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thecoleopterawithana · 5 years

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Love your blog! I was wondering if you’ve read Paul’s PR guy’s diaries? They are full of little gems, such as how Paul uses smileys and is very handy with his iPhone. I read this entry and the guy writes Paul lost “a soulmate and songwriter”. I think it’s quite telling that the people he works with call John his soulmate. Haven’t read all the guy’s entries yet but just wanted to mention this one; it’s the entry about the Freshen Up tour in Japan 2018.

Hey there! I’m so incredibly sorry for taking so long to reply, but life has been truly hectic!

To answer your question, I hadn’t had the chance to go through Stuart Bell’s accounts of the Japanese leg of the Freshen Up Tour (2018), so I’m grateful you’ve brought this to my attention! He certainly offers a different insight into the inner workings of the tour and how a more than experienced Paul navigates the commotion still with youthful enthusiasm. Even if written with a bit of a “PR hat on”, an amassing of ‘insider’ POVs (from people who were actually there) is invaluable to getting the full picture of Paul McCartney. And as someone who is filled with love every time a new facet is revealed, I appreciate any piece of information that comes my way!

So I have to agree with you that little anecdotes like these are hidden gems:

The devotion and adoration is incredible and as Paul’s car rolls by this afternoon, the faithful are rewarded as Paul winds down the window and waves. He is so touched, and awed, by the reception that he even shoots some footage as he rolls past the fans. (Later in the week I receive a text from Paul while I am out for a run and it contains the clip. It looks mega so I ask if I can post to his social media – shortly afterwards I receive a smile face. A little-known fact about Paul – he is the master of emojis when text messaging!

— Wednesday 31st October – Tokyo Dome, For Whom The Bell Tells: Japan 2018.

And then, we have this other entry, that I agree is rather interesting: not only does it give us an ‘insider’s perspective on John’s significance in Paul’s life, but the piece centres on the issue of art as a platform with the power to spread a message, social responsibility, and how the message is something one’s passionate about (Paul being described as “not shying away from wearing his heart on his sleeve” just tickles me):

It barely needs mentioning that music is a huge and central part of Paul’s life but he has never been detached from the wider world. Like many musicians, matters of the heart are a preoccupation in his song-writing but Paul has continued to express his thoughts on life, the world in general and the causes close to his heart through his songs, interviews and other interventions. You can look back to the controversy surrounding his debut single with Wings, 'Give Ireland Back To The Irish’ (a response to the ��Bloody Sunday” killings only a few weeks earlier in 1972), as an example of how he does not shy away from wearing his heart on his sleeve. Paul is passionate about many things and his humanity is self-evident. For a man who lost a soulmate and song-writing partner, you can imagine how the horrors of gun violence are an issue close to his heart. Just days ago the world was sickened by the mass shooting in a synagogue in Pittsburgh and so Paul has been keen to make his views known by not only showing his disgust at the attack which left 11 dead but also calling on the US to do the right thing by using their votes in the upcoming election to elect politicians who will do something about it. As I’m on my way to the venue Paul calls me and asks us to release a message in response to the terrible events. He gives me a quote over the phone and in a rather surreal moment as we chat, I find myself looking out of the car window to see giant posters of Paul across the city with huge welcome messages for him.

—Thursday 1st November – Tokyo Dome, For Whom The Bell Tells: Japan 2018.

But let’s address the bit about his relationship with John.

Like you, I find very telling the choice of words used here. It just goes to show how themselves and everyone around them have to scramble for a term that adequately describes the ineffability of their connection. It felt so encompassing, that the terms that regularly pop up hold that indescribable aspect in themselves: special, magical, cosmic soulmates. And seeing them struggle to put it into words is one of my favourite things! It’s no surprise then that I have an inordinate amount of overlapping tags covering the numerous nuances of this very same feeling, tracking their various attempts at capturing it.

But for me, it’s even more fascinating to look beyond the external awe-inducing aspect of it – this special, magical, cosmic glow that draws us to the relationship in the first place – and see how this notion felt to them; how it impacted the relationship in the first place.

Let’s look from Paul’s perspective first, as it is here, by a matter of the circumstances, that we find more material.

We wrote our first songs together, we grew up together and we lived our lives together. And when we’d do it together, something special would happen. There’d be that little magic spark.

— Paul McCartney, in Bill Harry’s The Paul McCartney Encyclopedia (2003).

We read each other. We’d grown up together! (…) We’d been teenagers together, I’d been sitting in his bedroom listening to Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, we’d been taking down the words together when we were like 16/17. So we’ve actually grown up together. So that, if he said: “Gotta be like Chuck Berry!” I knew what record he meant. I knew even what line he was talking about! You know? So, we read each other in that respect.

— Paul McCartney, interview for the Today Show (6 July 1997).

With John and I, it was so special, I think both of us knew we couldn’t get that again. And it’s proved itself, through time, to be as special as it felt when we were doing it. So I don’t think that could happen again. We really were a complete fluke – just two kids who happened to meet up in Liverpool and share an interest and start writing songs together. And then developed, organically, together. And had the same sense of humour. And learned things at the same rate. Found out about Vietnam together. Little things. All of these little awarenesses pretty much hit us at the same time over a period of years. And you really become soulmates when that happens.

— Paul McCartney, interview w/ Mark Binelli for Rolling Stone: Sir Paul rides again. (October 20th, 2005)

No matter what’s happened, even though John’s dead, I don’t feel like we are ever gonna be apart. I think we’re a part of each other’s lives, we’re a part of each other’s karma, man!

He was a lovely guy, you know. And it gets sadder and sadder to be saying “was”. Nearer to when he died I couldn’t believe I was saying “was”, but now I do believe I’m saying “was”. I’ve resisted it. I’ve tried to pretend he didn’t get killed… it’s a bit sad. But anyway, I was blessed to be in The Beatles, to work with John. Something, somewhere… you know they talk about a gift of songwriting, well that was a pretty cool gift whoever gave it me.

— Paul McCartney, interview w/ Mat Snow for MOJO (November, 1995).

Paul seems to take a causality approach, with a bit of occasional baffling at the mysterious workings of fate sprinkled in. In typical Macca fashion, he condenses in himself the apparently paradoxical views of people as pavers of their own paths – we became soulmates because of the circumstances, because we chose to spend all that time together – and people as participants in a big cosmic play – we were brought together in the first place by something, somewhere, blessed to be a part of each other’s lives, each other’s karma.

But overall, it is very important to realise that despite attributing the initial circumstances to chance or a higher-power – them meeting at that particular moment and clicking so well immediately – Paul seems to value shared time, space and experiences as some of the biggest factors behind the magic.

They became soulmates, by virtue of growing up and living their lives together.

This places the agency and the responsibility of making it work right in their own hands. You want to be that close, that attuned, that in-sync with the other to the point of feeling like you can read each other’s minds? Right, you have to actually spend the time together, to accrue shared references and memories that will end up developing into that unspoken language. You can’t expect to have been born on this planet inherently capable of communicating with your preordained soulmate.

And that brings us to John.

John is awesome because despite having all those overpowering emotions and traumas inside him, he wasn’t actually afraid of engaging in some introspection and facing those feelings head-on. Because of this, he was able of evolving much faster (or at least, even when he couldn’t always change his actions, he seemed willing to try and become self-aware enough to understand why he was acting that way in the first place).

So let’s see, after 40 years of getting to know himself, what answers did Johnny reach:

John: Well, you’re asking why we met. I mean, I don’t know. It’s like asking why you were born. I can give you theories of karmic pasts and things like that, but I’ve no idea why. But why it continues is because we want it to continue and work to continue. There seem to be certain cycles that relationships go through. The critical points are at different parts of the different cycles. The new way of talking is like, “Well, why work on a relationship? We just stop and get another one.” But the karmic joke is, presuming you’re lucky enough to find a new relationship anywhere near the relationship you’re giving up – or exchanging, or walking away from, or destroying by inattention or inadvertence of selfishness, or whatever it is – that you have to go through it over and over and over again right up until you’re seventy. People never grasp the fact that they’re going to have to go through the same thing again. They get to the sort of five-year stretch or the seven-year itch or whatever these tension points are, that seem to be organic, built in, like the tide coming in and going out. It’s like every time the tide goes out, you quit—you move your house of something, I’m not making it clear here but you get where I’m going…

Sheff: Yes, yes, but what made you see that?

John: When [Yoko] kicked me out, I saw I was kicked out. When I was kicked out, I realised where I was, which was on a raft in the middle of the universe, and whatever happened, presuming I could have started another relationship, I would have ended up in the same place—if I was lucky. And that’s a big if.

Sheff: You’re speaking about your separation in the early Seventies.

John: Seventy-three, or whenever we were separated, which is sort of a very cold way of saying it. It took a while, but that’s what I saw. If I was lucky… It’s like what they say about karma. If you don’t get it right in this lifetime, you have to come back and go through it again. Well, those laws that are sort of cosmically talked about – accepted or not, but talked about apply down to the most minute detail of life, too. It’s like ‘Instant Karma,’ which is my way of saying it, right? It’s not just some big cosmic thing, although it’s that as well, but it’s also the small things, like your life here and your relationship with the person you want to live with and be with. There are laws governing that relationship, too. You can either give up halfway up the hill and say, “I don’t want to climb the mountain, it’s too tough, I’m going to go back to the bottom and start again,” or you can do it this time.

Sheff: But you once decided it was too tough.

John: I did. But I didn’t see any of this then. Yoko and I were lucky enough to go through that and come back and pick up where we left off, although it took us some kind of effort and energy to – to blend in again and get in the same sync again. It took some time.

— John Lennon, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)

It is with great love and affection that I see John’s matured insights: that despite having met under cosmically mysterious circumstances, the choice to build it into something more is in your hands.

“Why it continues is because we want it to continue and work to continue.”

But John, like Paul, seems to have only gained this wisdom with the benefit of time and experience. It was with the perspective afforded by the passage of years that Paul came to fully realise and appreciate how truly special and improbably “perfect for each other” they were. And John “took his lucky break” and realised how hard it was to “find a new relationship anywhere near the relationship you’re giving up – or exchanging, or walking away from, or destroying by inattention or inadvertence of selfishness”.

(As an aside, I can’t help but point out how John pretty much disclosed what, in his opinion, made the mountain called JohnandPaul too difficult to climb: his selfishness and Paul’s inattention.)

In the same interview and continuing the reflections on the cyclic nature of relationships started above, and just what he lost by giving it up:

John: In a marriage, or a love affair – when the seven-year-itch or the twelve-year or whatever these things that you have to go through – there comes a point where the marriage collapses because they can’t face that reality, and they go seeking what they thought they should be having, still, somewhere else. I get a new girl, it’ll all be like that again; I get a new boy… But for all marriages, all couples, it’ll all be the same again. But what you lose is what you put into that… relationship. The early stuff – the Hard Day’s Night period, I call it – the early period, was the early equi– se– what I’m – what I’m equating it to is the sexual equivalent of the beginning of a relationship, of people in love. And the Sgt. Pepper-Abbey Road period was the period of maturity in the relationship. And maybe had we gone on together, maybe something more interesting would have come out of it. It would not have been the same. It would have been a different thing. But maybe it wouldn’t either. Maybe it was a marriage that had to end. Some marriages don’t get through that – that phase. It’s hard to speculate about what would have been.

— John Lennon, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)

So, John acknowledges how you risk losing a very special relationship and everything you’ve put into it by walking away when it goes through a cyclic tough phase, how he did it once but he “didn’t see any of this then”.

But what didn’t he see back then? Was he too careless and flippant about what they had, not appreciating how unique it was?

No.

John was, even back then, very much aware that this thing with Paul was special. And that, if anything, made it worse. Because now there were (perhaps unconscious) unmeetable expectations weighing down on his belief in the genuineness of the relationship.

If they are cosmically connected, then they should be able to communicate wordlessly, “share in each other’s minds”; if they can read each other’s minds, they should know the other’s every want and need; so if Paul is not innately responding to his wants and needs, he is either actively ignoring John’s suffering (because Paul doesn’t really care about him or, perhaps, because he actually derives pleasure from seeing John down); or Paul can’t actually feel John’s pain intrinsically in the first place, and that would mean that everything that John believed about the specialness of the relationship and the relationship itself was a lie.

And boy, faulty communication sure is one of the fatal flaws in their dynamic! All because there was the assumption that they were so in-tune that they didn’t need to talk! There seemed to be the expectation that everything would flow seamlessly. And if it wasn’t flowing, if anything required a bit of personal input to work it out, then it wasn’t genuine and spontaneous any more. And if the relationship wasn’t real, it wasn’t worth climbing the mountain for. It shouldn’t be a climb at all, but rather an effortless glide, hand-in-hand, through the universe!

John: Because we have plenty of arguments, but we’re also so attuned to each other, and we know each other so well, through the years, that an argument never reaches a climax. Or it never reaches the point where somebody goes off ‘cause they’re done talking, you know.

Q: In other words, it’s forgotten.

John: It’s not forgotten. But we know each other so well, it’s like sort of mind-reading. If an argument’s building up between Ringo and I, say, there comes to a point where we know what’s coming next and it’s all – everybody packs in. Or something – some, “Okay, he wins,” you know. So we have ordinary arguments, like other people, but we don’t – there’s no sort of conflict. All the people who have conflict in show business either get married about nineteen times, they leave the group they’re in and go solo… and nothing ever happens.

— Interview w/ Larry Kane (2 September 1964).

Hindle: What do you think about language?JOHN: I think it’s a bit crummy, you know? It is a drag form of communication, really. We’ll get – we’ll get telepathy. I believe that.Hindle: You believe that?JOHN: Yeah, sure. Sure. Sure as anything I believe. It’s too… Because now we need it so much. […] But it’s hard… it’s that bit, you know. There are – there’s people everywhere of the same mind and it’s just… even amongst ourselves we can’t communicate. Which is the hard bit, you know. Hindle: Yeah.JOHN: Amongst the people that sort of really agree. Hindle: Just ’cause of words?JOHN: Just ’cause of words, and upbringing, and attitude, and how you express your… Well, it’s just some – you’ve got to find a mutual sort of language to express yourself, you know? And my language is that—Hindle: Unless you fall in love it’s impossible to communicate like that. JOHN: I mean, I wasn’t in love last year, but I was communicating quite well with people. Not as well, or maybe not as powerfully. ’Cause now there’s two of us, doing that, brrmmm, whatever it is. Sending out a vibration or whatever. But before it was me and… or me and George, alright, or whatever it was; we weren’t in love, but. You know. There’s enough in you to shove it out. It is just that bit. If you – if somebody comes in a room and he’s uptight and that, he can make the whole room uptight.

— John Lennon, interview w/ Maurice Hindle (December 1968).

It’s sort of complicated but sometimes you say things, but it’s not really what you meant to say. If I say something to you and you hear it different from what I’ve said it, and you answer back and we’re not really getting down to it. I’m really talking like that you know. Like somebody says ‘do you want ice cream?’ and I’ll say no, and actually I meant yes. You find yourself saying the opposite of what you mean. This happens to me quite a lot. I speak a lot, but what I say is not always what I mean.

— John Lennon, when talking about I Know (I Know) (1973).

Laverdiere: [The Family Way soundtrack] was actually the first time you would officially compose outside the Lennon-McCartney tandem.

Paul: Yes, and you know, it’s funny. That’s true. It’s funny because talking to Yoko recently, you know, you talk about all these things that happen way back in history. It turns out John was not pleased; but I didn’t know ‘til a year ago that he wasn’t pleased. He always told me, “Fine.” ‘Cause he’d been acting in a film – he did a film called How I Won The War – so we started to do little solo thing, just for a change, just for a break, and so I assumed, I asked him, “Is it okay with you?” He said, “Yeah, fine, fine.”

But Yoko told me that he was actually a little bit put off by that, because he hoped probably that I would say Lennon-McCartney will write this together. But to me it seemed a good opportunity to get away of what I did normally. But Yoko just told me apparently John was a little bit hurt about that. Which is sad. But we did actually talk about it. He just never told me at that time. He probably just covered up.

—Paul McCartney, interview w/ Michel Laverdière. (May 23rd, 1995)

‘Rigby’’s, um, his first verse, and the rest of the verses are basically mine. But the way he did it was – uh, was he had the song, and he knew he’d got the song. So rather than ask me, “John, do these lyrics—” Because by that period, he didn’t want to say that – to me. Okay? So what he would say was, “Hey, you guys, finish off the lyrics,” while he was sort of fiddling around with the track or something, or – or arranging it, in the other part of the giant studio in EMI.

Now, I sat there with Mal Evans, a road manager who was a telephone installer, and Neil Aspinall, who was a not-completed student accountant who became our road manager. And I was insulted and hurt that he’d thrown it out in the air, but I wanted to grab a piece of it, and I wrote it with them sitting at the table. So. There might be a version that they contributed, but there isn’t a line in there that they put in.

But that’s how it – [Paul] just sort of— ‘Cause that’s the kind of insensitivity he would have – which made me upset in the later years – because to him, that meant nothing. But that’s the kind of person he is. So he threw ‘em out and said, “Here, finish these up,” like – to anybody, who was around. [By saying that] actually he meant I was to do it, but – you know, Neil and Mal were sitting there, and…

— John Lennon, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)

John: We don’t really write together any more. We haven’t written together for two years. Not really. Just occasional bits we help… somebody’s got to use a line or two.

Miles: How does that affect you when you’re playing then?

John: It doesn’t make any odds, who writes them. It’s when The Beatles perform that makes it into Beatle music. It’s a long time since we’ve sat down and written together for many reasons, because we used to write together mainly on tour. Then there was a valid reason for it. It got false – “Come round to my house and we’ll write some songs” – it doesn’t work anymore.

—John Lennon, interview w/ Barry Miles, (partially) unpublished. (September 23rd, 1969)

But in the early days of performing, whether it was Hamburg or Liverpool, when we were still playing dance halls, there was still a lot of inspirational energy. We hadn’t started repeating our little movements, our little licks. So in that respect, the Beatles’ live creativity had gone long before they came to America. And in the same respect, the creativity of songwriting had left Paul and me… well by the mid-Sixties it had become a craft.

And yet… a different kind of thing comes in. It’s like a love affair. When you first meet, you can have the hots twenty-four hours a day for each other. But after fifteen or twenty years, a different kind of sexual and intellectual relationship develops, right? It’s still love, but it’s different. So there’s that kind of difference in creativity too. As in a love affair, two creative people can destroy themselves trying to recapture that youthful spirit, at twenty-one or twenty-four, of creating without even being aware of how it’s happening. One takes to drugs, to drinks, to knock oneself out…

— John Lennon, interview w/ David Sheff for Playboy. (September, 1980)

I was really going through the “What’s it all about?” type thing – this songwriting is nothing, it’s pointless, and I’m no good, I’m not talented, and I’m shitty, and I couldn’t do anything but be a Beatle. What am I going to do about it? It lasted nearly two years and I was still in it during Pepper. I know Paul wasn’t at the time; he was feeling full of confidence, and I was going through murder during those periods.

—John Lennon, interview w/ Barry Miles, (partially) unpublished. (September 23rd, 1969)

You can get a picture of how this expectation of implicit understanding between them when mixed with the insecurity in the other’s love they harboured, bred a lot of hurts…

It takes two to tango, of course. I won’t really get into how Paul’s avoidance of his own feelings and implicit expectation that John would know how much he meant to him, without Paul having to look those emotions in the eye for too long or make himself vulnerable by saying them out loud, had a part to play in this. I have touched upon this in other posts and hope to go deeper in the future, but this has run away from me as it is!

It makes me happy that, even if only in retrospect, their approach to this special, magical, cosmic connection they shared evolved from the naive view that the relationship had to carry itself own the back of its own merits, to the more mature understanding that it continues because they want it to continue and work to continue. As John put it: Love is a flower and you have to water it.

Once again, thank you so much for the ask, and forgive me for losing myself completely down this rather angsty rabbit-hole… But feel free to explore the tags for more appreciations of the magical quality of Lennon/McCartney!

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writemarcus · 4 years

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Watch This Space: Playwrights Train for All Media

As dramatists begin to write for all media, the nation’s playwriting programs are starting to teach beyond the stage.

BY MARCUS SCOTT

In 2018, a record 495 original scripted series were released across cable, online, and broadcast platforms, according to a report by FX Networks. And with the growing popularity of streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon (not to mention new players like Disney and Apple), a whopping 146 more shows are up and running on various platforms now than were on air in 2013. So how does peak TV relate to theatre?

Once a way for financially strapped playwrights to land stable income and adequate health insurance, television has since emerged as a rewarding venue for ambitious dramatists looking to forge lifetime careers as working writers. Playwright Tanya Saracho is the current showrunner for “Vida” on Starz. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is the series developer of “Riverdale” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” Sheila Callaghan is executive producer of the long-running black comedy “Shameless.” Sarah Treem, co-creator and showrunner of “The Affair,” recently concluded the Rashomon-esque psychological drama in November.

To satiate demand for more content, showrunners have sought to recruit emerging playwrights to fill their writers’ rooms. It’s now common practice for them to read plays or spec scripts penned prior to a writer’s graduation.

Many aspiring playwrights have caught on, enrolling in drama school intent on flirting with virtually every medium under the umbrella of the performing arts. Several institutions around the country have become gatekeepers for the hopeful—post-graduate MFA boot camps bestowing scribes with the Aristotelian wisdom of plot, character, thought, diction, and spectacle before they’re dropped into the school of hard knocks that is the modern American writers’ room. Indeed, since our culture has emerged from the chrysalis of peak TV, playwriting programs have begun training students for a career that includes not only the stage but multiple mediums, including the screen.

Playwright Zayd Dohrn, who has served as both chair of Northwestern University’s radio/TV/film department and director of the MFA in writing for screen and stage since 2016, said versatility is the strongest tool in the kit of the program’s students.

“We offer classes in playwriting, screenwriting and TV writing, as well as podcasts, video games, interactive media, stand-up, improv, and much more,” he explained. “There’s no one way to approach the craft, and we offer world-class faculty with diverse backgrounds, professional experiences, and perspectives, so students can be exposed to the full range of professional and artistic practice.”

Dominic Taylor, vice chair of graduate studies at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in California, also agrees that multiplicity is the key to the survival of a working writer. “In the industries today, whether one is breaking a story in a writers’ room or writing coverage as an assistant, the ability to recognize and manipulate structure is paramount,” Taylor said. “The primary skill, aside from honing excellent social skills, would be to continue to study the forms as they emerge. Read scripts and note differences and strengths of form to the individual’s skill set. For example, the multi-cam network comedy is very different from the single-cam comedy—‘The Conners’ versus ‘Modern Family,’ let’s say. It’s not just the technology; it is the pace of the comedy.”

Taylor, a distinguished multi-hyphenate theatre artist working on both coasts, said that schools like UCLA offer a lot more than classes, including one with Phyllis Nagy (screenwriter of Carol). UCLA’s program also partners with its film school, and hires professional directors to work with playwrights to develop graduate student plays for productions at UCLA’s one-act festival, ONES, or its New Play Festival. Taylor also teaches four separate classes on Black theatre, giving students the opportunity to study the likes of Alice Childress, Marita Bonner, and Angelina Weld Grimké in a university setting (a rarity outside of historically Black colleges and universities).

Dohrn, a prominent playwright who is currently developing a feature film for Netflix and has TV shows in development at Showtime, BBC America, and NBC/Universal, said that television, like theatre, needs people who can create interesting characters and tell compelling stories, who have singular, unique voices—all of which are emphasized in playwriting training.

“Playwrights are not just good at writing dialogue—they are world creators who bring a unique vision to the stories they tell,” Dohrn emphasized. “More than anything else, a writer needs to develop his/her/their unique voice. Craft can be taught, but talent and creativity are the most important thing for a young writer.”

For playwright David Henry Hwang, who joined the faculty at Columbia University School of the Arts as head of the playwriting MFA program in 2014, success should be a byproduct, not a destination. “As a playwright, I don’t believe it’s possible to ‘game’ the system—i.e., to try and figure out how to write something ‘successful,’” he said. “The finished play is your reward for taking that journey. The thing that makes you different, and uniquely you, is your superpower as a dramatist, because it is the key to writing the play only you can write. Ironically, by focusing not on success but on what you really care about, you are more likely to find success.”

Since arriving at Columbia, one of Hwang’s top priorities was to expand the range of TV writing classes. This led to the creation of separate TV sub-department “concentrations,” housed in both the theatre and film programs. All playwriting students are required to take some television classes.

“We are at a rather anomalous moment in playwriting history, where the ability to write plays is actually a monetizable skill,” said Hwang, whose TV credits include Treem’s “The Affair.” “Playwrights have become increasingly valuable to TV because it has traditionally been a dialogue-driven medium (though shows like ‘Game of Thrones’ push into more cinematic storytelling language), and playwrights are comfortable being in production (unlike screenwriters, some of whom never go to set). Once TV discovered playwrights, we became more valuable for feature films as well.”

Playwrights aren’t the only generative theatremakers moving to the screen. Masi Asare is an assistant professor at Northwestern’s School of Communication, which teaches music theatre history, music theatre writing and composition, and vocal performance. The award-winning composer-lyricist, who recently saw her one-act Mirror of Most Value: A Ms. Marvel Play published by Marvel/Samuel French, said that the world of musical theatre is not all that different either; it’s experiencing a resurgence in both cinema and the small screen: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, Justin Hurwitz, and Benj Pasek and Justin Paul have all written songs that were nominated for or won Oscars. The growth of YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter have offered new ways for musical theatre graduates to market and monetize their songs and build an audience.

“The feeling that a song has to ‘work’ behind a microphone in order to be a good song is really having an impact on young writers,” said Asare. “The song must sound and look good in this encapsulated video that will be posted on the songwriters’ website and circulated via social media.” She noted that in this case, the medium of video is also changing the medium of musical theatre itself. “Certainly it may lead to different kinds of musicals—who knows? New experimentation can be exciting, but I think there is a perception that all you have to have is a series of good video clips to be a songwriter for the musical theatre, a musical storyteller. I think that does something of a disservice to rising composers and lyricists.”

Some playwriting students, of course, are not interested in learning about how to write for television. But many who spoke for this story agreed that learning about the different ways of storytelling can be beneficial. One program in particular that has its eyes on the multiplicity of storytelling mediums is the Writing for Performance program at the California Institute of the Arts. Founded by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks in 2001 as a synergy of immersive environments, visual art installation, screenplay, and the traditional stage play, the program has helped students and visiting artists alike transcend theatrical conventions. Though Parks is no longer on the CalArts faculty, her spirit still infuses the program. As Amanda Shank, assistant dean of the CalArts School of Theater, puts it, “Every time she came to the page, there was a real fidelity to the impulse of what she was trying to communicate with the play, and the form followed that. It’s not her trying to write a ‘correct’ kind of play or to lay things bare in a certain prescribed way.”

That instinct is in the life fiber of CalArts’s Special Topics in Writing, a peer-to-peer incubator for the development of new projects that grants students from across various departments the opportunity to develop and produce writing-based projects. Shank defines the vaguely titled yearlong class, which she began, as a “hybrid of a writing workshop and a dramaturgical project development space.” A playwright and dramaturg, Shank said her class was born of her experience as an MFA candidate; she attended the program between 2010 and 2013, and then noticed her fellow students’ lack of ability to fully shepherd their projects.

“I was finding a lot of students that would have an idea, bring in a few pages or even bring in a full draft, but then they would kind of abandon it,” said Shank. “I wanted a space [that would] marry generative creativity, a place of accountability, but also a place that was working that muscle of really developing a project. Because I think often as artists we look to other institutions, other people to usher our work along. Yes, you need collaborators, yes, you need organizations of supporters—but you have to some degree know how to do those things yourself.”

Program alum Virginia Grise agrees. Grise has been a working artist since her play blu won the 2010 Yale Drama Series Award. She conceived her latest play, rasgos asiaticos, while still attending CalArts. Inspired by her Chicana-Chinese family, the play has evolved into a walk-around theatrical experience with some dialogue pressed into phonograph records that accompany her great uncle’s 1920s-era Chinese opera records. After developing the production over a period of years, with the help of CalArts Center for New Performance (CNP), Grise will premiere rasgos asiaticos in downtown Los Angeles in March 2020, boasting a predominantly female cast, a Black female director, and a design team entirely composed of women of color. Her multidisciplinary work is emblematic of the direction CalArts is hoping to steer the field, with training that is responsive to a growingly diverse body of students who may not want to create theatre in the Western European tradition.

“You cannot recruit students of color into a training program and continue to train actors, writers, and directors in the same way you have trained them prior to recruiting them,” said Grise. “I feel like training programs should look at the diversity of aesthetics, the diversity of storytelling—what are the different ways in which we make performance, and how is that indicative of who we are, and where we are coming from, and who we are speaking to?”

As an educator whose work deals with Asian American identity, including the play M. Butterfly and the high-concept musical Soft Power, Hwang said that one of his goals as an educator is to train a diverse body of students and teach them how to write from a perspective that is uniquely theirs.

“If we assume that people like to see themselves onstage, this requires a range of diverse bodies as well as diverse stories in our theatres,” Hwang said. “Institutions like Columbia have a huge responsibility to address this issue, since we are helping to produce artists of the future. Our program takes diversity as our first core value—not only in terms of aesthetics, but also by trying to cultivate artists and stories which encompass the fullest range of communities, nationalities, races, genders, sexualities, differences, and identities.”

The film business could use similar cultivation. In March 2019, the Think Tank for Inclusion and Equity (TTIE), a self-organized syndicate of working television writers, published “Behind the Scenes: The State of Inclusion and Equity in TV Writing,” a research-driven survey funded by the Pop Culture Collaborative. Data from that report observed hiring, writer advancement, workplace harassment, and bias among diverse writers, examining 282 working Hollywood writers who identify as women or nonbinary, LGBTQ, people of color, and/or people with disabilities, analyzing how they fare within the writers’ room. In positions that range from staff writer to executive story editor, a nearly two thirds majority of this surveyed group reported troubling instances of bias, discrimination, and/or harassment by members of their individual writing staff. Also, 58 percent of them said they experienced pushback when pitching a non-stereotypical diverse character or storyline; 58 percent later experienced micro-aggressions in-house. The biggest slap in the face: When it comes to in-house pitches, 53 percent of this group’s ideas were rejected, only to have white writers pitch exactly the same idea a few minutes later and get accepted. Other key findings from the report: 58 percent say their agents pitch them to shows by highlighting their “otherness,” and 15 percent reported they took a demotion just to get a staff job.

But there was more: 65 percent of people of color in the survey reported being the only one in their writers’ room, and 34 percent of the women and nonbinary writers reported being the only woman or nonbinary member of their writing staff; 38 percent of writers with disabilities reported being the only one, and 68 percent of LGBTQ writers reported being the only one.

For Dominic Taylor, the lack of diversity and inclusion in TV writers’ rooms can be fought in part by opening up the curriculum on college campuses, which he has expanded since joining the faculty at UCLA. “Students need a comprehensive education,” Taylor pointed out. He noted the importance of prospective playwrights being as familiar with Migdalia Cruz, Maria Irene Fornés, James Yoshimura, Julia Cho, and William Yellow Robe as they are with William Shakespeare, and looking at traditions as vast as the Gelede Festival, the Egungun Festival, Shang theatre of China, as well as the Passion Plays of Ancient Egypt.

“All of these modes of performance predate the Greek theatre, which is the starting point for much of theatre history,” explained Taylor. “It is part of my mandate as an educator to complete the education of my students. Inclusion is crucial to that education.”

After all, with the growing variety of platforms for story and expression, why shouldn’t there also be diversity of forms and voices? Whatever the medium of delivery, these are trends worth keeping an eye on.

Marcus Scott is a New York City-based playwright, musical writer, and journalist. He’s written for Elle, Essence, Out, and Playbill, among other publications.

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artistjojo1228 · 5 years

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Rock and Roll Storytime #5: Brian Jones and his Five(?) Children

Note: This is going to be a bit less light-hearted than the others I’ve posted so far. Please bear with me.

I may occasionally admit to myself that I have schoolgirl crushes on the dead, but that doesn’t mean I won’t call them out for something they did. Take, for example, Brian Jones. I’ll admit that I love him, I’ll daydream about saving his life, and of course, I will stand up for him (because the Rolling Stones was once HIS band). But make no mistake, he didn’t have a good track record with his girlfriends or the various love-children he fathered over the years (which I especially take issue with being the child of two high school seniors and having never met my biological father). While I could tell you of his mutually-abusive relationship with Anita Pallenberg, I’d prefer to save that for another time. For now, let’s talk about those relationships, trysts, and one-night-stands that resulted in the births of his five confirmed children (there may be more, and I keep hearing of a daughter who was born just a few months before Brian’s death, but I’d prefer to stick with these five).

1. Barry David Corbett (aka Simon): Let’s face it, Brian started out young, by which I mean that he was just seventeen when he got his then-girlfriend, Valerie Corbett, pregnant. Sources don’t agree upon whether she was just fourteen (ew) or seventeen (which isn’t much better). Bear in mind, in the 1950s, not only was teenage pregnancy a serious no-no, but very often, the mothers were given no say in what happened to their unborn child, often being forced to give up the baby for adoption not long after birth (while the fathers usually got off relatively light in comparison with, say, a mildly-damaged reputation). Reportedly, Brian’s solutions for this were, depending on sources, a shotgun wedding (Paul Trynka’s Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones) or an ILLEGAL abortion (most other sources I’ve read). In the end though, Valerie gave birth to Barry on May 29, 1960, and the child was given up for adoption and given the name Simon. Because Brian wasn’t listed as his father on the birth certificate, he didn’t find out Brian was his father until 2004, and by then, he was married with two kids of his own.

2. Unknown name (Known as Belinda or Carol, depending on the source): Just a couple of months later, Brian was at it again, this time, having a one-night-stand with a married woman, Angeline, resulting in her pregnancy. She and her husband decided to raise the baby as their own, and on August 4, 1960, her and Brian’s daughter was born. Given that this resulted from a one-night-stand, Brian more than likely never knew about his only daughter’s birth. Brian’s bandmate, Bill Wyman, managed to get in contact with her for his 1990 book, Stone Alone. Growing up, she realized her adoptive father wasn’t her biological father when she was six, and by all accounts, she realized Brian was her father when her brother brought home a Rolling Stones record when she was fifteen. She has declined to let her real name be known to the public, most likely because the subject of Brian Jones is a sore spot in her family. However, it is made known in Stone Alone that she was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy (it can be hereditary), which, to her and Bill, explained some of Brian’s behaviors (e.g. switching off from conversations at random moments). While this probably doesn’t explain everything, and we’ll never know for sure whether Brian had epilepsy or not, I still think it’s an interesting explanation for at least some of Brian’s overall health problems.

3. Julian Mark Andrews: Certainly, Brian was living up to the “Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll” lifestyle before he’d even become a rock star. For a time, a then 19-year-old Brian dated 16-year-old Pat Andrews. By her own account, she was in such denial about being pregnant, that it apparently took her sister marching her into the GP’s office just to confirm it. On October 22, 1961, Pat gave birth to her and Brian’s son, better known as Mark. Reportedly, on the day Mark was born, Brian sold his record collection so he could buy flowers for Pat and clothes for his newborn son. Sadly though, Brian’s support was not to last. One reason might be that Brian never was good at that whole “fidelity” thing to begin with. Another might be Rolling Stones manager, Andrew Loog Oldham’s, meddling. By one account, Pat went with Mark to visit Brian, who promptly started bitching about how Brian shouldn’t be seen with a girlfriend and a young child, wanting to market Brian as a single young man and not a family man (much like what once happened with the Beatles’ John Lennon). Brian, obviously, didn’t seem to have the heart or spine to stand up for Pat and Mark and stopped associating with them. Yet another reason, according to Paul Trynka, was Mick Jagger making a drunken pass at Pat, and then bragging about it (with much embellishing) in Brian’s presence (and by her account, he never gave her a chance to explain her side of the story). For one reason or another, Brian eventually cut off all contact with Pat and Mark. She eventually sued him to try and get him to pay child support payments, and when Brian failed to show up for court, the judge, more than a little pissed with Brian, awarded her the maximum sum allowed at that time of £2.50 a week for Mark as well as another £78 to cover Pat’s court costs and confinement expenses. However, after Brian’s death, the payments stopped coming. According to Laura Jackson’s book, he has no memories of his father.

4. Julian Brian Jones Leitch: Yes, you’re reading that right, Brian had two sons named Julian after Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. 😑 By this time, Brian was dating 17-year-old Linda Lawrence, who gave birth to Brian’s fourth child (and third son), Julian, on July 23, 1964. Reportedly, Brian lived with Linda and her family for a while, but her parents kicked him out once they realized that he had no intentions of marrying their daughter. She was the first of Brian’s ex-girlfriends to come forward with a paternity suit, but it was dropped later that year and Linda was awarded a £1,000 lump sum when the suit was dropped. In October 1970, just over a year after Brian’s death, Linda married Brian’s friend and fellow musician Donovan Leitch (better known as Donovan), who taught Julian to play a guitar. He is the father of Joolz Leitch Jones (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJyE6DDbMzJgpU5mwCu1q8w), who is also a musician, much like his father and grandfather. Interestingly, I also found a clip of Julian singing “Sympathy for the Devil.” I’ll defer judgement to you guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zja7DuuYi-M

5. Paul Andrew Molloy (aka John Maynard): This one’s a doozy, even with my already-low standards when it comes to rock stars and their children (*eye-ing Steven Tyler*). This story starts with Brian dating 19-year-old Dawn Molloy on and off again throughout 1964, and her realizing she was pregnant. Brian straight-up abandoned her around this time , and Andrew, still of the opinion that the Rolling Stones should not be seen as family men (even though Bill Wyman was married and also had a young son), he essentially forced her to sign a non-disclosure agreement (witnessed by Mick Jagger, of all people) saying that she would not mention Brian or the child to the press and was paid £700 in exchange for her silence. She gave birth to her and Brian’s son Paul, on March 24, 1965. Soon after, she was forced to give her son up for adoption, and he was renamed John. Some thirty years later, he went looking for his biological family, and soon found out Brian was his father, and also got in contact with both Dawn and Bill. By that time, he was married with three children, and in a Daily Mail article in 2013, he was able to speak about his experiences. Likewise, Dawn has also written a book about her ordeal, Not Fade Away (which I haven't read yet).

And there you have it, the messy stories of Brian and the five children he’s been confirmed to have. And yes, somehow, Brian managed to have five children by the time he was 23, and he was dead at 27! Like I’ve said, there’s the kids speculated to be his, but I figured it’d be easier to stick with the five who are known. Though, knowing Brian, there is no doubt in my mind that there are probably scores more out there. One thing’s for sure though is that, despite my admitted infatuation with Brian, I cannot condone his behavior towards the children he knew he had, especially since I’ve been through a similar situation in my life. Thank God for contraception.

Sources: http://www.earcandymag.com/foundationstonebook-2.htm

Stone Alone by Bill Wyman

Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones by Paul Trynka

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8OANZg8_iE

Brian Jones, The Untold Life and Mysterious Death of a Rock Legend by Laura Jackson

https://ultimateclassicrock.com/the-rolling-stones-children/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1353783/Being-Brian-Joness-son-greatest-thing-happened-me.html

http://www.angelfire.com/rock3/sixtiesfish/kidsweb/kids.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Jones#Early_life_and_children

#brian jones #the rolling stones #most of my faves are straight-up problematic #brian i love you but come on #rock and roll

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themastercylinder · 5 years

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SUMMARY

Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) is a psychic who has been using his talents solely for personal gain, which mainly consists of gambling and womanizing. When he was 19 years old, Alex had been the prime subject of a scientific research project documenting his psychic ability, but in the midst of the study, he disappeared. After running afoul of a local gangster/extortionist named Snead (Redmond Gleeson), Alex evades two of Snead’s thugs by allowing himself to be taken by two men: Finch (Peter Jason) and Babcock (Chris Mulkey), who identify themselves as being from an academic institution.

At the institution, Alex is reunited with his former mentor Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow) who is now involved in government-funded psychic research. Novotny, aided by fellow scientist Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw), has developed a technique that allows psychics to voluntarily link with the minds of others by projecting themselves into the subconscious during REM sleep. Novotny equates the original idea for the dreamscape project to the practice of the Senoi natives of Malaysia, who believe the dream world is just as real as reality.

The project was intended for clinical use to diagnose and treat sleep disorders, particularly nightmares, but it has been hijacked by Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer), a powerful government agent. Novotny convinces Alex to join the program in order to investigate Blair’s intentions. Alex gains experience with the technique by helping a man who is worried about his wife’s infidelity and by treating a young boy named Buddy (Cory Yothers), who is plagued with nightmares so terrible that a previous psychic lost his sanity trying to help him. Buddy’s nightmare involves a large sinister “snake-man.”

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A subplot involving Alex and Jane’s growing infatuation culminates with him sneaking into Jane’s dream to have sex with her. He does this without technological aid—something no one else has been able to achieve. With the help of novelist Charlie Prince (George Wendt), who has been covertly investigating the project for a new book, Alex learns that Blair intends to use the dream-linking technique for assassination.

Blair murders Prince and Novotny to silence them. The president of the United States (Eddie Albert) is admitted as a patient due to recurring nightmares. Blair assigns Tommy Ray Glatman (David Patrick Kelly), a psychopath who murdered his own father, to enter the president’s nightmare and assassinate him—people who die in their dreams also die in the real world. Blair considers the president’s nightmares about nuclear holocaust as a sign of political weakness, which he deems a liability in the upcoming negotiations for nuclear disarmament.

Alex projects himself into the president’s dream—a nightmare of a post nuclear war wasteland—to try and protect him. After a fight in which Tommy rips out a police officer’s heart, attempts to incite a mutant-mob against the president, and battles Alex in the form of the snake-man from Buddy’s dream. Alex assumes the appearance of Tommy’s murdered father (Eric Gold) in order to distract him, allowing the president to impale him with a spear. The president is grateful to Alex but reluctant to confront Blair, who wields considerable political power. To protect himself and Jane, Alex enters Blair’s dream and kills him before Blair can retaliate.

The film ends with Jane and Alex boarding a train to Louisville, Kentucky, intent on making their previous dream encounter a reality. They are surprised to meet the ticket collector from Jane’s dream.

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The Dream Master Roger Zelazny

According to Roger Zelazny, the film developed from an initial outline that he wrote in 1981, based in part upon his novella “He Who Shapes” and novel The Dream Master. He was not involved in the project after 20th Century Fox bought his outline. Because he did not write the film treatment or the script, his name does not appear in the credits; assertions that he removed his name from the credits are unfounded.

DEVELOPMENT

DREAMSCAPE’s title encapsulates both the film and the mental landscape that its independent filmmakers occupied for almost three years. Its creators hoped that the production would not only prove to be a success, but that it would also give them the clout to go on to bigger, even more ambitious projects. Featuring elaborate special effects by Peter Kuran’s Visual Concept Engineering Company and makeup effects by Craig Reardon, the film was launched as the first outing of newly-formed Zupnik-Curtis Productions.

Producer Bruce Cohn Curtis is one of the few men left in Hollywood who still has ties to its fabled beginnings, the nephew of the legendary Harry Cohn, one of the founders of Columbia Pictures. Looking the producer, from his immaculately clipped hair down to his tailored, sharply creased suits, a chill falls over any set that Curtis walks onto. With a military air of no-nonsense, Curtis keeps a close eye on his productions and is happy only if filming is on schedule.

“I’m tyrannical on a set,” Curtis says with a smile of relaxed authority. “That’s why I use the people I have as well as I do. Many of the people on DREAMSCAPE have worked with me before and have come back because I am a perfectionist and won’t settle for less. I have a standard of excellence in my films that I’ve always maintained, no matter what the cost, so that even though you might not like the stories I’ve done, the look of the film is always rich.”

Remembering that he had to prove himself publicly in an industry filled with people just waiting for the newest Cohn to fail, for his first effort Curtis made OTLEY, a sharp-edged spy spoof/drama with Tom Courtney as an ersatz spy who finds his make-believe assignment being taken very seriously by the other side. The film died at the box office, but drew good critical notices. The industry sat up and noticed; Harry Cohn’s nephew was off and running.

Curtis partnered with various producers for awhile, including Irwin Yablans on HELL NIGHT, but chafed at being the junior partner without clout. The matter came to a head when he was making THE SEDUCTION with Yablans and grew tired of having his ideas ignored.

Curtis resolved to start his own company and make pictures his way. He found financial backing from businessman Stanley Zupnik, and was looking for scripts to start Zupnik-Curtis Productions when associate producer Chuck Russell brought in director Joe Ruben and the DREAMSCAPE script. Curtis had worked previously with both and gave the green light for Ruben and Russell to begin revising the script, written by David Loughery.

Ruben discovered Lowery’s script in 1981 at the William Morris Agency, which represents both artists. Lowery, a television writer, had come out to Hollywood in 1979 after winning a script writing contest sponsored by Columbia Pictures, while a student at the University of Iowa. Ruben had just finished directing the TV-pilot for BREAKING AWAY, and was looking for a new project.

Once Ruben started reading the DREAMSCAPE script he found he couldn’t put it down. The vision Loughery described was breathtaking, with rivers ablaze and boats filled with the undead. Ruben was excited by the property and showed it to Russell, his assistant director on JOY RIDE and GORP (also starring Dennis Quaid), films made with Bruce Cohn Curtis for producer Samuel Z. Arkoff. Russell suggested they take the script to Curtis and his new company.

It took seven months for Ruben and Russell to rewrite DREAMSCAPE; with Curtis providing detailed criticism and ideas throughout. Loughery was brought back in to help write the final draft.

“We knew some things in Loughery’s script, like the holocaust dream at the end, were so expansive that it was virtually un-filmable,” said Russell about the changes that were made. “The original ending was set in New York. We changed that so we could do the movie out here in Los Angeles. In Loughery’s script you saw all of New York on fire after the bomb had hit. You saw the Statue of Liberty, ferry boats filled with the undead, and flames across the harbor. It was really great, but I knew we couldn’t afford to do it like that.”

Putting a screenplay into production inevitably means rewrites and not always by the original writer. In the final billing, Loughery receives story credit, while sharing screenwriting credit with director Joe Ruben and associate producer Chuck Russell. When I started writing with Joe and Chuck,” he says, “the original screenplay was pretty ferme, about 108 pages. They wanted to work some more on the characters, and their relationships. That was a good thing the development of the characters gave the audience more reason to care for the people and what happened to them.”

One of the things that really worried us about the character of Alex Gardner is that he’s something of a smart ass. So, we were afraid the audience wouldn’t like him. As soon as Dennis went to work, it was obvious we weren’t going to have any problem.

“My favorite character is Tommy Ray, the psychotic psychic, played by David Patrick Kelly. He doesn’t have many scenes, but when he’s on, he does a great job. The ‘have a heart scene is going to be seen by the audience as a rip off of Temple of Doom, but the fact is we shot it months before Temple of Doom even went into production. That is Chuck’s idea; he has a grisly and macabre sense of humor.”

Russell and Ruben beefed-up the character of Buddy (Cory “Bumper” Yothers), the little boy whose nightmares are cured by the film’s dream research project. In Loughery’s script Buddy wasn’t a running character. The idea for Buddy’s character arose from concepts the writers picked up from the study of dream research.

“We found the case of a little boy who was having such terrible nightmares that he couldn’t sleep,” said Russell. “It was affecting him physically; we used that case as our model for Buddy. The first time in the film when Alex (Dennis Quaid) acts unselfishly is when he enters Buddy’s dream to try and help him. He rises to the occasion and fulfills the role of hero.”

THE DREAM CHAMBER

On an adjacent stage the set for the Dream Chamber was built. Outside, the set looked like a plywood igloo circled with florescent lights. Inside however, a small, padded chamber led to a main control room by a door and a large window. The set was a quiet haven, even when the normal racket of production was going on outside.

“The initial sketches of the set design for the Dream Chamber were some wild approaches that we felt were interesting, but not what we wanted,” Russell said. “Some of them made us feel too much like we were on a spaceship, while others were more like a classic, BRAINSTORM-type, wire-strewn lab. We decided we didn’t want a lot of whirling lights and buzzers, but something quiet and womb-like. It was a very difficult set to design because we were trying to make something that looked authentic, but we didn’t have any precedent for it.”

From an aesthetic standpoint, the design worked wonderfully. From a practical standpoint however, problems cropped up immediately that led to several delays in shooting. The set itself had been designed by Alan Jones without consulting with director of photography Brian Tufano. Jones then abruptly left the production for personal reasons so that when the set was built, Tufano had still not been consulted during the shuffle to find a new set designer. Tufano had great difficulty in setting up his lights and camera within the small confines of the set. An outside computer graphics firm had been brought in to supply authentic looking medical displays for the many small monitors built into the set. Unfortunately, the computer wouldn’t work right and left a full crew standing around collecting pay while technicians tried to figure out what had gone wrong with their expensive battery of equipment. Later, one of the technicians would quietly tell Russell that an Apple home computer would have been sufficient to give them the displays they wanted.

BEHIND THE SCENES / SPECIAL EFFECTS

“Some of the rough figures from effects companies were just staggering in the amount of money, research and development time they would need.” – Chuck Russell

Chuck Russell was told to shop around for people who could create the film’s extensive special effects and draw up a budget.

“It was very exciting to shop the script around and find out what could and couldn’t be done,” said Russell. “Some of the rough figures I got from effects companies were staggering in the amount of money, research and development time they would need. We just didn’t have the preparation time or budget of something like ALTERED STATES.

“When we found Peter Kuran’s VCE and Craig Reardon, and they got excited about the project, we knew they were perfect for it. They even helped sell the project because of their reputations, Reardon’s for working on Steven Spielberg’s POLTERGEIST and Kuran from his work with George Lucas.”

Russell assigned the live action makeup effects to Reardon, and the miniature and optical work to Kuran’s VCE company. Richard Taylor’s MAGI company was also asked to contribute computer animated imagery for the film’s “Dream Tunnel” effects. For the Dream Tunnel, Russell and Ruben wanted a semi-abstract look different from the other effects work in the picture, a “hazy.” dreamlike look, with an object or two from the upcoming scene to form and float towards the viewer to act as a visual cue for what was about to happen.

The effects sequences were storyboarded by Len Morganti; the budget was finalized on the basis of those storyboards. Because director Joe Ruben had not worked with special effects before, he carefully went through each scene with the storyboard artist.

“I knew that I had to be totally committed to my boards,” said Ruben. “I spent a lot of time thinking through the sequences and how I wanted to shoot them because I knew if I didn’t, the film would go out of control because the special effects people wouldn’t know what they were responsible for and what had to be done with each shot. I was able to get just what I was looking for. Morganti would sketch out something and if I asked him to move it a little lower and more to the right, he’d be able to do it with just a few strokes of his pencil. It was almost like working with a camera.”

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BUDDY”S NIGHTMARE

To try and save money while providing a sense of heightened realism, Russell and Ruben had wanted to shoot the “Buddy” dream, the little boy’s nightmare, on location.

“We found an old Victorian house and were actually shooting,” said Russell. “We realized that by the time you put in the lightning and thunder, it was going to look like Vincent Price was going to come around the corner. It was too on the nose, too traditional. We asked Jeff Stags, our art director, to do something different. He came up at the last minute with the idea of a forced perspective set, sort of Dr. Caligari style. It was a small set, but much more effective, as well as inexpensive. Buddy’s dream is really my favorite because it has much more impact, even though it’s not as spectacular as the last dream.”

Another problem that cropped up involved Reardon’s Snake man suit. Although an impressive work up close, Ruben felt that at even minor distances, it would seem as just a man in a rubber suit. Ruben and Russell still hoped that flickering low-level lighting would help. but Ruben began to realize that even with the extensive work he had put into planning the storyboard angles, the lighting was not going to be enough to sell the suit to an audience. Reardon firmly disagreed, “Contrary to negative thinking about rubber suits, you’ve got to see them as something delightful, and full of potential for doing something wonderful,” said Reardon. “You have to think of them almost as toys. Right when we were about to shoot the basement struggle scene, I went aside with Ruben and said there are two ways of looking at this; you can think of this as a rubber suit which will look bad, or as something which, with the proper angles and lighting, will convince people that they’re looking at a living, breathing, snarling Snake man. Now when Ruben first saw it, he said ‘Oh boy, Reardon, I don’t know…it’s a rubber suit. I thought that had a dangerous ring to it if he really believed it, which was hard to tell because he, Russell, and Loughery had this camaraderie among the three of them based on this constant derogatory kidding. That’s well and good and worth a few chuckles, but where it begins to become pernicious is when it begins to condition thinking to be truly negative.”

Reardon also objected to the low-level lighting strategy that Ruben and cinematographer Brian Tufano used to film the suit. “Tufano seemed to have a fine contempt for any kind of supplementary light which would be, in logical terms arbitrary, but in dramatic terms exciting and interesting … something that would catch the eye, something that would fill in a face or create a little cross light to show textures,” said Reardon. “The naturalistic photography Tufano used can be very detrimental, I think, to SF and fantasy stories. You contrast this with the work of John Hora, who shot THE HOWLING and GREMLINS, and you see that special effects profit enormously from using special tiny spots and direct lighting. But I didn’t feel it was my place to raise the issue.”

Reardon did try to get his viewpoint across to the filmmakers by preparing a lighting test on video. The test was crude but illustrated the alternative Reardon was suggesting. “They ignored it,” said Reardon of the test. “Yet, when they got on the set, they were completely vapor locked on the suit. They didn’t know what to do with it, and they didn’t have any ideas. All the storyboards that had been prepared in advance were completely ignored. Not once did I see anybody bring up a storyboard and crack it open and say that for this frame here we need to set up this angle. All the audacious plans evaporated. Ruben was at a loss to shoot special effects or rubber suits.”

Aupperle s first job was to coordinate the sculpture of the stop-motion Snake man, which was being done by Steve Czerkas, with the suit being built by Craig Reardon.

“They told me that they wanted to feature Craig’s suit prominently, so I was going to try and make the miniature as close as possible to Craig’s suit,” said Aupperle. “We started with a man’s armature and sculpted Craig’s design over it. I knew we were going to have to make some changes, like making the tail longer so it could whip around, but I wanted to avoid one of those instances where the suit never matches the miniature. I’d run back and forth to Craig and measure his design with calipers just to make sure we were dead on.

“Since Craig’s suit was being done in pieces our model was the first time the producers saw the way the design was going to come together. They wanted more changes than I ever expected. They actually had Steve Czerkas re-sculpt the model. It got away from the manlike design and no longer really matched the suit. I was a little concerned that the two would intercut, but that’s what they insisted upon.”

Causing Aupperle the most concern was the production’s seeming lack of respect for the story boards. *They wanted to be able to use Craig’s suit any way they wanted,” said Aupperle. “They didn’t want to be tied down by storyboards. At one time they asked me to revise the storyboards. They said they’d just have to wing it on the set. That attitude left me little to do until they were done with the live action. I found the situation very distressing.”

Perhaps the greatest disappointment for Reardon was the scant use made of a full snake-man costume. The suit appears in the film for just a few frames, as the man-snake breaks through a door; most of the action originally planned for Cedar was replaced by Jim Aupperle’s animation using models built, following Reardon’s design, by Steve Czerkas.

THE SNAKE MAN

Most changes made in the script did not alter Loughery’s story significantly. In Loughery’s original draft, the creature that menaces Buddy in the boy’s dream and later reappears as the creature stalking the President and Alex was to be a rat-man. “We changed that because so much had been done with werewolves,” said Russell. “This was right after THE HOWLING and AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON and we felt the difference between a man with a rat’s face and a man with a wolf’s face would be minimal.

“We wanted to take a different approach,” Russell continued. “Not the direction of John Carpenter’s Thing but something identifiable, so that when Tommy Ray changed into something to scare Alex, you would be able to see that it was Tommy Ray’s version of the same creature. Joe Ruben wanted to go with something that scared him, and since he’s scared of snakes, we went in that direction. I did some sketches of a snake creature and came up with something that really excited us because it was a departure from anything either of us had seen before. I think part of it came to me from my memories of seeing THE SEVEN FACES OF DR. LAO. When we showed it later to our effects people, Peter Kuran and Craig Reardon, they were really sparked by it too.

A stop-motion animator was the last member of the effects team to be hired, done through VCE. Both Russell and Ruben had agreed early on that the best and cheapest way to get what they wanted from the Snake man sequences would be with a mixture of live-action and stop-motion effects, but they were unsure just how they would mix the combination.

“I knew we would need a good animator,” said Russell. “I knew a live-action Snake man with its long neck and swishing tail would never work in a master shot. We didn’t have umpteen million dollars for physical effects.” Russell and Ruben planned to use low-key, flickering lighting for the sequences in order to seamlessly blend the two effects techniques.

Said Russell, “ Joe and I sat down with the special effects people on the Buddy sequence storyboards, which is the first appearance of the Snake man, and asked which way it made more sense to do it? It made sense to do the wide shots in stop motion and the close-ups in live action, and in the cases where we weren’t sure, we would have both of them overlap and whichever worked better, then that’s what we would go with.”

Although this arrangement was made in good faith and with the best intentions, the decision to let the two techniques overlap and not make a clear distinction between which shots would be assigned to each ultimately proved to be a decision that led to tensions and feelings of betrayal between makeup expert Craig Reardon and the production company.

Opticals were also used to create the clouds and background sky for the first dream that Quaid enters, the vertigo dream where he goes into the mind of a steelworker and falls. “There’s one shot where Dennis Quaid is supposed to be falling. said Kuran. “I spent some time trying to figure out how a person should fall so it will look right on film. We had a good plate of a falling background, and they rigged an elaborate harness at Raleigh to hold Dennis. When we were on the set. Ruben asked me how a person should fall, and I went through the motions of what Dennis should do, but Joe didn’t do that. He told Dennis to do something else that looks really corny. He ruined the shot. There was no way that I could think of to fix it and I think it looks really cheesy right now.

THE PRESIDENTS NIGHTMARES

At a budget of over $300,000 for some 90-odd cuts, DREAMSCAPE was one of the largest jobs VCE had taken on, as well as one of the most difficult. As the producers were continually asking VCE to create more or make changes with what they had done, Kuran wasn’t under pressure to have all the special effects done by the original deadline. Kuran pretty much improvises his effects as he goes along. The more they wanted him to do, the less certain he was about how much longer it would actually take to finish the effects. One thing was certain. There was no way they’d be able to get the movie out in the fall as Russell had originally hoped.

In a way though, the delays had been a good thing; something everyone was almost afraid to acknowledge because of all the tribulations the film had gone through. Kuran was creating the effects layer by layer, and even with only early tests to show, the effects still looked very good. It helped convince Curtis that even though the schedule and budget had gone to hell, it was still within limits he could work with—he was getting a better product for his money than he ever dreamed possible. The more Kuran tinkered with the visuals, the better they got. The live action footage of the actors had come out better than expected, too. Quaid and Von Sydow were marvelous in their roles, and if they could just get the effects to come out anywhere near what had been described in the script, they all began to feel they might have a movie yet, even if they did have to grimace a bit when they realized that the work on the film was still far from over.

Working with Zupnik-Curtis productions was not without its problems for Kuran in the beginning. Because Curtis had never worked with special effects before, he wasn’t sure what to expect.

“We started getting pressure from them early on,” said Kuran. “They had a rough cut of some of the sequences for us to work from, and they wanted to see something. But they kept changing the cutting without realizing that it meant we’d have to go back and redo the whole scene. There was a trolley shot that they wanted to make longer by one foot of film. At that point, all the backgrounds had been shot to length. All the miniatures had been broken down. I managed to talk them out of that one.”

Another problem is the very nature of post-production work. “When somebody does a movie, they make a little mistake here and a little mistake there, and if it doesn’t work, they just kind of throw the shit over their shoulders and it lands on them in post-production,” said Kuran. “Unfortunately, this is where we do most of our work. People are at their worst to deal with in post-production. They’re under deadlines, and if the movie doesn’t work they’re in even worse shit. The people who shot the movie are gone and they usually refuse to accept the fact that the movie is crummy because of them. Lots of people can go onto a production and create a lot of shit and come off smelling like a rose because the movie’s not finished when they leave it.”

Although VCE was contributing some 90 cuts to the film, the majority of the effects were going to be clustered around the holocaust dream near the end, and at the start, including the terrific A-Bomb teaser which opens the film. “I thought the bombs in THE DAY AFTER just didn’t look right,” said Kuran. “They looked so dark and cold. You look at a nuclear test and you can see it’s a very bright fireball, so we wanted a very hot look to our bomb.”

The Trolly/Subway Cart

Reardon’s and Kuran’s most elaborate work is seen in the climactic sequence, a surreal view of the day after Nuclear Armageddon. Dennis Quaid enters a dream which represents the President’s worst fears of nuclear war, the setting is an old trolley car that travels among the bombed-out ruins of Washington, D.C., past several surrealistic tableaux-travelling mattes and miniatures courtesy of Peter Kuran’s V.C.E. David Kelley, Plummer’s henchman, enters the dream as well, for a climactic confrontation with Quaid.

For the holocaust dream at the end, Kuran’s basic effects strategy was to have a live-action foreground element, an intermediate miniature behind that, and then have a matte or tinted water tank shot as the background. The scenes were difficult because Kuran needed something that would convey a sense of extremely large scale while still having realistic detail, a tall order on the show’s tight budget.

Russell had originally wanted to do the holocaust effects scenes first and rear-project them as they were shooting the live action. Kuran pointed out that it would take thousands and thousands of feet of film to try and generate the footage they would need, and that they would have a better chance of making sure the background footage matched with the live-action trolley car if they shot the trolley first and then had it to play the backgrounds against.

“Jim Belohovek and Sue Turner built the miniatures for the scenes, and we photographed them in different layers,” said Kuran. “To get good depth of field, we shot them at one frame per second. Then we started adding the fires. Because those had to be slowed down, we shot them at 72 frames a second. We don’t have any motion control equipment. I set up a dolly for the camera, filled the room with smoke, then lit the fires. It takes a couple of seconds to get the camera up to speed. Then we pushed the dolly down the tracks until eventually timed the push right and got it to look the same speed that we thought the trolley would be moving at. The background is a water tank shot that we used to make it look moody by adding some glows and fires. Counting everything I’d say there’s about 20 elements in that shot.”

While Kuran labored in the bowels of VCE, director Ruben and Academy Award winning editor Richard Halsey were slowly cutting the film together using unfinished optical tests that were the right length and Jim Aupperle’s Snake man animation. Kuran had been able to find them an east coast underground filmmaker named Dennis Pies (pronounced “pees”) to do the Dream Tunnel effects and the stuff looked wonderful. It was exactly what they wanted. But now it was time to decide how they were going to mix the live action Snake man and the animation, and to a great degree, they were coming down against the live action footage.

With the will to manipulate the dream to his own ends, Kelly at one point extends his fingernails into stilletos, which he uses to rip the heart from the car’s conductor, with the logic of dreams, the trolley then becomes a subway car, populated with a dozen grisly war victims, looking more dead than alive, Shortly after, Kelley transforms into a snake monster.

Reardon details the other effects he did for Dreamscape. “Tommy Ray Kelly transforms with knives springing from his fingers. He uses these to tear out someone’s heart which sits beating in his fingers,” the effects Technician says. “We made a prosthetic hand and an artificial heart for this scene.

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“We made 12 mutants up for them, Reardon says of the subway denizens, “all extremely exaggerated in their ugliness, so that, in the heavy shadows and flickering light that was planned for the shot, they would still prove effective. The design is heavy-handed, but suitably macabre for the scene.

“I hogged all the major sculpture on the picture for myself, but there were a number of other people working with me on this that also deserve mention. My greatest praise must go to Bruce Kasson, who took the weight off my shoulders where mechanical work is concerned. He worked out the mechanical effect used for the death of one of the characters at the end, as well as the stilleto fingernails. David Miller was our acrylic man, doing all the hard plastic pieces, and certainly one of my right hand men in doing the sculpture, along with David Cellitti.

Snake Man Transformation Effect

Following the completion of principal photography, there was a brief hiatus, during which Reardon re-stirred his somewhat-dampened enthusiasm, before tackling the transformation sequence.

Replacement animation is a variety of stop motion that uses separate, slightly differing sculptures, rather than the movable models most frequently associated with the form. Pioneered by George Pal, replacement animation is nowadays seen mostly in David Allen’s television commercials featuring such animated characters as Mrs. Butterworth and the Pillsbury Doughboy. Reardon’s suggestion to try this technique for an unusual transformation. Because of the frame-by-frame nature of the animation process, the sequence would be a short one-less than two seconds in sculpting work than Reardon (or, most likely, anyone else) had ever expended on a transformation effect of such short duration; 32 heads, each altered slightly from the previous head in sequence, each making a barely more than subliminal appearance in the film. It was this rapidity, and the violence of the change, that Reardon felt would make it entirely unique.

“The major problem was one of time,” Reardon says. “How was I to produce 32 different heads for this sequence within a reasonable schedule? The first thing you want to consider in a situation like this is, can you do it full-size? It took me about 15 seconds of heavy thought to realize that would be a killer, because of the molds that would be involved, and the sheer awkwardness of doing such an extensive sequence in full scale. From the beginning, they wanted David Kelley’s features discernible in the snake head’s face, so l also briefly considered taking a cast of Kelley’s face and using reduction techniques, like special shrinking molds, to bring it down to scale-but there is enough distortion in the reduction process that it wouldn’t likely be worth the effort. So I finally decided on doing a miniature portrait sculpture based on his features.

“One way to have gone would have been to produce molds of each and every stage cast one head, alter it a little further, make a mold from that and cast another stage. I ruled that out; it takes about a day to make one mold, so it would have taken a full month to prepare for the sequence.

“Instead, I took a master mold of the first stage turned out a dozen or so duplicates of that, and altered each of them to cover the first third of the total transformation. I then made another mold from the last of these, and changed those progressively. That way, I had to make no more than three molds. As the work progressed, I did some rough tests on video, which helped to show up a number of small glitches. Some of these proved very difficult to correct-seen side by side, two heads might appear to match perfectly, but tiny variances would show immediately on video.”

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A chief problem with all stop motion effects is that of temporal aliasing,” a term used to describe the unnatural look of objects seen to be in motion, but not blurred as they would be if actually filmed in real-time. All along, Chuck kept saying, ‘I hope this won’t look like animation,” says Reardon, “and of course all I could say was, I hope so, too.’

“Jim Aupperle, who did the stop motion animation on the snake monster, and my friend Randy Cook, made some suggestions to counter that problem. Both suggested that if each stage would be slightly dissolved into the next stage, that would soften the edges, and disguise whatever anomalies there were from one head to the next. So Peter took the negative and a dupe negative, printing them to a single positive with overlapping frames, so that no single frame gives a really razor sharp image of one sculpture.

The Caves

Another kind of problem arose in shooting the climax of the President’s holocaust dream, set in a cave-like underground grotto decorated with fires, twisted girders and a glowing pool of green water. Originally it was planned to shoot the scene on a section of the ruins” set at Raleigh Studios. But Russell found out that he could get a few days shooting time at Bronson Canyon. The site, long a favorite locale for low-budget productions, is actually a short “Y” shaped tunnel through a jutting canyon wall in the nearby Hollywood hills. Open at all three ends and with a high ceiling, Ruben and Russell felt they could put up a more effective set inside the cave at relatively little cost to the production.

The art department scrambled on something like 48 hours notice to come up with a revised set for the cave. They did well, but lighting the set so that the lights themselves wouldn’t show was a difficult task made harder by the fact that creating the pool of water just past the junction of the “Y” in the cave had turned the rest of its sandy floor into gritty muck that forced the crew to support the lights and camera on wooden planks and sandbags the best they could. Working in the enclosed confines quickly turned miserable too. Brian Tufano, who had been hired because of his work on QUADROPHENIA and THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE, is yet another British cinematographer who likes to use smoke to diffuse his lighting to give the set greater visual depth. Every time Ruben went for a take, Tufano’s assistants would pump the small, sealed cave full of hot, oily smoke and wait to see if the density was right. While the crew and stars quietly gasped behind their respirators, either more smoke would be pumped in if it wasn’t enough.

According to Craig Reardon, the first scenes that were supposed to be shot in the caves were thought to be relatively straightforward. Quaid, followed by Albert, is moving through the cave when they are attacked by a mutant dog. For the dog’s costume, Reardon’s assistant, Michiko Tagawa, had made some wonderfully revolting costumes.

“They were beautiful.” Reardon said. “They had entrails bulging out of the body and exposed rib cages and boils and french fried skin. Now we were told that a Doberman would wear the costume, and in fact, the trainer had auditioned the dogs in a costume they worked in on the BUCK ROGERS television show. So Michiko went to a great deal of trouble to measure the Dobermans and I contributed sculptures for the heads while she built the body parts up from reject castings for the subway zombies.” Once we got them suited up at the Bronson location however, the Dobermans refused to perform.

“The dogs trouped around in the mud and the zippers and their fur got packed with it,” said Reardon. “It was a disaster. They took one of the suits and tried to put it on a German Shepherd, a dog which is considerably different in body build.”

In his big scene the dog was supposed to run a short distance and jump at Quaid. In take after take however, the dog merely trotted up to Quaid and stopped at his feet to try and shake the costume off. Eyes turned on the dog’s embarrassed handlers who quickly explained that the dog usually didn’t act like that; it was probably because he felt uncomfortable with the costume.

Reardon snipped parts of the costume’s legs away, hoping to make it more comfortable, but this produced no better reaction. Next, the dog’s owners took to furiously waving a little furry target at the dog. then quickly sticking it just inside Quaid’s shirt while everyone enthusiastically urged the dog to attack. This made the dog think everyone just wanted to play. It would run up to Quaid, half-hop once, then bark excitedly while waiting for his trainers to get the toy again.

Quipped Reardon, Bruce Cohn Curtis said the mutant dog looked like someone’s dirty laundry running across the floor.” Finally the dog made one decent leap past Quaid and Ruben called it a take. The shot is still in the film, although the rest of the mutant dogs were replaced with German Shepherd with their fur shaved in patches and dabbled with red goo.

“The script also called for these two raggedy dogs to chase after Quaid and Albert in the dream. It seemed that the easiest way to achieve a really striking appearance for the dogs would be to suit them in a costume covered with foam latex. I consulted with the trainers on the feasibility of it, and they said

‘Yeah, sure.’ So l sculpted two mutated dog heads, and Michiko Tagawa, a very good craftsperson who’s done work with Winston and Burman, did a beautiful job on the body suits-really hideous and nasty. She took some reject castings from the subway mutants, and reworked them into twisted body shapes, warped, burned and decked with growths. But the dogs wouldn’t wear them, and the trainers sort of shrugged, and said ‘What do you expect?’

“Those trainers were let go, and replaced by Karl Miller, who allowed them to shave his dogs in erratic patches, and we gobbed all kinds of blood, goo and crap on them. Good enough, but it’s unfortunate that Michiko’s suits will never be seen.”

VCE generated the bits and pieces that would help add life and highlights to the live action effects. A red glow was added to the mutant dog’s eyes, as well as crawling purple electrical effects when the dogs vanish. Opticals materialized David Patrick Kelly’s nunchaku weapons smoothly into his hands as well as allowed Dennis Quaid to heal his wounds and transform himself into Kelly’s father.

Snake Man Showdown

The next scene planned for the cave involved Quaid and Albert, discovering it is a dead end and that the Snakeman is right behind them. It comes out of a side tunnel, snarls, and attacks Quaid. Ruben decided he wanted to use the full-sized Snakeman suit for the shot, and Reardon was given short notice to get it ready. At the time, Reardon was working full tilt to prepare the suit needed for the basement struggle in the boy’s nightmare. A different head would be needed for the cave sequence.

“Russell got a hold of Bronson Canyon and said we’ve got to do the Kelly head to look like David Patrick Kelly, playing the President’s assassin) right away. You can’t change things around like that. I said I’d try when I should have told him no.”

Ruben shot Reardon’s live Snakeman suit in the cave, although eventually discarded most of it and replaced the scene with a stop-motion cut. Also discarded was a small but important effect Reardon had worked very hard on getting right, a brief shot where Dennis Quaid “heals” a wound in his shoulder.

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“We created a sort of bite effect, then put a plastic membrane over it and melted it with a plastic solvent so that when they ran the film backwards, the wound would heal,” explained Reardon. “It didn’t work as well as it did on the bench, which is frequently the case, but you did get a feeling of the actual fleshy material knitting itself. They opted to have Peter Kuran redo it with animation.”

More successful was a Reardon designed effect where Kelly, now distracted by an ingenious ploy of Quaid’s, reverts to a half-human, half-snake form. While diverted, Albert sneaks up behind him and drives a length of pipe through Kelly’s chest. For this shot, Reardon made a false chest with a mechanical rubber pole section inside that was connected to a spring and operated by cable. Albert would sneak up holding the pipe, then drop it out of camera sight as he lunged for Kelly, and the rubber pipe would burst through a section of painted tissue paper. Although the complex mechanical effect took some time to rig, it was accomplished in only three takes and is gruesomely realistic. It made for a happy interlude before the crew was to run into yet more problems once they left Bronson Canyon and returned to Raleigh Studios.

Dave Millers Unused Snake Man

“I also worked on a snake man head, the one that was originally going to be in the elevator sequence, emerging from the head of Dennis Quaid. But then, they had some kind of quibble over Craig’s head of Quaid–they said it didn’t look like him, or some such garbage-and they hired Greg Cannom to do that sequence over. Greg did another head of Quaid, which they wound up not even showing, though it looked perfect, and another snakeman, which-sorry, Greg I didn’t care for too much. It didn’t seem to have much definition; it was hard to tell what it was. Plus, it was pretty badly edited.” – David Miller

BOB BLAIR’S DREAM DEMISE

The “Buddy” dream completed the bulk of the main shooting. DREAMSCAPE moved from the largest soundstage at Raleigh into one small stage for what was hoped would be the final shot of the would grasp what was happening. Because Quaid’s strike against Plummer was to be a surprise, Ruben and Russell felt it was absolutely necessary to make sure that the lighting look realistic right up to the moment of the attack. This meant shooting the effect not with lighting that would highlight the makeup, but with ordinary florescent lighting. Reardon hated the lighting, but went along with Ruben’s insistence that changing the lighting would tip-off people that something was about to happen.

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About a month earlier, in late June, Reardon had supplied a transformation head, known as a “change-0” head in the business, for a scene late in the film in which Dennis Quaid confronts political schemer Christopher Plummer in the one place where Plummer is vulnerable, inside Plummer’s own dream. Quaid borrows a trick from dream assassin David Patrick Kelly and changes into his own version of the Snakeman before killing Plummer. The effect was planned to first show Quaid’s head beginning to change, cut back to Plummer as the Snakeman’s hands shoot out for his throat (a very brief scene which was shot earlier) then a quick cut back to Dennis Quaid’s Snakeman head coming for the camera.

“We prepared a head, which I felt was better than a lot of THE HOWLING heads,” said Reardon. “We didn’t content ourselves with just having the face bulge out. We had the eyes blink, and when they opened they were snake eyes. At the same time the neck elongated and the cheeks distended, and the eyes began to pop out of their sockets. The mouth opens unnaturally wide and the teeth elongate. But nobody liked it. Ruben said to me, ‘Geez Reardon, I expected something like AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.’ That’s great. You give me six months and six hundred thousand dollars and maybe you could get that. Besides, that effect was five different heads. I told them all along that I was only going to come up with one head and do as much with it as I could.”

Neither Russell nor Ruben had been happy with the head when Reardon had brought it in. Under the flat lighting of the elevator mockup, the hair looked too bushy and still, the face too lifeless, and the neck far thicker than Quaid’s. The head didn’t work well either. with eyes that frequently jammed as they started to roll up. It took several takes to get the mechanism to work right. But beyond that, when Ruben and Russell saw footage of the effect, they realized that what they thought would be a good visual just wasn’t that exciting.

“Forget that it wasn’t convincing on film,” Ruben said. “When I saw it, I just realized that we needed a more shocking effect.”

“It wasn’t exciting enough,” added Russell. “We didn’t realize that until we saw it. It was a subtle effect that just wasn’t explosive enough. Craig’s head didn’t show anything either that would connect it with the Snakeman, and we decided we needed that, so we racked our brains and decided on something simple, like a guy’s head ripping apart with the Snakeman’s head coming out of the pieces.”

Russell contacted Reardon, but by this time, Reardon was both fed up with the production and busy trying to finish the replacement animation for David Patrick Kelly’s Snakeman transformation so he could be done with the film. Since Reardon was busy, Russell had to find someone who could do the effect and do it quickly. He decided on Greg Cannom, a former assistant to Rick Baker and Rob Bottin. Cannom’s first solo assignment was THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, and more recently he assisted Baker with the apes for GREYSTOKE.

Cannom had talked with Russell about a year before DREAMSCAPE about another film project that never went through. Cannom was interested in the assignment, but checked with Craig Reardon first, before committing himself. Reardon gave his blessing. Cannom went into his workshop and tried an effect which would combine the two concepts that Russell discussed, creating a skull that would not only split apart, but split apart and turn into a monster at the same time. “I could see the use of the Snakeman with the kid’s nightmare, but going into an adult’s nightmare, I thought it should be a lot more horrendous and scary,” said Cannom.

Cannom’s first prototype makeup was deemed unacceptable by producer Bruce Cohn Curtis. It was a bitter decision because of the amount of effort Cannom had put into it. Cannom took a fiberglass skull which he cut and hinged so it could be pulled apart. Inside the skull, Cannom used a soft foam and sculpted a hideous face so that when the skull was pulled apart, the jaw would drop down and the foam face would come out to form the monster.

“I loved Cannom’s first approach,” said associate producer Chuck Russell. “I think it was terrific. The dangerous thing about the makeup was that in a very quick cut, with a man splitting his head open and something gooey, dark, and spongy coming out, it might look like brains. It was hard to argue for it because of that.”

Curtis told Cannom that they wanted something closer to Reardon’s Snakeman concept. Cannom tried to figure out how to fit Reardon’s Snakeman design into a reworked version of the splitting skull but finally gave up and settled for a two-piece approach. Cannom first built a small, embryonic Snakeman head which would be moved like a hand puppet inside the skull after it split apart. Cannom wanted to stop the camera and replace the small head with a fullsized but slimmer Snakeman head that would rise out of the neck and lunge for the camera dripping goo and skin. As with Reardon before him, Cannom was less than happy with the treatment he felt his makeup got from Ruben and Curtis. Assisted by Jill Rocklow, Kevin Yagher and Brian Wade, Cannom did the effect, but felt little enthusiasm for the final product.

“Bruce Cohn Curtis and the other producer, Jerry Tokofsky, were so insulting and rude to me it was incredible,” said Cannom. “It was like they already had something against me and wanted to find fault. I never want to see Bruce Cohn Curtis again.

“I don’t really think my effect works either,” added Cannom. “It’s not done the way we wanted to set it up. We were very careful about it. First, the skull would split apart, then we would cut away, put the snake creature back into the neck and put skin all around it, and then have it come at the camera. I spent hours getting the chicken skins for the makeup and preparing them, then setting-up the effect. Ruben looked at it and said, ‘That’s not what I want. No neck and no skin. I just want the head coming at the camera.’ I told him that didn’t make any sense! But that’s what he wanted, so we did it his way.”

POST PRODUCTION

Because Ruben and Halsey had been able to do much of the editing work while the final opticals were being generated, the final scoring and assembly of the footage was completed quickly. Curtis had a finished film only a month later and premiered it to his friends in mid-January at a small mixing theater in Hollywood. Although there were some clunky spots that hadn’t been fixed because of time and budgetary problems, the final cut was deftly edited around most of them and they were visible only if you knew what to look for. The audience gave the film a big hand and Curtis was very happy, as well as Kuran. Russell, Ruben and Loughery, who now looked forward to having a potential hit associated with their names. Although Craig Reardon liked the film, he was still unhappy with director Ruben.

Ruben defended his decision to replace Reardon’s work. “Craig was under tremendous pressure to deliver an awful lot of complicated physical effects,” said Ruben. “I wouldn’t be able to see a finished physical effect practically until the day we were ready to shoot it. That was a rough way for both of us to work. I was disappointed some times, and I’m sure he was disappointed in the way I was shooting things, although at no time can I remember him making specific suggestions. I think that the main thing I would change if I were to do it again, and I wouldn’t mind working with Craig again.

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Dreamscape (1984) Music by Maurice Jarre 01.DREAMSCAPE 2:58 02.THE JOURNEY 4:22 03.FIRST EXPERIMENT 1:55 04.SUSPENSE 2:09 05.JEALOUSY MERRY-GO ROUND 2:56 06.THE SNAKEMAN 1:08 07.ENTERING THE NIGHTMARE 4:17 08.LOVE DREAMS 4:10

REFERENCES and SOURCES

Twilight Zone v04 n01_ Fangoria 44 Fangoria 27 Fangoria 34 Fangoria 39 Cinefantastique v15 n02

Dreamscape (1984) Retrospective SUMMARY Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) is a psychic who has been using his talents solely for personal gain, which mainly consists of gambling and womanizing.

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d2kvirus · 5 years

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Dickheads of the Month: January 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of January 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

It seems that Rachel Riley is quite smart at maths but a complete moron at anything else, what with her accusing Noam Chomsky of antisemitism in spite of the fact that Chomsky is a little bit Jewish, before following it up by encouraging her far-right Twitter followers to dogpile onto anyone voicing different opinions to her - which mainly involved a 16-year old girl bearing the brunt of it. However she wasn’t finished there, as when she was rightly being criticised for encouraging her followers to dogpile onto people she then went whinging to the press about being bullied by left-wing trolls before announcing she needed personal security for when she was attending Countdown tapings, which sounds uncannily similar to the same stunt Laura Kuenssberg pulled a couple of years ago

Starting the year with a bang we had Chris Grayling first try and defend the Seaborne Freight farce by saying he was supporting up-and-coming British business (while omitting the parts about them being owned by the brother of a significant Tory donor, or not having any ships or trading history, let alone the fact the contract wasn’t even put out to tender) and followed that up by claiming the rail fare hikes are entirely the fault of the unions and definitely nothing to do with shareholder dividends or years of rail services taking the piss with fare hikes on January 2nd every year. Of course, Grayling being Grayling, he also helped out the Britait debate by saying that a second referendum shouldn’t take place because if the result came back in support of Remain it would go against The Will Of The People™ - which apparently said people willingly voting to remain wouldn’t be

It didn't help Grayling that those checking the Seaborne Freight website found that their Ts & Cs were from the template used when setting up a website for a takeaway food outlet, the timetable for services was blank (and, for some reason, in Latin), while their privacy page had forgotten that the fields marked [Business Name] are supposed to be filled with the name of the business using the website

Overly sensitive snowflake Piers Moron Morgan spent a hell of a lot of time and energy yelling from the rooftops how appalling it was that Greggs are selling vegan sausage rolls, which is apparently the downfall of humanity as we know it and definitely not the hourly cry for attention from an attention-seeking lunatic - and while some claimed it was a stunt because he and Greggs share a PR agency, that theory appears to have been ever so slightly undermined by him then spouting off about McDonalds selling vegan Happy Meals

It’s funny how James Goddard demonstrated just how much of a difference a day makes, with him threatening Anna Soubry and Owen Jones on January 7th and bellowing at police officers that if they so much as touched him he’d start a a war...yet on January 8th he was bawling his eyes out on Twitter because his Facebook and PayPal accounts had been terminated

Lying (through his teeth) in front of a tractor Boris Johnson claimed he never mentioned Turkey at any point during the EU Referendum campaign - and when confronted with his numerous comments about Turkish immigrants flocking into the UK if the country voted Remain by Channel 4 journalist Michael Crick, he ran away to hide like an utter coward

Proving that gaslighting is the in thing at the BBC, Director General Tony Hall stated in an interview with the Financial Times that there is no need to discipline Andrew Neil for referring to Carole Cadwalladr as a “mad cat woman” as he had apologised - except for the fact that, while it may be plausible that Neil apologised to the BBC, there has not been a public apology for his comments

Sticking with the BBC, it took just two editions of Question Time before Fiona Bruce showed her true colours as she spent ten minutes making jokes about Diane Abbott (including suggesting that she only became Shadow Home Secretary because she once slept with Jeremy Corbyn) prior to one edition which Abbott was a guest on, and for the remainder of the episode constantly talked over Abbott while letting the other guests speak uninterrupted, including allowing Isabel Oakeshott to not just make a patently false statement but use said patently false statement to attack Abbott. It wasn’t helped that when the BBC finally got around to admitting fault almost two weeks later, their statement actually said it was a joke - you know, like the school bully tries to claim when they get caught

Oh boy, there were so many triggered manbabies were up in arms about a Gillette advert for suggesting that maybe, just maybe, being a toxic dickhead isn’t any way to behave - to which they responded by acting like a bunch of toxic dickheads throwing a temper tantrum all over social media not seen since Nike featured Colin Kaepernick in an ad campaign

I’m going to assume AnonymousQ1776 thought they were being really, really clever when posting that video clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez coupled with their sneering comment that made them sound uncannily like a teenage edgelord who doesn't know what communism is but throws the word around a lot. I’m also going to assume they weren’t happy when the stunt backfired on them by not only making Ocasio-Cortez look like a normal human being who does normal things, but doing so also reopened the can of worms about what Brett Kavanaugh was up to when he was younger...

Middle England’s favourite edgelord Rod Liddle obviously needed to be extra quote-unquote provocative this month after using his column in The Sun to suggest that what Britain needs is a new political party that represents traditional values - which means neither Muslims nor the entire LGBT spectrum are not allowed

Just when you thought John Humphreys couldn’t sound any more like a pompous windbag with the credibility of a arthritic toad, he only goes to suggest that the Republic of Ireland should rejoin the UK - because who gives a toss about centuries of history or the minor inconvenience of 92% of irish people preferring to remain in the EU when Radio 4′s most jumped-up presenter suggests they swallow their pride and return to the warm chokehold of the British Empire?

It appeared The Daily Star had a real scoop when they printed an interview with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in which he made scathing comments about the “snowflake generation” and how they were “looking for reasons to be offended” - that is until Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson issued a statement saying that not only did he not say those things, but he also never gave that interview

It seems The Board of Deputies of British Jews never got around to reading The Crucible judging by their going Full Baddiel and accusing Tottenham fans of antisemitism and, in the same statement, said they should follow the model of Chelsea fans - yes, the same Chelsea fans who have subjected Spurs fans to songs about Hitler and gas chambers for decades, who just so happen to be under investigation by UEFA for their anti semitic chanting during a Europa League match against Vidi in December

This month’s worst case of Trump Derangement Syndrome comes from Sarah Huckabee Sanders after she said that God wanted Donald Trump to become President in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network

Lucky for Lara Kollab there’s nothing in the hippocratic oath forbidding being an anti semitic bigot on Twitter. On the other hand, there certainly was in the employment contract at the hospital she worked at, which is why they fired her

Somehow the British Army paid £1.5m on an recruitment ad campaign that was so successful that it led to members of the army quitting when finding out their photos were used to recruit “Snow flakes" (sic) and “Me me me millennials” - but that didn’t stop Gavin Williamson claiming it was “a powerful call to action” (rather than “bloody patronising”) while James Cleverly mouthed off like an idiot on Twitter in support because mouthing off like an idiot on Twitter is all that somebody who makes their surname fair game on a regular basis like James Cleverley knows how to do

It took a while but Jake Paul finally found a way to reclaim his crown of Most Odious Paul Brother by hitting upon a loot box scheme to encourage his viewers to, in effect, gamble - because apparently he (and Ricegum) only paid attention to the part where the likes of Electronic Arts were making money hand over fist when they were shoving loot boxes in all their games, but didn’t bother listening when various gambling commissions began looking into the practise

To prove my point James Cleverly took it upon himself to take to Twitter and sneer “You do realise that it’s not a documentary” when I, Daniel Blake was airing on TV - because it's better to score points on Twitter than admit that a UN report late last year was damning of the Tory government’s treatment of their less well-off citizens, isn’t it?

Trying to explain away his dickheadishness saw Wayne Hennessey claim he wasn’t doing a Nazi salute in a photo that happened to be taken by German teammate Max Meyer, he was actually waving at somebody - and the reason he had his finger on his top lip wasn’t the well-known mimicry of Hitler’s ‘tache but he was putting his hand to his mouth so somebody on the other side of the room could hear him. For some strange reason nobody was convinced...

Attention-seeking loon Laura Loomer didn’t learn from the humiliation conga line that was her so-called protest at Twitter HQ judging by her protest against illegal immigration that involved her climbing over the fence around Nancy Pelosi’s property and setting up a stall on Pelosi’s lawn - at which point she appears to have forgotten what she was protesting about and instead kept yelling for Pelosi to respond to her, even though anyone with C-SPAN would’ve told her Pelosi was currently in the Senate

In order to promote her UK tour Azealia Banks thought the best idea was to vomit a long string of invective about the Irish on her social media all because she got irked by one Aer Lingus flight attendant

Can somebody tell Bill Maher that he doesn’t make himself sound more correct every time he regurgitates the “adults shouldn’t read comics” rant he first brought it up in the wake of Stan Lee’s death? Because it appears nobody has

Out of curiosity, is Gregory Prytyka Jr. still popping over here in an attempt to find material to try and attack me with because they can’t handle the fact I called them out for their tedious shitposting, or have they crawled back under the rock they usually live under?

And finally, harrumphing to himself in a way that everyone can hear (although they wish they couldn’t) is Donald Trump and his banquets that look suspiciously like those given by the megalomaniacal villain of Kingsmen, continuing to throw a diplomatic temper tantrum over a wall he said Mexico would pay for

#dickheads of the month

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crimeculturepodcast · 6 years

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On First Looking into Chapman's Holden: Speculations on a Murder

Mark David Chapman, the young assassin, was carrying two things with him when he shot and killed John Lennon on the steps of the Dakota apartments in Manhattan: a pistol and a paperback copy of The Catcher in the Rye. The function of the pistol was obvious. Less obvious was the function of J. D. Salinger’s novel. Yet the book, it seems fair to say, must have had some special significance to Mark Chapman. Any attempt to uncover its significance is, in the nature of the case, highly speculative. Yet some aspects of The Catcher in the Rye, set beside Mark Chapman’s murder of John Lennon, seems so suggestive that not to speculate upon the connections between the two seems a temptation impossible to forgo.

J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951. Like the Beatles, whose rise to fame came about roughly thirteen years later, the novel’s adolescent hero, Holden Caulfield, became a spokesman for a generation of rebellious, supposedly much-misunderstood youth. An oversimplified yet functional reading of the Salinger novel might conclude that all that the book advocates would fall under the heading of “innocence” and all that it condemns falls under that of “phoniness.” Holden Caulfield, during his somewhat aimless ramble through New York, feels overwhelmed by the phoniness he finds all around him. He struggles to preserve his own tenuous hold on youthful innocence–or, as he sometimes puts it, “niceness”–and despairs when he finds that innocence lost or threatened in the young people around him.

At his trial, Mark Chapman read what is perhaps The Catcher in the Rye’s most famous passage:

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around–nobody big, I mean–except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff–I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.

While scarcely as succinct as John Wilkes Booth’s “Sic Semper Tyrannus,” or as compelling as Brutus’s “Romans, countrymen, and lovers,” the above passage was Chapman’s sole attempt to justify the murder of John Lennon. It ought to be examined for anything in it that might have led Chapman from Salinger’s rye fields to the Dakota apartments.

Probably no one will object too strenuously to the notion that Mark Chapman identified himself rather heavily with Holden Caulfield. Chapman would, after all, be only one of millions who felt that Salinger’s book was written especially for him, that it addressed itself to his problems and, in the way that certain books do, eased his pain. If Chapman identified with Holden, what sort of view of the world would accompany the identification? The Catcher in the Rye is a book almost wholly concerned with the preservation of innocence. When Holden speaks of “coming out from somewhere” to catch the children, he hopes to save them from becoming the adult “phonies” of the kind he has been encountering in New York. He doesn’t want the children to grow up into people who will “talk about how many miles their goddam cars get to the gallon.” If Chapman also saw himself as a protector of innocence, why was he inspired to shoot Lennon? Here is a question of the kind Holden himself might have called “a real bastard.”

Two possibilities come to mind: either Mark Chapman saw John Lennon as a corruptor of innocence, or he saw him as an innocent about to be corrupted. If Chapman imagined that Lennon was a threat to the innocence of youth, he certainly took his time in doing anything about it. After all, the man who in his music sang the joys of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and later posed nude on album covers while exhorting listeners to “open their thighs,” was not exactly what one would call a Samaritan. But Lennon’s last album, “Double Fantasy,” was, by contrast, a Girl Scout manual. This album, which came after a silence of six years, dealt largely with the joys of home life and fatherhood. There was little in the album’s songs that could be considered threatening; and the interviews that Lennon gave to promote it showed that he had settled into a comfortable, somewhat embourgeoisified life of baking bread and clipping coupons. Surely, this John Lennon was not the sort of person likely to threaten the innocence of children or of anyone else.

It is more likely, then, that Chapman saw Lennon as an innocent who was himself about to be corrupted. Some problems arise here, but the idea becomes at least plausible if considered in tandem with The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield provides some useful standards by which to judge innocence. His older brother, D. B., is the novel’s clearest example of innocence gone bad. D. B., it will be recalled, was apparently a writer of great promise who “sold out” and began to “prostitute himself” in Hollywood by writing cheap movie scripts. Commercial success at the expense of artistic integrity is, in The Catcher in the Rye, the worst expression of phoniness. Throughout the novel, Holden despairs that his once-noble brother has fallen.

This model of the fallen artist is easily applicable to the world of Mark Chapman. As a teenager, he idolized the Beatles, and a large part of the charm of the Beatles lay in their absolute unwillingness to compromise their integrity for the sake of commercial gain, as Holden’s brother D. B. had. As it happens, the Beatles made fabulous sums of money anyway, but they often risked both their fortune and their popularity in unorthodox creative ventures. Sometimes, as with the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” they succeeded in spite of their heterodoxy. Other times, as with their disastrous merchandising firm Apple Corps., they failed. But they always preserved their dedication to their fans and their art, which made them easily the world’s most exciting rock band, while other bands clung to tested, profitable, and secondhand formulas. When the Beatles disbanded in 1970, their fans–including, one imagines, Mark Chapman–watched with interest to see what the individual members would do. Could any of the four men who had formed the Beatles achieve anything like a similar success on his own? Ringo Starr and George Harrison pursued fairly steady and largely uninteresting solo careers. Paul McCartney and John Lennon, divided by the stresses that had disrupted the Beatles, took off in two wildly divergent directions. Salinger himself couldn’t have wished for two characters whose careers more clearly defined the two sides of The Catcher in the Rye dilemma.

James Paul McCartney, as almost everyone who once cared for the Beatles is aware, became the most successful male pop artist the world has ever known, but in the process, he completely alienated his former fans. The man who had written such songs as “Hey Jude,” “Let It Be,” and “Yesterday” now churned out material that was designed, almost scientifically, to sell. From a purely commercial standpoint, McCartney was several times more successful than the Beatles ever were, but he had, like Holden’s older brother, clearly sold out in producing obviously commercial music. If Chapman held to the definitions of “phoney” and “nice” as outlined by J. D. Salinger, Paul McCartney had become a phoney.

Turn now to John Lennon. Lennon’s solo career was easily the most erratic of the four former Beatles. He released a series of albums that were alternately brilliant and peculiar, sometimes both, and then he dropped out of sight. “Dropped out of sight” actually means that he stopped recording and dedicated six years to raising his son, Sean, while his wife, Yoko, managed their business affairs and sold Holstein cows for enormous sums. While McCartney was so much in the news that even his toes were once photographed for Time, John Lennon–and all his various parts–were hidden from sight. No one has ever made much sense out of Lennon’s post-BeatIe years, but one thing is certain: in the code of rock music, he preserved his Beatle integrity. He was not a phoney. Even his artistic failures were dignified, and his self-imposed exile did nothing to damage but rather strengthened the claim of some music critics that Lennon was, after Elvis Presley, the “king of rock.”

Lennon’s exile suggests an interesting and possibly illuminating parallel to The Catcher in the Rye as it might have been interpreted by Mark Chapman. Possibly America’s most famous recluse is J. D. Salinger. For more than twenty years Salinger has isolated himself in his bunker-like retreat in New Hampshire. Like Lennon, Salinger has preserved the mystique that surrounds his early work, and he has accomplished this simply by removing himself from society. This isolation has done nothing to damage but rather has strengthened the claim of some literary critics that Salinger is one of the more important American writers in the postwar era.

Salinger’s retreat from society is anticipated in The Catcher in the Rye. On a date with the pretty but vapid Sally Hayes, Holden suddenly asks:

How would you like to get the hell out of here? Here’s my idea. I know this guy... we can borrow his car for a couple of weeks. What we could do is, tomorrow morning we could drive up to Massachusetts and Vermont, and all around there, see. It’s beautiful as hell up there... I have about a hundred and eighty bucks... we’ll stay in these cabin camps and stuff...

Holden’s plan is, obviously, unrealistic, a fact that, in the novel, Sally Hayes belabors at somewhat tedious length. But the desire to “get the hell out of here,” which Holden expresses several times, is entirely consistent with the uncompromising line Holden draws between “nice” and “phony,” and his fantastical if winning desire to become a “catcher in the rye.” “There were goddam phonies coming in the windows,” Holden complains at one point. Thus overwhelmed, the logical recourse is escape. Salinger’s own decision “to get the hell out of here” must mark one of the rare cases in literature in which an author has taken his character’s advice.

Though one can hardly call holing up in the Dakota “getting the hell out of here,” John Lennon did follow a course roughly like the one outlined by Holden. He, too, “got the hell out.” If Chapman shared the views of Holden Caulfield, then the chances are fairly good that he very much admired Lennon’s withdrawal from public life. When Lennon resurfaced in 1980, suddenly granting interviews and appearing in public, Chapman may have perceived a threat to the Salinger credo and a crack in the wall that protected Lennon’s splendid innocence.

The self-promotion accompanying Lennon’s re-entry into the world of high publicity was unlike anything he had ever done before, and it seems likely that Chapman found him listing dangerously toward commercialism. After six years of seclusion, news of John Lennon’s doings was everywhere. The hermit of rock had become all too accessible, in a People magazine, vulgar way. In many respects, he resembled Paul McCartney promoting his albums, which led John Lennon’s fans to wonder, with some trepidation, what Lennon’s long-awaited album would sound like.

Since his death, Lennon’s last album, “Double Fantasy,” has been hailed as a rock classic. At the time of its release, however, when Lennon was still alive, the album received a very lukewarm reception. In England, his home country, The National Music Express suggested that “the old man” ought to have stayed in retirement and pointed out striking similarities between this album and the work of Paul McCartney, which Lennon was known to have found distasteful. Fans who hoped for, or expected, another album of the quality of “Imagine” were disappointed.

We can only speculate, of course, upon what effect Lennon’s re-emergence might have had on Mark Chapman. Perhaps Chapman had been perfectly content as long as Lennon remained in Salinger-like isolation. Now, however, Lennon thrust himself into the open with a McCartney-like publicity blitz and released what was generally acknowledged to be a mediocre piece of work, Lennon was in trouble; he was in danger of falling off the cliff, à la D. B. Caulfield, and Paul McCartney. What could Mark Chapman do about it? If we examine the question with The Catcher in the Rye in mind, a most distressing, twisted solution arises. Simply put, it appears Chapman misread The Catcher in the Rye. He took the “catcher” passage to be the novel’s solution, when in fact it is the crisis.

No one who has read The Catcher in the Rye will argue that Holden Caulfield was a seriously disturbed sixteen-year-old. He wanders through New York with a genuine desire, to quote an old Beatles tune, to “take a sad song and make it better,” but he doesn’t know how to begin. As a result, he develops an all-purpose, self-protective cynicism, When challenged by his younger sister Phoebe to justify this cynicism, he offers the famous “catcher” speech. But the book doesn’t end there. What Holden has outlined in his “some crazy cliff” plan, and in his earlier “get the hell out” plan, is impossible. Holden Caulfield wants to stop reality. He wants to keep the children in the rye field from growing up. But growing up is the natural order of things. It cannot be stopped. Yet Holden longs to do the impossible. This is what brings about his crisis in The Catcher in the Rye.

Can it be that Mark Chapman, devoted J. D. Salinger reader, had his own difficulty in dealing with reality and responsibility in a world of grown-ups? In addition to The Catcher in the Rue, Chapman was known to favor a song of Lennon’s called “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Like Salinger’s rye fields, Lennon’s strawberry fields offered a frozen, unrealistic approach to life; it promised an eternity in a land where, to quote from the song, “nothing is real.” If Chapman was madly drawn to both Holden Caulfield’s “catcher” and John Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields,” it is not inconceivable that he would have wanted Lennon himself to remain “caught” in his protective retreat, where “nothing is real.” Especially now, with the release of the mediocre album “Double Fantasy,” Mark Chapman could have viewed John Lennon poised on the edge of the crazy cliff, and it was up to him, Chapman, to play catcher in the rye.

So Chapman flew to New York and began a sojourn very much like the one that takes place in The Catcher in the Rye. Although it is difficult to know for certain how Chapman filled the time, he was in the city for two full days before the shooting. He is said to have switched hotels (as Holden did); walked out of a movie theater (“I hate the movies,” Holden says, “don’t even mention them to me”); and regaled a cab driver with tales of a forthcoming Lennon/McCartney album, which he claimed to be producing (”I’m a terrific liar,” Holden admits, “I have to watch myself sometimes”).

Now comes the large question: Why did Chapman shoot Lennon? Given his Holden Caulfield state of mind, wouldn’t it have made more sense to invite Lennon out for a night-cap somewhere or to go skating at Radio City, there to caution him against selling out? But Chapman was a confused, disturbed man. There are no easy explanations for why he did what he did. One answer is suggested in the pages of The Catcher in the Rye. Chapman may have believed that the highest possible attainment, at least as viewed through Salinger’s novel, would be to achieve that permanent state of innocence suggested in the “catcher” passage. Only one character in The Catcher in the Rye manages that unimpeachable innocence–Holden’s younger brother Allie. Allie is the only character in the novel, including Holden, who never shows any hint of phoniness, and who never will. How is this possible? It is possible only because Allie is dead.

Immediately preceding Caulfield’s “catcher” speech, which Chapman found so significant and which he recited at his trial, there is a section in the novel in which Holden’s sister Phoebe asks if her depressed brother can “name one thing” that he likes. Holden has a lot of trouble responding. He recalls a boy at school, James Castle, who, rather than taking back something he had said about a bully, jumped out of a fifth-floor window. Then he reveals what at first seems to be an unrelated piece of information: that he likes his brother Allie. “Allie’s dead!” Phoebe cries, “You always say that! If somebody’s dead and everything, and in Heaven, then it isn’t really–”

“I know he’s dead!” Holden returns. “Don’t you think I know that? I can still like him though, can’t I? Just because someone’s dead, you don’t just stop liking them, for God’s sake-especially if they were about a thousand times nicer than the people you know that’re alive and all.”

In the traditional interpretation of the novel, Holden’s reference to his brother is simply another indication of his unrealistic desire to freeze innocence and thwart phoniness. But Chapman, who wrote “This is my statement” in the flyleaf of his copy of the Salinger novel, was not a typical reader. To him, the “catcher” speech was the book’s final and transcendent message, which would make Allie the real hero of The Catcher in the Rye. Allie, in this reading, is the only character to come out unscathed. Death, then, would have presented itself to Chapman as the only safeguard against loss of innocence.

Holden Caulfield and Mark Chapman were faced with the same crisis: an assault on innocence. Holden Caulfield could not find a way to preserve innocence forever and was forced to entertain the notion of growing up. If I am correct in my speculation, Chapman found a way. Taking as a model the only character in The Catcher in the Rye who achieved perpetual innocence, Chapman found his course clear. For John Lennon’s innocence–which was essential to Chapman’s own spiritual well-being–to remain intact, Lennon himself would have to die. Only then could his innocence, like Allie’s, be preserved forever.

Unfortunately, this idea, as I have set it out here, is not as absurd or outrageous as it sounds. If Chapman’s intention was to secure, and even to improve, the legend of John Lennon, the artist of perfect integrity, he succeeded. Gone now is the John Lennon who once smeared excrement on the walls of his dressing room; who claimed that the Beatles were a bigger item than Christ; and who appeared in a Los Angeles nightclub with a Kotex on his head. In his place is a sort of rock-and-roll Gandhi. Because of his violent death, anything about him that is base or even unkind has been erased. In the most extraordinary way, John Lennon today is viewed as a man of pristine innocence—“a genius of the spirit,” Norman Mailer has called him. And all because Mark Chapman, standing outside the Dakota apartments, caught him in the rye.

- Daniel Stashower (January 30th 2010)

#crime culture #crime #culture #podcast #true crime #true crime podcast #episode 3 #MDC #mark david chapman #john lennon #article

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Tyler Hoover Net Worth Garage Wife TV Show

Tyler Hoover was born on January 28, 1990 and once played football for the Michigan State Spartans and both the Indianapolis Colts and Philadelphia Eagles. Hoover's pro career did not last long as he was unable to play regular season games and face teams like the Minnesota Vikings, Chicago Bears, the Niners, Green Bay Packers, Denver Broncos, and Dallas Cowboys. TBH - the name is known more now for a hit Youtube show. Tyler Hoover's height is 6 fee and 7 inches. His playing weight was around 295 pounds. There is another Tyler Hoover that grew up in Kansas and hosts a show on live stream and in 4K HDR that documents all of his crazy car purchases and him fixing them up. Estimates are that the Tyler Hoover net worth is above $1 Million given the popularity of the Youtube show and other activities. Hoover went to college at Wichita State and the auto enthusiast side hustled by selling cars of course. After graduation in 2010, he started his own used car business call Ad Astra. The economics and money aspect were challenging, so he bolted for the TV show angle. No word on if he accepted Bitcoin or Tezos for cars. Tyler Hoover TV Show Before the TV show, Hoover's Garage earned a little bit of notoriety for being one of the bad guys. In the early days of the show, they battled it out with the city in their attempts to run a garage sale. During this time, they made some enemies as well. To have a successful garage sale, they had to become more extreme in their actions, making their popularity grow even more. The show kept the animosity between the two competing agencies going. Hoover and City Hall battled it out over several episodes. Hoover's came out on top in the end because it was cheaper to not follow the city rules than to conform to them. The garage was willing to go the extra mile to make sure that their customers had a good experience. This is a trait that many others around the country are taking into consideration as well. You can see fan reactions on Twitter and Tiktok with various GIF and MEME - plenty there to see HIFW and if they are really OTP - IKR? If you are looking for a way to market your garage sales to a national audience, YouTube might be the answer. There are many YouTube channels dedicated to a variety of different things. They all offer different merchandise and in many cases, you can add your own personal touch to the videos to create your own style and flair. Many people are finding that they have gained great success marketing garage sales through YouTube. When the music video for 'I Can't Drive 15 Miles' first hit the internet, it immediately captured the imagination of viewers. People could not get enough of the humor that the two main characters, Matt Preston and Tyler Oakley portrayed in the video. You can take a video clip from any number of videos on YouTube. It is best to choose an existing clip that has some kind of humorous message to it. That way you can add your own voice and personality to it and really draw the viewer in. The voice and attitude should be your own. If you don't like something that someone else is saying about your business, you can always make up your own story about what the two say about your business. You should also include something that will really attract your viewers to your garage sales. You can easily add short clips of you and your customers discussing how well you are doing in your garage sale. You can share photos, videos, or whatever you feel you need to do to make your video appealing to viewers. You never know, they might buy something just because of what you're selling. Once you have your videos uploaded to YouTube, you will want to put your effort into getting your YouTube channel out there. You should share each video with at least three different Facebook pages. You can even add those to your MySpace and Twitter accounts as well. If you are using the MySpace and Twitter account to post your videos, you should add your MySpace and Twitter links to those accounts. This will help you receive feedback and really make it easy for people to share your videos with their friends. Hoovie's Garage stays well engaged with the fans at all times. Once you have a large network of websites where people can find your garage sales, you can expand your reach with the next step. Join up with Facebook groups and message boards. Take advantage of the forums on your network of websites and start posting your videos. You can even set up a system so that you can automate your Facebook and MySpace accounts so that they will send out updates automatically to your messages board pages. Avoid FOMO and NSFW comments about YOLO by following along other interesting facts about people such as Serena Williams, Post Malone, Tyler the Creator, Dear Evan Hansen, Paul Bernon, Hadestown, Aerosmith, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Jimmy Carter, Einstein, Edgar Allan Poe, Pink, Lady Gaga, Lizzo, Billie Eilish, and much more. https://youtu.be/VZA49-53osY https://youtu.be/oKrvE2j4Iss Read the full article

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tiefighters · 7 years

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ILM Shares ‘Star Wars Stories’ at Gnomon

ILM’S Paul Giacoppo, Charmaine Chan, and Jay Machado discuss their career paths, making Rogue One, and much more.

From the opening shot until those final moments before the Tantive IV takes off into hyperspace, Rogue One’s visual storytelling takes center-stage in a big way. The credits run long for a reason, and that’s because hundreds of people at Industrial Light & Magic worked tirelessly to bring every major visual to life in a way that felt both “classic” and new at the same time. Last month at Gnomon University in Los Angeles, three of those visionaries brought their work to an audience of eager visual effects students in a special presentation called Star Wars Stories: An Evening with ILM. ILM’s Paul Giacoppo, Charmaine Chan, and Jay Machado brought decades’ worth of experience to their discussion.

Machado was on the modeling team for The Force Awakens’ Millennium Falcon, and created the award-winning Imperial Star Destroyer that we see rise from the shadows in Rogue One. Charmaine Chan spoke of her history at ILM, illustrating how careers grow and change on the company’s campus. Giacoppo is behind some extremely recognizable work that reaches back decades over the history of Lucasfilm and ILM; the crowd was hooked when he showed off his visually memorable “Hulk Smash” shot from Marvel’s Avengers.

But while their extensive careers could take up an entire editorial on their own, the focus of the evening was visual storytelling, and how ILM created Rogue One. Giacoppo outlined the overall objective of what the team wanted fans to see and understand: “The idea behind our work on Rogue One was that it had to have the visual feel of the classic 1977 Star Wars, but have a new vision as well.”

When it came to seeking out inspiration, the team had to look further than the usual standards. They began with concepts by Ralph McQuarrie, Joe Johnson, and several others that defined the look of Star Wars. These angular, expansive, and recognizable styles still reflect throughout Rogue One, but the team looked at what they could do differently as well, because the story in itself was different from the norm. “[McQuarrie and Johnson’s concepts] were part of what the visual language of Rogue One was,” said Giacoppo. “But it was a different kind of movie. It was a true war movie, about people with a mission to complete. So it’s not exactly a ‘hero’s journey,’ and we had to change what we were doing in order to tell this different kind of story.”

Giacoppo dove into set design, then, showing off digital recreations of classic sets that were created by John Knoll, ILM’s chief creative officer and a staple of Star Wars creativity. Knoll, attempting to explain how characters would move through various scenes, created digital set tours practically overnight in order to explain his vision.

Giacoppo then dove into characters that were created digitally for the film, focusing first and foremost on K-2SO, who he says has been part of the Rogue One story since its original pitch. K-2SO varied greatly from past on-screen droid companions, who were so often cute, or at least a little more friendly-looking. “He’s intimidating, he’s really stealthy, and he’s huge… and he was always an Imperial enforcer droid.

“There was a lot of time spent with the texture artists to get those same materials and weathering we’re used to in Star Wars,” Giacoppo explained, noting the details that showed Kaytoo’s age and length of use.

The team took designing Kaytoo very seriously, spending hours on specific details about how he would emote. The team looked at more eyes than one can count on two hands, then went through tests of how they would move — if at all — and how Kaytoo looked when expressing himself. “There was a big push to have a part of him blink, and to have a part of him move his mouth,” said Giacoppo, noting that such a thing is a rarity among Star Wars droids, who often reflect a much more industrial feel in design than most AI-driven beings within the genre. “But it just didn’t feel like Star Wars. See, he’s all blinking and jittering around… there’s too much going on.” With animation supervisor Hal Hickel’s guidance, the team ultimately went with “this sort of more impassive mask”, said Giacoppo, allowing fans to read and “project” emotions onto Kaytoo as they got to know him.

As a special bonus, Giacoppo showed a tiny clip of K-2SO playing with toys that paired with some very familiar audio from Alan Tudyk’s Wash in Firefly (“Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!).

ILM’s Jay Machado, a hard-surface modeler and texture artist, was a welcome and familiar face that evening. As a Gnomon alum himself, Machado’s post-grad years have been more than exciting. For Rogue One, following his Millenium Falcon re-creation, Machado was tasked with creating iconic ship-looks once again. To set the tone for the talk, Machado showed off that iconic opening shot from A New Hope, where the belly of the Star Destroyer sails over the camera in pursuit of Princess Leia’s Tantive IV. “We wanted it to feel like the exact same era,” said Machado. So, his team at ILM went to the root of all builds to recreate and design ships in Rogue One. “For the ships, we went up to the archives, we took lots of photos, we scanned things, stuff like that — all to get the ships to be just right,” Machado told the crowd. “There’s a few people still working at ILM that we were able to talk to, like [long-time ILM VFX artist and supervisor] Dennis Muren, who [shot] much of this originally, and that really helped when it came to making it accurate.

“What I was surprised by is that the original Star Destroyer is only three feet long…a lot of the panel lines are drawn in with pencil. And we wanted to match that so that in a way, you could watch Rogue One and seamlessly start A New Hope.”

As far as new ships went, Machado noted that the tasks were just as difficult, but worth every grueling second. “Working with Doug Chiang and the art department, we had to design [the new ships] in a way that felt familiar so that they would blend in seamlessly with the ships we know and love.” Machado highlighted the U-wing, Krennic’s ship, and the new TIE strikers, stating that they were kind of meant to “compliment” the U-wing, with forward-sweeping panels and a unique, planet-specific use.

What may have been most exciting was the creation of new ships to the canon, like the Ghost from Star Wars Rebels, which featured on screen twice in Rogue One. “It fell to me to actually [build the Ghost] and it was kind of a secret project,” said Machado. “Well, at first it was a secret. Nobody else was supposed to know about it. I was supposed to do this quickly, and I had to design it in between my daily work so that people within the office wouldn’t start getting suspicious,” he joked. There are panels and pieces that might look familiar, too — parts of the Ghost might look similar to the Falcon, and that’s no mistake.

One other major ship from Rebels that ended up in Rogue One came all the way from the Knights of the Old Republic games, originally. Hammerhead cruisers, which Princess Leia worked with Kanan Jarrus and Ezra Bridger to steal for the Rebellion in Star Wars Rebels, played an integral part in Rogue One, and Machado was among those responsible for their finished designs on the big screen.

Charmaine Chan’s presentation focused more on the process of growing her career before and after ILM. As an up-and-coming artist who veered off the trail that her parents originally wanted (worry not — they were ultimately supportive either way), Chan hit the ground running by creating work early and producing it every day. Since joining ILM, Chan has worked on more movies than one can count — a once-over of her IMDB page shows credits for Transformers, Captain America: Civil War, Jurassic World, and more. But her beginnings were in Web development.

According to Chan, she learned HTML, CSS+, and more “so that I could build Spice Girls websites” as a little girl. As that hobby grew, Chan broke into graphic design, then Flash animation. (As someone who started her career building Star Wars and N*SYNC fansites, this writer can relate.) “That’s what really started all of this, because I started watching movies closer and learning what it took to compose a full shot. There’s lightning, texture, and all sorts of details to consider, which I found really interesting…it really helped me move into this form of art.” Chan took those skills to the next level, learning visual effects, making motion graphics (“You know, like, DVD menus!” she joked) and eventually applying for a digital research position at ILM. “That gave me a really great overview of what the VFX process is,” said Chan. “I got to touch the shots at the beginning and the end.” From there, she kept working her way into a position at ILM that has grown and spanned over a decade, leading to her work as a compositor today.

The night was a wonderfully informative look at how the story of Rogue One was brought to to the big screen with stunning, modern, yet familiar visuals. One of the biggest surprises for this writer was learning about the sheer scale of people working on each Star Wars film. Hundreds of names scroll down through the credits after every film, but there’s just something unique and different about putting faces to those names and realizing just how many people it takes to make our favorite galaxy far, far away come to life.

#Gnomon #star wars #ilm #events #news #Charmaine Chan #Jay Machado #Paul Giacoppo #lucasfilm #filmmaking

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sarahifox · 7 years

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Disney/ Pixar’s ‘Cars 3’ is a Treasure Trove that Offers many Pearls of Wisdom for People of All Ages

By: Sarah Fox

I recently had the pleasure of seeing “Cars 3” in the theater with my younger sister and I have to say that it was a very enjoyable experience. My anticipation for this movie grew as the months passed by. I kept up to date with all the teasers, clips, and speculation videos, attended the Road to the Races event in May, stocked up on various Cars 3 merchandise, and even bought my tickets online before the movie came out! When the day finally arrived for me to see this spectacle, I was one satisfied customer.

While I was overjoyed at the film’s debut, many critics gave the movie mixed reviews (including a 67% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 59% on Metacritic). I personally believe that the movie contains many riches hidden behind the animated style of talking cars with eyes and mouths. Brian Fee’s “Cars 3” centers around seven time Piston Cup Champion, Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) and his internal struggle in facing the challenges that come with old age. The main plot summary of the movie states:

“Blindsided by a new generation of blazing-fast cars, the legendary Lightning McQueen finds himself pushed out of the sport that he loves. Hoping to get back in the game, he turns to Cruz Ramirez (voiced by Cristela Alonzo), an eager young technician who has her own plans for winning. With inspiration from the Fabulous Hudson Hornet and a few unexpected turns, No. 95 prepares to compete on Piston Cup Racing’s biggest stage.”

The Cars franchise was always considered the “black sheep” of the Pixar family. Not only did the first Cars film receive a passive response from both critics and audiences after its 2006 release, “Cars 2” also lowered the bar for Pixar films after unanimously gaining the title of the worst Pixar film to date. Even the two spin off films, “Planes” and “Planes: Fire and Rescue,” didn’t come off as a hit with audiences. The third installment of the franchise aims to redeem the Cars reputation and explore a deeper concept in learning how to deal with a person’s ever changing career.

Before I dive into the nuggets of truth that the movie presents us with, I must address the various qualms I had with the film (the following list may contain spoilers): (1) The film’s pacing felt a bit rushed. Every scene in the first act zooms past the viewers, giving them little time to immerse themselves in the protagonist’s struggle. Although the first half of the movie had a hurried pace and dull tone, it gets better in the second half with the colorful explosions in the Demolition Derby scene, reliving the Glory Days with past racing legends, and the budding relationship between Lightning McQueen and Cruz Ramirez.

(2) The humor was dry and repetitive. Many of the jokes in this movie were hit or miss. There was a “life’s a beach” reference and a scene with Cal Weather’s bad comebacks repeating itself one time too many.

(3) The final act of this movie didn’t feel like a proper send off for Lighting McQueen. With all the persistent attacks on his character during the movie, I felt Lightning deserved to demolish his opponent Jackson Storm (voiced by Armie Hammer) and prove that passion will always supersede statistics when it comes to the heart of racing. Instead of letting Lightning cross the finish line and claim the victory, it was pawned off on Cruz, making the two have a joint win. I felt like this ending downplayed Lightning’s struggle in making a comeback story for the ages.

Now with all my complaints aside, it is time to uncover the treasures that are present within Cars 3. As the movie unfolds its valuable life lessons, I found that there are also many biblical truths within these morals. (This list will contain spoilers).

1. Self Doubt is the biggest obstacle when it comes to pursuing your dreams. One of the many themes in Cars 3 comes from exploring the dangers of self doubt. Although Lightning suffered the effects of self doubt after his crash, Cruz Ramirez was another character who allowed her doubts to rob her of the opportunity at becoming a racer. In a heated exchange between her and McQueen, Cruz (in a moment of vulnerability) expressed her desire for becoming a racer due to seeing Lightning race on television. She explained that her family always told her to “dream small or not at all” in an attempt to protect her from shattered expectations. This caused her to persevere in achieving her dream despite her family’s doubts. When she arrived at her first race, her doubts began to strip her of her confidence as she compared herself to the other competitors. She claims that they were bigger and stronger and had better engines, and she knew that she would never measure up to their level of boldness.

I admire the connection that Cruz and Lightning shared in that moment. They each had an internal battle with self doubt and the impact that those doubts had on their future. As their relationship progressed, I found myself staring into a mirror. I too, struggle with self doubt. There are many moments in my life where I get into the habit of doubting myself and comparing myself with others: “I’ll never be able to write like her.” “I don’t look like anyone in this room. How can I make a positive impact when I’m always the odd man out?” “My waistline will never be as small as hers.” “I bet her relationship with God is way better than mine.” The doubts keep replaying in my mind. Even in the midst of my doubts, God reminds me that his perfect love casts out all my fears (1 John 4:18). If I place my trust in His strength rather than my own, the lies that Satan throws at me won’t be able to hinder me from the plan that God has for my life (Jeremiah 29:11). I can be confident that God’s grace will always be sufficient in working through my flaws (2 Corinthians 12:9).

2. You can have a profound influence in someone’s life and not even realize it. Another central theme in Cars 3 is the importance of mentorship. One of the most profound scenes in the movie was when Doc’s teacher, Smokey (voiced by Chris Cooper) took Lightning into his garage to show him the letters that Doc sent over the past few years. After the Fabulous Hudson Hornet (also known as Doc Hudson) suffered a career ending crash, he was forced to give up on his love for the sport of racing. Lightning explained to Smokey that he didn’t want to end up surrendering his career under the same circumstances as Doc did. As Lightning began to see the various newspaper clippings of his racing legacy, he began to realize (as Smokey pointed out) that racing wasn’t the only thing that mattered to Doc. Without being aware of it, Lightning had made a major impression on his mentor. The connection that he and Doc shared was a powerful bond. Smokey continued to tell Lightning that “Doc saw something in him that he didn’t see in himself.”

Sometimes I get into the habit of questioning the value that I bring to others. I often get a bit melodramatic in thinking that my worth depends on the amount of likes I receive on a post or how often my articles get read or shared. The truth is, God didn’t place me on this earth to receive validation from others. He wants my life to reflect his love. He created me to be a light that shines brightly for him so that others will see my good works and glorify my Father in Heaven (Matthew 5:14-16). I might be making a difference in someone’s life without even realizing it. Sometimes it takes an extra set of eyes to see the potential that you never knew you had.

3. In order to keep the flame going, you need to ignite that spark in someone else. Although I didn’t appreciate Lightning McQueen sharing his win, I have to say that there is yet another gem within this scene as well. During the Florida 500 race, a huge crash took place causing all the racers to go to the pits. McQueen decided to have Cruz replace him in the second half of the race. Being reluctant at first, Cruz wasn’t sure if she should ruin Lightning’s last chance at winning. He told her that “this was his last chance to give Cruz, her first chance.” This scene stood out to me because it highlights the importance of passing on the mantle to the younger generation.

Someone once told me that passing the mantle to younger generations is a biblical command. In Titus chapter 2, the Apostle Paul encouraged churches to allow the older men to teach the younger men and the older women to teach the younger women. One of the goals that I hope to achieve comes from my desire to make a difference in the lives of others, especially younger children. Since I aspire to be a Juvenile Delinquency Attorney, I pray that God would give me an opportunity to pass on wisdom and truth to underprivileged children in the criminal justice system. I appreciate Cars 3 for bringing that message to light through Lightning passing on the torch to Cruz.

While there are many other lessons to be learned from Cars 3, I wanted to highlight those specific instances which stood out to me. Although critics didn’t receive the movie in a positive light, I adored the sweet story that was presented in the film. With brilliant cinematography and lovable characters, Cars 3 is a treasure trove full of many gems for people of all ages.

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may96477158-blog · 4 years

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The Best eBook Software Creator ebook creator software for android

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Memoirs of Nepal: Representations Throughout A Many Years John Paul Lederacho Fixed-Layout Digital Book Created through a well-known peace-builder and also intellectual, this ebook was an affordable feature for a many years of essential non-profit work and also a digital friend to publish editions. Right here is actually a list of the best e Reserve creation software our team compared, for all your ebook printing and also writing requirements. Kitaboo -- Prize-winning cloud-based digital printing system to generate, release and also safely distribution multimedia-enhanced active e-books. Epubeemaker -- Free ebook printing software in the kind of a term add-in, it helps you generate epub directly from your phrase doctor Flipbuilder -- Converts PDF right into Media Rich e Works with a flipbook design Blurb -- An ebook printing software competent of aiding throughout the printing and also distribution procedure Pressbooks -- Offers epublishing solution to schools, writers and also self-publishers Flip HTML 5 -- HTML 5 digital printing system Concept press -- Permits self-publishers simplify their epublishing procedure with its own offerings i Works Writer -- e Book writing tool through Apple, helps generate books for Apple devices. While standard books were made through dropping trees, e Works are actually made in a quite mild and also reasonable manner. The only thing you require to generate an e Reserve is a great e Reserve creation software and also naturally your document. For a new writer that is making an effort to establish an e Reserve, it looks like fairly a traumatic job to find the right devices which may effectively perform the task. As well as currently you are actually puzzled over which e Reserve Production Software to utilize. Google is kind sufficient to bring to pass fifty or even so ebook designers for you to decide on. Yet that does not minimize the problem of locating out which one is better. You can not keep making an effort every single e Reserve creation software.

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ebook creator software for android https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17O-GVuG6cv-UVlO5w8LR0HRjhFlU_ABpmnBqfvoxJr0

Right here is actually additional on exactly how to generate active e-books . The intriguing part about this software is that it offers the flipping page effect when you depend on the upcoming page in your e Reserve. This flip effect comes as an appealing change when compared to normal e Works. You can incorporate multimedia factors to your e Reserve reports. The e Works could be accessed from any unit and also system. You would certainly must install this software on your Windows, i OS or even Android unit just before utilizing it. Blurb delivers you with an e Reserve creation software for developing and also posting. You would certainly first must install their complimentary pc software package if you want to begin with book creation. You require a lowest of 22 web pages to generate an e Reserve from a PDF. As soon as your e Reserve is prepared, Blurb even helps you offer your e Reserve. They deal with the logistics, delivery and also on-demand publishing. You can offer your e Reserve via the Blurb Book Store, Amazon, Ingram, and also Apple i Manual outlet. You just require to subscribe and also can right away begin making your e Reserve. If you already possess a composition prepared, you can import the data and also paste phases in this e Reserve creation software. It permits you to incorporate sound, video clip and also picture reports. You can also select the appearance of your page from their list of show themes. As soon as you have downloaded your reports, you can provide them to e Reserve shops or even utilize a 3rd party representative to offer your recently made e Reserve. Yet another flip book producer that permits you to generate active e Works. It is actually an HTML 5 digital printing system, where you can install the information with hyperlinks, multimedia, pictures and also computer animation. Your e Works could be accessed on all devices and also internet internet browsers. Turn HTML 5 is a free of cost tool and also can change PDF, MS Workplace, Open Workplace and also Images to HTML 5, creating your e Book additional active. It also permits you to generate a custom-made domain name for your e Reserve. This tool permits you to generate your e Works right from square one. You can select the page design and also layout and also concept the cover page. Their cost computation tool permits you specify a suitable cost for the e Book. The tool also helps you keep a monitor of your profits and also the variety of books you have actually sold. This software is available absolutely free on the Mac computer App Store. You can generate active e Works utilizing this tool for i Pad, i Phone and also Mac computer devices. It has a bunch of attributes which you can utilize to boost your e Reserve, like pictures, sound, videos, computer animations, 3D things, algebraic expressions etc . You can export your e Reserve in various data styles if you perform certainly not desire to limit it to an Apple gadget. It offers you the possibility to export reports in text, PDF, and also e PUB style. You can begin developing your new e Reserve with among the software package deals listed above. If it is a text-heavy book like fiction novels or even profiles, after that you may certainly not possess an odds to consist of a bunch of interactivities, but or else, you could truly boost your e Reserve through adding some multimedia attributes. Everyone appreciates a great book with powerful information, and also if you could possibly produce your user's analysis take in even better through integrating interesting interactivities, your audiences may certainly never put down their analysis gadget. Greatest General The best without a doubt, Atavist permits you release various forms of on the web information making use of preferred media data kinds in order that you can insert video clip and also photos directly right into your text message. Greatest Value for Mac Users Free with an apple account, i Works has heaps of devices and also permits you take care of all your jobs from a core place. https://shuff18721941.tumblr.com/post/189942727374/the-best-ebook-software-creator-ebook-content

#ebook #sqribble #sqribble review #ebook creator #pdf creator #amazon kindle creator

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doesitreallywork · 5 years

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There aren’t many products out there like Ultimate Copywriting Membership Program. We decided to review it to give you all the info you need to see if it’s right for you!

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Ultimate Copywriting Membership Program Review – Does It Really Work?

Are you a copywriter? Do you wish to end up being one of the most paid copywriter? Do not fret any longer given that this evaluation will certainly lead you to the success of your desire. Generally I would certainly state that you remain in the best location.

Are you anticipating create significant earnings than what prior to? Do you intend to make a various on your job? This is the ideal testimonial for you. A testimonial that is extremely various from any type of various other testimonials that you might have discovered worrying this program.

To read more concerning this program it is for that reason best if you undergo my whole write-up and also unravel what the program in hand has in shop for you.

Concerning The Ultimate Copywriting Membership Program

Ultimate Copywriting Membership Program is primarily a program that is established to aid you come to be a renowned copywriter. The program makes you a manager. You operate at your speed without any rush.

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Regarding the Writer, Paul Hancox

Paul Hancox is the gent behind this valuable program. Paul is a seasoned author that has actually been composing duplicates available for sale for over 15 years. He has actually likewise been authoring much publications made use of in advertising.

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Exactly how does the program job?

As earlier stated the program is really distinct. Despite having its functioning it shares its originality. The training program competes twelve month which is damaged down right into regular monthly programs.

For each and every month of training you will certainly have the ability to access the training components that remain in pdf type for download. This sort of training generates the very best outcomes. Each component has a task to aid you examine on your own on what you have actually discovered.

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Ultimate copywriting membership program is an extremely special program that is not such as any type of various other program. The program can not be contrasted to the so called Cleric Books of Training. The method in this program have actually not been located anywhere else.

Amongst the important things that you learn when you sign up with the program are;

The Contract Factor System-This reveals you just how you can produce a great connection with the viewers to encourage them get your item. This is one of the most effective ability you can ever before utilize in your writing.

Starting a sales letter- The program will certainly show you various means to start with your letter up for sale to ensure that you will certainly never ever obtain stuck anywhere also as you begin.

Word weapons method- Below Paul reveals a manner in which will certainly allow you to place suggestions psychological of the customer as well as entirely transform them to have your item.

Bullet home builder- Extremely distinct is this function that will certainly make the visitor constantly desire and also wish for your items. This appears wonderful as you will certainly never ever shed consumers anytime.

Inspiration- This program leaves you inspired with the dexterity for more information. This is done by presenting a principle prior to the genuine day of training.

Comprehending– Via the split discovering an idea will certainly be presented to you to review it prior to the genuine day. This will certainly aid you comprehend much better.

Is it Reputable or a Fraud?

Because of boosting instances of phony programs online, customers are currently really cautious on the items and also programs examined. No person wishes to shed their cash.

With the Ultimate Copywriting Membership Program no concern, it is simply a light program, it will certainly assist you significantly. The program is extremely distinct following its one-of-a-kind methods to the training. This makes it a program to be trustful.

You additionally obtain the comments as well as inspiration from the knowledgeable programmer.

Just how much does the Program Price?

The sales of an item is identified by its rate as well as top quality. Picture just how much it would certainly cost you to come to be a well known copywriter and also create effective duplicates.

Individuals have actually invested $30000 to obtain college that has no warranty at the end of everything. This is not so with the ultimate copywriting membership program. With just $99 plus the BARREL. You can get the program for one month. Is this not a throw out rate contrasted to what you obtain after the training?

In instance you get the program for 4 months and also it appears not to benefit you can constantly request your full cash back. This reveals that the program is take the chance of complimentary.

Final verdict

Ultimate copywriting Membership Program was created to aid the copywriters enhance the writing. If you wish to be one of the most paid copywriter, simply attempt this program.

The program is not a fraud and also for that reason I would certainly advise it for you. It will certainly show you excellent points as well as assist you boost your unpleasant blunders in copywriting to bring in customers. The program is take the chance of complimentary because you will certainly obtain your cash back in situation it stops working to function.

Pros

– The program features a complete cash back assure in instance you locate that it is not helping you in the very first 4 months of application.

– The strategy in the program are totally special from any type of various other program. This makes the program to be extremely various on the market.

– In situation you are embeded the center you can constantly ask the professional and also you will certainly obtain the responses and also the called for inspiration from the professional.

– You do not require to have any type of copywriting experience to begin the program because the program presumes that you have no experience in copywriting.

– The program is more affordable contrasted to picking up from guides as well as colleges.

– After the training program you will certainly be aided to obtain your customers to aid you generate income.

Cons

– The program does not assure you the cash you gain when you come to be a copywriter as this hinges on your initiative.

– The training procedure is labor extensive and also extremely tiring.

Summary

Ultimate Copywriting Program is primarily a program established by Paul to copywriters in their writing. The program makes a wonderful copywriter as well as boosts the variety of your customers. Your settlements are likewise raised with the program.

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There’s a War on Sugar. Is It Justified? (Ep. 285 Rebroadcast)

(Photo Credit: MattyFlicks / flickr)

Some people argue that sugar should be regulated, like alcohol and tobacco, on the grounds that it’s addictive and toxic. How much sense does that make? We hear from a regulatory advocate, an evidence-based skeptic, a former F.D.A. commissioner — and the organizers of Milktoberfest.

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

This week we’re bringing you one of our most popular episodes from the archive. Because we’re traveling. Our American listeners know why. To the rest of you: this is the week we all drive hundreds of miles to eat turkey — which isn’t that great, honestly — and pie, which is great. So we thought it’d be a good time to re-release this episode, called “There’s a War on Sugar. Is It Justified?”

[MUSIC: Jonathan Still, “Lederhosen”]

Surely you’re familiar with the beloved autumn festival that revolves around folk dancing and lots and lots of drinking …

LAYTON: Milktoberfest! The holiday for drinking milk and doing homework.

Okay, not what you were expecting. Bavaria has Oktoberfest; Brigham Young University, in Provo, Utah, has Milktoberfest — Brigham Young being a Mormon university, and therefore prohibiting the consumption of, among other substances, alcohol.

LAYTON: People don’t drink, but we still like to have a lot of fun.

Roger Layton, communications manager at the B.Y.U. library, helps produce Milktoberfest.

LAYTON: And so we thought, “Let’s just embrace that. Let’s just enjoy it.” We had a very energetic group of German folk dancers come in and perform, and we brought in cases and cases of chocolate milk. As soon as the milk was there and we said, “Go!” — it basically became a free-for-all.

OLDROYD: People love it because Milktoberfest was almost B.Y.U. lite or something like that.

That’s Brenna Oldroyd, a B.Y.U. student who helped put together Milktoberfest.

OLDROYD: Like, “Hey, this is what we love to drink all the time!”

The chocolate milk they’re drinking isn’t just any chocolate milk. It’s some pretty legendary chocolate milk, made in B.Y.U.’s own creamery.

LAYTON: If you show up at a party with chocolate milk, no one’s going to complain. It may seem a little childish, but people will drink it. It’s friendly, it’s safe, and it’s happy.

OLDROYD: And one of the great things about partying with chocolate milk is if you’re smart, you’re not going to throw up later. That’s a plus.

This all sounds pretty awesome, right? And wholesome, too — swapping out beer for chocolate milk. But is chocolate milk really as wholesome as it seems? Do you know how much sugar there is in one cup of chocolate milk? The answer is 24 grams — a bit more than you’d find in a standard serving of soda. And there are those who argue that the detriments of sugar — well, they’d argue that, from a metabolic standpoint at least, Milktoberfest isn’t much better than Oktoberfest.

Robert LUSTIG: We started comparing what sugar did versus what alcohol did, and we realized, you know what, sugar and alcohol do the exact same thing.

If you’ve been following health news in the last decade, you’ve likely noticed that there’s a war on sugar.

Belva DAVIS in a clip from KQED’s This Week in Northern California: An alarming rise in the rate of obesity and related health problems has prompted a nationwide movement to ban or restrict sugary drinks …

How justified is that war? Today’s episode was inspired by a question we received …

Saul ARNOW: Dear Freakonomics, My name is Saul Arnow, and I’m an 11-year-old listener from Chicago. I was wondering why sugar isn’t considered a drug even though it is addictive and stimulates the brain. Sincerely, Saul.

Okay, Saul — we’ll do our best to answer your question. Along the way, we’ll learn some sugar history:

Elizabeth ABBOTT: St. Thomas Aquinas, way back in the 13th century, pronounced sugar a medicine.

We’ll hear from some people who fully agree with you:

Robert LUSTIG: Now alcohol, tobacco, morphine and heroin clearly meet these four criteria.

Some people who don’t agree with you:

Richard KAHN: We have no clue, no real good evidence that it’s going to do any good whatsoever.

And we’ll hear about your sugar habits.

BOY: I tried to give it up once, but it didn’t work out at all because I’m addicted to sugar. I can’t help it.

* * *

[MUSIC: Paul Freitas, “Sugar Daddy” (from Salon de Cabaret)]

Before we get into the nitty-gritty on sugar, let me offer a sort of caveat.

KAHN: In general, nutrition studies are not very robust compared to many other fields in biological science.

That’s Richard Kahn.

KAHN: I’m the former chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association.

So what’s the problem with nutrition studies?

KAHN: There are often no controls, no randomization, small number of subjects — it’s very difficult to conduct very robust, long-term studies on nutrition.

Okay, this is a really important point. It’s the kind of thing we talk about all the time on this program — the legitimacy of data, yada yada. But with nutrition, there are a few things going on that make it particularly tough. No. 1: this is about something that we all put in our mouth every day. Which means we all think of ourselves as experts. Unlike particle physics or financial engineering, this is something we all do all the time, so of course we know what we’re talking about. No. 2: most nutrition science is built on survey data — that is, asking people about what they’ve eaten, or asking them to keep food diaries, things like that. If you’ve been paying any attention at all to Freakonomics Radio over the years, you know this is a surefire way to gather some not-so-realistic, or at least not-so-robust data. And so, as Richard Kahn said, it can be a real challenge to run a really convincing nutrition study.

KAHN: Because people do not want to participate. They don’t want to alter their diet patterns for a long time and they don’t comply with the regimen of the instructions in the randomized trial.

Now, if we could take a few thousand people, and randomize them, and then control every single thing they ate and drank for a few years — well, that that’d be great. But, absent that, we do our best. We look for data. We ask questions. Starting here:

Stephen J. DUBNER: As a public health official in New York and at the national level, you’ve tried to stem AIDS and T.B. and pandemic flu. You’ve tried to prepare the public for a potential bioterror attacks. How, in light of those dangers, would you rank the consumption of sugar?

HAMBURG: Well, they’re very different threats. But we have to recognize that — while acute public health crises really demand all of our attention and get a lot of response — that how we live, what we eat, if we exercise, many aspects of our daily lives have the greatest impact on health and disease.

That’s Margaret Hamburg.

HAMBURG: I am a medical doctor and a public health professional who has served in government at many levels over many years now including most recently as the U.S. F.D.A. commissioner.

DUBNER: I wanted to ask you briefly about some F.D.A. definitions. When I read them I have to say they are somewhere between comical and incomprehensible. When the F.D.A. defines food, food additives, drugs and, then “substances generally regarded as safe.” So those are the categories. Which of these definitions apply to sugar?

HAMBURG: You know, I have to agree with you that many of the definitions are hard to penetrate.

DUBNER: I didn’t mean to slam you. I assumed you didn’t write them and that there were 40 lawyers between whoever wrote them and—

HAMBURG: No, no! Congress is responsible for some of it, and the F.D.A. lawyers for some of it. And, of course, many of these laws and regulations and guidances and definitions have evolved over many, many years. But it is complicated and confusing and it’s why there are almost as many lawyers as scientists at the F.D.A.

DUBNER: For instance, the very first thing: “food.” No. 1, “articles used for food or drink for man or other animals.” I can imagine that could easily fit within F.D.A. guidelines then, if it were used for food. Yep?

HAMBURG: It’s really hard to answer a question like the one you just posed to me. Sugar is intrinsic to many food products. It’s not going to be regulated in the same way that a completely exogenous additive to a food product can be regulated.

DUBNER: But technically, the categories under which sugar falls, however, are “food additive” and G.R.A.S., “generally regarded as safe,” and not food itself. Correct?

HAMBURG: This is my point. I’m not going to answer your question because I don’t have my lawyers here.

DUBNER: I see.

HAMBURG: But there are sugars in fruits and vegetables, there are sugars in dairy products, there’re sugars in various grasses that people consume. It’s intrinsic to the food product itself.

[MUSIC: Paul Freitas, “A Little Crazy” (from Again Spring)]

For instance, let’s get back to chocolate milk for a minute. As we said, it’s got 24 grams of sugar per one-cup serving, more than some soda. But regular old milk, without the chocolate, has about 12 grams of sugar — it’s naturally sweet from the lactose. And then there’s the sugar that’s added to many foods.

HAMBURG: Products that you think are actually very healthy — yogurt — the levels of sugar are astonishingly high. Things like barbecue sauce and spaghetti sauce and soup actually have much higher levels of sugar than you would ever imagine. Not to mention the levels that are in you know pies and cakes and ice cream and things where you would expect to see sugar.

So how much sugar, overall, do we actually consume?

LUSTIG: Right now we are about 60 to 65 percent over our limit, and that’s average.

That’s Robert Lustig.

LUSTIG: I’m a professor of pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, also a member of their Institute for Health Policy Studies. My job is to try to treat obese children and now, also, alter the global food supply.

DUBNER: Easy picking the low hanging fruit for yourself, I see.

LUSTIG: Easier said than done. In both cases.

The data vary — again, this is nutrition science we’re talking about here — but the most recent estimates show that Americans consume between 20 and 30 teaspoons of added sugar per day. That’s down a bit from our peak consumption, sometime around the early 2000’s, but Americans still consume more added sugar than anyone else. This has turned Lustig into one of the most outspoken sugar critics you will find. He came to this position over many years.

LUSTIG: I’m a pediatric endocrinologist. I take care of glandular hormonal problems in children. I was doing that pretty seamlessly for a good two-to-three decades. Then the kids started getting fat on me. The question was, “What’s going on?” We started looking at what sugar did to the body, and what we realized was it caused this thing called insulin resistance and particularly in the liver. We started comparing what sugar did versus what alcohol did, and we realized, you know what, sugar and alcohol do the exact same thing, and it makes sense that it should, because after all, where do you get alcohol from? Fermentation of sugar. We were now seeing the diseases of alcohol without the alcohol. That started my, shall we say, advocacy in this field of obesity and public health.

KAHN: If you are indeed overweight or obese, you want to lose weight, the first place to start is to reduce sugar consumption.

That, again, is Richard Kahn, formerly of the American Diabetes Association.

KAHN: The reason being that we get plenty of energy from other carbohydrates, we don’t have to rely on sugar to get our energy. And the second reason is that sugar itself does not come along with any other essential nutrients, vitamins or minerals.

So you might think that Kahn and Lustig are in precisely the same camp. But there you’d be wrong.

KAHN: There’s no question that there is a real obesity epidemic throughout the world. That, I think is very real. It’s very important. It’s very serious. It has clear adverse health consequences. In addition, that has led directly to a dramatic increase in the incidence of diabetes throughout the world. We first saw this in the United States. We’ve seen it in European countries. We’re now seeing it in Asian countries. Diabetes is clearly a serious disease. It has quite serious complications and that’s a problem. Then the question becomes, “What has caused the obesity epidemic?” And that is, to use the euphemism, the $64,000 question.

There are many potential contributors to the rise in obesity.

KAHN: There’s been some evidence that with the increased use of psychotropic drugs, anti-depressive drugs, drugs for schizophrenia and other mental disorders — those drugs tend to promote weight gain. Another possibility is that we’ve seen, clearly, smoking cessation in a large proportion of the population. And when people stop smoking, that’s usually been associated with weight gain. Psychotropic drugs, smoking cessation, potential infections have been attributed to a rise in obesity.

There’s also a lot of research arguing the rather obvious point that we consume more calories today than we used to — for a lot of reasons. The relative low cost of food; the deliciousness of food; the availability of food — especially the availability of cheap, delicious, sweet food.

KAHN: Many people do believe that sugar consumption has been the cause, is the cause, of our obesity epidemic and then, subsequently, diabetes. But I believe that the evidence for this is pretty weak.

When the City of San Francisco wanted to add warning labels to soda, Kahn submitted an expert report on behalf of, among others, the American Beverage Association. He wrote: “There is no scientific consensus that added sugar (including added sugar in beverages) plays a unique role in the development of obesity and diabetes.”

KAHN: If we look as an analogy, for example, to cigarette smoking, and try to make the link between sugar and obesity or diabetes, and cigarette smoking to cancer. What are the differences?

Okay, what are the differences?

KAHN: In the cigarette-smoking realm, the lowest smoking rate produced an enormous incidence of lung cancer. The highest rate of smoking was just simply off the charts in terms of the likelihood of developing lung cancer. Conversely, with sugar consumption, it’s less than a two-fold increase at the highest levels.

This gets into tricky territory. As Kahn says, some studies do find a two-fold increase in diabetes at the highest level of sugar consumption — but other analyses, including one by Robert Lustig, argue it’s considerably higher. That said, the relationship between sugar and obesity is nowhere near as strong as the relationship between smoking and lung cancer. According to the NIH, even “light smoking” results in a nine-fold increase.

KAHN: The next one is something called temporality. In other words, is there association in time between sugar consumption and obesity? That held pretty true from about 1985 to the year 2000. Where obesity levels went up, sugar consumption went up. But thereafter starting in the year 2000, even to today, sugar consumption has declined somewhere around 15 to 20 percent, whereas obesity rates continue to rise. We don’t see that at all with smoking, the analogous situation. Cigarette smoking rises, cancer rises. Cigarette smoking declines, cancer declines.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that sugar doesn’t contribute to obesity. Just that, again, the relationship isn’t so definitive. Kahn points to another difference between smoking and sugar.

KAHN: In cigarette smoking, we found a link between cigarette smoking and cancer in every population, every ethnicity, both genders, all kinds of tobacco use and even in bystanders. Conversely, with sugar, we don’t have that consistency whatsoever.

For instance: some studies show a strong relationship between weight gain and sugar-sweetened beverages — S.S.B.’s — but that relationship is most consistent when the S.S.B.’s are consumed in addition to a person’s regular diet. So the problem might simply be the extra calories, not the sugar per se. It could also be that people who drink a lot of sugary drinks do other things that lead to weight gain. There’s also the fact that, as Richard Kahn said earlier …

KAHN: In general, nutrition studies are not very robust compared to many other fields in biological science. In sugar consumption, most of [the studies have] either no controls, a very small number of subjects … They’ve only lasted for days or weeks at the most. The experimental studies have not been robust.

So in Kahn’s view, the science on sugar is not settled. Which means that the notion of regulating sugar is, at best, premature.

KAHN: I don’t think that there is any absolute amount of sugar that we should be under in our consumption. It all relates to eating a well-rounded diet.

To Robert Lustig, meanwhile, the time for regulation is now.

[MUSIC: Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics, “It’s About Time” (from It’s About Time)]

DUBNER: This episode was inspired by a listener, who wrote in to say, “If sugar is as bad for us as a lot of people are now saying it is, why isn’t it regulated the way other potentially harmful substances, like alcohol or tobacco, are regulated?” How do you answer that question?

LUSTIG: Well, the public health community has identified four separate criteria that are needed to be fulfilled before a substance can be considered for regulation. No. 1: ubiquity, that is, can’t get away from it. No. 2: toxicity, that it’s dangerous. No. 3: abused, that increased consumption is inherent in the molecule itself. Finally, No. 4 is externalities. That is, your consumption hurts me. Now alcohol, tobacco, morphine, and heroin clearly meet these four criteria. The question is, “Does sugar meet them?” And the answer is, yes, it does, absolutely.

Okay, let’s look at those four criteria for sugar. Ubiquity? That’s pretty much a no-brainer. But what about toxicity? Lustig’s hypothesis has to do with how the body handles fructose.

LUSTIG: When you consume dietary sugar, the glucose molecules can go anywhere in the body; only about 20 percent hit the liver. But the fructose molecules have to be handled in the liver, because there’s a specific transporter called the GLUT5 transporter; it is only in the liver. When you consume a soda, you are flooding your liver, and your liver can’t handle the flood. The liver has no choice but to turn that fructose into liver fat. It’s that liver fat that causes the chronic metabolic disease. We have the data that demonstrates that it’s the liver fat made from dietary sugar that is at the nidus, at the beginning of type-2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver disease. We’re starting to ferret out the links between dietary sugar and cancer and dementia as well.

DUBNER: But I know there’s other research that says that the toxicity argument may be overstated. That it’s not an acute toxin but a chronic one.

LUSTIG: You are absolutely right that sugar is not an acute toxin. Chronic toxins are still toxins even though they don’t make you keel over and die. Is benzene a toxin? We regulate it as such. Benzene doesn’t kill you acutely.

DUBNER: What about alcohol?

LUSTIG: Alcohol is both. It’s an acute toxin. You can die on a bender. Or it’s a chronic toxin — you can fry your liver. It’s both. The point is that the F.D.A. regulates acute toxins, because it’s in their charter, The Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938. Very specifically, it does not say anything about chronic toxins. The F.D.A. does not regulate chronic toxins.

Criteria No. 3 for regulation: the potential for abuse.

LUSTIG: It turns out that there is no biochemical reaction in any vertebrate on the planet that requires dietary fructose. Now, it happens to be sweet. It happens to signal our brain reward centers that we like the stuff. We happen to crave it. We happen to really enjoy it, and a little too much. In fact, now we have data that shows that it happens to be addictive as well.

Nicole AVENA: The question about whether sugar can meet the criteria for an addiction or an abused substance is something that I’ve been studying for many years now. It’s something that I think has become of interest to a lot of people.

That’s Dr. Nicole Avena. She’s a research neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

AVENA: The way in which we’ve been studying this and the way in which others have studied this is to use these D.S.M. criteria for addiction and ask the question, “Can sugar, when it’s consumed in excess, produce some of these behavioral indications and neurochemical indications that you would typically see with a substance of abuse?”

The D.S.M. is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It defines addiction or substance abuse along four main criteria: impaired control; social impairment; risky use; and pharmacological indicators like tolerance and withdrawal.

AVENA: You certainly don’t need to meet all of them and many people who are addicts don’t meet all those criteria. But you do need to meet a certain number of them for a protracted period of time. What the research has suggested in both animal models and in clinical studies is that the criteria for addiction as we classically define it in the DSM can be met when the substance of abuse is a sugar or a palatable food, in many cases. We see evidence of bingeing, withdrawal, craving. We also see changes in the brain.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that some of the most troubling studies are animal studies, which can be problematic on two fronts. One: the lab animals aren’t people, so they process sugar differently. Two: the doses of sugar they receive in the lab are often so large as to not be comparable to what most people would consume. Moreover, sugar isn’t the only thing we consume that has “addictive” qualities: pizza and french fries are also at the top of the list. So how well does this emerging model of sugar addiction line up to the addictive criteria for the sort of drugs that we do regulate?

AVENA: It’s a difficult question, because sugar is safe when it’s used in moderation. But the problem is that most people are unaware of how much sugar they’re consuming. Also, if the data suggests that the sugar is producing addictive-like changes in the brain, then we’re talking about something very different. Because if you’re no longer be able to have full volitional control over your decision to eat or not eat the sugar, then that becomes a different type of discussion.

The fourth criteria for regulation, that Robert Lustig was telling us about: externalities.

LUSTIG: That is, your consumption hurts me.

A classic case of externalities is auto travel. Every time you drive, it costs me something whether I’m driving or not. More pollution; more congestion; more risk of accident. We share all those costs, regardless of my actions.

LUSTIG: The question is, “Does this fit for sugar? Do I have anything to say about your consumption?” And the answer is, “Yeah, you’re costing me in obesity-related health care — whether I’m obese or not — because of your obesity.” It’s economic, but it’s real. 62 percent of all the health care costs in this country are shouldered by the federal government. Damn right, we share it!

[MUSIC: Ruby Velle & The Soulphonics, “My Dear” (from It’s About Time)]

* * *

[MUSIC: Vic & Gab, “When You Walk In The Room” (from Love of Mine)]

It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t like sugar. And nearly just as hard to find anyone who doesn’t think they’re having too much of it …

YOUNG WOMAN: I really like sugar. I know it’s bad for you, but I like it.

SOUTHERN MAN: Right now, I am staying away from sugar, trying to eat a better, have a better diet.

MAN: I’ve tried to cut back on it, but I’ve never given it up. I think it tastes delicious in the right thing, and I think that, at this point, it’s probably an addiction that my body just needs to have. I’ve never tried to give it up, nor will I try any time soon.

GIRL: I’ve definitely eaten too much of it, because I had a sleepover at my friend’s, and for breakfast we had lollies!

It wasn’t always thus.

ABBOTT: Sugar started out as a minor commodity that was used for medicine and for spice, up into the Middle Ages.

That’s Elizabeth Abbott. She teaches history at Trinity College, University of Toronto, and is the author of Sugar: A Bittersweet History. She says the debate over what sugar is — a food, a drug, or something in between — is hardly new.

ABBOTT: St. Thomas Aquinas, way back in the 13th century, pronounced sugar a medicine. He said: “Though nutritious in themselves, sugared spices are nonetheless not eaten with the end in mind of nourishment, but rather for ease in digestion. Accordingly, they do not break the fast any more than the taking of any other medicine.”

One reason sugar was welcome in medicine was because a lot of medicine tasted terrible — a combination bitter roots, animal feces, even bits of corpse. So yeah, a spoonful of sugar really does make the medicine go down! Outside of medicine, however, sugar was decidedly aristocratic.

ABBOTT: For example, Persia — or Iran today — [sugar] was very popular among the elite. They are the ones that started this trend, this architecture of sugar. They would make beautiful sculptures often, for example, life-size trees.

Sugar was costly, and sugar was rare. But the sugar trade began to grow, built on the back of the slave trade.

ABBOTT: By 1680, sugar costs only half what it had in 1630. That was thanks to slavery. By 1700, the percentage of imported foodstuffs including sugar had more than doubled and they quadrupled between 1700 and 1740. England and Wales consumed 60 times more sugar — though their populations did not quite double.

Abbott argues it was the Industrial Revolution that helped turn sugar into an everyday thing.

ABBOTT: People started going from their farms and so on into cities and into factories. They couldn’t go home for lunch because they had maybe a 15-minute break. So sugared tea and a bun — or some sort of thing like that, often with jam on it — was offered instead, and that was what popularized it. It’s said that it fueled the Industrial Revolution because sugared tea — and it would be really sugary — has calories. They’re not nutritious but they are units of energy.

The sugar boom helped create another boom that we’re still living through.

ABBOTT: They had a lobby that was extremely powerful. We could say all the big heavy industrial lobbying probably stems from the success of the sugar lobby.

That’s right: it wasn’t enough to benefit from slave labor and huge demand for their product.

ABBOTT: The sugar plantations were profitable not just because of the demand but largely because of how they were politically strong. If they had failures, if they had hurricanes, if they had bad crops — which they often did — they could keep the price. They could get Parliament to help them out with good legislation and tariffs and so on that would favor them. By the way, the sugar lobby is still a very important on. It has a lot of weight still, and it now is an alliance of cane sugar planters and beet sugar planters. They get together to lobby when and when they feel that their interests are at stake.

It was only recently uncovered that in the 1960’s, the sugar industry paid three Harvard scientists to write a review that shifted the blame for heart disease from sugar to saturated fat. Much more recently, Coca-Cola spent millions of dollars on research arguing that the real culprit in obesity is lack of exercise, not sugary drinks. So you can’t blame people for being confused, maybe conflicted, about the degree to which sugar is a health risk. I brought this up with Robert Lustig.

DUBNER: Right now, we’re talking in the year 2017. A lot of people now are convinced that the U.S. government and many others erred terribly in declaring fat to be the cause of obesity. Many people now believe, as you argue, that sugar is a much bigger villain. How do we know you’re not the guy that’s wrong this time, that you’re not just another — perhaps well-intentioned — big-brained do-gooder who is making a massive mistake?

LUSTIG: An awfully good question. This is known as the pessimistic meta-induction theory. What it says is, “Everything we knew 10 years ago is already wrong, and everything we know today will be wrong 10 years from now. Why should we do anything differently when we know that whatever it is that we believe today will end up being wrong?” If you play that game, then you might as well never do any research, never do anything at all, and live with the current dogma.

There’s also the confounding fact, pointed out by former F.D.A. commissioner Margaret Hamburg, that a lot of time you’re eating sugar even when you don’t know you’re eating sugar.

HAMBURG: Things like barbecue sauce and spaghetti sauce and soup actually have much higher levels of sugar than you would ever imagine.

DUBNER: Talk to me for a moment about the Smart Choices program and what the F.D.A. did there.

HAMBURG: The Smart Choices program was an effort spearheaded by industry. A number of major food-producing companies came together to create a system where you would give different scores to different aspects of the nutritional value of a product. The total number would then either give you the green check, the smart choice, or not.

DUBNER: The name, I gather, was an industry name, yes?

HAMBURG: Right. Exactly. The problem with it was that you could score adequately high to get that “green smart choice check” without the food truly reflecting what any sensible nutrition expert would view as a healthy, smart choice. Some of the products that got the smart choice label were over 40 percent sugar. We joked that you could practically take sawdust and if you added enough nutrients to it and the fiber of sawdust, you could have it labeled as a healthy choice, a smart choice.

DUBNER: How long did that last?

HAMBURG: It was out there for a little while. We expressed our concerns to the group that had put this together and was implementing it. They listened and understood. They decided voluntarily to withdraw the program. There have been a number of efforts to look at other strategies for providing consumers with important information about foods. The nutrition facts label, of course, is one important aspect. The nutrition facts label that’s on most processed foods and beverages in this country was first put into place more than two decades ago. But then it was never updated. When I was commissioner, we decided it did need to be updated to reflect both deeper understandings about how people eat. Serving size for example. Also, advances in nutrition science. We embarked on a process to update it. I think the most important contribution that this updated nutrition facts label provides is in the area of added sugar.

DUBNER: As I understand it, food and beverage companies are already adjusting their products to consider the new labeling. Was that your intention?

HAMBURG: Absolutely. One of the goals of putting out that information is to encourage companies to reformulate foods towards healthier products. We’ve certainly seen that happen as we move towards this the implementation of this new nutrition facts label. Stonyfield Yogurt just recently decided to significantly reduce levels of sugar before the new facts label is actually in place. F.D.A., in some ways, has the opportunity to use both the carrot and the stick. Knowing that we could do mandatory guidelines on certain things often encouraged industry to work with us, to come to voluntary approaches. But there’s no doubt that there are tensions.

DUBNER: Robert Lustig and several others in that camp argue that sugar should be regulated substantially because it meets criteria for substances that should be controlled or regulated: unavoidability, toxicity, potential for abuse, and negative impact on society. I’m curious what your thoughts are on sugar fitting those criteria and whether you think that’s even a useful framework.

HAMBURG: We need to reduce excess sugar in our diets and in the products that we consume. Consumers need more education and information. But I’m not sure that I can really embrace the proposal to regulate sugar in that way.

DUBNER: Because it would be too overreaching? Because it would be too difficult? Why?

HAMBURG: It’s a complex area to regulate in that sugars are intrinsic components of many foods which should be part of a balanced nutritious diet. Fruits and vegetables and dairy products are good examples. I think that some of the concerns that have been raised may not be fully grounded in the best possible science.

“Not fully grounded in the best possible science.” That, you’ll recall, was Richard Kahn’s main objection to the idea of regulating sugar. But there’s another one too:

KAHN: If you reduce it or get rid of it or put policies and laws regulating it, what good is it going to do? We have no clue, no real good evidence that it’s going to do any good whatsoever. Therefore, unintended consequences become a very important factor.

Robert Lustig, meanwhile, is — as you’ve likely figured out by now — in favor of just about any kind of sugar regulation you can imagine. Taxes, for instance, and price hikes — both of which worked to reduce cigarette smoking, and are already being used on sugary drinks in a few places.

LUSTIG: The modeling studies that have been done suggests that you have to raise the price of a can of soda by about 20 percent in order to see any meaningful reduction in consumption.

Lustig’s also in favor of limiting the availability of sugar — removing vending machines from schools for instance. Also, banning TV commercials for products with added sugar. Also: getting rid of subsidies.

LUSTIG: Subsidies for food make no sense because subsidies distort the market.

DUBNER: One last question, perhaps ridiculous or impossible: let’s say we’re in a world where you could edit genes quite easily. It seems we’re not that far from it. Whether we’re talking about a 50-year-old person or a zygote. How would you consider editing the genes related to what seems to be a craving, perhaps even dangerous craving for sugar?

LUSTIG: That’s a really tough question. We don’t want to turn off our reward system entirely. If we do, we get into trouble. We actually did this. We did this experiment with a medicine back in the early 2000’s. That medicine was called Rimonabant. What it was was it was the anti-marijuana medicine. It blocked the endo-cannabinoid receptors in the brain, and by doing so reduced reward for alcohol and for food. In fact, people who took Rimonabant lost a fair amount of weight. It looked very promising. Until we started looking at the Phase 3 data and started realizing that a lot of these people became severely depressed, and many of them committed suicide. We didn’t realize it, until we did those Phase 3 trial. It was never approved here in the United States. Bottom line is, if you take away a reward, you take away the reason for living. Be careful about gene editing our rewards system.

Most of the regulatory measures Robert Lustig would like to see around sugar lie somewhere between unlikely and impossible, at least for now. In any case, we asked a bunch of people in Times Square what they thought of it …

YOUNG MAN: Most definitely shouldn’t ban sugar. Sugar’s one of the best things in the world. But I don’t think it should be taxed, either. I feel like it should just be accessible to everybody, because it’s a nice thing. It’s the best thing out there!

YOUNG WOMAN: Probably a tax, but not a ban. I don’t think a ban would work very well. There’s just too much sugar in the world. But maybe a tax would have people thinking more about what they’re buying a little bit more.

SOUTHERN MAN: A tax or ban on sugar? I feel that would backfire really bad. Look back at the Revolutionary War. The British put a tax on tea and people didn’t really like that too much!

SMALL GIRL: I would probably cry because I love sugar!

A love of sugar seems, from what we can tell, pretty universal. Including among the scientists and doctors we’ve been speaking with today. From Richard Kahn, formerly of the American Diabetes Association…

KAHN: One clear thing that comes to mind is just pleasure. Sugar is enjoyable to eat. It’s part of our culture, keeping our community together, our families together.

To Margaret Hamburg, former F.D.A. commissioner…

HAMBURG: I will admit to having a sweet tooth. Oatmeal cookies, I’ll tell you, are my particular vice.

To the most anti-sugar one of all, Dr. Robert Lustig:

LUSTIG: Sugar’s celebratory! Sugar’s fun! Sugar’s Apple Pie. Sugar is reward — but once a week.

[MUSIC: Stubborn Son, “Vixen” (from Birthright)]

* * *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam with help from Eliza Lambert, Matt Fidler, and Sam Bair. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Alvin Melathe, Harry Huggins and Zack Lapinski. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Saul Arnow, the 11-year-old Freakonomics Radio listener who inspired this episode!

Elizabeth Abbott, senior research associate in the arts at Trinity College, University of Toronto.

Dr. Nicole Avena, research neuroscientist at at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Margaret Hamburg, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Roger Layton, communications and public relations manager at Brigham Young University Library.

Robert Lustig, professor of pediatrics and member of the Institute for Health Policy Studies at The University of California, San Francisco; president of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition.

Richard Kahn, former chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association.

Brenna Oldroyd, student at Brigham Young University.

RESOURCES

“A Big Tobacco Moment for the Sugar Industry,” James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, (September 15, 2016).

“ Dietary Sugar and Body Weight: Have We Reached a Crisis in the Epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes?: Health Be Damned! Pour on the Sugar,” George A. Bray and Barry M. Popkin. (April 2014).

“Dietary Sugar and Body Weight: Have We Reached a Crisis in the Epidemic of Obesity and Diabetes?: We Have, but the Pox on Sugar Is Overwrought and Overworked,” Richard Kahn and John L. Sievenpiper. (April 2014).

“Evidence for Sugar Addiction: Behavioral and Neurochemical Effects of Intermittent, Excessive Sugar Intake,” Nicole M. Avena, Pedro Rada, and Bartley G. Hoebel (2008).

“How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat,” Anahad O’Connor, The New York Times (September 12, 2016).

“Is Everything We Eat Associated with Cancer? A Systematic Cookbook Review,” Jonathan D. Schoenfeld and John P.A. Ioannidis (January 1, 2013).

“Isocaloric Fructose Restriction and Metabolic Improvement in Children with Obesity and Metabolic Syndrome,” Robert Lustig, Kathleen Mulligan, Susan M. Noworolski, Viva W. Tai, Michael J. Wen, Ayca Erkin-Cakmak, Alejandro Gugliucci, and Jean-Marc Schwarz (February 2016).

“The Public Health and Economic Benefits of Taxing Sugar-Sweetened Beverages,” Kelly D. Brownell, Thomas Farley, Walter C. Willett, Barry M. Popkin, Frank J. Chaloupka, Joseph W. Thompson, and David S. Ludwig (October 15, 2009).

“Public Health: The Toxic Truth about Sugar,” Robert Lustig, Laura A. Schmidt, and Claire D. Brindis (February 2, 2012).

“The Relationship of Sugar to Population-Level Diabetes Prevalence: An Econometric Analysis of Repeated Cross-Sectional Data,” Sanjay Basu, Paula Yoffe, Nancy Hills, and Robert H. Lustig (February 27, 2013).

“Resolved: There Is Sufficient Scientific Evidence That Decreasing Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption Will Reduce the Prevalence of Obesity and Obesity-Related Diseases,” Frank Hu (August 2013).

“Sickeningly Sweet: Does Sugar Cause Chronic Disease? No,” John Sievenpiper (August 1, 2016).

“Sickeningly Sweet: Does Sugar Cause Type 2 Diabetes? Yes,” Robert Lustig (August 1, 2016).

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Abbott, Elizabeth (The Overlook Press, 2011).

Sugar: The Bitter Truth by University of California Television (UCTV) (March 7, 2017).

“The Sugar Wars,” Daniel Engber, The Atlantic , (January/February 2017).

“Which Foods May Be Addictive? The Roles of Processing, Fat Content, and Glycemic Load,” Erica M. Schulte, Nicole M. Avena, and Ashley N. Gearhardt (February 18, 2015).

“You’re About to Find Out How Much Sugar Is Added to Your Food,” Deena Shankar Bloomberg.com , (August 9, 2016).

EXTRA

Fed Up, (Atlas Films, 2014).

“Healthy Diet,” World Health Organization.

Milktoberfest.

“Understanding and Addressing Food Addiction: A Science-Based Approach to Policy, Practice and Research” The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse.

The post There’s a War on Sugar. Is It Justified? (Ep. 285 Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/sugar-rebroadcast/

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5 Things You Might Not Know About Ansel Adams

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5 Things You Might Not Know About Ansel Adams

You probably know Ansel Adams—who was born on February 20, 1902—as the man who helped promote the National Park Service through his magnificent photographs. But there was a lot more to the shutterbug than his iconic, black-and-white vistas. Here are five lesser-known facts about the celebrated photographer.

1. AN EARTHQUAKE LED TO HIS DISTINCTIVE NOSE.

Adams was a four-year-old tot when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake struck his hometown. Although the boy managed to escape injury during the quake itself, an aftershock threw him face-first into a garden wall, breaking his nose. According to a 1979 interview with TIME, Adams said that doctors told his parents that it would be best to fix the nose when the boy matured. He joked, “But of course I never did mature, so I still have the nose.” The nose became Adams’ most striking physical feature. His buddy Cedric Wright liked to refer to Adams’ honker as his “earthquake nose.”

2. HE ALMOST BECAME A PIANIST.

Adams was an energetic, inattentive student, and that trait coupled with a possible case of dyslexia earned him the heave-ho from private schools. It was clear, however, that he was a sharp boy—when motivated.

When Adams was just 12 years old, he taught himself to play the piano and read music, and he quickly showed a great aptitude for it. For nearly a dozen years, Adams focused intensely on his piano training. He was still playful—he would end performances by jumping up and sitting on his piano—but he took his musical education seriously. Adams ultimately devoted over a decade to his study, but he eventually came to the realization that his hands simply weren’t big enough for him to become a professional concert pianist. He decided to leave the keys for the camera after meeting photographer Paul Strand, much to his family’s dismay.

3. HE HELPED CREATE A NATIONAL PARK.

If you’ve ever enjoyed Kings Canyon National Park in California, tip your cap to Adams. In the 1930s Adams took a series of photographs that eventually became the book Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail. When Adams sent a copy to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, the cabinet member showed it to Franklin Roosevelt. The photographs so delighted FDR that he wouldn’t give the book back to Ickes. Adams sent Ickes a replacement copy, and FDR kept his with him in the White House.

After a few years, Ickes, Adams, and the Sierra Club successfully convinced Roosevelt to make Kings Canyon a national park in 1940. Roosevelt’s designation specifically provided that the park be left totally undeveloped and roadless, so the only way FDR himself would ever experience it was through Adams’ lenses.

4. HE WELCOMED COMMERCIAL ASSIGNMENTS.

While many of his contemporary fine art photographers shunned commercial assignments as crass or materialistic, Adams went out of his way to find paying gigs. If a company needed a camera for hire, Adams would generally show up, and as a result, he had some unlikely clients. According to The Ansel Adams Gallery, he snapped shots for everyone from IBM to AT&T to women’s colleges to a dried fruit company. All of this commercial print work dismayed Adams’s mentor Alfred Stieglitz and even worried Adams when he couldn’t find time to work on his own projects. It did, however, keep the lights on.

5. HE AND GEORGIA O’KEEFFE WERE FRIENDS.

Adams and legendary painter O’Keeffe were pals and occasional traveling buddies who found common ground despite their very different artistic approaches. They met through their mutual friend/mentor Stieglitz—who eventually became O’Keeffe’s husband—and became friends who traveled throughout the Southwest together during the 1930s. O’Keeffe would paint while Adams took photographs.

These journeys together led to some of the artists’ best-known work, like Adams’ portrait of O’Keeffe and a wrangler named Orville Cox, and while both artists revered nature and the American Southwest, Adams considered O’Keeffe the master when it came to capturing the area.

“The Southwest is O’Keeffe’s land,” he wrote. “No one else has extracted from it such a style and color, or has revealed the essential forms so beautifully as she has in her paintings.”

The two remained close throughout their lives. Adams would visit O’Keeffe’s ranch, and the two wrote to each other until Adams’ death in 1984.

Dan Bell

A Cartographer Is Mapping All of the UK’s National Parks, J.R.R. Tolkien-Style

Peak District National Park

Dan Bell

Cartographer Dan Bell makes national parks into fantasy lands. Bell, who lives near Lake District National Park in England, is currently on a mission to draw every national park in the UK in the style of the maps in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Kottke.org reports.

The project began in September 2017, when Bell posted his own hand-drawn version of a Middle Earth map online. He received such a positive response that he decided to apply the fantasy style to real world locations. He has completed 11 out of the UK’s 15 parks so far. Once he finishes, he hopes to tackle the U.S. National Park system, too. (He already has Yellowstone National Park down.)

Bell has done various other maps in the same style, including ones for London and Game of Thrones’s Westeros, and he commissions, in case you have your own special locale that could use the Tolkien treatment. Check out a few of his park maps below.

You can buy prints of the maps here.

[h/t Kottke.org]

All images by Dan Bell

iStock

The Simple Optical Illusion That Makes an Image Look Like It’s Drawing Itself

iStock

Artist James Nolan Gandy invents robot arms that sketch intricate mathematical shapes with pen and paper. When viewed in real time, the effect is impressive. But it becomes even more so when the videos are sped up in a timelapse. If you look closely in the video below, the illustration appears to materialize faster than the robot can put the design to paper. Gizmodo recently explained how the illusion works to make it look like parts of the sketch are forming before the machine has time to draw them.

The optical illusion isn’t an example of tricky image editing: It’s the result of something called the wagon wheel effect. You can observe this in a car wheel accelerating down the highway or in propeller blades lifting up a helicopter. If an object makes enough rotations per second, it can appear to slow down, move backwards, or even stand still.

This is especially apparent on film. Every “moving image” we see on a screen is an illusion caused by the brain filling in the gaps between a sequence of still images. In the case of the timelapse video below, the camera captured the right amount of images, in the right order, to depict the pen as moving more slowly than it did in real life. But unlike the pen, the drawing formed throughout the video isn’t subject to the wagon-wheel effect, so it still appears to move at full speed. This difference makes it look like the sketch is drawing itself, no pen required.

Gandy frequently shares behind-the-scenes videos of his mechanical art on his Instagram page. You can check out some of his non-timelapse clips like the one below to better understand how his machines work, then visit his website to browse and purchase the art made by his ‘bots.

And if you think his stuff is impressive, make sure to explore some of the incredible art robots have made in the past.

[h/t Gizmodo]