taking. Her film The Blind Side was one of the throwaway nominees for Best Picture — and a failed adaptation of one of the most compelling books I’ve read in the last few years — and while she delivers a strong dramatic performance in it, hers is fairly two-dimensional when viewed alongside, say, Julia’s Oscar-winning performance in Erin Brockovich, a comparison drawn more than once during this Oscar season.

And while I actually found myself wishing, as the category drew near, that Gabourey Sidibe might win — for her harrowing debut performance in a film bearing the imprimatur of both Oprah and Tyler Perry, those twin harbingers of the apocalypse — neither would I want to wish that on her or her other young fellow nominee, Carey Mulligan. Too often the Academy honors actresses in their 20s who never again live up to that standard of excellence, and I want so much more for both of them — for Mulligan, who is one of the truly breathtaking discoveries of an otherwise dismal year, and for Sidibe, who came literally from nowhere, has captivated everyone during award season, and now has a golden ticket to wherever her newfound stardom will carry her. (I’m hoping for a comedy. As is anyone who saw Precious, I believe.)

Dame Helen Mirren is a recent honoree, and Meryl Streep is the most-nominated actor ever (and a two-time winner), so that leaves Sandra, winning for a performance that doesn’t really feel like one for the ages.

Which is true, I believe, of the entire enterprise that was this year’s Academy Awards.

From this year’s field, I truly believe that Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker richly deserve the accolades they received. And the truly singular standout for me this year was Quentin Tarantino’s great discovery Christoph Waltz, whose performance in Inglourious Basterds is hands-down my favorite of the year and whom I look forward to watching for many more years to come.

Beyond that, this year’s Oscars are, for me, a shrug of the shoulders and a wish for something more powerful and enduring in the year to come. Failing that, could the Academy at least admit that this year’s experiment failed and revert to only five Best Picture nominees next year?

2010-03-05T13:07:00.002-08:00

LAUNDRY DAY
In which Shepcat praises the durability and resilience
of Banana Republic’s white cotton T-shirts
So I’m at my parents’ house Friday afternoon, availing myself of their washer and dryer. I go to the washer to remove my whites, and find that the agitator has twisted all my T-shirts together into a giant white taffy pull that resembles something you’d throw out a second-floor window to effect your escape from a mental hospital.

One T-shirt in particular is stretched out at the neck so completely that it looks like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s T-shirt — you know the one I’m talking about — somehow got mixed in with my laundry.

Reflexively, I toss it into the dryer. I don’t know why. I just do. Already I’m writing off the loss of the T-shirt, figuring I got more than my $14 worth of wear out of the thing years ago, but it might as well be dry if someone wants to use it as a rag or something.

I return a half-hour or so later to take everything out of the dryer and seriously can’t tell the difference between the stretched out T-shirt and the other one in the load that has the same printed label inside the neck. It’s a laundry-day miracle.

Which isn’t to say that someday I won’t be walking down the street when the neck band just goes sproing! and suddenly I look like I’m doing my perp walk out of the spider hole. But for the time being, the delicate balance of my meager wardrobe has been maintained.

I’m just sayin’. I don’t know where KSM was buying his T’s, but I’d love to know if the Gitmo laundry crew was able to do anything to restore his arrest T to its original molecular structure.

2009-12-03T08:23:00.004-08:00

WELL, THAT WAS CERTAINLY HUMBLING
Thursday morning, the culprit responded, via e-mail¹:

Thanks for the update on my “disgusting freaking Kleenexes”. If you go back to day you will find another “disgusting freaking kleenexes” on top. Please note that that is not mine.....as far as the plastic wrappers etc. Please fell free to come by and check my trash....you will see that I do use the correct container....I would like to talk to you “man to man”, but I think you like to send e-mails....anyway I am sorry that you have to dig through the trash. I will do my best to watch to see if I can remember to do your request as I should. Brent thanks again for the update. C—

Tail between my legs, I replied in kind:

If I’ve accused you in error, then please accept my apologies.

The fact remains, though, that on the most recent occasion I found kleenexes in the recycling bin, they were mixed among the KC scan envelopes. Whether someone else is responsible for handling those envelopes after you, or someone is merely clever enough to single you out as a fall guy, I only want to put an end to this as soon as possible.

I handled this matter by e-mail — however badly — in the interest of discretion. Thanks for your own discretion, and again, my apologies.

Brent

Whether I truly wronged C— or he was merely reacting as anyone would when cornered, only time will tell. But I dropped by his desk a little later to apologize again, this time man to man, and the fact is he was an absolute mensch about the whole matter, extending his hand in diplomacy even before I was finished apologizing. We chatted. He exhibited genuine understanding about the situation and promised his continued cooperation. We parted on friendly terms.

Now I find myself in the awkward position of refining my investigation and retrenching against the other, actual culprit without blowing my cool and making another accusation short of presenting hard evidence and perhaps DNA analysis instead of the admittedly circumstantial evidence on which I based my case against C—.

I don’t like being wrong even once. I refuse to be wrong twice. And now I feel particularly beholden to C—, to clear his good name (at least for my own peace of mind) while handling the second, decidedly final sting and takedown as quietly and discreetly as I attempted to handle the first, and much more intelligently at that, because I realize that this episode shines a spotlight on me as the embattled, self-righteous, by-any-means-necessary employee that I all too often am in the workplace.

That said, if it turns out that C— was lying to me just now, I’ll flip him like a cheese omelet.

UPDATE, 12/4/09: Friday afternoon, in a totally unrelated conversation which touched upon our co-workers’ collective disregard for signage posted throughout our office, another of my longsuffering compatriots remarked, “…And then there’s C—, who always throws his kleenexes in his recycling bin and then dumps them back there. He knows he’s not supposed to, but he does it out of spite. I’ve never actually seen him do it, but I know it’s him. I just know it.”

Suddenly, I don’t feel quite as bad about what may have been a rush to judgment on my part.

¹ Feel free to insert your own mental [sic]s as you read along. I did not want to interrupt the visual flow of C—’s e-mail with my editorial meddling.

2009-12-01T12:49:00.002-08:00

OF COURSE YOU REALIZE THIS MEANS WAR
Some of my readers are familiar with my ongoing struggle to explain the concept of recycling to my co-workers. In addition to incidents I may have reported here, a certain sharply worded — and quite witty, I thought — e-mail missive, one of two I’ve composed to explain the process, made the rounds among some of you awhile back.

Recently my powers of deduction caught up with a certain repeat offender in the office. As quietly and discreetly, but forcefully, as possible, I called him out Tuesday. I’ve experienced some other issues with him recently, unrelated to recycling, and I thought now would be the ideal time to illustrate for him that, though, like him, I’m among the lowliest grunts in our office, in my mailroom and in my warehouse I am the law and the lord of all I survey. Hence the following e-mail message:

C—,

Having ascertained that you, in fact, have a trash can in your cubicle, right there within arm’s reach, I would like to encourage you to use it.

Having determined that it’s your plastic food wrappers and used kleenexes I keep finding in the recycling bin — and I know this because I find them mixed in with [your] Kansas City Region scan envelopes — I must insist that you start using the aforementioned trash can to dispose of such items and other non-recyclable matter.

Often I have to dig into the recycling bin to remove other items that people have discarded there in error. Occasionally, people recycle old magazines that others sift through for reading material. The last thing any of us need is to contract swine flu or hepatitis or whatever other communicable disease you might be blowing into your kleenexes.

I’ve sent two explicit e-mails on this subject already. I’ve posted explicit signage on the bins themselves. And because you seem to have heeded none of these requests to date, I must now ask you man to man, please — pretty please, with sugar on it — separate your trash, and particularly your disgusting freaking kleenexes, from your recycling.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Brent Shepherd
Mailroom Supervisor

I’m a reasonable man. I’m generally non-confrontational. But I intend to exercise what little authority and autonomy I have been given within my sphere of endeavor and the parameters of my position.

It is my sincere hope that C— is just smart enough to interpret the subtext of the correspondence reprinted above, specifically: Do as I say, old man, or so help me, I’ll take off my shoe and beat you with it ’til you’re unconscious. If he’s not, then I’ll have to say it to him out loud in just so many words, and that’s when complaints get filed and supervisors get involved and people start throwing about phrases like “abuse of power” and “hostile work environment.”

To which my only reply is, You have no idea.

2009-11-23T21:22:00.003-08:00

DESPERATE MEASURES
Those who know me well know that the action I’ve just taken is tantamount to Sophie’s choice:

I, Brent Shepherd, self-proclaimed television-made man, disconnected my cable Monday.

Take a moment, if you need one, to let the magnitude of that sink in.

The thunderbolt hit me on a Monday night in late October when I looked at my bank account online and realized that my employer had neglected to deposit my previous week’s paycheck. That they should have done it anyway is irrelevant; its absence only served to shine a klieg light on the precarious nature of my personal finances at a moment not far removed from my issuing a $130 electronic transfer to cover my monthly media fix. And buying a $520 airline ticket. And shelling out $1,000 or so for auto repairs.

Between the standard channels, the basic cable channels, HBO, the rental of the digital video recorder box, an additional fee for the ability to record using the DVR they’re already renting to me, and the “Digital Tier” (whatever the hell that is), I was spending about $90, which suddenly seemed like a luxury that I could live without if it meant being able to heat my apartment this winter and, you know, eating.

Benefits to be gained by doing so? I’ll get more use out of my neglected Netflix membership and my own DVD library. I’ll read more. Those two points alone ensure that I won’t be without entertainment, and they’ll focus my attentions on entertainments that matter: motion pictures and a backlog of books, both of which I can learn from, as opposed to television, which I find myself watching with greater frequency for mere distraction rather than for edification.

Most important, though, is this: I’ll write more. (See? I’m doing it now.)

I need to be writing more, and perhaps no other distraction impedes or precludes my writing more than television does. (A case could be made against the Internet, too, but for the purpose of research, it’s something of a necessary evil, so I’m hanging on to it.) Without channels to surf in search of diversions, without the flickering screen to vie for my attention, I’ll be more likely to stare at the blinking cursor, the glowing monitor, the blank white page. That’s where the hard work of my craft must be done, and this is the hard choice I had to make to get there.

Apart from the twin concerns of panic and fiscal responsibility, it seemed reasonable to ask at this juncture: Is there anything on television right now that I’m enjoying so much as to justify the exorbitant price I’m paying from month to month? Am I seeing enough good boxing to justify all the layers of fees I have to pay just to be eligible to tack on another 15 bucks for HBO? Besides Mad Men and 30 Rock, is there anything so groundbreaking on television right now that it’s worth paying for everything on TV that isn’t? Now that The West Wing is off the air and no one seems to rerun old Homicide episodes anymore¹, do I really need a box full of stuff I don’t want?

If I get desperate enough, I can always buy one of those newfangled digital converter boxes the kids are talking about these days so I can at least pick up local broadcast channels. Would that defeat the purpose of so bold a step backward as the one I’m taking? Perhaps. Local TV is just as big a part of the problem as network television and pay cable, and there’s nothing I can’t learn faster on the Internet — weather forecasts, traffic updates, sports scores — rather than wait around for an evening newscast. At least I wouldn’t be renting my “antenna” for such a princely sum, exacted monthly.

So there you have it: a compelling case for me to do away with television until such time as it is fiscally feasible for me to return home to the mother ship and to discover, in the meantime, what untold treasures I can claim while free of its hold on my life.

Wish me luck.

¹ Because I’m breaking all sorts of new ground here, it seems only fitting that I would do something unprecedented within the format of the Chronicles. And so I bring you my first-ever complete post within a footnote:

KISS MY ASS, NBC
Probably I wouldn’t be so hasty to give up television if television would meet me halfway, but it occurred to me when I was writing the paragraph above that the National Broadcasting Company, which once gave me so much that inspired me — the aforementioned Homicide: Life on the Street and The West Wing to name but two — now gives me only 30 Rock. I searched my mental mainframe and realized that there is nothing else I watch on NBC, except maybe Sunday Night Football.

The thought that NBC is washed up saddens me, really. But they have only themselves — and exiled former entertainment chief Ben Silverman — to blame for some of the most atrocious programming decision-making in the history of prime-time television. To wit:

Forcing Jay Leno off the Tonight Show desk is the equivalent of the Packers forcing Brett Favre out of Green Bay. And when NBC realized that a snubbed Leno might jump ship to another network and kick their ass at 11:30, they had to cook up their cockamamie plan to put him in prime time, which my friend Todd calls “the greatest thing ever to happen to old people.”
Leno at 10 p.m. five nights a week also means five fewer hourlong dramas in NBC’s schedule — including Medium, which jumped to CBS, and Southland, which got picked up by TNT — all because the new guard are a bunch of cheapskates minding the bottom line instead of remembering the legacy of a network that gave us St. Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues and ER (you know, back when ER was good), all in the 10 p.m. time slot.
Go ahead: Name an hourlong drama on NBC right now that isn’t part of the Law & Order franchise. And if you can do that, then tell me this: Are you watching it?
As a parent company NBC gutted Bravo, which was once one of the premier arts and culture channels and which is now the home of The Real Housewives of [Any Major City Where There Are Gold-Digging Tramps Willing to Whore Themselves In Front of a Camera].
Possibly the trampiest of those women — The Real Housewives of New Jersey — were recently cast in a guest appearance on the network’s new hospital drama Mercy. That’s called synergy, people — it’s a corporate philosophy more damning than communism or fascism, and among other reasons, it’s why I walked out on my last major employer in L.A.
And speaking of Bravo: Five years ago this month, I wrote in these chronicles about the downward spiral of James Lipton’s once-great program Inside the Actors Studio. The 2004-05 season that had me so up in arms at the time now seems like a veritable golden age when one considers that this season Lipton actually interviewed Bon Jovi on the program. That’s not a typo: Bon Jovi. And that resounding thud! you just heard is what hitting bottom sounds like.

I could go on, but I think I’ve covered the lowlights pretty well here. These alone were reason enough for me to abandon ship, anyway.

NBC, a once-great network that was willing to stick with a police drama like Homicide when it had lousy ratings because they knew it was a high-quality production that just needed to find its audience now cares so little about television and television viewers alike that they’ll just put anything and anybody in front of you as long as it’s cheap to produce and it gets you to buy whatever their sponsors are selling.

And if that’s how you run the world’s most powerful medium (into the ground) these days, then good riddance to the lot of you.

2009-11-04T17:33:00.002-08:00

JUSTICE DEFERRED IS JUSTICE DENIED:
A Modest Proposal for a More Even Playing Field
I have long believed the following to be true, and I don’t think I’m alone:

Stupid should hurt.

Dickishness¹ should not go unpunished or unremarked.

The meek don’t really have their hearts set on the earth, and they shouldn’t have to wait around to inherit what they truly desire most.

In a world in which justice is often stacked against those who abide by the law — that is to say that most laws are created with an eye toward further repressing the majority who already play by the rules, and not necessarily toward deterring or punishing the amoral minority who routinely flout the law — good people should not have to suffer under the weight of their own obedience while others get away with acting like pricks.

Worst of all, the pricks of the world almost never get what’s coming to them, and if they do, it often arrives too late for them to connect the karmic dots in what really ought to be an object lesson as well as retribution.

To wit, a modicum of frontier justice might not be such a bad thing, provided it doesn’t get out of hand. My solution is a just and simple one:

The first punch is free.

In the heat of the moment, when one has been pushed to the limits of one’s patience, when one’s integrity has been impugned, when one’s dignity has been laid bare by one’s moral and/or intellectual inferior, one should be allowed to punch the offender as hard as one can without having to stop to ponder the consequences and legal ramifications.

One punch. Or a slap, if one prefers or the situation merits it. Call it corporal punctuation — the victim, for a change, gets to be the one who puts the period or the exclamation point at the end of that to which he has too long been sentenced.

However, the following conditions would apply:

1. It must be provoked. You can’t hit someone just because you want to.

2. It must be instantaneous. No more than, say, five seconds should elapse between the subject’s provocative statement or act and your throwing of the punch. Ten seconds at the outside, in case you have to cross a room or walk around an obstacle to get to the subject.

3. You must be facing your subject. No rabbit punches. No sucker punches. You have to let him see it coming. If the subject turns to walk away, you have a few seconds before the window of opportunity closes to tap him on the shoulder, get his full, focused attention, then rearrange his file drawer for him.

One free punch. Better make it count.

Because the second punch, if not preceded by a retaliatory punch from the subject, would constitute misdemeanor battery. Three months probation.

A third unanswered punch — a night in jail and six months probation.

After three unabated punches, we’re getting into felony territory, and you don’t want to go there.

Don’t get greedy. You just want to make a point: “You’re being an asshole. Cut it out.”

One punch is really all you need to get that point across. And if the three aforementioned conditions are met, the subject is legally precluded from going all candy-ass and trying to press charges or sue you for some trumped-up reason or other — one whose ostensible subtext is “My ass can’t cash the checks my mouth has been writing” — hiding behind the law when he or she² was the one acting like a douchenozzle.

If one finds oneself often enough on the receiving end — particularly at the hands of a number of different people — the idea might eventually get into his thick skull that the problem lies with him, that he’s a recidivist, that he might want to change his ways. If just one person keeps doing it, well, then he might want to go out of his way to stop pissing off that one person.

I daresay such a provision in the law would make us on the whole a more well behaved society and would give us more interesting things to talk about at the dinner table.

It’s an idea whose time has come — elegant in its simplicity, if I say so myself. If your U.S. representatives and state legislators express interest, please direct them to me, and we’ll iron out the details.

¹ See also: asshattery, douchebaggery.

² Men would of course be prohibited from striking women, except in certain extenuating circumstances (e.g., she has just been caught in flagrante; she is armed).

2009-10-16T11:36:00.001-07:00

THE FALCON AND THE SHOWMEN
Kids. What are you gonna do, huh?

I’m of two minds about the “Balloon Boy” episode that captivated millions Thursday afternoon when we all should have been at our desks getting some work done. Admittedly, I too was mesmerized, off and on, for a couple of hours, watching that oversized pan of Jiffy Pop popcorn sail and tilt and twirl and swoosh a metallic streak across the Colorado sky like a not-so-special effect in an Ed Wood movie. (I know — “Look! Shiny!” — right?) I apologize for taking leave of my senses and sensibilities. I feel a little guilty about being so captivated by it, because it really is an exemplar of the sort of quick media fix that is destroying the American consciousness about Things That Actually Matter.

As a storyteller, however, I couldn’t help but be drawn to the drama, the wonder, the seemingly infinite possibilities, the limitless potential for either triumph or tragedy and the burning question of which would be the end result. In short, that silver streak was nothing less than J.J. Abrams’ Mystery Box made manifest and immediate for public consumption in real time.

Is the boy really trapped inside the balloon’s basket? Is he conscious? Is he alive? Is he cold? Certainly he’s terrified. Is he dizzy? Is he vomiting spectacularly all over himself and the inside of the basket? Is his name really “Falcon”? You’re shitting me, right? What is it made of? How strong are the materials? How much impact can it withstand upon landing? Or crashing? What altitude is it flying at? Is it descending at all? How long before something gets in its way? Something substantial like a skyscraper. Or a mountain. Or electrical lines. Can a chopper or small plane intercept it? Can they capture it with a hook or a net? Could they do more harm than good by intercepting it? If they knew for sure that the kid wasn’t inside, they could just shoot it down. But they don’t know whether the kid’s inside. The balloon is deflating on one side. Is it releasing ballast? Is it leaking helium? Is it leaking helium into the basket? How much helium can a 50-pound child ingest before it poisons his bloodstream? How did he get in? Is there a hatch? Could he have fallen out? Was something else attached to the balloon that isn’t there anymore? Could he have been in that? Could he be a bug-splat on the windshield of the Colorado countryside right now? Was he screwing around too close to the balloon in the back yard? Did he climb inside? Did he climb out without anyone noticing? Did he release the thing accidentally? Is he hiding from his father? His father’s gonna be pissed. His father’s gonna be relieved. His father might have staged this entire fiasco.

I don’t apologize for any of that. It’s a great writing exercise, one that I don’t engage in often enough these days. One that might never have occurred to me, left to my own devices. Some absent-minded, weather-chasing, attention-seeking mad inventor in Colorado actually had to lose control of both his balloon and his child to even present the notion, after which I could see nothing but dramatic possibility.

Now, about that attention-seeking business…

At The Lede on The New York Times online, a commenter named “paul doane” wrote, “It certainly smells like a scam, and if so, the parents should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It would also show the downside of the reality show culture we have created.” It’s that last sentence that makes me want to track down paul doane and buy him a beer.

At what point are we — both the consumers of media and the television producers and studio executives who reap the profits from such shameless solicitation and exhibition — going to wake up to the consequences of our rampant widespread addiction to “fame”? I set off the word in quotes here because the concept as we know it has been degraded and cheapened over the years. It used to be that, if you wanted to be famous, you had to actually be somebody important or do something of critical value. In 1927, you had to pilot an airplane from New York to Paris. In 1941, you had to hit safely in 56 consecutive games. In the 1960s you had to campaign for civil rights or allow yourself to be launched into space. And no matter the decade, killing someone or being killed yourself has always been a sure ploy to get noticed — but it helps to be famous to begin with.

Today you can be anybody or do anything. If pressed for a hook, all you really have to do is get pregnant (or get someone else pregnant), then handle badly everything that follows. As long as you’re savvy enough to do it in front of a camera.

On her eponymous website Friday, Arianna Huffington, whom I’ve long held in high regard, wrote about the media’s inane fixation on this “non-story,” which wormed its way into her scheduled appearance on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, on which she originally had been booked to discuss troop escalation in Afghanistan and its political ramifications here in the U.S.

Oddly, it doesn’t occur to Arianna that she and I are part of the same hypocrisy (to borrow a line from Michael Corleone): On the same day, the front page of The Huffington Post is cluttered with other “non-stories,” such as the TLC network’s breach-of-contract suit against reality-TV douchebag Jon Gosselin; Fox News Channel douchebag Glenn Beck crying on air again; Meghan McCain flashing her cleavage on Twitter; Halle Berry and Padma Lakshmi showing off their cleavage in public; the Shauna Sand sex tape; HuffPost readers’ Halloween costumes; and a separate banner link to the Balloon Boy story itself. For all the news that is actually fit for the HuffPost to print, one has to wade through a lot of non-stories on an average weekday there just to get to it.

We can choose from an unlimited number of destinations on television and the Internet for our daily dose of schlock and awe. So why do the major media outlets and newspaper websites feel they have to provide the same or similar content in order to compete with content providers who aren’t posting anything newsworthy? Is it too much to ask for them just to do their job and trust that we’ll show up to get from them what we can’t get anywhere else?

It’s a fair question. And it’s one I’m sorry I wasn’t more mindful of yesterday as I was transfixed by that gleaming projectile racing across the autumn sky.

2009-10-04T13:34:00.002-07:00

NO IDLE CHITCHAT
It’s not quite Grady Tripp’s description of James Leer’s overcoat, but I came across the following paragraph this past week and immediately enshrined it in my literary hall of fame’s circle of honor:

“Your wife make you do the shopping too?” Jackie Brown said.

“My friend,” the stocky man replied, “you don’t have much time and I’m kind of in a hurry myself. I don’t have time to explain married life to you, and besides, you wouldn’t believe me anyway. I didn’t believe it when they told me, and you wouldn’t believe it if I told you. Let’s stick to business.”
— The Friends of Eddie Coyle
by George V. Higgins

Not that it isn’t great on its own merits, but it helps to imagine Robert Mitchum saying it.

Higgins’ book itself is filled with hard-boiled dialogue so rich that you feel like you’re right there on the streets of Boston. Foley’s virtuoso ode to the worst grilled-cheese sandwich ever and Waters’ instructions on how to make one properly is too long to reprint here — for that, you’ll have to read the book. You can thank me later.

2009-10-02T10:45:00.002-07:00

THE BEST POLICY. PERIOD.
Whatever your opinion of David Letterman may be — as an entertainer, as a host, as a man, whatever you’ve thought of him in the past, whatever you think of him after the events of this week — know this: What Letterman did under duress on Thursday evening’s Late Show was the toughest high-wire act a man in his position can be called upon to perform, and he nailed it.

They ought to show last night’s post-monologue/pre-guest segment in classrooms where public relations is taught — hell, they ought to show it to every disgraced politician the moment his indiscretions come to light — because you are rarely going to see someone address their personal failings with the same directness, honesty, humor and humility. However badly Dave may have behaved to bring this moment upon himself, whatever might happen to Dave personally or professionally from this moment forward, his conduct Thursday evening was laudable.

I’ve written about these principles of crisis-response public relations once before — referring to Johnson & Johnson’s handling of the Tylenol scare of 1982 — and what Dave did Thursday was effectively to apply that proven institutional model to an individual matter.

1. He got out in front of the story. As we learned from Watergate, the cover-up almost always causes more damage than the original crime, usually in direct proportion to the time elapsed. In this case, Dave was first contacted by his blackmailer three weeks ago, and he didn’t hesitate to go public with his story as soon as the crisis was resolved and he was legally able to do so.

2. He used the media to get the story out. This is a no-brainer, being that Dave is the media, but were he not, he should have done so anyway.

3. He told the whole sordid truth. Or at least as much as we might be entitled to know. And this is perhaps the most important aspect of public confession: In owning up to his own transgressions — which appear to include, to varying degrees, adultery, dishonesty, betrayal, and perhaps sexual harassment — Dave largely pre-empted any potential leaks, attacks and revelations from other parties and necessarily diminished the shock value of any information that does come out.

4. He made the story about himself. “Well, of course, he did,” you might be saying. “He’s a powerful media figure and narcissistic entertainer who has spent the last four decades in the public eye.” But that argument is both reductive and erroneous.

Inasmuch as Dave is able to preclude the identities of the women involved from ever being made public, he was leaning into the strike zone and taking the hit so that those women, who have never been public figures themselves, may continue to deal privately with what has always been, for them, a private matter. To a large extent, Dave also limited the potential culpability and disavowed the complicity of his Late Show staff and the CBS television network by putting himself out front.

5. He dropped the subject. After telling us everything we need to know to be brought up to speed — as opposed to any salacious details the 24-Hour News Beast asserts that we have a right to know — Dave concluded, “I don’t plan to say much more about this on this particular topic.” And with that, it now becomes a private matter between Dave and his family. (Until such time as, you know, it isn’t.)

One reason Letterman handled this situation so masterfully when others might not have is because, in a way, his entire career has prepared him for this moment. Among his other flaws, he is no one’s idea of a handsome man, never has been, but he has turned self-deprecation into a huge advantage over the years. Oddly enough, it’s one of the foundations of his undeniable charisma as an entertainer. (Let’s face it: Birthday or not, when Drew Barrymore gives you a table dance and flashes you on national television, you must be doing something right.)

Also, as Dave confessed Thursday night, “I’m motivated by guilt. If you know anything about me, you know that I’m a towering mass of Midwestern, Lutheran guilt.” He humanizes himself by admitting his insecurities, and herein lies the particular brilliance of the Letterman who has emerged in recent years.

For decades, Dave was the snarky wiseass who alienated as many guests as he befriended and perhaps drove several hundred thousand viewers to his safer, friendlier, less edgy late-night rival, Jay Leno. Letterman has rewarded the loyalty of those viewers who stayed with him by offering the occasional window into the ways his life has been profoundly changed over the last decade — by 9/11; by his life-saving heart operation; by the birth of his son, Harry; and by his marriage to his longtime companion, Regina Lasko. In these surprising moments when he lets us glimpse behind his persona and gives away a piece of his innermost self, he only enhances his brand and his credibility as a broadcaster.

He did it again Thursday night, by confessing his sins, by admitting his fears, by taking a terrifying event that threatens his family, his staff, his employers and his livelihood and not merely turning it into a compelling 10 minutes of television but scoring a powerful public-relations coup in the process. Whatever happens next will not diminish that show of strength. However Dave might be held accountable, you should still be taking notes.

2009-09-24T10:36:00.004-07:00

PRINT THE LEGEND

The following is adapted from an e-mail I sent to Adriane in late February 2006, when we were just setting out together on our long, winding road to love. I went looking for this story among the Chronicles today and was astonished to discover that I had never actually posted anything about it here.

My father, Larry Shepherd. The second coming of Steve McQueen, circa 1971, standing beside the obsidian Pegasus of my childhood.

The car was a 1953 Ford that my Uncle Jerry had driven back and forth to Pittsburg when he went to college there. When Jerry went off to the Army, my grandfather let Dad have the car to race. The car moved with my family from Springfield, where Dad didn’t have enough time to work on it, to Monett, where it rusted sitting out in the rain, to Neosho, where he finally got around to making it race-ready.

Dad gutted the car, removed all the chrome and glass, removed the passenger seats, removed the muffler, chopped off the exhaust pipes, welded in a roll cage, and painted pitch black that which had once been a lovely blue. Back in those days, when he managed the Safeway store across from Big Spring Park, he would make his own pricing signs by hand, and because he was particularly adept at drawing 5s and 8s, his nightmare steed became No. 588.

Dad raced on Saturday nights, trading paint and kicking up clouds of dust or clods of mud at the Highway 71 Speedway, a name that evokes a somewhat more majestic image than a quarter-mile dirt track bordered on one side by rickety bleachers. I knew the names and car numbers of everyone my father raced against, but today the only name that stands out in my memory is that of Larry Pyle, who was one of the better modified-stock drivers in the area.

No. 588 still ran on its original 1953 engine, which Dad says could do 70 m.p.h. in second gear. (Unfortunately, it would only get up to 80 in third.) Over the course of the one season he raced it, Dad eventually replaced the radiator and carburetor with larger truck parts and added a track cam for better performance, fitting it to the engine block himself, even though he had never done anything like that before.

He took me for a ride in it once, just around the block in our neighborhood. I was no more than 4 years old at the time, and there was no place to sit inside the car unless you were driving it, so I stood beside him where the passenger seat had once been, holding onto the roll cage for dear life. Without the muffler, the car rumbled like the very bowels of hell itself, and even though Dad drove no faster than 10 or 15 miles per hour, the adventure frightened me to my marrow.

Thirty-five years passed before I had the conversation with my father in which I confirmed all these facts, the most astounding of which being that he raced only one season. I was only 4 at the time, though, so that one season, with all its velocity, noise and fury, accounted for a significant fraction of my young life. It is little wonder, then, that it stands out in my memory as vividly as it does, while other tales of that time must be recounted to me secondhand.

I can still see No. 588 parked on the grass to the right of our driveway at the house on Benton Avenue. (Always there, in that spot, whereas Dad’s ’63 Impala and, later, his ’74 Camaro were often parked right on the front lawn, at an angle, as if caught in freeze-frame as they careered out of control toward the living-room picture window.) I remember taking No. 588 for granted. I remember being awed by it. Even now, I don’t think of it as a memory so much as something that is encoded into my DNA, sense memory, something I can feel rather than simply know.

That feeling is as vast and thrilling as the limitless imagination of a 4-year-old boy. In the interest of history, though, I’ll always have this picture as proof:

My dad’s cooler than your dad.

2009-08-28T09:40:00.002-07:00

SOME PEOPLE NEVER LEARN
The remedials who work in shipping at the Staples warehouse are apparently still employed, still plugging away, still straining to wrap their minds around spatial relations. I suppose we’re making progress, though, because this time, at least, they didn’t send me an empty box.

No, today they shipped me a single 50-count sleeve of Solo 12 oz. paper drinking cups, measuring roughly 20¼” tall by 3½” in diameter, and they packed it in a box measuring 21” x 14” x 12”. No AirFill bubbles or packing foam this time. Just a single sleeve of cups rattling around in a box large enough to hold at least a dozen. And this time, instead of sending it out on one of their own delivery trucks, they (or we) paid to ship it via UPS Ground.

Why we needed only 50 paper coffee cups or how they managed to short us 50 on a previous order, I can only speculate.

Again, I must come to grips with the idea that I can’t be in more than one place at a time, can’t be the brains of every operation — at least, not without staging a coup d’etat and deploying my own goon squads to enforce the newly decreed laws of the land. Instead I’ll just settle for my consolation prize: a nice, sturdy, reusable cardboard box.

2009-08-16T23:29:00.003-07:00

SHEPCAT SAVES THE RECORDING INDUSTRY
I don’t even have a vested interest in the recording industry anymore. I don’t buy CDs in bulk the way I used to¹, and I don’t listen to commercial radio enough to be turned on by new music with any regularity. (To wit: The new Franz Ferdinand single is finally worming its way into my cerebral cortex, and it was released how many months ago?)

But sometimes a complete lack of involvement and investment is a good thing — whatever the arena may be. It means that you don’t even have to make an effort to think outside the box, because you are outside the box.

So here’s how I’ll save the recording industry with one simple suggestion:

It came to me while I was reading The Lefsetz Letter, a blog maintained by a music-industry insider/watcher named Bob Lefsetz. I receive it in my RSS feeds, but I don’t read it religiously, because, as I mentioned above, I have no vested interest in the recording industry. So indifferent am I, in fact, that I read no further than the second paragraph of a recent Lefsetz letter before I discovered the key to the recording labels’ salvation and stopped reading immediately so that I could pass it along to you — and to anyone else with a legitimate vested interest in the recording industry.

In fact, scratch that — I didn’t even have to read beyond the second sentence, because it contained this phrase: “[T]rack sales are never going to equal CD sales…”

And it hit me.

Of course track sales are never going to equal CD sales. A CD — or rather, a full album — costs at least $9.99 when you purchase it from a major online distributor of digital music like iTunes, while a single costs only 99 cents.

Of course track sales are never going to equal CD sales — not as long as the industry allows iTunes and Amazon and Rhapsody and all the other online distributors to release an entire album to be cherry-picked by the end-user (that’s the consumer — you and me) at 99 cents a pop.

See where I’m headed with this?

Back in the day, when music-loving, radio-listening kids of my generation were spending our allowances and our summer lawn-mowing money on LPs, 8-tracks and cassettes, we were impeded by an industry that allowed us to hear only the songs they wanted us to hear when they wanted us to hear them. We heard a song on the radio, and if we loved it, we had no way of knowing whether the rest of the album was as good as that one hit single until what?

Until the label released another single off the album. Then another. Then another.

Or until we scraped together enough lawn-mowing money to go out and buy the whole damn album. Which is what the labels wanted us to do in the first place.

So why in hell would the labels allow iTunes and its imitators to come along and create a new model in which you and I can hear any and every song on an album — whether in full or as a 30-second sample — on the day and date it’s released? Why in hell would they give up the one trump card they had in controlling the online sales of their music with regard to the most meaningful measure of their economic success, album sales?

For example: Interscope releases U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind in 2000. A month or two before the album hits the street, the label releases “Beautiful Day” as a single. Great freaking single — practically sells the album all by itself. But for the sake of argument, we’ll pretend that U2 is not the Greatest Freaking Band on the Planet but just another decent radio act doing all right for themselves on the Billboard Top 100.

Street date arrives, and what does Interscope (and every other label in the business) do? It allows iTunes (and every other online distributor of digital music) to release the whole album, not as an album to be sold at one price but as a loose collection of tracks to be sold individually at 99 cents a piece. Doesn’t matter that they’re never gonna release “New York” as a single — if you want it right now without having to buy the whole album, they’re gonna make that happen for you. Why are they gonna do that? Because they’re idiots who haven’t got enough sense to look out for their own survival.

Where they screwed up — and by now you should be able to recite it along with me — is by not maintaining control over the release of individual singles — not just for radio airplay but for online download — exactly as they did in the 1970s when I was a kid who dug Steely Dan and had a weekly allowance burning a hole in my pocket.

When I was a kid, you waited for the single to air on the radio, you liked it, you ran to the record store downtown to buy the 45. By the time you knew you wanted to buy the whole album, you may already have bought three or four of the singles.

Why, then, does the online marketplace today operate any differently? With all their collective bitching about how the current business model is destroying the recording industry, the recording industry only demonstrates that they failed to learn the most crucial lesson of the old business model, the one they controlled once upon a time — and still could if they had kept their eyes on the ball when the ground began to shift beneath their feet.

To wit: How could the recording industry have been so stupid as to give up the milk a bottle at a time when they already had control of the entire cow?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s already too late for this lesson in simple economics to have any effect on a recording industry that is losing relevance with every passing day and with each new technological advancement. Maybe this outside-the-box thinking of mine is only enough to stanch the hemorrhaging but not enough to save the patient.

But come on. I’m the guy who could barely stay awake during Prof. Harry Shafer’s 8:35 a.m. ECON 101 class, and if I can have an epiphany about this at 11 p.m. after two vodka gimlets and a gin rickey, then how is it possible that the geniuses who ruled the recording industry for the seven or eight decades that predated the Internet couldn’t figure it out before Steve Jobs rode into town and yanked their raison d’etre right out from under them?

Again, I don’t know enough about the way things really work today to understand all the fine print and the backroom wheeling and dealing, but it seems to me that, when negotiation time comes around again, this is the one bullet point the recording industry had better seize control of if they have any interest whatsoever in sending their kids to Harvard and Yale instead of whatever safety schools they’ve got in the on-deck circle. Although at this point, a strong vo-tech school ought to be looking pretty good to those kids who were unfortunate enough to have sprung from the loins of not-terribly-bright record company executives.

Do what you will with this information.

My work here is done.

You’re welcome.

Shepcat out.

¹ I miss you, Amoeba Records. [sniff]

2009-08-07T09:52:00.003-07:00

THE HARDER THEY FALL
It wasn’t just July. It turns out that it’s been a brutal summer altogether for boxers. I found out only Thursday night about the death of another fighter that occurred at the beginning of June. This one struck closer to home.

My connection to the welterweight Brian “The Lion” Carden was tenuous at best: I saw him fight for only two minutes, 36 seconds in St. Joseph, Missouri, in July 2008. I wrote about his stunning knockout of Reymundo Hernandez here in the Chronicles, and he reached out with a comment to correct me about his name, which I had been misinformed was Ryan. I congratulated him on the knockout, a spectacular night train of a punch that Hernandez, who had acquitted himself nicely up to that point, never saw coming. I wished him luck on his upcoming fight, which was scheduled to take place in Tampa, Florida (he ended up on a card in Chicago instead, though), and asked if he was coming down in class for the fight. Brian thanked me and explained that he was “cutting” to make 139 for the junior welterweight bout, which was going to be tough because he often had trouble making 147 to fight at his more natural weight.

I enjoyed talking about boxing with an actual fighter. It’s hard not to like a fighter, especially at that stage of his career, when he’s humble and hungry and always itching to get back into the ring for another go. I liked Brian instantly, and I wished that our conversation could have gone on, but that comment was the last I ever heard from him.

Whenever I happened to think of Brian — I now considered him “a friend of the Chronicles,” as I consider you all — I followed his fight schedule periodically on BoxRec, the most comprehensive database of fighters and fights available on the Internet.

It was there Thursday night that I first learned of Brian’s last fights, including the one he ended on his own terms on June 2, 2009.

BoxRec features a biography link alongside some boxers’ fight histories. It’s unusual for lesser-known, less experienced fighters to have biographies on the site — Brian had fought only 26 professional rounds, with a record of 8-8-0 — so I clicked on the link to see what had been written about him.

The only line of his biography reads, “Brian Micheal Carden, 31, St. Joseph, formerly of Maryville, Mo., died Tuesday, June 2, 2009, at his home.”

I Googled him and discovered an obituary in the St. Joseph newspaper, which repeated that he had died “at his home.” I suspected the worst, and with more digging my fears were confirmed: Brian had in fact taken his own life.

The picture that gradually came into focus over the course of the evening was one of immense sadness and struggle. I will spare the details except to say that my heart aches for this flawed, troubled man and the fights he fought every day outside the ring.

I noticed on BoxRec that Brian had lost his last three fights — two by first-round TKOs; the last, only a few weeks before his death, by a first-round disqualification. I wondered how much that slump, trivial though it may seem alongside the rest of the facts of his life, might have contributed to his depression.

I am inclined to believe that a slump was all it was, that he’d have found a way to rebound in the ring soon, because a closer examination of Brian’s record indicated that he was an all-or-nothing fighter: Of the eight fights he won, seven were by knockout. Of the eight fights he lost, six were by knockout. Only five of his 16 fights went past the first round. Only two of his fights, a win and a loss, went the distance to a unanimous decision.

Of course, if you want to read it this way, his record also indicates that, for every step forward Brian took, he took one step backward. It is a poignant metaphor for the life he lived, inasmuch as I’m unable to paint a complete picture of that life based on the scant information at my disposal.

He left behind sons, one of whom, maybe 6 years old at the time, I remembered from that night, walking around the arena with his father before the fight. Brian was apparently trying to keep his muscles loose and warm and burn off a little nervous energy before entering the ring. They circled the floor a half-dozen times if they circled it once, the little guy always at his father’s side, serious, like a miniature corner man leading his fighter into the ring. My heart goes out to him today, and to all the family and friends Brian left behind, who knew him much better than I ever got the chance to.

Because I never knew Brian the man, I will remember Brian the fighter, “The Lion,” perpetrator of one of the most surgical, devastating knockouts I’ve ever seen in the ring. It will remain my one truly lasting memory of that summer night in St. Joseph.

Meager though his career record is, Brian fought on cards at both Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City (a.k.a. “the house that Gatti built”) and the most storied address in all of boxing, Madison Square Garden in New York City. He lost both fights, but I can’t even comprehend what a thrill it must have been for a fighter from small-town Missouri just to stand in those rings in those arenas. It’s small consolation to know that some fighters — and many of us who are merely admirers of the sweet science — never even get there.

Small consolation indeed in the midst of his turbulent life, his daily struggle just to break even — in Brian’s words, “working, taking the punches one at a time, trying to deflect a few…”

In the end, I wish him God’s mercy and the peace he could not find in this life, and I strike a final 10-count for Brian “The Lion” Carden.

2009-07-21T09:32:00.001-07:00

TALES FROM THE MAILROOM
Tuesday morning Staples delivered an empty box to me.

I’m not making this up.

One of our smokers was taking a cigarette break at the back door, and he signed for the box and brought it to my desk. It was light as air, so I wondered aloud, “Is there even anything in it?”

“It didn’t hurt my back to lift it,” he joked. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have brought it to you.”

So I opened it, and sure enough, the box — measuring roughly 14½ by 11 by 8½ and weighing a total of 12.2 ounces — contained nothing but a perforated strip of five plastic Air-Fill bubbles and the adhesive packing slip whose absence from the previous day’s delivery of spiral-bound steno notebooks had gone entirely unnoticed.

If it was really that important (it isn’t; we throw out the packing slips and supply-order paperwork pretty much immediately), they could have slipped it in an envelope and mailed it to us for 44 cents.

Instead, the geniuses at the distribution center assembled a box, tossed in the slip, pumped some air into the packing bubbles, sealed the box, slapped a bar-coded address label on it, scanned it into their tracking inventory, then loaded it onto a truck, making their driver go out of his way to deliver to us a virtually empty box.

All of which would be entirely pointless if I weren’t a reduce-reuse-recycle guy who’ll end up shipping something before week’s end using both the box and the bubbles — together, in all likelihood. So, you know, thanks for the box, I guess.

Morons. They’re everywhere.

2009-07-19T20:11:00.004-07:00

REQUIEM FOR A WARRIOR
It’s been a brutal July for anyone who loves boxing as I do.

On Wednesday the 1st, the great Alexis Arguello took his own life in Managua, firing a single 9mm round into one of the most remarkable hearts that ever beat within the squared circle. Then, on the 11th, before we had even caught our collective breath, the news came that Arturo Gatti, “the Human Highlight Reel,” had been found dead in a rented apartment in Porto de Galinhas, Brazil, possibly murdered by his young wife.

As stunned as I was by the former, the latter revelation has left me feeling (as I noted earlier) sucker-punched.

My earliest memories of boxing are of the last golden age of the heavyweights — Ali, Frazier, Foreman, Norton — of the remarkable battles they fought and the belts they traded among themselves during the early ’70s. My imagination was fired by the young Sugar Ray Leonard when he won light-welterweight gold at Montreal in 1976 and again as he rose through the ranks to fight the epic battles of the ’80s, at 147 pounds and heavier, against the likes of Hearns, Duran and Hagler. But no fighter I have ever watched carried my heart into the ring the way Arturo “Thunder” Gatti did.

The die-hard sports fan gives his allegiance a team or athlete and stands with them regardless of whether they win or lose. With Gatti, though, a fan’s allegiance was always more complicated, because the final outcome of Gatti’s fights was irrelevant. A loss was always disappointing, sure, but you cheered for Gatti not merely because you wanted him to win, but because you knew that he was giving absolutely everything he had to give in the ring, that he would leave it all there on the canvas, that he’d be carried out on his shield if that’s what it took.

Arturo Gatti, when he climbed into the ring, was beautiful — dark, elegant and lean, like one of Hemingway’s bullfighters. But unlike, say, the earlier, risk-averse Oscar De La Hoya, who preserved his prettiness as long as he was able, Gatti, by the time the final bell rang, would be a swollen, bloody mess, as if he been hit in the face with a cinder block. This was because Gatti was a puncher who plied his trade at point-blank range, not a boxer who danced around his target. As such, Gatti often took three shots just to get off one of his own. And he would never stop coming forward until he or the other guy was destroyed.

The odds are against a fighter with so little concern for his own self-preservation, but Arturo Gatti was no ordinary fighter. It’s not that he was a better, more talented fighter than his opponents but rather that he could seemingly take a harder beating than he dished out. More to the point, he knew what the other guy didn’t: that the limits of his endurance extended further than anyone, particularly his opponent, could imagine.

Except for one opponent, that is. The one destined to define Arturo Gatti as a fighter and to be defined by him in turn.

The trilogy of ring battles waged between Gatti and Irish Micky Ward over 13 months in 2002 and 2003 rank alongside the greatest duels in history. Think Ali-Frazier minus 60 or so pounds, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of where these fights belong in the boxing pantheon. The difference being that there was never anything but personal honor on the line when the two men faced each other — no titles, no belts, no money to rival that of the marquee championship fights of those years.

When fight watchers repeat the adage “Styles make fights,” they are usually referring to the disparity between two fighters and the varied skills they bring into the ring against each other.

What stands out about the Gatti-Ward matchup, though, is how similar the two men and their styles were. Both were working-class fighters — the Italian-born Gatti fighting out of Jersey City by way of Montreal, the Irish Ward out of Lowell, Massachusetts — to whom fighting was a craft, a trade, a job worth doing well, the way a mechanic approaches an engine block or a bricklayer approaches a building. Both were orthodox fighters who could switch their stance if needed to alter their circumstances or gain an advantage. Both were devastating body punchers and, as such, did their best fighting inside at close range.

Above all, both were warriors who understood that playing it safe in the ring was a fool’s errand, that pain and damage were the inevitable by-products of their chosen profession. Neither man was vain about his appearance nor squeamish about the sight of his own blood.

It is fitting, then, that midway through Round 1 of their first duel, in May 2002, a Gatti left hook opened a deep cut over Ward’s right eye. It would not be the last of either man’s blood to be spilled during their trilogy. Not only would Ward show what he was made of, but in his corner between rounds, Al Gavin would prove himself to be one of the sport’s most gifted cutmen.

Later, after a low blow from Gatti and an error by an inattentive timekeeper that shortened both Round 4 and the amount of time Ward was allowed to recover — up to five minutes, if necessary — Ward, after 90 seconds or less, told his corner and the referee, “I’m all set. I wanna go.”

At the ends of rounds, referee Frank Cappuccino had to step between Gatti and Ward, sensing that they might keep going after each other after the bell. The irony is that, even then, they were forging such deep respect for each other that they might have kept fighting without round breaks, not out of acrimony but just to save time and stay focused on the task at hand.

As relentlessly as the two men attacked each other throughout the fight, Round 9 of Gatti-Ward I is incontrovertibly the greatest three minutes of boxing I’ve ever witnessed. Hell, the first two minutes alone were perhaps better than any full round I’ve seen. The fight might have ended with Ward’s devastating left hook that caught Gatti in the liver and dropped him to one knee wincing in pain. Somehow, though, Gatti rose at the count of nine. When asked later how he could have gotten up when no one else would have, he replied, “Because I’m an animal, and I don’t know any better.”

That animal instinct would lead Gatti back to the center of the ring, where he would soon overpower Ward with a blinding flurry of punches that would have ended most fights. Except that Ward, every bit as tough as his opponent, refused to go down. This fierce tide would turn back and forth between the two men for the full three minutes. Though Ward would win the round on the strength of a point deduction for the knockdown, Round 9 is the greatest two-sided display of sustained ring violence I have ever seen.

Taking into account another point deduction for the low blow in Round 4, Ward would win the bout by a majority decision in which one ringside judge scored the fight a 94-94 draw.

Gatti and Ward were not done with each other, though. Not by a long shot.

Yet while it is just as likely for fighters to develop a deep hatred of each other over the course of repeated meetings and beatings, the Italian and the Irishman, in a crucible of fire and iron, forged a deep respect and love for each other as blood brothers that would extend beyond the ring.

Most fighters touch gloves when they come out for the final round of a fight. When Gatti and Ward came out for their 20th and 30th rounds together, they hugged. Then they stood toe to toe and pummeled each other like two guys who were both losing, even though Gatti was clearly winning the second fight by a decisive margin and was likely, though not a lock, to win the third.

What transpired in those last two fights at Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City only deepened the legend of two men who did not know the word quit. HBO fight announcer Jim Lampley said he believed that Gatti and Ward would have fought the way they did even with only $10 on the line, let alone a million and a half.

In Round 5 of the second fight, a straight right hand from Gatti snapped Ward’s head back like he was a Pez dispenser, but from the neck down his body kept moving forward until his head could right itself and catch up with the rest of Ward. He would puncture an eardrum in that fight.

Gatti would break his right hand in both fights, each time in Round 3. Between the third and fourth rounds of the rubber match, Gatti leaned up and whispered something in trainer Buddy McGirt’s ear that wasn’t picked up by HBO’s microphones, to which McGirt very coolly replied, “OK… but you’re boxin’ beautiful, baby.” Gatti was in fact informing his trainer — “Oh, by the way…” — that he had broken the hand again; McGirt was taking the news in stride.

Gatti went to the left almost exclusively after that, working the jab in a big way, then throwing pummeling left hooks in rapid succession as if he were driving railroad spikes. For his part, Ward had announced his retirement prior to the third fight but still fought it like a man whose family was being held hostage in warehouse nearby.

I can’t help thinking that my grandfather, who trained fighters, would have loved these two.

Gatti and Ward poured everything they had into their confrontations and created such a perfect pugilistic alchemy that Gatti’s remaining seven fights could only be disappointing by comparison, particularly as he wound down his career with dispiriting TKO losses to Floyd Mayweather Jr., Carlos Baldomir and Alfonso Gomez, men against whom he could never get close enough to execute his fight plan. Never mind whether he might actually have won those fights, because, as I’ve said, the outcome was irrelevant. (Although I’d love to have seen him leave a few indelible marks on Mayweather.)

Gatti retired in his locker room after the Gomez fight, and almost two years later to the day, for reasons that surpass my understanding, Arturo Gatti went down for the count for the last time and will never get up again. The circumstances of his death will forever defy logic and reason, will be at odds with his legacy as a fighter who could take the worst that any opponent had to throw at him.

If ever I was in a fight with everything on the line, I would hope that I would keep getting up, keep moving forward, keep walking headlong into the furies the way Arturo Gatti did.

2009-07-05T13:58:00.004-07:00

THE LAST DETAIL
The legendary architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe once famously declared, “God is in the details.” That statement has become the unofficial epigraph of my freelance enterprise and is a standard to which I aspire in my literary and journalistic endeavors, among others. I’ve always believed that, if I didn’t care about the details as much as I do — about bringing them to light, getting them right, preserving their integrity — who else would bother?

Of course, sometimes I care — too much, perhaps — about details that mean nothing to anyone but me. You will note that the post immediately preceding this one is titled “The Insignificant Detail,” and its subject could not possibly be more trivial.

This one’s different, though. This one is a matter of life and death.

Specifically, this one is about the death of the great fighter and gentleman Alexis Arguello, discovered early last Wednesday in his home in Managua, Nicaragua, dead of a gunshot wound to the chest.

Based on that casual reportage, one assumes that the bullet was fired into Arguello’s heart, because anyone who ever watched him fight would tell you that you would have to destroy his magnificent lion’s heart before you could ever begin to destroy the man.

As soon as Arguello’s death was reported, the Sandinista Party’s Radio Ya and other local media were already calling it an apparent suicide.

But appearances can be deceiving, particularly in a city like Managua, which last year elected Arguello its mayor by a narrow, disputed margin and amid subsequent claims of voter fraud. Even a national hero and champion as beloved as Arguello, who had previously served his hometown as its vice-mayor since 2004, is not fully immune from controversy.

Arguello had a complicated political history, having once been photographed alongside the Nicaraguan strongman Anastasio Samoza and accused of sympathizing with his government; having lost his brother, Eduardo, a Sandinista rebel who was wounded, captured and burned alive by the forces of the Samoza government; having fought against the insurgent Sandinista government in the 1980s after it confiscated his property, liquidated his bank accounts, evicted his mother and sister, and forced Arguello into exile; having then joined the Contras and fought with them in the jungle after having been trained in Costa Rica by a then-unknown Marine officer named Oliver North.

Finally, after a long period of exile in Miami and struggles with his personal demons — including failed marriages, alcohol and drug abuse, and a flirtation with suicide — Arguello turned to God, who he said told him to give back to his people. He returned to Managua and reconciled with his former nemesis, the Sandinista leader and current Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega, who gave him his start in politics.

With all that in mind, I have read many news reports in the aftermath of Arguello’s death, and so far, only the great boxing writer Ron Borges has observed, as I do, that the manner of his death “would seem to hint of something more nefarious” than mere suicide.

A subsequent report from The Associated Press cited Managua’s assistant judicial police chief Glenda Zavala as stating that “traces of gunpowder were found on the 57-year-old Arguello’s hands, suggesting he shot himself. There were no other signs of violence in the room where he was found.”

But here’s where my instinct for detail kicks in: What about the proverbial smoking gun? Did police at least find the weapon? Why hasn’t it been reported yet? “Traces of gunpowder” notwithstanding, are we supposed to just assume that a gun was found at the scene?

Because not a single report among the many I have read has included a sentence along these lines: “A small-caliber handgun was found near the body.” Or: “Arguello was discovered with a .32-caliber automatic in his hand.” Maybe that seems like a small, obvious detail in a news story of this nature, but if you’re a reporter or editor, why exclude it from the story? If you’re a police official, why conceal it from the media?

In a city like Managua, in an embattled country like Nicaragua, whose standards for truth are different than our own and whose public officials and press are not above suspicion (any more than our own, I should add), it takes more than mere reports and attribution to close a case — whether it is finally ruled a homicide or suicide — and to lay a story to rest.

It takes evidence, however seemingly circumstantial it may be.

One small but significant detail can go a long way in quelling suspicion and satisfying the public’s curiosity, even if the truth itself is as much a casualty as the body it lies alongside in the morgue. Absent a suicide note — which also should have been reported by now if one exists — that last detail is the gun itself. And until that detail is provided, regardless of whether I ultimately believe it, I won’t be able to close the books on Arguello.

In the end, Arguello will be remembered most for how he lived and celebrated for how he fought. Good Lord, how he fought. And on fight cards all over the world this weekend, he was undoubtedly honored with the traditional moment of silence accompanied by 10 strikes of the ringside bell, a final 10-count for the champion they called “El Flaco Explosivo” — “The Explosive Thin Man.”

However he died, and whether or not we ever know the truth, may God, who created every detail and who resides in them all, grant mercy, grace and eternal peace to his brave warrior Alexis Arguello.

UPDATE, 7/7/09: Case closed. And a very convincing case for suicide it is.

In the end, all it took to satisfy my need to know was one very comprehensive article in last Friday’s La Prensa — helpfully, if imperfectly, related into English by Google Translate — covering in exhaustive forensic detail the results of the autopsy performed on Alexis Arguello.

If The Associated Press or any of the other agencies that have been relaying the news surrounding Arguello’s death had bothered to include even one of the details in La Prensa’s reportage — in particular the Cesca Model 75 9mm handgun found near the body — I might not have had to piece together conclusions of my own.

2009-06-14T18:38:00.002-07:00

THE INSIGNIFICANT DETAIL, #4 in a Series

BANG! BANG! BANG! SHE SHOT ME DOWN
Just when you suspected that I only watch the same five or six Alfred Hitchcock movies on a permanent loop, I am at long last shifting the conversation to another of my favorite directors, Billy Wilder. In fact, for his excellence also as a writer and for the sheer breadth of his body of work — dramas, war movies, films noir and comedies (including arguably one of the two or three funniest movies ever made¹, as well as a very funny movie titled One, Two, Three, for that matter) — I rank Mr. Wilder at No. 1 on my personal list of the greatest directors of all time.

On this particular occasion, I was only half watching 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, a movie I’ve seen several times in its entirety and at least two or three times on a big screen. (Pause a moment here while I pine for the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles.)

The first time you watch Sunset Boulevard, you know right away that the story is going to end badly because — and I don’t think I’ll be ruining the film for anybody here — it opens on its narrator, the screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), floating facedown in a swimming pool.²

On subsequent viewings, you already know how Joe came to be facedown in that pool, but because the movie is more about madness than murder — and here is where I might begin ruining the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it yet³ — you’re forever anticipating the big finish, in which faded, forgotten, crazy-as-a-bedbug silent-film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is coaxed down the grand staircase of her mansion amid a swarm of police and press, believing that the great director (and her frequent collaborator back in the Silent Era) Cecil B. De Mille is at the bottom waiting to film her triumphant return to the silver screen and one of the greatest closing lines in movie history.⁴

It’s the sequence before that, though — the actual climax of the movie — that is sort of easy to gloss over until you’ve seen it a few or several times. No one ever really says, “Well, I didn’t see that coming,” but it is easy to miss The Insignificant Detail.

Joe, in love with his best friend’s girl, another contract screenwriter named Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson), and beyond the limits of his patience with the drama queen Norma, finally blows up, tells Norma he’s through with her and storms out of the house to go reclaim his former life.

Norma follows him into the yard and fires a shot, which appears to hit him in the shoulder. The shot stuns Joe, and Holden does this fantastic little zombie three-step before the next two shots ring out, and this time both we and Joe know he’s been hit. His legs fold up under him just as he arrives at the edge of the swimming pool, and down he goes, face first into the drink where we first met him.

It was only on this last viewing, though, that I caught something for the very first time: Norma does not shoot Joe at anything close to point-blank range.

When she fires the first shot from the bottom of the steps, Norma’s a good 20 feet away from Joe, and she doesn’t move very far from that spot as the stunned but determined Joe continues to stumble away from her. By the time she fires the two coups de grâce, he is maybe 40 feet away.

OK, now this is a 50-year-old woman living in a fantasy world of her own fuzzy design, and as far as we know, the revolver itself is a recent development. We learn about it only in the previous sequence, during another desperate attempt at emotional blackmail, when Norma informs Joe that she has obtained a gun intending to use it on herself. We’re given no reason to believe that she has any prior experience with guns, and yet in the heat of a moment fraught with emotion, she goes three-for-three shooting Joe in the back as he’s walking away from her.

I’m not saying this is as unlikely as Oswald acting alone on the sixth floor of the book depository, but it’s a pretty impressive display of marksmanship from a presumed first-timer, a novice at the very least.

Try not to let it interfere with your enjoyment of the film, though. Norma Desmond’s sharpshooting is only the most minor of details in one of the greatest of motion pictures.

¹ That would be Some Like It Hot, of course.

² Pretty much every writer in Hollywood wakes up feeling like this every day.

³ And to those readers I say, “For hell’s sake, people, what are you waiting for?”

⁴ Mr. Wilder and his collaborators were good for a few of those. In this case, of course, it’s “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. De Mille.” The honor roll also includes “Nobody’s perfect” and “Shut up and deal.”

2009-05-20T18:57:00.002-07:00

THE BIG CHILL
The venerable British doyen of belles-lettres Sir Michael Philip Jagger once wrote, “You can’t always get what you want¹, but if you try sometimes, you might find you get what you need.”

Herein I will relate to you, in plain contemporary English less florid than that spoken in Sir Michael’s day, how exactly one goes about getting what one needs, whatever that might be. In my case, the basic modern necessity in question was air conditioning.

But first, the backstory:

Since I moved in mid-April, my new apartment complex’s management hasn’t gone out of its way to earn my undying (or even grudging) faith and appreciation. My initial impression is that the leasing agents and other staff are practitioners of the fine art of passing the buck, as if it’s more a modus operandi than an incidental impediment to effective property management.

From the very beginning, they have directed me to do a lot of legwork on their behalf, the sorts of things that I have taken for granted during previous moves, things that had already been taken care of by the time I signed my lease and picked up my keys.

To begin with, while attempting to verify my employment in this brave new 21st-century world, the leasing agents informed me that it would take the better part of a week to receive the necessary information from my employer using such archaic devices as telephones and fax machines. On a Friday afternoon, they asked me to contact my employer to ascertain for them the procedure and point of contact for verifying my employment, and when I called back the following Monday with the information they had requested, I was told that they already knew it and had begun processing my verification. Four days later, it finally occurred to them to suggest that the process might be expedited if I would bring them copies of my last six pay stubs, which of course contained all the information they required in the first place.

Their delay in verifying my employment begat a delay in their approving my lease, which begat a delay in my being able to contact Kansas City Power & Light to establish an account and to have the electricity turned on in the apartment. On this count, the leasing office never actually called to inform me that my lease had been approved, which news I was awaiting before I could contact KCP&L; instead they called me midafternoon the following Friday, the day I was to take possession, to ask if I had obtained the necessary confirmation number from KCP&L.

“Oh, yeah,” the girl said matter-of-factly, “you’re approved. But we’ll need that number as soon as you can get back to us with it.”

Because I was contacting them so late in the day, so late in the week, KCP&L informed me that they would not be able to turn on my electricity until Monday, meaning that I was taking possession of an apartment that I couldn’t actually move into for three days because I wouldn’t be able to see in the dark, operate any appliances or refrigerate any food.

Monday I arrived after work, expecting to move my stuff into the apartment, only to find that I still had no electricity and no light, and by which time the leasing office had closed for the day. Contacting the emergency maintenance number, I was informed by the on-call maintenance man that he was 40 minutes away and didn’t want to drive all the way into work just to flip a switch or to learn that KCP&L had not actually turned on the power yet. (In fairness, the latter turned out to be the case — KCP&L had turned on the power but hadn’t sent anyone out to activate my meter — but if I may: What the hell kind of property has an emergency, on-call maintenance tech who a) lives 40 minutes away and b) argues with the tenant experiencing said emergency? In the end, having thrown all my breaker switches to no avail, I decided I didn’t want to wait around for him after all, and spent the night at my parents’ house instead.)

So it’s Tuesday now, I’ve been paying rent for four days, and just now I’m beginning to move my meager belongings into the apartment for the privilege of sleeping on an air mattress on the floor.

The apartment now illuminated, I was finally able to walk from room to room, appraising conditions and filling out the itemized move-in checklist I’ve been holding onto. While I described my findings as explicitly as possible, most of the features and fixtures on the list rated an “OK” or an “N/A.” One notable exception was the air-conditioning unit, alongside which I noted simply in eye-grabbing block letters “DOES NOT WORK.”²

Apparently the move-in checklist just gets stuck in a file with your lease application and other paperwork, because after two weeks in the apartment, no one had made an effort to contact me about any of the possible trouble spots I had called to their attention. Most of it is not a big deal so long as, upon moving out, I don’t get billed for any damage not of my making. But the weather here has been warming up lately, and soon a working air conditioner would become non-negotiable.

So I filled out the maintenance request form they had given me with my paperwork (the one that still read “2008” next to the date line): “Air conditioner does not work. Please repair or replace.” I walked the form down to the leasing office on Saturday, May 2, so I could hand it in with my rent check.

The woman who seems to be in charge — in much the same way a baby with a razor blade seems to be shaving — looked over the form and asked, “Is this an emergency?”

“No. But the weather is warming up and pretty soon I’ll need air conditioning, so I just wanted to get my request on your radar.”

Apparently, she wasn’t even listening to me, because she countered with, “Because it’s the weekend and our maintenance staff is off, so it would be Monday or maybe Tuesday before anyone could get to this, unless it’s an emergency.”

“No. No emergency,” I repeated. “Anytime in the next week is fine, whenever you can get around to it.”

“Because if it’s an emergency, we’ll have to call someone in.”

I could feel my hand curling into a fist, which would have received the launch codes if she had said “emergency” just one more time, so I simply thanked her and excused myself from the office.

The following Monday morning she reached me at work to inform me that I would need to call KCP&L again. It seems that they had turned on the electricity to my apartment without turning on the electricity to my air-conditioning unit. (Who knew they were on separate grids?)

When I called, though, the utility’s customer service representative pulled up my account and assured me that all the power to my apartment had been turned on. And so, armed with this information, I threw all my breaker switches one evening, completely powering down the apartment and hoping against all hope that everything would power back up when I threw the switches on again.

Everything did.

Except for the air conditioner, that is.

So, in the brief but thorough letter I dropped off in the leasing office’s mail slot Sunday evening, I closed with: “I give up. Whatever is required to make my A/C unit fully operational will have to be performed by someone who knows the building, the A/C unit and the power coursing into both better than I do. … I appreciate your attention to this matter,” et cetera and so forth.

At 9:19 a.m. the following morning, my phone rang, indicating that the leasing office was calling. I picked it up expecting the caller to be the feckless, emergency-obsessed woman I’ve been dealing with all this time and that I’d have to explain to some degree the intent, content, context and/or subtext of my letter.

To my surprise, a man’s voice greeted me. He identified himself as an attorney for the complex’s new management group and, without demanding any explanation of my circumstances or who the hell I thought I was, proceeded to apologize in such a gracious, self-effacing manner that I almost asked him if he was shitting me about his being an attorney. He informed me that a couple of HVAC guys were on site that day, that they’d get right on my case, and that I should not hesitate in the future to contact the office with any issues or concerns I needed addressed.

Sure enough, when I returned home that evening, a couple of lights had been left on, and the air conditioner was filling my apartment with a pleasant arctic chill.

Being a writer is not without its benefits, not least of which is this: When I craft my correspondences, whether on paper or electronically, people tend to take me more seriously than I even take myself. Something about the written word wielded just so makes people nervous, skittish, even a little paranoid. I can’t explain it, but you’d better believe I’m going to exploit it.

Here, then, are a few simple tips to getting it in writing, getting the other guy’s attention, and getting what you need:

1. Make it look official. I have letterhead. Nothing flashy, nothing I paid some stationer a lot of money to emboss on 24 lb. linen stock — just a modestly designed block of text containing all my basic contact info in a clean, bold font that adds a little bit of visual interest atop a blank Word document and casts about me the aura of an entity as opposed to a mere individual.

2. Be direct. Be specific. Project intelligence. You don’t need a college education or a degree in journalism, but it helps if you can string sentences together coherently. (And a couple of well-placed five-dollar words help too, just to let them know you’re not some lummox from the sticks.) Failing that, enlist a friend who can write well to edit your letter for you, just enough so that it reads like you’re smart and you mean business. (Most of you already are. Most of you already do.)

3. Create your letter on a computer. Save it to your hard drive. I’ve always done this, but the reasons why it is perhaps the key to the whole process became clear to me only after I received the attorney’s call Monday morning:

More so than a handwritten note that you might dash off and slide under the door, a dated letter, word-processed and laser-printed, suggests ever so subtly, especially to the sorts of people who are paid to worry about such things, that a paper trail and a record of individual grievances exists. It also implies that the full extent of your correspondence can be reproduced at will with just a click of a mouse and delivered in triplicate to whomever might take an active interest — say, your own attorney, the local housing authority or the “Call for Action” reporter at the local TV station.

If, as a bonus, you deliver your letter in a sealed envelope (see letterhead entry, above), you create for the price of a few extra cents an aura of mystery and anticipation about what’s inside the envelope while they’re fumbling to open it and unfold its contents.

These three things combined create in the recipient’s mind the picture of a formidable individual who must be dealt with seriously or dismissed at one’s own peril.

Then again, it could just end up being you and the woman in the leasing office locked in a pissing match until your lease expires.

But I already like my odds in that battle of wits.

¹ Pronounced “wah-ahnt” in the original Middle English.

² Had there been more space been provided on the form, I would have described in more explicit detail the pervasive skankiness of the air conditioner, a motel-style wall unit encased in sheet metal so as to mask the generally disgusting condition of the machinery within. It’s dirty, greasy, infested with dust bunnies, and at some point I’m going to have to bite the bullet and get in there with some rubber gloves and industrial-strength cleaning products just to make it so I’m not afraid to reach in and operate the controls.

2009-05-02T21:16:00.002-07:00

PACQUIAO KOs HATTON IN TWO!
Wow.

I mean, wow.

All right, then. Let’s settle this once and for all:

Bring. On. Mayweather.

UPDATE, 5/10/09: Instantaneous.

That is to say, the instant Manny Pacquiao’s left hook impacted Ricky Hatton’s chin, at 2:52 of the second round, the night was over. Before the red leather of the Filipino’s Cleto Reyes glove withdrew even a millimeter from Hatton’s chin, before the Englishman even began his arc toward the canvas, his entire face had gone as pale and blank as a dry-erase board. His eyes were black slits — “dead eyes, like a doll’s eyes,” to borrow a line from Robert Shaw’s shark hunter Quint. It took the fine referee Kenny Bayless less than seven seconds to reach the fallen fighter and determine that he didn’t even need to start the count.

Observers had time to expect that left hook, the one Hatton never saw coming, thanks to the first two knockdown shots, which in and of themselves are almost too incredible to ponder. I mean, a guy like Ricky Hatton doesn’t just go down in the first round on any given night, and certainly not twice.

By sheer virtue of Pacquiao’s blinding hand speed and the camera angle that the HBO Sports director had called at that particular moment in time — not even a moment so much as a mere blip on the space-time continuum — his first knockdown of Hatton, a devastating right hook, resembled in real time nothing less than Muhammad Ali’s so-called “phantom punch” of 1965, the one that floored Charles “Sonny” Liston in Lewiston, Maine, of all places, and became arguably the greatest sports photograph of all time, the one that hangs on my wall thanks to my very good friend and fellow fight fan back west. (Other camera angles, however, left no room for doubt about the pinpoint accuracy of Manny’s right hook.)

The second knockdown, occurring at the end of the opening round, was an overwhelming assault. It was Pacquiao pushing Hatton down a flight of stairs, like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death.

It should be noted that, in the spaces and moments in between these three surgical strikes, Hatton wasn’t just standing around waiting to be hit. He was a man who came looking for a fight; he just didn’t anticipate the one he got. He consistently charged toward Pacquiao and threw punches that would have unspooled lesser fighters, but he just couldn’t land them. It wasn’t that Pacquiao was running away from him; Pacquiao just wasn’t there when the punch arrived, as if Hatton were trying to thread a moving needle.

Make no mistake: Ricky Hatton is not some tomato can. With his great flattened mug and pint-raising bonhomie, he is a working-class soccer hooligan from Manchester, England, built to brawl. If unpleasantness broke out in a pub anywhere in the world, Ricky Hatton is on my short list of guys I’d want at my flank, aside from which he’s one of the three or four greatest ever to enter the ring at 140 pounds. But I will tell you now that it has been a very long time since I’ve seen a porch light extinguished the way his was last Saturday night in Las Vegas. Hatton is not a pushover. God bless him, he is a fearless fighter who walked face first into boxing’s Perfect Storm.

I have now seen Manny Pacquiao dominate opponents in four different weight classes (to say nothing of the two divisions he conquered before I became aware of him). I believe that, if he ever settles down and makes a home in one of them — or even if he moves back and forth between two or three of them, always sizing up the most formidable opponents, the most interesting and lucrative fights — he stands a chance of becoming one of the greatest champions in the history of the sport. We can’t know now just how great that is, because he’s only 30 years old and shows no signs of being anywhere close to finished.

The self-aggrandizing loudmouth Floyd Mayweather Jr. spent the last few years of his prime avoiding the best fighters in the welterweight and junior welterweight divisions, then beat Oscar De La Hoya in 10 rounds, mainly by running away from him on a night when the Golden Boy rarely took a step backward. In the inevitable pound-for-pound showdown to come, Mayweather had better hope Pacquiao never catches him.

To Floyd Mayweather Sr., who trained Hatton for the Pacquiao fight, I have only this to say: If you are presently on speaking terms with your son, you’d better let him know there’s a propeller out there with his name on it.

2009-05-01T12:52:00.003-07:00

“NEITHER RAIN NOR SLEET NOR SNOW NOR
THE FAULTY WIRING AND FUZZY LOGIC
OF THE CUSTOMERS WE SERVE
SHALL STAY US FROM OUR APPOINTED ROUNDS”
The first thing I do every morning at work is weigh and sort the incoming mail, the preponderance of which is reporting paperwork submitted by hundreds of grocery stores, each envelope and its contents looking not much different from the next. I sort it according to regional divisions and file it in the mail slots of the administrative assistants assigned to those regions, after which it is out of my hands and I don’t really think about it much until 8 a.m. the following morning.

Every now and then, though, one distinguishes oneself from the rest of the pack.

For example, there’s a woman at one of the Kansas City stores who eschews address labels and instead transforms her plain white #10 envelopes into tedium-inspired works of art. We might receive a half-dozen or more from her on any given day, and each one will be addressed in different colors of felt-tip marker, the letters drawn in bold flourishes and embellished with outlines, polka dots, fattened endpoints, what-have-you. (One of our admins has even pinned a small exhibition of these minor works to the wall of her cubicle.)

That anonymous artist represents the high-water mark of the morning mail, though. More often, when someone pulls out the stops to make a name for oneself, it is one of the rabble who resides in the muddy shallows of intellectual achievement — like the people who wrap two layers of heavy-duty packing tape around the flap of an envelope, signaling, among other things, their naked distrust of modern advancements in mucilage.

Friday morning, one such undeveloped tadpole wriggled free from the primordial ooze in Wichita, Kansas, and staked so bold a claim on the mantle of workplace idiocy as to dare all others to strip him or her of the title.

Which is not to say that the achievement lacked imagination. No, it takes a mind unburdened by guile and conventional logic to devise a solution so far outside the box that even Plato, who first declared necessity to be the mother of invention, would likely respond, “OK, I didn’t see that one coming.” Behold:

For desperate want of a 9” x 12” envelope in which to mail a stack of paperwork about a quarter-inch thick, the anonymous office drone in question apparently dug through the trash and salvaged halves of two separate 9” x 12” (or perhaps 10” x 13”) envelopes — one a darker brown shade of manila, the other a brighter yellow shade — then stapled them together to enclose the aforementioned paperwork before applying a return-address label and printing the forwarding address on the makeshift “front,” applying postage, and sending the “envelope” on its way.

In point of fact, the two manila halves were stapled together on only three sides, so the result was more like a pita pocket than an envelope per se. Because the fourth side was unstapled, I checked to see if this master of innovation had perhaps stapled the whole package somewhere in the middle as a means of keeping the paperwork secured inside the “envelope.” Alas, he or she had not.

Also remarkable is that the U.S. Postal Service delivered the item exactly as it was originally posted. Ordinarily they might secure such an item in a clear plastic bag to ensure its safe delivery, particularly in the event it had been damaged in transit or handling. But in this instance, it’s as though the Postal Service wanted to let the item stand on its own merits, even as they disavowed any responsibility for its condition and disposition. (Time will tell whether all the original paperwork arrived safely at its destination, against all odds, like the animal protagonists in Homeward Bound.)

However one slices it, though, this is a personal achievement of jaw-dropping magnitude. In the annals of human endeavor, I’d say it ranks just ahead of the redneck inventor and marketing wiz who gave the world TruckNutz.

2009-04-29T10:06:00.001-07:00

DAY 100
It’s an arbitrary milepost that amounts to less than one-fifteenth of his first term, so right now there’s no way of knowing whether Barack Obama will go down in history as a great leader, a failed one or merely a mediocre one who didn’t quite attain all the lofty goals he set for his presidency.

Has it been a perfect 100 days? No. Have I agreed with everything the Obama administration has done so far? No. Has the business of the nation proceeded as smoothly as possible? Heavens, no. Do I occasionally question the wisdom behind some of the decisions made at the top? Of course.

I will say this, though: One hundred days isn’t quite enough time to get me past the night terrors of the last eight years, either, but I still feel a little surge of giddiness every time I hear the words “President Obama.”

Barack Obama is already the statesman America deserves, and though his detractors may still dismiss him as a “rock star” and a “fad” whose glamour will fade as soon as the going gets really tough, the fact remains that he has already improved our relations with our allies by the virtues of his intelligence, focus and charisma, and he has set the tone for improved relations with our antagonists and enemies by addressing and engaging them in the spirit and tone of actual diplomacy instead of cowboy bravado.

The greatest difference, however, may be the manner in which he addresses the American people. One of the things that most infuriated me about George W. Bush was his habit of squinting down over the podium after one of his pronouncements, a quizzical look on his face that read, “I can’t believe you people don’t unnerstan’ this.” (The subtext, of course, being, Why, hell, they just ’splained it to me a half-hour ago an’ it makes perfect sense to me now.)

Obama, on the other hand, seems to treat every question he is asked as though it is the most important one he’ll be asked all day. His responses are measured and thoughtful, and though he is at times long-winded, it is not the sort of circuitous rambling that was Sen. John Kerry’s liability during his 2004 presidential run. (I admire Kerry greatly, but listening to him respond to questions back then was often like watching Phil Mickelson putt: “Get there… Get there…”) Obama, by contrast, already knows where he’s going when he speaks, and he wants to take us with him. It is becoming almost a cliché at this point, a verbal tic that now belongs to Fred Armisen’s impersonation of the president on Saturday Night Live, but I find it invariably comforting to hear President Obama preface any remark with “Now let me be perfectly clear…”

One hundred days isn’t much time at all, but this much I already know: Barack Obama wants to govern, and he wants to lead. He doesn’t wield fear like a cudgel to keep us in line and the rest of the world at bay, but neither does he back down from telling Americans or anybody else what they need to hear. He’s the smartest guy in the room, and he’s surrounded himself with other smart people, starting with his vice president¹. He hasn’t embarrassed himself — or me — yet.² I haven’t for one moment regretted casting my vote for him. To those who say he’s taking on too much too soon, he seems to reply, “Well, that’s what you hired me to do, isn’t it?” He’s got big ideas and an honest-to-God vision for America, and if he fails, it won’t be for a lack of trying to achieve that vision.

Barack Obama has 1,361 days remaining in his first term, and I still like his odds.

¹ Laugh all you want, but God help me, I love Joe Biden.

² OK, that time I was talking about Obama, though.

2009-04-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

THANK GOD OBAMA’S IN THE WHITE HOUSE
One more reason I’m grateful for our new chief executive is that there’s now a real chance for a meaningful long-term payoff to a scene that is likely to play out at dinner tables across the nation tonight. It goes something like this:

“Dad/Mom, I had a lot of fun spending time with you today and following you around the office/warehouse/sales floor/abattoir, so I hope you won’t take it the wrong way when I say that, after watching you at work and learning more about what you do for a living, I’ve decided that I’d really like to pursue a career in the arts.”

2009-04-23T09:17:00.001-07:00

TAKE YOUR CHILDREN TO WORK DAY
It’s a terrific bonus to have a little youth and vitality in the ordinarily staid environs of the office workplace — it changes the tenor and tone of the building ever so slightly, relaxing the mood and putting people on their better (if not in fact their best) behavior.

But the truly depressing thing about today is seeing a shy, tentative 11-year-old girl, who stood by only once and watched me operate our enormous Canon ImageRunner 7086 — the tireless mechanical heart that incessantly pumps paper through the arteries and organs of this otherwise lifeless cadaver — return about a half-hour later and operate it fearlessly, without any help from me. Meanwhile, there are people who live in this office 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, who are sometimes puzzled by the simplest functions of the most common machinery.

I realize it’s specified in my job description that I am to know how these things operate, but c’mon, people — it’s a copy machine, not the NORAD missile-defense system. You needn’t imbue it with mythical powers; apparently it’s so simple, even a child can operate it.

2009-04-22T09:04:00.002-07:00

HENCE, THE DRINKING

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
— Dorothy Parker

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White’s essential primer on grammatical style turns 50 this year. Bourbon is timeless.

2009-04-18T14:00:00.001-07:00

LEATHER PANTS
Saw them today on an unlikely candidate in an unlikely locale. Wondering now if Duran Duran is launching a comeback bid.

Brown. Tastefully baggy and not (thank God) skin tight. Fashionably understated, casually complemented, but still a pretty bold statement for this neck of the suburbs.

File under “Things You’ll Never Find in My Closet.”

2009-04-17T19:42:00.004-07:00

A KANSAS ADDRESS, A NEW YORK STATE OF MIND
I signed the lease on a new apartment Friday evening.

From the initial impetus to make the move to the discovery online of said apartment to the signing of said lease, the whole thing happened pretty quickly — so quickly as to make one wonder whether one has leapt without first considering one’s trajectory and various angles of incidence. But there you have it.

Other factors sped the process along (I won’t bore you with them), but perhaps the biggest reason for this accelerated time frame is location, location, location. Call it not being able to see one’s own tree for the forest, but certainly I was seduced foremost by the notion of living in this particular forest for all the options and conveniences it places in immediate proximity to me. As suburban neighborhoods go, this one rates high for the quality I refer to as “New Yorkness” — that sense that everything you might need is just outside your door.

Just off the top of my head, I will be within walking distance of a coffeehouse, an arthouse movie theater, a post office, two barbershops, a liquor store, two sports bars, two Mexican restaurants, two pizza places, an Italian restaurant, a venerable Chinese restaurant, a barbecue dive, a donut shop, a farmers market (Wednesdays and Saturdays), a spice emporium, and a highfalutin dining establishment about which I have not yet formed an opinion. And that doesn’t even account for all the corporate giants — McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, QuikTrip, Walgreen’s, what-have-you — who ply their wares on the major thoroughfare a few blocks over.

For Adriane there’s a yarn shop and the frozen-custard stand she loves, the walking distance to and from which would justify (in our minds, at least) whatever caloric travesty we might perpetrate upon ourselves there, and the two swimming pools in my complex that formed the basis of her insistence that I must live there.

Time will tell whether I love the apartment itself even a tenth as much as the neighborhood that surrounds it. I won’t actually begin to sort out my feelings for it until Monday evening, however, as, for reasons beyond my control, my apartment will not have electricity until then. Upon receiving my keys Friday evening, I was unable to make even a cursory evaluation for the move-in checklist I am to return to the management, as my south-facing front windows didn’t let in enough sunlight to illuminate the rearmost reaches of the apartment. I had already seen it, of course; I just haven’t seen it yet.

Already I can attest that the kitchen is the size of a phone booth, and the apartment in general is lacking in storage. Both situations will require creative problem-solving on my part.

On the plus side, though, all the kitchen appliances (including a dishwasher, thankyouverymuch) appear quite new, and I’ll have a separate bedroom and living room for the first time in over a decade. Also, my building stands literally at the foot of the downtown water tower, so I’m hopeful that will translate to exceptional water pressure in the shower. (Having my own dedicated water heater will address the second half of that equation.)

Now begins the gradual process of moving out of my parents’ basement as many of my personal effects, archives and furnishings as my new fortress of solitude will hold. It will be a little like Christmas — opening boxes and discovering things I’ve all but forgotten I own. (For all I know we’ll find the Ark of the Covenant filed away down there.) And by this time next week, I hope to have established some semblance of a household, a power cave, a base of operations in the heart of my inviting, enticing, intriguing new environs.

I hope they prove to be worth the leap.

2009-04-03T07:10:00.001-07:00

GREATEST. ONLINE REVIEW. EVER.
Friday at work I was on Yahoo! Yellow Pages attempting to confirm the street address of a small-town grocery store to which I was sending a package. While doing so, I linked to a feedback page where I discovered the following review of the store from a disgruntled customer, identified as “Cindy M.”:

The Manager Debbie [last name redacted] is a Slut and has slept with my husband she should be fired. She has employed her son witch [sic] was charged for drugs. She is a whore… And should be fired. I am going to turn her in to her managers.

Posted 03/11/09

Was this review helpful to you? Yes / No

I’m assuming of course that “witch” was a misspelling of “which” (also used erroneously in place of “who”) and not an allegation of occult practices on the part of Debbie’s son’s, who — not to put too fine a point on it — would actually be considered a warlock.

2009-03-03T15:57:00.002-08:00

C’MERE, T.J., AND TAKE YOUR BITCH-SLAPPING
LIKE THE MAN I KNOW YOU ARE
T.J. Houshmandzadeh (pronounced just like it’s spelled) is a world-class wide receiver who is coming off his third consecutive season with 90 or more receptions. Perhaps more important, he has performed at this level while playing for the woeful Cincinnati Bengals and keeping his mouth shut while the team’s star receiver and insufferable blowhard, Chad “Ocho Cinco” Johnson, has strutted and preened and jabbered nonstop about how freaking great he is, when really? not so much.

I’ve always thought Houshmandzadeh was a better receiver and a class act who deserved to play somewhere outside of the shadow cast by the poor man’s Terrell Owens, so I was delighted when I learned that he signed with the Seattle Seahawks this week, after turning down the Bengals’ offer and dismissing the Minnesota Vikings because of their dodgy quarterback situation.

But then today I read this article, in which T.J. is quoted as saying, “I never had stress in my life — until this weekend. I was waking up in the middle of the night.”

Stress, T.J.? Really?

The economy is tanking. Every day another major corporation announces a new round of layoffs. Unemployment figures come out every Thursday, and they’re holding steady at over 650,000 claims a week. Those who do still have their jobs no longer have pension plans or 401(k)s worth the paper they’re printed on. People are getting foreclosed out of their homes, and homeowners who aren’t are learning that their homes aren’t worth as much now as they were three years ago.

But you, T.J., were stressed out this weekend because you were trying to decide whether to move to Seattle and let them pay you $40 million? (I, on the other hand, would be thrilled if someone in Seattle would offer me $40 thousand right now, but as of this writing, my calls aren’t being returned.)

All right, it’s tough-love time. Now I realize that, for the past half-dozen years or so, there isn’t a microphone in Cincinnati that actually made it to within a foot of your mouth because Chad kept jumping in front of them and pushing you out of the way. But now that you’re going to Seattle, you’re going to be a big deal there, and people are actually going to be interested in the words that are coming out of your mouth. So for the love of God, T.J., don’t get flustered and just say the first thing that pops into your head. Chad does that, and you know how we all hate his breathing guts.

Now stand still and brace yourself for your bitch-slap. It’ll only take a second, then we can go grab a beer together.

Of course, you’re buying the first round.

2009-03-01T18:54:00.002-08:00

WORST SPORTS BAR EVER?
A word of advice to the owners of a local sports pub from someone who’s spent time in a pub or two:

If, at 6 p.m. on a Sunday evening, you insist on three-fourths of your two dozen or more flat-screen satellite TVs being tuned to CBS’s 60 Minutes, at least turn down the Van Halen so we can hear Morley Safer’s interview segment with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Then again, perhaps the preceding paragraph is riddled with clues as to why there are only seven people dining and drinking in your sports pub, with its seating capacity of 211.

2009-02-22T09:35:00.003-08:00

OSCAR 2009: WHY SO SERIOUS?
or, What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?

I have mixed emotions about the year in film that was 2008. I witnessed some truly remarkable individual achievements this past year, but I’m having a hard time getting worked up about some of the films themselves. Does that mean that I arrived at some of my conclusions by default? Not necessarily. I think we’ll be watching and talking about some of these films and performances for years to come. I just wish there had somehow been… more.

Anyway, this is the ballot I’m casting in 2009:

Best Actor
Sean Penn, Milk
Frank Langella delivered a great performance but (I thought) a weak Nixon impersonation. Mickey Rourke gave a career-defining performance… as Mickey Rourke. And Sean Penn…

That was Sean Penn?

The best compliment I can pay any actor is that I forgot I was watching him or her while watching his or her performance. This is not the bombastic, overly emotive Penn who won his first Oscar for playing a man in Mystic River not much different than we perceive him to be offscreen. This is a Penn who disappears into the role of slain San Francisco district supervisor Harvey Milk. This is a man you want to throw your arms around. And when was the last time any of us felt the impulse to give Sean Penn a hug?

To further support my thesis, I direct you to hulu.com, where you can presently stream and watch the outstanding Oscar-winning 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. You will get a stronger sense not only of how precise Penn’s embodiment of Milk is but also of how meticulously Gus Van Sant’s production re-creates the Castro district of the 1970s.

Best Actress
Meryl Streep, Doubt
Admittedly, this is a category about which I am conflicted. Each of the performances is excellent in its own way, but I have trouble identifying a clear-cut winner among them (which in a way is its own reward and yet may also have more to do with the way films in general have underwhelmed me this year). I feel as though my leaning toward Meryl this year is a bit of a copout because — well, let’s face it — she’s Meryl freaking Streep. She’s the money. She’s the fallback position in any serious conversation about the great film actresses of our — or any — time.

Meryl does, however, play Sister Aloysius to the hilt, in a way that sort of makes me thank God I’m a Southern Baptist (although I’ve always carried with me a decidedly Catholic sense of guilt that would have made me a natural in Shanley’s Bronx). And because the movie in general shone a spotlight on the deficiencies of the stage production I saw (more about that to follow), the immutable fact of her Meryl Streepness is all the more difficult to discount this year.

Best Supporting Actor
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
It has nothing to do with Ledger’s tragic, unexpected death a year ago and everything to do with this: Perhaps more so than even Penn, Heath Ledger transformed himself so completely into a force of pure, nihilistic evil that I might not have recognized him even without the makeup and transformed the character itself into a creature that bears no resemblance even to Nicholson’s Joker. That this is the same actor who portrayed the taciturn cowboy Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain is a testament to what a remarkable talent was lost last year.

Best Supporting Actress
Viola Davis, Doubt
Wow! This category shouldn’t even be open to discussion except to say again, emphatically, Wow! In a single sequence that amounts to the most devastating nine minutes of drama I saw all year, Viola Davis walks into the middle of a production headlined by two of the finest actors of this generation and pretty much yanks the picture right out from under them. By the time she exited the screen, this remarkable actress left me dumbfounded, forcing me to sympathize with Mrs. Miller in ways that the stage production I saw utterly failed to inspire.

To quote no less than Meryl Streep herself, “Viola Davis: My God, somebody give her a movie.”

Best Original Screenplay
Wall-E, screenplay by Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon
story by Andrew Stanton & Pete Docter
The guys (and girls) at Pixar are — how shall I put this? — geniuses with hearts the size of watermelons. It’s not enough that they fill the screen with dazzling images. Before they animate a single frame, they make sure first and foremost that they’re telling a great story. Case in point: They once made me cry using nothing but Tom Hanks’ voice and some rough storyboard drawings. They’re that good.

This time out, the story can be boiled down to three questions:

1. Who among us hasn’t longed to hold the hand of the prettiest girl or handsomest boy we’ve ever laid eyes on?

2. To what lengths would we be willing to go just to make that happen?

3. What if Charlie Chaplin were a robot?

Boom — there’s your movie, right there. And it’s magical.

Wall-E also happens to be the first movie Adriane and I ever saw in a theater together. So Andrew, Pete, Jim — thank you for that. I hope you guys walk off with some more hardware tonight.

Best Adapted Screenplay
Slumdog Millionaire, screenplay by Simon Beaufoy
As happy as I’d be to see my idol John Patrick Shanley win an(other) Oscar to go along with his Tony and his Pulitzer and become Oscar’s second-greatest triple threat — trailing only Vice President Al Gore and his Nobel — I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Despite one dramatic detail I still have a small issue with, I’m casting my vote for Simon Beaufoy’s adaptation of the Vikas Swarup novel Q & A, because it plays so wonderfully as a fable, a Dickensian epic and a love story all rolled into one and it employs the best MacGuffin I’ve seen in a long time. It plunges the audience into the filth and muck of a world many of us can’t begin to imagine and pulls out a diamond, revealing to us such ecstatic joy and wonder as we never imagined could exist there.

Best Director
Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
You will read in the next entry why I believe Danny Boyle should win in this category. Instead I will use this space to posit that, if The Curious Case of Benjamin Button does reap a major award from its 13 nominations, it is most likely to come in this category.

With Benjamin Button, director David Fincher places his name in the same breath with which we utter the names Zemeckis and Cameron. As I wrote of Cameron in the run-up to Titanic’s big night, there are times when one is reminded that the category’s official title is “Best Achievement in Directing,” and Fincher’s balancing of cutting-edge technology and human drama here, I feel, is more impressive and fulfilling than Cameron’s. If Fincher’s film suffers, it is because (in this of all years) there is so little emotional payoff from a film that runs 2 hours 45 minutes. But a David Fincher film is never boring, and with Button he commands that he be regarded as seriously as any of the great technical artists who have preceded him.

Best Picture
Slumdog Millionaire
I didn’t trust my feelings, so I went back this past Thursday evening and watched Danny Boyle’s Mumbai slum fable one more time because I had to be sure. I’m accustomed to Best Picture winners that kick my guts out — films like Schindler’s List, Million Dollar Baby, Crash and No Country for Old Men. One would think that the Best Picture of 2008 should inflict the same kind of emotional distress, right?

Well, in Slumdog’s defense, I should point out that it tries to do just that: The film depicts enough poverty, squalor, crime, violence, torture, corruption and human cruelty to fill five films, and yet…

I left the theater exhilarated. Twice.

If only all movies were as alive as Slumdog Millionaire is. It is electric. It is delirious. It is breathtaking. It is precisely the film I anticipated after hearing an interview with Boyle on NPR. Often filmmakers sound a little pretentious and serious when they’re interviewed about their movies, but Boyle sounded like a kid on Christmas morning. At first I thought that maybe that lilting brogue of his just makes everything he talks about sound more fun, but that’s not it. This is a man who loves his job in ways that you and I never will, and you can feel that thrill in every frame of his movie.

What’s so bad about going to the movies to feel good? This year, absolutely nothing.

2009-02-16T09:22:00.004-08:00

1 VS. 178
I’d like to challenge all 178 House Republicans to a street fight. Not a metaphorical one, either. I’m talking about a bare-knuckled, bottle-smashing, bicycle chain-swinging, Bronson-style street fight. I’m talking about soccer hooliganism on an epic scale. I’m talking about Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.

I’m pretty sure I can take them, too.

You know how I know there are 178 of them?

Because they’re that much easier to count when there isn’t a single original thinker among them who’ll stand apart from the crowd. (They’re like the Redcoats that way, and you remember how we gave those guys the ass-kicking they so richly deserved at Yorktown.) Not one breathing soul among them has the stones to stand up to that feckless child John Boehner, whose idea of leadership is to band them all together like a cafeteria full of jealous, catty, bitchy little high-school girls who say mean things about the pretty new girl in the hopes that she’ll develop an eating disorder and transfer to another school.

That’s 177 people so desperate right now to matter to anyone — even if it’s only to the person who imposes his ineffectual leadership upon them — that not one of them will vote against the rest of them by daring to stand for something resembling an actual principle.

That’s 178 people who still behave as if they have a mandate, who still lead with their glass chins and their wounded egos, who still believe this is about winning, not governing. Even when they’re up against an insurmountable Democratic majority, they want to make it clear to the American public in general and Republican voters in particular that no matter what happens, they intend to stay the course. Their game plan will always be about winning instead of governing because, after all this time, it’s easier for them to identify enemies and opposing ideologies than it is to contribute to a solution or to let anyone else take the credit for progress. It’s about being so firmly entrenched in the house that you yourself set ablaze that you won’t accept the help of the fireman who comes to rescue you.

I’m not arguing that the stimulus plan is perfect, and I’m not saying that there aren’t Republican representatives who don’t have good and valid reasons for voting against the stimulus plan. I’m just saying, how can any one of those good, valid reasons be at all meaningful if it can be so easily trumped by the party’s lemminglike impulse to leap into the chasm en masse? How can any one of those representatives look like a visionary or a voice of reason if he’s going to ally himself with a bunch of people who will vote as one to save face instead of voting as 178 individuals interested in serving their constituents in their districts back home? How can any of those citizens believe their representative is looking out for them if he or she doesn’t distinguish him- or herself by truly representing them — and not his or her party’s unquenchable hubris — in the ongoing debate about our economic survival?

And that’s why I like the odds. That’s why me against 178 House Republicans is a mismatch like Uma against the Crazy 88s.

I’ll even let that pussy Boehner throw the first punch.

2009-02-12T14:30:00.000-08:00

EIGHT ARMS TO HOLD YOU
After seeing the graphic and disturbing images of media sensation Nadya Suleman’s pregnant belly, I’m afraid I still need some confirmation:

Are they saying she gave birth to octuplets or an octopus?

2009-02-05T19:36:00.001-08:00

ON THE CUFF
Wednesday after work I stopped off at my neighborhood tailor to pick up a pair of jeans and a pair of khakis I had left for alterations.

I like the cuffs on any non-dress pants tapered just so. I won’t bore you with the why, but my fashion neurosis dictates that the cuffs on my jeans are tapered an inch narrower still than the cuffs on my khakis. This was the second time I’ve dropped off one pair of each in this particular shop, and I generally suffer a moment’s terror when I’m giving the proprietors my instructions, because everyone there is apparently a first-generation Chinese-American, and I’m never entirely certain that they understand what I want. My fears are for naught, though, because they routinely do terrific work and don’t interpret my instructions backward.

So Wednesday the gentleman of the shop (there is also a lady of the shop and at least one young lady of the shop) came out, took my claim ticket and retrieved my pants from the rack. At the register he rang up my order, and with tax it came to $30.21. I handed him two twenties. He paused a moment with his hand at the drawer and looked up at me.

“You have quarter?”

I dug into my pockets and came up empty-handed.

“Sorry,” I said. “No change.”

I was expecting nine dollars and some coins back but he surprised me by handing me a ten. It took me a second for my mind to process the transaction and, finally getting it, I said, “Oh. Thank you.”

But instead of some self-effacing gesture of magnanimity, the tailor fixed one of those deadpan Asian gazes on me — you know the ones: it’s not the fish-eye exactly, but I can never tell if such a look is just typically ancient and inscrutable or if there really is some insult or threat lurking just beneath its surface — and said flatly, “Next time.”

Next time what?

If he was Italian, for example, or even just another Anglo like me, I might detect a certain lilt or inflection in his voice that would imply “don’t worry about it” or “no big deal.” Besides which, where I come from, if a guy’s got a cash register, that usually means he’s going to trump me in the change department.

But the gentleman’s delivery was so cold and direct, his demeanor so stony, that he might very well have been telling me, “You’d better have exact freaking change next time you come in here or so help me I’m gonna strangle you with your own pants and dump your body in the alley.”

It’s not like I throw a lot of business their way, but I have this curious feeling that the next time I walk in there I’m going to be greeted with, “Oh. You again. Before you say one damn word, give us our 21 cents, you deadbeat.”

2009-02-02T07:57:00.001-08:00

THE MINORITY OPINION
Tennis fans, can we please, please, please table all discussion about how Roger Federer is possibly the greatest tennis player of all time until he learns how to win a major on clay? I’ll even give him a bonus shout-out if he can finally beat Rafael Nadal to do it. Until then, my money’s on the Spaniard.

2009-01-20T00:18:00.001-08:00

DAY ONE
I am waking from an eight-year nightmare to a blinding dawn illuminated by hope.

I am overjoyed for all who thought they’d never live to see this day.

I extend my jealousy to every child who will grow up taking this day for granted.

I am filled with admiration for those who fought to make this day happen and those who fight still.

We were great once.

Time to be great again.

2009-01-03T16:02:00.002-08:00

THE CASE FOR DOUBT
Some people who, like me, were fortunate enough to see it performed on the stage have complained that the “opening-up” of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt for the screen has cluttered the story in a way that blunts the impact it delivered from the boards.

Because he has worked both in the theater and in Hollywood, Shanley understands better than most the precarious compromise between art and commerce. In the theater, the writer is king, but he doesn’t exactly get away with murder there. As Shanley himself noted recently, the economics of mounting a theater production are as much a factor in his writing plays for four or fewer characters as his talent for incisive, economical storytelling is. Certainly if money were no object, playwrights would indulge in the occasional dramatic extravagance.

In short, don’t be hatin’ just because producer Scott Rudin threw all those Hollywood dollars at Shanley and his play.¹

For one thing, today’s average filmgoer, sadly, has neither the attention span nor the appreciation for nuance that the best theater productions demand of their audiences. To make that distinction, one would first have to see a great (or even merely competent) production of the play before taking apart the film. To wit, I extend my jealousy to anyone who saw the great Cherry Jones play Sister Aloysius in her Tony Award-winning turn on Broadway.

That said, Meryl Streep ain’t exactly chopped liver. But her performance benefits somewhat from her interaction with a fully realized onscreen world, in which the addition of another seven or eight Sisters of Charity more effectively establishes Sister Aloysius atop a pecking order than does the mere fact of her relationship to young, impressionable Sister James.² With her Bronx accent and her red-ringed eyes that make her look a little like Emperor Palpatine under that bonnet, Streep transforms Sister Aloysius into a thug in a nun’s habit, one who doesn’t seem to have been called to service by God so much as having taken over her order like a neighborhood enforcer putting the squeeze on a Korean grocer.

Fighting out of the blue corner, Philip Seymour Hoffman continues to build his résumé as one of the most talented and intuitive actors of his generation. Hoffman looks very much like an overgrown boy with his thick build, fair hair and ruddy complexion. But he possesses a mastery of little subtleties and mannerisms that add 10 or 15 years to his Father Flynn right before your eyes. Bryan F. O’Byrne, who originated the role on Broadway, and Jonathan Cake, who appeared in the 2005 production I saw at the Pasadena Playhouse, are both tall, strapping, sinewy men, 40ish in appearance and possessing the physicality of street fighters, cast perhaps to appear capable of brawling with Shanley’s vision of Sister Aloysius.

Hoffman, on the other hand, possesses the lived-in look of a priest who took his vows years ago and has settled in to a sort of comfortable grace. That Hoffman has played his share of creeps over the years might make his Father Flynn immediately suspect in the audience’s mind, but here it’s his earnestness and humanity that shines through, and he invites our faith in him as much as he would his congregation’s. Because Flynn is both an authority figure and a man fighting to maintain that authority under challenge, that humanity is not only his calling card but also his primary defense against Sister Aloysius, whose gnawing distrust of Flynn quickly snowballs into an all-consuming certainty that he is engaged in evil. Hoffman plays Flynn not as a man throwing around the weight of his authority but as one appealing to a spirit of fairness and decency that no longer dwells in Sister Aloysius, if ever it did.

Whatever your assessment of the aforementioned opening-up of this adaptation, the best parts of Doubt are still those moments that occur between two characters in isolated confrontation. The rest may be window dressing, but it breathes life and realism into the story’s periphery rather than clutters or obstructs it. Admittedly, Shanley is a bit heavy-handed and theatrical (naturally) in his use of weather and other forces of nature to underscore the dramatic tension.³ More effective, however, is the Bronx neighborhood setting, the period dress and parked cars, the presence of children in classrooms and corridors, and congregants packed into church pews — the familiarity of which puts us at ease, a little off our guard, so that we squirm in our seats when Shanley begins to turn up the heat and tighten the screws in a scene.

In Doubt that skill is exemplified by the sequence in which Mrs. Miller, the mother of the parish’s only black student and altar boy, is summoned to meet with Sister Aloysius. Under the pretext of protecting her son, Donald, Sister Aloysius intends to enlist Mrs. Miller in her campaign against Father Flynn, whose curious interest in the boy is the plot point which drives the whole story forward. But as Mrs. Miller slowly builds her own case for protecting her son, a clash of wills transpires that brings new information to light and shifts the balance of power, such as it is, between the two women.

Dressed all in muted beige, Mrs. Miller is as austere in her own dress as Sister Aloysius is in her black habit. Viola Davis is a larger woman than Streep, but she appears small in her camel-hair coat, as if she’s willing herself to disappear inside it. Mrs. Miller is a woman accustomed to being pushed around, but here she pushes back, asserting her position in a way that is at once shocking and heartbreaking, steering the argument away from morality to matters of human nature, which ground Sister Aloysius is not prepared to defend.

It is but one scene in a movie conspicuously headlined by two great actors, but if Doubt wins only one Oscar this year, it will belong to Viola Davis. I defy you to show me the woman who is going to wrest the Best Supporting Actress statuette away from her.

Prior to seeing the film, I read the play for the first time since I saw it performed and also re-read what I wrote about the play in April 2005. Interestingly, though I was aware then that Shanley had written much more between the lines, I viewed the play as more of a straightforward observation of Catholic faith (and Christian faith in general) and of the child-molestation controversy in the Church that is still not fully illuminated or resolved. Whether it was a shortcoming of the production I saw or the limitations of my own initial impression, I cannot say.

I’m fascinated to note, though, that I described Mrs. Muller⁴ then as “a dangerously negligent mother,” because I have come away from the film — and Davis’ performance in particular — with a much more complicated and sympathetic opinion of her that informs my impression of the story as a whole.

Whatever knowledge or hindsight you take with you into the theater, I challenge you to check your preconceptions and convictions at the door, table them even as the evidence is being presented, and leave yourself open to the possibilities presented by doubt.

¹ While he has a reputation for being something of a tyrant, it should be noted that Rudin is the closest thing Hollywood has to a patron saint of literature. His book-to-screen batting average is excellent, not merely from the standpoint of profitability but also in terms of protecting the integrity of the source material — Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men being but two notable examples.

² Even a small measure of such interaction would have strengthened the otherwise decent production I saw at the Pasadena Playhouse, in which Academy Award winner Linda Hunt’s Sister Aloysius seemed a little dotty, more cantankerous than draconian.

³ The subtitle of Shanley’s play, after all, is “A Parable,” which accounts both for the theatricality of those effects and for the story’s overall subtext: To wit, filmgoers are invited to consider, among other things, the absolute conviction with which certain authority figures were conducting domestic and foreign policy as the play was opening in 2004. Yes, Virginia, it’s more than just a cautionary tale about Catholic priests.

⁴ Though they are African-American in both presentations, the “Mullers” of the play are named “Miller” in the film. I don’t know the reason for this seemingly minor change.