Hollywood Has Left L.A.

The past decade has been tough on Hollywood — both the industry and the place. L.A. has endured a parade of black-swan catastrophes that have repeatedly upended its signature business, including fires, strikes, COVID, the decline of movie theaters and linear TV, and streaming’s boom and bust. Taken together, these disasters have triggered something like an identity crisis. If you call up a couple dozen executives, agents, directors, producers, writers, actors, and below-the-line artists and ask about the scene on the ground right now, they’ll describe a city detached from its old rhythms and sense of purpose. Today’s L.A., a few say, feels more like a Rust Belt crater than the glamorous capital of the world’s entertainment. “It’s so grim, like a sad company town where the mill is closing,” says one executive. “It’s morose, and everybody’s scared,” says the actor and director Mark Duplass. “It’s a bummer to live here now,” says a writer.

Pieces of the business still hum along in the city, albeit more quietly than they used to. Executives and agents are back in the office, at least the ones who weren’t laid off. Pitching and deal-making continue, though much of that now happens over Zoom. But production — the physical process of turning script pages into movies and TV shows — has largely left town. What began years ago as a trickle has suddenly become an exodus. Today, only about a fifth of American movies and shows are filmed in L.A. (...)

As the labor of making movies and shows splinters across far-flung cities and countries, Hollywood has become dislodged from its physical home. Some of these new hubs may suit the needs of individual projects, but none of them offers what L.A. did for most of the past century: a stable gravitational center where crews can make a living and the craft can be passed down. This isn’t just a logistical reorganization; it’s an existential shift, and there may be no going back. “The nucleus that Hollywood grew out of is dying,” says Jonathan Nolan, the writer-director whose work includes Person of Interest, Westworld, and Fallout. “I don’t think Hollywood the industry has much to do with Hollywood the place anymore,” says Lowe.

One reason L.A. even became a city at all is because it was a great place to make movies. (It helped that it was far enough from New Jersey to escape the enforcement of Thomas Edison’s patents on motion-picture cameras and projectors.) The weather allowed for year-round outdoor shooting, attracting the industry’s best filmmakers, actors, and crews. This created a self-reinforcing bubble in which the top talent was all concentrated in the same place; this, in turn, supported an informal apprenticeship system under which younger crew members learned on the job, providing a steady influx of skilled labor. For a long time, there was usually no good reason to shoot anywhere else.

Then, in the 1990s, British Columbia hatched a plan to bring some of that action north. The Canadian provincial government introduced one of the world’s first film tax credits — a financial incentive meant to lure foreign productions — offering a modest rebate on money spent employing local crews. It worked, and many U.S. states took notice. In the early aughts, Louisiana and New Mexico rolled out flashy credits of their own, transforming New Orleans and Albuquerque into viable production hubs.

A short while later, streaming boomed, and the demand for scripted entertainment exploded. With more production in play, regions around the world began ramping up their incentives, and many built soundstages and crew bases that could compete with those in L.A. What followed was a global bakeoff for Hollywood’s business. Canada, the U.K., and Australia enhanced their already aggressive tax credits, often made even more appealing by favorable exchange rates. Many U.S. states, including Georgia and New York, followed. Before long, most of the country, and dozens of countries beyond, were offering some version of a production subsidy.

These incentives can be shockingly generous. Today, producers can shoot in certain locations and receive back 30 to 40 percent of a project’s budget with local taxpayers footing the bill. Unlike traditional tax breaks, which merely reduce what a company owes, these credits often amount to direct cash payments, issued regardless of whether the production generates significant tax revenue in return. New York State, for example, offers a 30 percent base tax credit with a 10 percent bonus for projects made upstate. Last year, New York tax dollars helped subsidize TV shows including HBO’s The Gilded Age (which received $52 million from state coffers), Prime Video’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel ($46 million), and Apple TV+’s Severance ($39 million). An Albany-funded audit of New York’s film tax credit, published last year, determined that the incentive is probably a net loss for the state, returning as little as 15 cents in direct tax revenue for every dollar spent. Regardless, in May, New York added an additional $100 million for independent films, bringing the state’s total film subsidies to $800 million.

Meanwhile, California mostly sat on its hands, assuming its long-standing monopoly on talent and infrastructure would be enough to keep Hollywood anchored. Subsidizing an industry already based there was a tougher political sell, but the state introduced its own incentive program in 2009 and has sweetened it since. Unfortunately, while the credit may sound generous, in practice it’s miserly to the point of uselessness.

by Lane Brown, Vulture |  Read more:

Image: Alvaro Dominguez

The Last Good Thing

On a late-winter Chicago day that was more gray than cold, I retrieved a binder from a neighbor’s front porch. The binder was fat and unexpectedly heavy, and I had the deranged thought that it might be filled with sand, but it wasn’t filled with sand. It was filled with 92 DVDs. DVDs can seem heavy if you haven’t held them in a while.

I had not been on the lookout for DVDs, and until I became aware of this binder, I had no special attachment to DVDs of any sort. There was no box of Criterion Collection masterpieces lugged from apartment to apartment since my college days. I certainly did not long for the color-coded cables that always had to be untangled and reconnected to the DVD player my husband weirdly couldn’t bring himself to throw away, nor did I miss hunting for the special remote that only ever made an appearance when I was looking for the regular one. Society had moved past DVDs, and frankly, so had I.

Still, the second I saw the binder—containing “practically every major kid’s cartoon movie from the last 20 years on DVD”—appear on my local Free Box Facebook group (where my neighbors give away everything from original artwork to half-empty bottles of shampoo), I wanted it deeply, covetously, like when you see someone wearing a wool sweater that is so entirely your style, you can’t believe it isn’t already yours. Ninety-two disks! Without a moment’s hesitation, I typed, “Interested!” and pressed return. And the next day, I stood awkwardly on my neighbor’s porch to collect my prize.

At this point, I still assumed my excitement about the DVDs had primarily to do with thriftiness, or perhaps a kind of rugged self-reliance. I still assumed their appeal came not from what they could offer me but from what they could free me of, namely going along with the ever-more-expensive whims of Disney+ executives.

In other words, I considered a binder containing 92 DVDs to be the children’s media equivalent of F*** You Money—Take that streaming bill and shove it!—and not, say, something to build my identity as a parent around.

Obviously.

That evening, while my husband sautéed asparagus on the stovetop and my children squabbled over whether to watch Peppa Pig on Amazon Prime or All Engines Go on Netflix, I announced to my family that we were quitting our streaming services and going analog.

“Well, more analog,” I said, suddenly unsure. “Digital analog. Is that a thing?” I sensed that it might not be, but also that this wasn’t particularly important. What was important was that our viewing habits were moving back in time to an era when watching television didn’t require keeping a credit card on file with five different companies.

Then I inhaled sharply, cringing the way one does while uncorking a particularly volatile bottle of champagne. Ditching streaming would be no great struggle for me, someone who watches about as much television as your typical giant Pacific octopus. But the rest of them?

To my surprise, the anticipated shrieks of displeasure never came. My children, whose ears shut down at six p.m. though their bodies keep kicking until eight, wouldn’t even register the change until the end of the month, when our Netflix account finally ran out of gas. At that point they would look at me as though I’d shredded a sacred contract formed between them and the universe. I would, in turn, cheerfully remind them about the DVDs.

“That’s right,” I would say. “They are very shiny. No, stop—you can’t touch them! They scratch.”

Even my husband merely nodded and flipped the asparagus. I could only assume that he was deep in thought, considering the transformative possibilities of spending less time watching television. The two of us have always shared some private dismay about not being altogether more impressive people—Times obit–worthy, ideally, but at the very least, people who exercise more often. Besides, it went without saying that I would not be canceling YouTube Premium, which is where my husband watches sports highlights. In my quest to become a thriftier parent, I had no desire to become a single parent.

An honest account of the binder’s out-of-nowhere appeal should also include observing how neatly DVDs’ technological primacy aligns with my own “reminiscence bump.” This is what psychologists call the increased salience for the autobiographical memories we form between the ages of approximately 10 and 30. For the rest of our lives, although what came before and after will predictably recede, the events of those 20 years will maintain their privileged place in our minds. Researchers aren’t entirely sure why this is. Some suspect novelty: New things are inherently more memorable, and this is a time of new things. Others chalk it up to the sheer number of culturally significant milestones that happen during our teens and 20s, from first kisses and summer jobs and driver’s licenses to weddings and college graduations and—well, more common until recently—first homes. Another theory focuses on storytelling: As we come of age, the places we go and the music we listen to and the people we bond with become the settings and soundtracks and characters for the stories we tell ourselves about the people we are becoming, stories that we’ll carry all our lives.

If these theories sound similar, it’s because they’re all trying to explain the same phenomenon: why our formative years are so very formative. They are all trying to explain why some part of a reasonably well-adjusted, middle-aged woman with a husband and two kids will always be a teenager with spiky hair, trying desperately to convince herself that she likes watching low-budget horror movies.

Low-budget horror movies on DVD, that is. In 1997, when the disks first hit American shelves, I was just 13; by the time revenue from streaming eventually eclipsed that from DVDs (and their higher-definition Blu-Ray cousins), I had already left my 20s behind. Which means that for me, the pinnacle of home entertainment is and will always be synonymous with a fat binder of DVDs.

For a few weeks, quitting our streaming services and embracing DVDs indeed seemed like a sacrifice. Quickly, though, the experiment morphed into something quite different. I found myself proselytizing about the Way of the DVD. They’re so cheap, I’d say to another parent at pre-K pickup. People are literally giving them away. Go to a garage sale of any size and there you go: more DVDs for the collection.

It’s nice to really own a thing, I’d say to a colleague with children of her own. It’s nice not to worry something will go poof in the night.

It’s great for the kids to have choices but not too many choices, I’d say to anyone still listening. It’s great when what they want to watch is in the binder, and it’s great when it isn’t and they have to decide whether they want to purchase How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World with their tooth-fairy money (both of my kids were in highly productive tooth-losing phases) or wait for a free disk to arrive at the library. Because when everything can be yours just like that, is anything even real?

It’s good for movies to be real, I’d say. Treat them badly—roll them down the stairs or throw them like frisbees or wear them because it’s fun to pretend to have large, glassy robot eyes—and they will scratch. Natural consequences! It’s good for there to be natural consequences. (...)

Unlike VHS tapes, DVDs encode data digitally, allowing for higher video resolution and superior audio quality. DVDs also store more data, and they store the information more efficiently. This is what frees up space for the bells and whistles: dubbed audio tracks and subtitles, director’s cuts and deleted scenes. DVDs are read by laser; so long as they aren’t used as coasters or hockey pucks, they shouldn’t wear or tear at all. On a commercial DVD, even the most determined fool cannot accidentally tape over a favorite movie. And remember the days before opening menus, when you stood by the television and pressed “REW” on the VCR until the members of your family screamed that you’d gone too far, in which case you’d press “FF” until they screamed again? DVDs have menus, and when they arrived, America let out a collective, “Hell yeah.”

But VHS, the technology that DVDs supplanted, was the truly transformative one. VHS was what let us all own movies in the first place, to watch whenever we wanted to. Or was it color television that transformed home entertainment? The rise of network programming? That very first public broadcast? It hardly matters. By the time DVDs came along, the latest crest among so many waves of progress, it seemed inevitable that they would be good, and that the technology that eventually replaced them would be even better.

A lot of things seemed inevitable then.

I grew up, after all, when the growing up was good. The Berlin Wall was coming down, and the world was opening up. The economy was strong and college attendance was on the rise and Americans were more optimistic that children would live better lives than their parents. There were problems, sure, but they were problems that would resolve themselves in time, as a new, more enlightened generation took the helm. I grew up when time itself seemed on my side.

I watched social media connect us, and then I watched it detonate us into a billion tiny factions. I watched smartphones liberate us, and then I watched them capture us all over again. Now I see artificial intelligence on the horizon, and even as I am awestruck by its potential, I shudder.

“When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” said the philosopher Paul Virilio. Here’s the thing: I grew up when it still felt possible that we could invent the ship and then put our heads together to avoid the shipwreck. In the world bequeathed to my children, it can seem like there is no avoiding the wreck. And in this world, in this widening gyre of uncertain outcomes and frictionless gratification, DVDs are shiny and real and the same shape as life preservers. DVDs are the last unambiguously good thing: the last technology that arrived and only made things better and would never ever let us down.

by Jess Love, The American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: Gracia Lamb

John & Yoko: One to One

A fire alert disrupts the Venice screening of One to One: John & Yoko, Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ documentary about Lennon’s rambunctious post-Beatles heyday, when he and his artist wife Ono were first putting down roots in New York. Inside the hushed screening room, the flashing red lights and blaring alarm provide the second big surprise of the night. The first was how much I was enjoying the show.

Short of a documentary that unearths incontrovertible new evidence that he faked his own death, I’m not convinced that the world needs another John Lennon film. The medium, surely, has him well covered already. But Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have managed to find and mine a rich source of material, tightly tucked away amid all the other wildcat wells. Their film turns back the clock to the early 1970s and a benefit gig that occurred around the time of Lennon’s deportation battle with Nixon (see previous documentaries for details) and his extended lost weekend with May Pang (ditto). Crucially, too, it throws this concert against the maelstrom of the US political scene, with a channel-surfing aesthetic that skips from car and Coke commercials to the Attica prison riot and the near-fatal shooting of Alabama governor George Wallace.

While Lennon claims that he spent his first year in New York mostly watching TV, One to One suggests otherwise. Instead he hit the ground running, hurling himself at the action to become the standard bearer and figurehead for whatever progressive leftist cause was doing the rounds that week. The film blends archive footage with a trove of previously unheard phone conversations to show the ways in which he and Ono leveraged their celebrity status and surrounded themselves with a crew of colourful upstarts, from Allen Ginsberg to Jerry Rubin. The oddest of these, perhaps, is the activist AJ Weberman, who is tasked with a mission to raid Bob Dylan’s bins in order to prove what a “multimillionaire hypocrite” the singer has become. Ono pleads with Weberman to apologise, explaining that they need Dylan to perform at a planned “Free the People” concert in Miami, but AJ is unrepentant and initially won’t be budged.

In the event, the Free the People event was cancelled. But Lennon promptly finds a new focus with the One to One benefit for disabled children from the Willowbrook state school. Macdonald and Rice-Edwards have remastered Phil Spector’s muddy original recording so that the footage now plays with a fresh, bullish swagger. This was Lennon’s first full-length concert since the Beatles performed at Candlestick Park and, it transpired, the last he would ever play.

If only more nostalgic music documentaries could muster such a fun, fierce and full-blooded take on old, familiar material. One to One, against the odds, makes Lennon feel somehow vital again. It catches him like a butterfly at arguably his most interesting period, when he felt liberated and unfettered and was living “like a student” in a two-room loft in Greenwich Village. He’s radioactive with charisma, tilting at windmills and kicking out sparks. 

by Xan Brooks, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: One to One/YT

[ed. Haven't seen this yet, but the link above about May Pang and her relationship with John was fascinating. Didn't know Yoko set them up to take pressure off of John's straying, and that, after a couple years (and an alleged affair of her own), became jealous and reeled him back in.]

Favorite Rob Reiner Credits

When Rob Reiner was killed earlier this week, along with his wife and creative partner Michelle, the world of film lost one of its most beloved and respected figures, an artist who had done very good and extremely popular work in a variety of genres, first in front of the camera, then behind it as a writer, producer, and director, and then again in his later life as an actor. All the while, Reiner maintained a spotless reputation as a mensch, in an industry with vanishingly few of those. He was one of the most sophisticated and successful political activists in California, and his work (and money) helped pass the state's groundbreaking marriage equality law. Few filmmakers have had as vast or varied an impact on American life over the last 50 years, which is something that Reiner would surely have found very funny. Here are some of Reiner's films and roles that we love:

Stand By Me

Stand By Me is probably the purest chunk of schmaltz in Rob Reiner's generational early-career run. The movie is oozing with sentiment, factory-designed to squeeze profundity out of every otherwise mundane childhood interaction, and some not so mundane. It pulls out every trouble-at-home cliché to make you root for the kids and add dramatic heft. Richard Dreyfuss's narration should come with an insulin pump.

And yet it works! It works. You root for the kids, and you identify with them; you laugh when you're meant to laugh and cry when you're supposed to; and yes, through the sheen of memory, all those moments with your own childhood pals take on a patina that preserves them as something meaningful. It's distilled nostalgia, which in moviemaking is much easier to fuck up than to get right.

Weapons-grade middlebrow competence was Reiner's strength. That's a compliment, to be clear, especially as Hollywood has come to devalue that skillset and the type of work it produced. He was visually unflashy, almost to an extent that it became his signature as a director. I'm not sure what a Rob Reiner film "looks like." He mostly picked great scripts, made his visual and storytelling choices, and got out of the way to let his actors cook. In Stand By Me, his first crucial decision was to give the movie a main character; the novella focuses on all four boys equally. The second was the casting. Reiner reportedly auditioned more than 300 kids, and got all four exactly right. A Mount Rushmore of child actors could credibly just be the four boys from this film.

It can be easy and is tempting to think of a movie as something that just sort of happens, and succeeds and fails for ineffable reasons, but it's really just a collection of a million different choices being made—most of the big ones by the director—and any one of which, if misguided, could torpedo the whole thing. Stand By Me doesn't work if the kids don't work. For its flaws, every choice that Reiner needed to nail in this movie, he nailed. You can more or less say the same for his entire first 12 years of directing. His hit rate was a miracle—no, not a miracle, that denies agency. It is the collective work of a real-deal genius.  (...)

- Barry Petchesky

When Harry Met Sally

It’s like 90 minutes, and all of them are perfect. Harry and Sally might suffer for their neuroses, but the greatest gift a director can give an audience is a film whose every detail was obsessed over. New York, warm and orange, has never looked better. Carrie Fisher says her lines the only way they could ever sound: You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right. I want you to know that I will never want that wagon wheel coffee table.

That a film so brisk can feel so lived-in owes to Nora Ephron’s screenplay and also to Reiner’s neat choices, like the split-screen that makes it look like Harry and Sally are watching Casablanca in the same bed, an effect dialed up later in a continuously shot four-way phone call scene that took 60 tries to get right. Every time I watch When Harry Met Sally, I think it must have been impossible to make; the coziness of the movie is cut with something sad and mischievous and hard to describe. Estelle Reiner’s deadpan line reading at Katz’s Deli is a classic, and every family Pictionary night in our house began with someone guessing “baby fish mouth,” but the bit that came to mind first was this scene set at a Giants game: Harry tells Jess about his wife’s affair between rounds of the wave.

- Maitreyi Anantharaman

Michael "Meathead" Stivic in All In The Family

Rob Reiner was proof that every once in a rare while, nepotism is a great idea. Of all the lessons he could glean from his father Carl, one of this nation's undisputed comedic geniuses, he put nearly all of them to best use over his voluminous IMDB page.

The credit that Reiner broke out with was the one that seemed with hindsight to be the least consequential of them all—his straight man/son-in-law/earnest doofus role in the Norman Lear sitcom All In The Family. The show, which for several years was the nation's defining situation comedy, ran through the risible but weirdly prescient venom of Carroll O'Connor's towering performance, and positioned Reiner as the stereotypically liberal son-in-law and foil for O'Connor's cardboard conservative Archie Bunker. Reiner helped frame the show, while mostly serving up setups for O'Connor. He played the part well, but it was not an especially dignified one. I mean, his character's name was Mike Stivic, but he became known universally as "Meathead" because Bunker only referred to him as such. Reiner learned from his father's years with Mel Brooks how to be that acquiescent foil, and if his work in that part did not make him a recognized comedian except to those folks who knew how comedy actually works, it indisputably gave him an eight-year advanced education on all the things required to make funny. Those studies would serve him well in his director's chair. His gift was not in being the funny, but in building sturdy and elegant setups for the funny, and there has never been a good comedy movie without that. The Princess Bride doesn't work for 10 minutes without Cary Elwes, and Elwes's performance wouldn't work if his director did not repeatedly put him in position to succeed.

Maybe Reiner would not have gotten the AITF gig without being his father's son—Richard Dreyfuss also wanted the role and Harrison Ford turned it down, for what that may be worth—but sometimes nepotism works for those outside the family. Reiner wrote three of the 174 episodes in which he appeared; he learned to thrive behind and off to the side of the camera. It all counted, it all contributed, and every credit Reiner is credited with here owes some of its shine to that television show, which in turn owes its existence to The Dick Van Dyke Show and his father and Mel Brooks's work with The 2000-Year-Old Man and Your Show Of Shows. That takes us back 75 years, into the earliest days of the medium, which may as well be the entire history of American comedy. Every giant stood on the shoulders of another, and that giant did the same. It is all of a piece, and IMDB would be half as large a quarter as useful without them, and him. 

- Ray Ratto

This Is Spinal Tap

In a particularly on-brand bit of trivia, I first became aware of This Is Spinal Tap through Guitar Hero II. The titular band’s hit “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” was downloadable content for that game, and I spent hours trying to perfect it before I ever thought about watching the movie it hailed from. I did eventually do it, and I remember exactly where I was—in Venezuela in the summer of 2007, traveling around for the Copa América—because Spinal Tap is a near-flawless movie, and one that seared itself into my brain. I can’t recall with certainty, but I’m pretty sure that this is when I first became aware of Rob Reiner—I knew his dad from Ocean’s Eleven, another perfect movie—and Spinal Tap is such a stunning collection of talent that it’s hard to pick out a favorite role or MVP. Here’s the thing about that, though: The best and most important performance in the film might be from Reiner himself, because the movie doesn’t work as well as it does without him.

On the one hand, this is obvious; he directed the movie and co-wrote it, so his fingerprints are quite naturally all over it. And yet, in a movie full of massive characters and comedians perfectly suited for those roles, Reiner’s performance as the flabbergasted documentarian is what makes the whole thing hang together. Reiner was a comedic genius in his own right, but I think the thing I appreciate most about Spinal Tap whenever I watch it is how much he understands about his cast’s strengths and how much he allows himself to recede into the background while still working to guide the jokes to their best conclusions. Every great comedy needs a straight man, and Reiner’s Marty DiBergi is certainly that, but the movie is so funny, and Reiner is such a welcome presence on screen, that even DiBergi gets to be effortlessly hilarious. He does this, for the most part, just by playing an ostensibly normal person and turning that all up to, well, 11.

Let’s take what I consider one of the most iconic comedic scenes of all time, and certainly the one that I have quoted the most in my life: “It’s one louder.”

Christopher Guest is perfect in this scene, unsurprisingly; his Nigel Tufnel is an idiot, and the movie gets a lot of humor out of that fact throughout, and especially here. However, Reiner’s plain-spoken incredulity over the idiocy is what really elevates the scene to me. You can feel his character grappling with this concept throughout: First with a plain-spoken revelation (“Oh I see, and most of the amps go to 10”), but then he comes in with the setup: “Why don’t you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder?” Every single time I watch this scene, the pause before Guest goes “These go to eleven” makes me giggle in anticipation.

Spinal Tap is hilarious in its own right, and also birthed the mockumentary genre; it’s crazy to think about all of the things that the movie directly influenced, from Guest’s own filmmaking work (shout out Best In Show), to Drop Dead Gorgeous, on through Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. God, I love that last one, and so many things that work in Popstar are directly traceable to the work Reiner did on Spinal Tap. (Spinal Tap also birthed a sequel just this year; I haven’t watched it yet, mainly because of how much I love the original and don’t need more from this stupid British band, but I am relieved to report that I’ve heard it’s a fine enough time at the movies.)

That This Is Spinal Tap was Reiner’s directorial debut only adds to the absurdity. Who produces not just a masterpiece, but such an utterly distinctive piece of work in their first real attempt? The answer, really, is that Reiner was a master, and he would go on to prove that over a historic run over the next decade, making Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Misery, and A Few Good Men in just eight years. Ridiculous. This Is Spinal Tap is my favorite of all of those, though, and one of the most rewatchable movies ever made. Hell, as I’m writing this, I just remembered the scene where Reiner reads the band some reviews (“The review you had on Shark Sandwich, which was merely a two-word review just said … Shit Sandwich”) which is also among the funniest things put to film. The whole movie is strewn with gems like that. What a gift.

- Luis Paez-Pumar

by Defector Staff, Defector |  Read more:
Images: Andy Schwartz/Fotos International/Getty Images; Harry Met Sally, Spinal Tap (YouTube).]

[ed. See also: As You Wish: Rob Reiner (1947-2025). Ebert.com]

Scenes from the “This Is Spinal Tap” Cutting-Room Floor

In 1982, I began shooting an almost entirely improvised film,“This Is Spinal Tap,” which also happened to be my first as a director. It transformed my life and the lives of my three friends, co-writers, and co-stars: Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer.

We also decided that it was time to tell the full story of the making of the original “This Is Spinal Tap.” What you are about to read is a short excerpt from that account.

Early on in editing “This Is Spinal Tap,” it became obvious that some of the film’s plotlines would have to be thrown out altogether. For example, Spinal Tap initially had an opening act, a New Wave band called the Dose. The guys are against having the Dose tour with them. They feel that the group’s punky music isn’t a good fit with heavy metal. But then, during a sound check, they catch sight of the Dose’s lead singer, Stellazine, played by Cherie Currie, the former lead singer of the Runaways—a beautiful, sexy, young blonde in a skintight, metallic-blue catsuit.

After a deliberation of about an eighth of a second, the band does a one-eighty and insists to Ian (Tony Hendra) that it’s critical the Dose be their opening act for the entire length of the tour. Ian obliges and books the band. But there’s a problem: Stellazine is what one might deem a “free spirit.” After a scene in which Nigel (Guest) is seen making time with her, he turns up with a herpes sore on his lip. Next, we see David (McKean) pairing up with Stellazine, after which he, too, sports a herpes sore. Stellazine then hangs out with Derek (Shearer) and then Viv (David Kaff), both of whom subsequently also display the herpes badge.

A band meeting is called: Should the Dose remain on the tour? The four herpes-afflicted Tap members vote the Dose out. Mick (R. J. Parnell), who is clueless and herpes-free, votes for the Dose to stay.

Currie’s scenes were terrific, but the travelling-herpes show took way too long to play out. So, unfortunately, the sequence had to go. There is, however, a remnant of this subplot in the scene in which Nigel and David defend the “Smell the Glove” album cover to Bobbi Flekman (Fran Drescher). Nigel has a sore on his lower lip, and David has one on his upper lip. Conspicuous as these blemishes are, they go unexplained. Depending on your take, this is either a complete non sequitur or an ambiguous “What the hell is going on?” moment. Regardless, it always got a laugh—which surprised me. (...)

There was also a subplot about Derek going through a painful divorce. We filmed a number of scenes of him on the phone, getting the latest bad news from his lawyer. In one scene, he learns that his soon-to-be ex has taken out a full-page ad in the New Musical Express laying out her settlement demands. In another, he is seen saying, “She can’t have the Lamborghini. . . . O.K., she can have the Mini.” Again, it slowed the momentum. So the audience would never learn of Derek’s crumbling marriage.

Parnell, who had no background in acting, delivered an incredible performance in a scene we cut. The setup was that Artie Fufkin (Paul Shaffer) had succeeded in getting the band to do an early­morning radio-station appearance. What Artie didn’t know was that, on that day, the station had changed its programming format from sports talk to rock and roll. One caller, who wasn’t aware of the change, asks the band, “Can you settle a bet I have with a buddy of mine? I think Ferguson Jenkins had fifty shutouts with the Cubs. He says he had forty-four. Who’s right?” Just as the radio host is about to brush off the question, Mick—shades on, cigarette in hand—answers, “Actually, you’re both wrong, mate. Ferguson Jenkins has had forty-eight career shutouts, and not all of them were with the Cubs.”

Then, in his sleepy drawl, he proceeds to deliver a complete statistical breakdown of Jenkins’s career. But since we ended up losing the radio-station scene, we lost with it Parnell’s eloquent Ferguson Jenkins soliloquy.

I not only cut scenes we had planned. On any given day, brilliant stuff would spontaneously fly out of someone’s mouth. A lot of that stuff had to go, too, to keep the film’s motor running. In particular, I remember a dissertation that David delivers to Marty (as played by me) about slime molds:

Slime molds are so close to being both plant and animal that it’s like they can’t make up their mind. And they’re thinking now that maybe this is who’s been running the earth all this time: these layabouts who can’t commit.

’Cause there’s more slime molds than any other form of protoplasm on the planet. And if they wanted to—if they finally made up their minds to commit to being either plant or animal—they could take us over like that. You’re walking down an alleyway. You slip and twist your ankle, maybe. It wasn’t an accident. It was an attack...

It’s easy to become self-indulgent. You fall in love with things that make you laugh, and you want to leave it in, even though it doesn’t help sculpt the elephant. But you have to be ruthless. If you indulge, you lose the audience.

So we sculpted away. Originally, the scene in which the band gets lost trying to find the stage had more dialogue between the band and the maintenance man who gives them directions (played by a terrific actor named Wonderful Smith). We had a bit in which Nigel positions himself in a fixed spot, shouting, “Hello! Hello!” so that the other guys would have a reference point to prevent them from getting even more lost. But this took away from a more important bit, the band’s efforts to amp themselves up for the crowd. (It was in this spirit that Harry shouted out a line that became one of the film’s most quoted: “Hello, Cleveland!”)

The “Australian’s nightmare” scene, in which Ian ridicules Jeanine and quits, used to include a series of filthy comebacks improvised by Chadwick, with Jeanine calling Ian a “bumbling, dwarf-willied prick,” a “fucking twit full of shit,” and an “impotent bat ’n’ balls full o’ crabs.”

As tempting as it was to leave these moments in, all they did was give the elephant a second trunk. When it came to the scenes we shot depicting the seamy sex-and-drugs side of rock and roll, we made the decision to play that aspect down. There is a fleeting moment in which you can see some groupies sniffing powder. But we cut the other scenes showing drug use, and one in which Nigel has his arm around a topless girl. We felt it went against the tone of the film.

For me, looking back after forty years, all I see are the flaws that stayed in the movie, such as the continuity mistakes that I would have been able to avoid in a scripted film. With an improvised film, there are times when you just have to live with the mismatches. For instance, in the scene in which the band reacts to the all-black cover of the “Smell the Glove” album, you’ll notice that Nigel’s position keeps changing from shot to shot. First, we see him standing to the right of Ian. Then, after a cut to David and Jeanine, we go back to Nigel, who is now standing to Ian’s left as he observes, “It’s so black. It’s, like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is: none. None more black.” Normally, you want to avoid that kind of gaffe. But it was the only take in which Chris said, “None more black,” so we lived with it.

Few viewers pick up on this stuff. The editor Bob Leighton, with whom I worked on this and many of my other films, has always said that it’s more important to make the audio work smoothly than the visuals. A jump in sound is much more jarring than a jump in picture. 

by Rob Reiner and Spinal Tap, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Embassy Pictures / Everett

My neighbor Totoro
via:

The High-Romantic Nightmare That Wasn’t

Someday someone will actually adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein into a film. Until then, we will have to make do with filmmakers using Shelley’s ever-resilient scaffolding as a playground for their own obsessions. Del Toro’s newest treatment of the story has been marketed and blurbed by many critics as “the movie he was born to make.” More than anything, though, the film serves to prove how far we still are from realizing the depths of Shelley’s original vision. Del Toro’s achingly sincere and fitfully compelling version of the book has maintained only that — the mere scaffolding of the story. It has next to nothing in common with the spirit of Shelley’s High-Romantic nightmare, and far more to do with del Toro’s own interests, especially his perennially unilluminating and often ponderous dedication to the tone of fable and fairy tale.

It’s no accident that the only great Frankenstein films — James Whale’s two immortal Universal classics, Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) — didn’t even worry about the scaffolding. They are of course the bases for the Frankenstein of modern popular culture, films which jettisoned all but a few garbled scenarios from the book and erected the rest from a pure Hollywood riff on a century of other vague Gothic imagery and literature. Two of the funniest movies ever made — Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) and Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974) — are themselves riffs on the Universal films, and only those films. And while there have been a few attempts to stage the proper Shelley version, nearly all of them, such as Kenneth Branagh’s awful and characteristically self-important 1994 film, have seen fit to mangle whole sections of Shelley’s work, and invent others from whole cloth.

So now we get the long-awaited version from the man who would seem the most obvious choice to make it — and yet, once again, here is a Frankenstein that finds nothing worth saving from the original besides that basic scenario. In the first, authoritative 1818 version of the text, Victor Frankenstein was a man from a happy family, betrothed to his cousin Elizabeth, who finds himself reading the works of alchemists like Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus while getting caught up in the fervor of late 18th-century Enlightenment science. This precise setting and period are key to the original story’s brilliance: Shelley evokes an almost beatific time in her own recent history where faith in medical, technological, and social progress was just beginning to achieve its modern velocity — a time in which the center of scientific study was shifting from physics to chemistry and biology.

English Romanticism was the great inheritor of this new concern for biological science, and thrived on metaphors of botany and organicism, just as it fed itself on the new psychology of the German philosophers. Frankenstein gets its power from this — and from its mordant, haunting sense of the old fairy tales furiously spinning into new, wretched life at the birth of the industrial world. In a way, to read Frankenstein is to read what the Romantics thought of the Enlightenment — and their thought was, in brief, that the new scientists had better read Paradise Lost. In fact, one could sum up the ambiguity of the original Shelley novel simply by saying that, in her Frankenstein, it is the Monster himself who reads and understands Milton, not his creator.

Del Toro, as expected, avoids almost all of Shelley’s original material. His primal obsession has always been the feeling of fairy tale itself, united with the trappings and settings of old Hollywood horror films. Even the subtler, Promethean horrors of the original are absent. Instead, he grafts all the whizbang technologic set-dressing of the old Universal films onto an even more overtly-Romantic, maximalist vision of the Shelley story; updating its setting to the mid-19th century — presumably to get in a few dull stereotypes of Victorian squalor and a tinge of punk Darwinism in the reanimation presentation to the Edinburgh Dons, who revoke Frankenstein’s qualifications in horror.

Victor Frankenstein himself (Oscar Isaac, in an uncharacteristically hammy and misjudged performance) becomes, to all effects, like a grown-up Lord Bullingdon from Barry Lyndon: he’s a sour brooder with a tyrannical father (Charles Dance, in a Charles-Dance-type role) and a doomed pregnant mother (Mia Goth, who also pulls Oedipal double-duty as Elizabeth). The nature of Frankenstein’s work is changed from accidental discovery to lifelong attempt at making up for the loss of his dead mother. Cousin Elizabeth is no longer the saintly pen pal and future wife, but a foil and an object of envy destined to marry Frankenstein’s brother (and, in a peculiar turn, a sort of angel for the Monster). She’s also the niece of the man who wants to bankroll Frankenstein’s experiment (Christoph Waltz). The private, tortured space of Frankenstein’s chambers in the book is transplanted to a huge, vertiginous castle on the edge of a sea — if we had any doubts before about just what height of Gothicism del Toro is going for.

The point of all this, of course, is not only to amp up the opera, but to give del Toro a chance to dream up a thousand gnarly details for the making of the Monster. Shelley herself barely spared a moment to describe the actual process of making the creature. But for del Toro, that’s the whole point. He delights in playing yet another turgid, whimsical Alexandre Desplat waltz while he lingers over Frankenstein’s vivisections, and makes sure to show us all the minute aspects of the building of the electrical apparatus, as well as the construction of the attic and underbelly of the tower. This sequence of the film is entertaining, even if his incessantly roaming, unfixed camera quickly grows exhausting. When it comes to the camera, del Toro is no great director: his Frankenstein has moments of beauty, but even the most arresting images are frequently undercut by the film’s waxy, shadowless look and by awkward framing that makes every other shot feel as if it’s coming from the corner of a too-wide room. (...)

In the end, there’s one main reason to see Del Toro’s Frankenstein and that is Jacob Elordi, who here proves himself to be what was mostly hidden underneath the pure exploitation schlock of Saltburn or Euphoria, and could be briefly glimpsed in his Elvis from Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla: that is, a great physical actor trapped in the body of a beautiful man. Has any contemporary heartthrob so totally embraced such a complete privation of his trademark physique? There’s no room for vanity within the Monster. Elordi surely saw his chance to free himself of the burden of his looks — and yet what he chooses to do is pretty magnificent. His elegantly awkward, Butoh-inspired performance is the real glory of a film that would be a rather hollow experience otherwise. After its overheated Freudian first half, the film finally comes alive when it leaves behind Frankenstein the man and follows the Monster — a section which comes closest to following the finest section of Shelley’s story. The middle of the film, wherein the Monster leaves to hide and watch the family of an old blind man, is also the finest part of the film. And, thank god, this time the movie Monster actually does read Paradise Lost.

As the film goes on, and the Monster returns to wreak havoc, del Toro’s Frankenstein almost comes close to the heights of a tragic fairy tale. Though the contrivances del Toro takes to get himself there are ridiculous, the pietà of Elizabeth’s death in the Monster’s arms is lovely (so sincere that there were snickers in my theater when I saw it), as is the Monster’s return to the ruins of the tower to discover the site of his creation. Even at the ending, when the Monster and Frankenstein have met out on the ice and come together in the cabins of the Scandinavian ship — the resolution of this particular father-son/God-Adam story is moving. Still, del Toro doesn’t quite earn the weight of the climax he worked so ponderously toward. It rests entirely on Jacob Elordi’s broad shoulders, and he does his best. Yet where Shelley’s Monster chooses to burn his creator and end his own life — del Toro, big earnest softy that he is, can’t help but let his Monster stare off into the sunset, ponder his apparent immortality, and conquer his desire to die.

by Sam Jennings, Metropolitan Review |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein about a year or so ago, and it's true, much of the power and nuance (and tenderness) of that book is lost in this film. That said, it's still the best adaptation that I've seen to date. Did you know that her monster developed a deep literary and philosophical intelligence (from reading so many books in isolation), and that his main objective in pursuing and tormenting his creator was simply to have him create a female companion to share his life (which the doctor initially promised to do, then refused after having second thoughts)? Great book that really should be read to get a full appreciation of all its many themes (including technological hubris). See also: Analysis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Literary Theory and Criticism):]

***

The work and its monster-hero became such a popular subject for film and stage, in serious, comedic, and parodic productions, that many acquaint themselves with Victor Frankenstein’s monster long before encountering it in Shelley’s book. Many first-time readers discover with a shock that the monster remains unnamed, with his creator bearing the Frankenstein moniker. A second, stronger shock may occur when readers realize that the monster, in great contrast to the bumbling, murderous, wild-eyed, grunting, crazy-stitched object of film, proves the most rational and also the most eloquent of any of the novel’s characters. (...)

The monster was not “born” hating others; his hate was taught him by people who refused to see beyond his external appearance to the brilliant warm nature existing just below its surface. While science might be expected to lack compassion, the same could not be said of religion, which should have prepared the public to be more accepting. That the monster possesses a quick intellect and a natural warmth and goodness that is corrupted only by his exposure to humans remains an indictment of shallow social values and a rigid class structure.

Speed Negotiations

[ed. Funny. Never seen this clip before (NewsRadio). Finding the right one takes time (the wrong one, not so much).]

The Decline of Deviance

Where has all the weirdness gone?

People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline.

I’m not the first to notice something strange going on—or, really, the lack of something strange going on. But so far, I think, each person has only pointed to a piece of the phenomenon. As a result, most of them have concluded that these trends are:

a) very recent, and therefore likely caused by the internet, when in fact most of them began long before

b) restricted to one segment of society (art, science, business), when in fact this is a culture-wide phenomenon, and

c) purely bad, when in fact they’re a mix of positive and negative.

When you put all the data together, you see a stark shift in society that is on the one hand miraculous, fantastic, worthy of a ticker-tape parade. And a shift that is, on the other hand, dismal, depressing, and in need of immediate intervention. Looking at these epoch-making events also suggests, I think, that they may all share a single cause.

by Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History |  Read more:

Images: Author and Alex Murrell

[ed. Interesting thesis. For example, architecture:]

***

The physical world, too, looks increasingly same-y. As Alex Murrell has documented, every cafe in the world now has the same bourgeois boho style:

Every new apartment building looks like this:

From My Dinner With Andre (1981), directed by Louis Malle and written by and starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn.
via:

[ed. Inconceivable.]

A House of Dynamite Conversation

At one point in Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, A House of Dynamite, Captain Olivia Walker (played by Rebecca Ferguson) is overseeing the White House Situation Room as a single nuclear-armed missile streaks toward the American heartland. Amid tense efforts to intercept the missile, Walker finds a toy dinosaur belonging to her young son in her pocket. In that moment, the heartbreak and terror of the less-than-20-minute countdown to impact all but overwhelm Walker—and I suspect many who have watched the film in theaters. Suddenly, the stakes are clear: All the young children, all their parents, all the animals on the planet face extinction. Not as a vague possibility or a theoretical concept debated in policy white papers, not as something that might happen sometime, but as unavoidable reality that is actually happening. Right now.

In the pantheon of movies about nuclear catastrophe, the emotional power of A House of Dynamite is rivalled, to my way of thinking, only by Fail Safe, in which Henry Fonda, as an American president, must drop the bomb on New York City to atone for a mistaken US attack on Moscow and stave off all-out nuclear war. The equally relentless scenario for A House of Dynamite is superficially simple: A lone intercontinental ballistic missile is identified over the western Pacific, heading for somewhere in mid-America. Its launch was not seen by satellite sensors, so it’s unclear what country might have initiated the attack. An effort to shoot down the missile fails, despite the best efforts of an array of earnest military and civilian officials, and it becomes clear that—barring a technological malfunction of the missile’s warhead—Chicago will be obliterated. The United States’ response to the attack could well initiate worldwide nuclear war.

The emotional effectiveness of Bigelow’s film stems partly from its tripartite structure—the story is told three times, from three different points of view, each telling adding to and magnifying the others—partly from solid acting performances by a relatively large ensemble of actors, and not inconsequentially from details like the dinosaur. The film is in one sense a thriller, full of rising tension driven by a terrifying deadline. In a larger sense, it is a tragedy for each of the dedicated public servants trying to stave off the end of the world, and in that sense, it’s a tragedy for all of us to contemplate seriously.

I spoke with Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim, who wrote the screenplay for the film, last week, ahead of its debut on Netflix tomorrow. It opened widely in US theaters earlier in the month, which is why I’ve made no attempt to avoid spoilers in the following interview, which has been edited and condensed for readability. If you don’t already know that A House of Dynamite ends ambiguously, without explicitly showing whether Chicago and the world are or are not destroyed, you do now. (...)

Mecklin

I found the movie very effective, but I was curious about the decision not to have a depiction of nuclear effects on screen. There weren’t bombs blowing up. The movie had what some people say is an ambiguous ending. You don’t really know what followed. Why no explosions?

Bigelow

I felt like the fact that the bomb didn’t go off was an opportunity to start a conversation. With an explosion at the end, it would have been kind of all wrapped up neat, and you could point your finger [and say] “it’s bad that happened.” But it would sort of absolve us, the human race, of responsibility. And in fact, no, we are responsible for having created these weapons, and in a perfect world, getting rid of them.

Mecklin

So, do you have a different answer to that, Noah?

Noah Oppenheim

No, I don’t. I think that is the answer. I think if I were to add anything, it would only be that I do think audiences are numb to depictions of widespread destruction at this point. I mean, we’ve come off of years of comic book movies in which major cities have been reduced to rubble as if it were nothing. I think we just chose to take a different approach to trying to capture what this danger is.

Bigelow

And to stimulate a conversation. With an ambiguous ending, you walk out of the theater thinking, “Well, wait a minute.” It sort of could be interpreted, the film, as a call to action.

Mecklin

Within the expert community, the missile defense part of the movie is being discussed. It isn’t a surprise to them, or me, that missile defense is less than perfect. Some of them worry that this depiction in the movie will impel people to say, “Oh, we need better missile defense. We should build Golden Dome, right?” What do you feel about that? Kathryn first.

Bigelow

I think that’s kind of a misnomer. I think, in fact, if anything, we realize we’re not protected, we’re not safe. There is no magic situation that’s going to save the day. I’m sure you know a lot more about this, and Noah knows a lot more than I do, but from my cursory reading, you could spend $300 billion on a missile defense system, and it’s still not infallible. That is not, in my opinion, a smart course of action.

Mecklin

Noah, obviously you have talked to experts and read a lot about, in general, the nuclear threat, but also missile defense. How did you know to come up with, whatever, 61 percent [effectiveness of US missile interceptors]?

Oppenheim

That came directly from one of the tests that had been done on our current ground-based intercept system. Listen, as long as there are nuclear weapons in the world, it would obviously be better if we had more effective defense systems. But I think that the myth of a perfect missile defense system has given a lot of people false comfort over the years. In many ways, it appears to be an easier solution to chase. Right? How can we possibly eliminate the nuclear problem? So instead, maybe we can build an impenetrable shield that we can all retreat under.

But I think that there’s no such thing as an impenetrable shield at the end of the day, or at least not one that we’ve been able to build thus far. And from all of my conversations with people who work in missile defense—and again, I think we all are aligned and hoping that those systems could be improved—but I think that those folks are the first to acknowledge that it is a really hard physics problem at the end of the day that we may never be able to solve perfectly.

And so we do need to start looking at the other piece of this, which is the size of the nuclear stockpile. And how can we reduce the number of weapons that exist in the world, and how can we reduce the likelihood that they’re ever used?

Mecklin

Before I go on to other things, I wanted to give you the opportunity to name check any particular experts you consulted who helped you with thinking about or writing the movie.

Oppenheim

It’s a long list. I don’t know Kathryn—do you want to talk about Dan Karbler, who worked in missile defense for STRATCOM?

Bigelow

Go for it.

Oppenheim

So, we had a three-star general who came up in the missile defense field and actually has two kids whom he talks about, who also now work in missile defense, as well. We spoke to people who’ve worked in senior roles at the Pentagon, at the CIA, at the White House. We had STRATCOM officers on set almost every day that we were shooting those sequences. And then we relied upon the incredible body of work that folks who work in the nuclear field have been amassing for years. I mean, we talk a lot about the fact that the nuclear threat has fallen out of focus for a long time for the general public. But there is this incredible community of policy experts and journalists who’ve never stopped thinking about it, worrying about it, analyzing it.

And so whether it’s somebody like [the late Princeton researcher and former missileer] Bruce Blair or a journalist like Garrett Graff, who has written about continuity of government protocol, or Fred Kaplan and his book The Bomb—there’s a terrific library of resources that people can turn to.

Mecklin

I have found in my job that nuclear types—nuclear experts, journalists—are very picky. And I’m just curious: Generally with this kind of thing, trying to be a very technically accurate movie, inevitably you get people saying: “Oh, you got this little thing wrong. You got that little thing wrong.” Have you had anything like that that you’d want to talk about?

Bigelow

Actually, on the contrary, just yesterday in The Atlantic, Tom Nichols wrote a piece on the movie, and he said, you would think there might be some discrepancies, you would think there might be some inaccurate details, but according to him, and he’s very steeped in this space, it’s relatively accurate through and through. And it raises the need for a conversation about the fact that there are all these weapons in the world. (...)

Mecklin

I’m going to ask sort of a craft question. The narrative of the movie is telling essentially the same story three times from different points of view. And I’d just like to hear both of you talk about why and the challenges of doing that. Because the second, third time through—hey, maybe people get bored and walk out of the movie.

Bigelow

They don’t seem to.

I was interested in doing this story in real time, but of course, it takes 18, 19, minutes for that missile to impact, which would not be long enough for a feature film. But also, it’s not the same story, because you’re looking at it from different perspectives. You’re looking at it from the missile defense men at Ft. Greely. Then you’re looking at it from the White House Situation Room, where they need to get the information up to the president as quickly and as comprehensively as possible. And then you’re looking at it through STRATCOM, which is the home of the nuclear umbrella. And then, of course, finally, the Secretary of Defense and the president. So each time you’re looking at it through a different set of parameters.

Mecklin

And was that a difficult thing for you, Noah, in terms of writing it? There’s got to be the narrative thing that keeps people watching, right?

Oppenheim

First, as Kathryn mentioned, trying to give the audience a visceral understanding of how short a period of time something like this would unfold in was really important. But during that incredibly short period of time, the number of moving parts within the government and within our military are vast, and so I actually looked at it as an opportunity, right? Because there’s so much going on in various agencies—at Greeley, at STRATCOM, at the Pentagon, the situation in the Situation Room—and so you have the chance to kind of layer the audience’s understanding with each retelling. Because the first time you experience it, I think it’s just overwhelming, just making sense of it all. And then the second and third time, you’re able to appreciate additional nuance and deepen your understanding of the challenge that our policymakers and military officers would face. And I think the weight of that just accumulates over the course of the film, when you realize what we would be confronting if this were to happen.

by John Mecklin, with Kathryn Bigelow and Noah Oppenheim, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists |  Read more:

Image: Eros Hoagland/Netflix © 2025.

[ed. See also: How to understand the ending of ‘A House of Dynamite’; and, for a realistic scenario of what a nuclear strike might look like: The “House of Dynamite” sequel you didn’t know you needed (BotAS):]

***

If we pick up where A House of Dynamite ends, the story becomes one of devastation and cascading crises. Decades of modeling and simulations based on the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki help us understand the immediate and longer-term effects of a nuclear explosion. But in today’s deeply interconnected world, the effects of a nuclear attack would be far more complex and difficult to predict.

Let us assume that the missile carried a several-hundred-kiloton (kt) nuclear warhead—many times more powerful than the 15-kt bomb the United States used to destroy Hiroshima—and detonated directly above Chicago’s Loop, the dense commercial and financial core of the nation’s third-largest city.

What would ensue in the seconds, minutes, days, and months that follow, and how far would the effects ripple across the region, nation, and beyond?

The first seconds and minutes: detonation

At 9:51 a.m., without warning, the sky flashes white above Chicago. A fireball hotter than the surface of the sun engulfs the Loop, releasing a powerful pulse of heat, light, and x-rays. In less than a heartbeat, everyone within half a square mile—from commuters to children, doctors, and tourists—is vaporized instantly. Every building simply vanishes.

A shockwave expands outward faster than the speed of sound, flattening everything within roughly one mile of ground zero, including the Riverwalk, the Bean, Union Station, most of Chicago’s financial district, and the Jardine Water Purification Plant—which supplies drinking water to more than five million people. People are killed by debris and collapsing buildings. The city’s power, transport, communications, and water systems fail simultaneously. Major hospitals responsible for the city’s emergency and intensive care are destroyed.

Two miles from the epicenter, residential and commercial buildings in the West Loop, South Loop, and River North neighborhoods are heavily damaged or leveled. Debris blocks the streets and fires spread as gas lines rupture and wood and paper burn.

Anybody outside or near windows in at least a four-mile radius suffers third-degree burns from thermal radiation within milliseconds of the detonation. Those “lucky” enough to survive the initial blast absorb a dose of radiation about 800 times higher than the average annual exposure for Americans, causing severe radiation sickness that will likely be fatal within days or weeks.

The blast may have produced a localized electromagnetic pulse, frying electronics and communication technologies in the vicinity of the explosion. If not already physically destroyed, Chicago’s electric grid, telecom networks, and computer systems are knocked offline, complicating response efforts.

In less than 10 minutes, 350,000 people are dead and more than 200,000 are injured. Much of Chicago is destroyed and beyond recognition.

The first hours and days: fallout

Then, there is fallout. The intense heat vaporizes microscopic particles, including dust, soil, concrete, ash, debris, and radioactive materials, and lifts them into the atmosphere, forming the infamous mushroom cloud. As the wind carries these particles, they fall back to the earth, contaminating people, animals, water, and soil.

The direction and speed of the wind over Chicago can vary, making fallout inherently unpredictable. Assuming the region’s prevailing westerly winds push the cloud eastward, fallout descends on Lake Michigan—the largest public drinking water source in the state, serving approximately 6.6 million residents.

At average wind speeds, radiation that travels roughly 40 to 50 miles of the plume is immediately lethal to anyone outdoors. More than a hundred miles downwind, the intensity of exposure inflicts severe radiation sickness. Contamination from longer-lived isotopes would reach even further, poisoning Michigan’s robust agriculture and dairy industry and contaminating milk, meat, and grains.

Back in the city, the destruction of critical infrastructure triggers a chain of systemic failures, paralyzing emergency response. Tens of thousands of survivors suffer from deep burns, requiring urgent care. With only twenty Level I-burn centers in the state and scores of medical personnel among the injured or killed, this capacity amounts to a drop in an ocean of suffering. The city’s health system, among the most advanced in the world, has effectively collapsed. Suburban hospitals are quickly inundated, forced to focus on those most likely to live.

via:

The War Between Silicon Valley and Hollywood is Officially Over...

Silicon Valley needs creativity, but hates to pay for it. So the war rages on.

But we are now entering the final stage of the war. Silicon Valley is now swallowing up Hollywood. The pace at which this is happening is frightening.

The main protagonist here is a man named David Ellison—a tech scion who wants to be the biggest mogul in the movie industry. A few days ago, his father Larry Ellison became (briefly) the richest man in the world.

Ellison is founder of Oracle, a database software company with a market cap of almost a trillion dollars. That’s nice work if you can get it. But his son David wanted to do something more fun than databases, so he dropped out of college to dabble in movies.

But this quickly became more than dabbling. He produced hit franchise films, notably the Mission Impossible movies. He didn’t care much about artsy cinema—and instead churned out Baywatch and Spy Kids. Like his dad, he knows how to make money.

And then he went on a spending spree. It’s not hard to do that in Hollywood if you have a big pile of cash. Many of the legendary properties from the past have fallen on hard times, and can be acquired from their current owners at a very reasonable price.

So David Ellison bought up National Amusements and merged it into his production company. This gave him control over

• Paramount Pictures

• CBS (and CBS News)

• MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and other cable TV channels

• Paramount+ and Pluto TV streaming platforms

But now he is preparing a takeover of Warner Bros Discovery—which would put him in charge of Warner Bros film and television studios

• HBO

• CNN

• TNT

And it doesn’t stop there.

Oracle, the company founded by David Ellison’s father, will now be one of the new owners of TikTok. So in one generation, the Ellison family has gone from software entrepreneurs to the biggest powerhouse in film and media.

What’s next?

The most attractive remaining asset in Hollywood is Disney. It’s just a matter of time before it gets swallowed up by the techies. The most likely outcome is Apple acquiring Disney, but some other Silicon Valley powerhouse could also do this deal.

There’s so much money in NorCal, and a lot of techies would like to own their own famous mouse (along with theme parks and all the rest). Musk could do it. Zuckerberg could do it. Alphabet could do it. Even some company you don’t think much about, like Broadcom (market cap = $1.6 trillion), could easily finance this deal.

There’s heavy irony in this fact. That’s because Disney helped launch Silicon Valley.

There’s a garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto that’s called the birthplace of Silicon Valley. But that birthing only happened because Walt Disney gave Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard an order for eight audio oscillators—which gave them enough cash and confidence to create their garage-born company.

Hewlett-Packard trained the next generation of tech entrepreneurs, including Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. So an Apple buyout of Disney would simply take things full circle.

There are still some chess pieces on the board, and a few moves left to be made—but the winner of this game is already obvious. Hollywood, or what’s left of it, will become a subsidiary of tech interests. I don’t see any other outcome.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Hollywood Boulevard in the 1930s

Tilly Norwood

Tilly Norwood: how scared should we be of the viral AI ‘actor’? 

It takes a lot to be the most controversial figure in Hollywood, especially when Mel Gibson still exists. And yet somehow, in a career yet to even begin, Tilly Norwood has been inundated with scorn.

This is for the simple fact that Tilly Norwood does not exist. Despite looking like an uncanny fusion of Gal Gadot, Ana de Armas and High School Musical-era Vanessa Hudgens, Norwood is the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) talent studio called Xicoia. And if Xicoia is to be believed, then Norwood represents the dazzling future of the film industry.

Unveiled this weekend at the Zurich film festival, Norwood has been touted as the next Scarlett Johansson, with studios apparently clamouring to work with her and a talent agency lined up to represent her. Sure, it should also be pointed out that her existence alone is enough to fill the pit of your stomach with a sense of untameable dread for the entire future of humanity, but that’s Hollywood for you.

by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Well, this sucks.]

Subscription Prices Gone Wild

Most platform subscription price are going up, not down—and many are skyrocketing.

Music streaming is one more example. Spotify’s Chief Business Officer recently offered the bland observation that price hikes are “part of our toolbox now”—and added “we’ll do it when it makes sense.”

What does that really mean?

According to a recent report from Goldman Sachs, Spotify subscribers should expect regular prices increases from Spotify in the future—with a boost coming every 12-24 months.

Spotify even bragged to the investment community that it’s always planning a price boost somewhere. Here again is the Chief Business Officer laying it out for us:

I want to also remind you that we take a portfolio approach. So in a sense, you could say that we raise all the time. For instance, in the last quarter we raised in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. And I can report to you that on churn, we didn’t see anything out of the ordinary for Spotify.

Years ago, I claimed that streaming economics were broken, and price increases were inevitable. But I never anticipated the rapacious response of the suits in the C-suite.

The short explanation is that they do it because they can. Sure, some people cancel their subscriptions, but not enough to make a difference. Most subscribers simply put up with it.

That’s why the streamers keep boosting prices again and again. They will continue doing it until they encounter serious resistance—and they haven’t hit it yet. So I expect more of the same.

But there’s a danger to this business strategy. Look at Las Vegas, where tourism is collapsing because the casinos went too far. For a long time, the public didn’t flinch in the face of price hikes, but then it got ridiculous:

• $95 ATM fees

• $14 coffee

• $50 early check-in fees

• $30 cocktails

The casinos have now earned a reputation as exploitative price-gougers. Tourism is now down sharply—hotel occupancy has dropped 15%. The city feels “eerily empty.”

This isn’t easy to fix. Once you destroy your reputation and lose the customer’s trust, it’s almost impossible to get it back. That happened in an earlier day to Sears and K-Mart, and they never recovered.

Something similar may already be happening at Disney’s theme parks. Some visitors report that Disney World is empty—looking like a ghost town even during Labor Day weekend.

by Ted Gioia, Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Daniel Parris, Stat Significant

[ed. May have to go back to cable (horrors). Just canceled my Amazon Prime account. See also: Is TV's Golden Age (Officially) Over? A Statistical Analysis.]

Notes on The Greatest Night In Pop

A Study In Leadership, Teamwork, and Love

The Netflix documentary, The Greatest Night In Pop, tells the story of the making of We Are The World, the 1985 charity single featuring (almost) everyone in American pop at the time: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Diana Ross, Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Billy Joel, Dionne Warwick…the list goes on and on.

The documentary is based on hours of footage from the night they recorded the single, only a few minutes of which was used for the original music video. The Greatest Night In Pop (TGNIP) came out eighteen months ago, and while millions of people have viewed it, I’m constantly surprised to learn that many have not. Everyone should.

If I had to recommend a documentary or just ‘something to watch on TV’ for absolutely anyone - man or woman, old or young, liberal or conservative, highbrow or lowbrow - I’d recommend The Greatest Night In Pop. It may not be the deepest, most profound ninety minutes of TV, but it is irresistibly enjoyable. And actually, like the best pop, it is deep; it just doesn’t pretend to be.

To us Brits, We Are The World was a mere footnote to Do They Know It’s Christmas? That record was instigated by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure and recorded by a supergroup of British and Irish musicians under the name Band Aid (an underrated pun). The proceeds went to famine victims in Ethiopia. We Are The World was made for the same cause.

I knew that, but what I learnt from TGNIP is that there was an element of racial pride in the American response, which arose spontaneously from a conversation between Harry Belafonte and Lionel Richie’s manager. Belafonte said, “We have white folks saving Black folks—we don’t have Black folks saving Black folks”. Lionel agreed, and the wheels started to turn.

Ah, Lionel. The man who makes everything happen. It is perhaps not coincidental that he should emerge as the star of this documentary, given that he co-produced it. The same might be said of Paul McCartney, who emerged as the hero of Get Back. But in neither case do I sense corruption of historical truth. Richie is extraordinary, both as a talking head and in his 1985 incarnation. As chief interviewee - host might be a better word - he sparkles: mischievous, funny, a supreme storyteller. As the prime mover behind the recording of We Are The World, he is simply awesome.

After Belafonte’s prompt, Lionel calls Quincy Jones - the maestro, the master, the producer of the best-selling album of all time. Jones immediately says yes, and they call Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. Both agree, Stevie only belatedly because nobody can get hold of him (a theme of the doc is that Stevie Wonder is both delightful and utterly ungovernable). With these stars on board, they know that pretty much everyone else will want to be involved, and so it proves. They decide to recruit white stars as well as black, and get Springsteen and Joel and Kenny Rogers and Willie Nelson and others.

The first thing the principals need to do is come up with a song. Lionel goes to Michael’s house, and the pair spend several days hacking away at the piano (Stevie was invited but is AWOL). With a couple of days to go, they crack it (that is, Quincy likes it). The song is, well, fine: not a work of genius but a pleasant, gospel-inflected anthem, easy enough to sing without much preparation, catchy enough to be a hit. It does the job.

When he took up this baton, Richie was on a career high. He’d left The Commodores and broken out as a solo star. He was about to host the American Music Awards in Los Angeles, the biggest primetime music show, for which he himself was nominated for eight awards (he won six). It soon becomes apparent to all concerned that the best and perhaps only way to get all the talent in the same place to record a single would be to do it on the night of the awards, when so many of them are in town anyway. That would mean doing an all-night session, and for Lionel, it would mean first hosting a live awards show watched by millions - demanding, stressful, exhausting - then helping to run this second, private show right afterwards. No problem!

So it is that after the AMAs we see limousines dropping stars off at an LA recording studio. From a narrative point of view, a delicious premise emerges: a bunch of very famous, egotistical, impatient, nervous pop stars, most of whom don’t know each other (“It was like the first day of kindergarten”, recalls Richie) are brought together in a room to make a record of a song they barely know (they’ve heard a demo). It absolutely has to be a huge hit. They have about eight hours; there’s no coming back tomorrow.

It could have gone badly wrong. That it didn’t is testament to all involved but to Richie and Jones in particular. The two of them corral this unwieldy gaggle into making a sleek and successful product.1 The first time I watched TGNIP I enjoyed it unreflectively. When I watched it for a second time, I began to see it as a study in leadership, collaboration and teamwork.

I’ve written before about how diversity needs to be interpreted beyond demographic attributes like race and gender to temperament and personality. The British management researcher Meredith Belbin constructed a famous inventory of behavioural types which together make up a successful team: the Resource Investigator, the Coordinator, the Shaper, the Catalyst, and so on.

TGNIP prompted me to come up with an inventory of my own: the Decider, the Connector, the Conscience, the Old Buck, the Disrupter, the Weirdo, and the Lover.

THE DECIDER

Quincy Jones taped up a handwritten sign at the entrance to the studio: LEAVE YOUR EGO AT THE DOOR. He was possibly the only person in America who would have dared to write such a sign for such a crowd and certainly the only one who would have been listened to.

To lead a team of 40 superstars was a tough task but it certainly helped to be Quincy Jones. Aged 51, he been an arranger for Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra; produced Donna Summer and Aretha Franklin; won multiple Grammys; turned Michael Jackson into the biggest artist in the world.

In TGNIP he is somewhat marginal to the action just because he is in the control room, while the camera roves the studio floor. We hear his voice over the intercom and see him when he comes onto the floor to coach someone through a difficult vocal part. (He wasn’t interviewed for the doc but we hear him speaking about the night from an earlier interview).

There’s no question he is in charge, though. His interventions are economical and precise; he doesn’t waste words. He is stern when he needs be, jocular in a restrained way; cool. Everyone in the room looks up to him, literally and metaphorically. He is friendly but not your best friend. He is here to make sure the job gets done, and done well. He is The Decider.

THE CONNECTOR

By contrast, Lionel Richie is very much your best friend. He is everywhere, talking to everyone: greeting, thanking, hugging; answering a thousand queries; soothing egos; telling stories and making jokes; giving pep talks; smoothing over potential conflicts; solving musical problems; hyping and cheerleading; raising the energy level when it flags; consoling the weary. Somebody else says of him, “He’s making the water flow.” That’s it.

Richie has a special knack for wrangling very talented, slightly nuts individuals. Cyndi Lauper, who was a massive star at that time, bigger than Madonna, decided on the evening of the recording that she wasn’t going to do it after all. The reason she gave is that her boyfriend didn’t like the demo of the song that Richie and Jackson had made. He’d told her it would never be a hit.

Lionel has to take a minute backstage at the awards ceremony which he is presenting to find Lauper, put any hurt feelings he might have aside, and cajole her into returning to the team. Later on, he’s the one negotiating with Prince over his possible participation over the phone. He also has to hide wine bottles from Al Jarreau so that he doesn’t get too drunk before recording his solo part. Details.

by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Netflix

[ed. Highly recommended.]