MovieMonday: Mike Wallace Is Here

The title of this documentary is meant to suggest what a prominent person might be told if Mike Wallace and his camera crew showed up at said person's office or atelier.  The reaction of the person to be interviewed was said to be "Mike fright."

Wallace, who died in 2012, was for decades the famed -- and dreaded -- interviewer for 60 Minutes, the CBS television newsmagazine that changed television news, inspired imitators and perhaps ultimately led to the dreck that passes for news on television today (not that the last is Wallace's fault.)

This documentary, composed entirely of film of the man's career, operates on two levels:  It tells us about Mike Wallace's struggles as a person, and it canvasses the evolution of television as a news medium.

The filmmaker, Avi Belkin, was given access to many, many, many hours of television archives.  That he managed to edit it down to something like 90 minutes is impressive, but it is useful to question whether his Israeli background (not the Jewish part but the unfamiliarity with US television) limited his confidence about describing the impact of television from the late 1940s to the current day on journalism in this country.

The general story is this.  Wallace came to television in its very early days.  He was a jack of many trades -- sometime actor, sometime game show host, frequent pitch man for products from cigarettes to lipstick -- as no doubt many others were in his day.  He also did news and developed a reputation as a good conductor of interviews.

In the late 1950s, he was the face of Night Beat, a one-on-one interview program that didn't shrink from booking contentious guests, including a Ku Klux Klan Wizard.  It was new and unusual and led to another half-hour interview show and finally to Wallace's hiring by CBS, the classy home of elite correspondents like Walter Cronkite and Edward Murrow.  When CBS agreed to let Don Hewitt try 60 Minutes in 1968, Wallace was an obvious choice for the team.

Suddenly television news became more than serious guys reading reports occasionally accompanied by film.  60 Minutes had a more documentary feel and ultimately created news events.  It developed a huge following.

Some of Wallace's work for the show interesting and newsworthy, but some of it is hard to watch.  Examples:

-- Wallace asked Larry King, a TV talk-show host, "How many times have you been married?" and King remonstrated.  Later, when the how-many-marriages question was put to Wallace, he resented it too.  Who wouldn't?

--  In 1988, Wallace interviewed Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator who exiled and/or ordered the assassination of enemies, who made money by accommodating the illegal drug trade, who laundered ill-got riches out of his country and who intervened (perhaps in cahoots with the United States) in various revolutions in Latin America.

           According to the documentary, Wallace's gotcha question for Noriega was this:  "How much (money) do you make?"  The only goal of a question like that is to get a bad guy's facial reaction on film.  It may have been good television, but it was off point.

-- Wallace interviewed Barbra Streisand and asked her why she had spent 23 years in psychoanalysis.  She called Wallace "a son of a bitch."  Twice.


Mike Wallace the Man

The movie shows us Wallace talking about his teenage acne, about the accidental death of his son and how it stiffened his resolve to become a serious news reporter and about his late-in-life diagnosis of depression and a suicide attempt.

Wallace was willing to say all this, which was his business, but the fact of it and the public interest in such matters are relatively new phenomena.   People are being drawn to this documentary at least in part because they felt a personal connection to Mike Wallace.  This is part of the break television has made from journalism in the traditional sense.  (Yes, television viewers "trusted" Walter Cronkite, but did they know about his emotional life?   Would it have occurred to his colleagues even to ask such questions?)


The Point

The movie seems to want to raise questions about the direction of television journalism, but more than a few critics see it as an homage to Mike Wallace and his 60 Minutes years of fame, understandably perhaps, given that its content consists entirely of news footage and outtakes.  (In fact, Wallace was no dummy and wrote serious articles and books.)

Midway through the movie, in a discussion probably filmed in the early 1980s, the editor of the Wall Street Journal describes 60 Minutes thusly:  "I think it's more obvious and has very little to do with actual journalism."

The documentary opens with a 15-year-old conversation between Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly and Mike Wallace.  O'Reilly says, "People want straight talk. You're a dinosaur."

Then O'Reilly twists the knife.  "You're the driving force behind my career."

-----

We know that O'Reilly was washed out of his self-named show several years ago after it was revealed that he paid millions of dollars of hush money to women he had harassed sexually.

We also know that Walter Cronkite's successor, Dan Rather, was let go by CBS (formerly the "Tiffany Network") after he ran with a story that seemed to confirm his beliefs about George W.  Bush but that was discredited almost immediately upon its release.

These sorts of scandals used to end journalistic careers, but no more.

Curiously, Rather is quoted in this documentary.  And a feature film, amusingly called Truth, was made championing Rather and his producer in the matter of the episode that got them fired.

For his part, O'Reilly launched a syndicated radio report this spring that is carried on at least 100 stations nationwide.

-----

A fair question is whether either O'Reilly or Rather would dare to sit for an on-camera interview with Mike Wallace if Wallace were alive today.

MovieMonday: Addiction Flicks

American Relapse



I saw this in a theater recently, and I cannot recommend it.  It should not have been released because its premise -- for-profit drug rehab outfits taking advantage of addicts -- was largely invalidated by the time filming was finished.  

The setting is Del Ray Beach in South Florida, which seems to attract heroin addicts.  In 2016 alone, there were 596 overdose deaths in Delray's county.  Because addicts with health insurance or Medicaid coverage are eligible for medical treatment, the region also attracted for-profit detox centers, drug-testing labs and "sober homes" that serve as halfway houses between inpatient treatment and community release.  There also developed a market for addicts with insurance; detox centers would pay procurers up to $2,000 for each referral.  (Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Florida also is notorious for very high levels of Medicare fraud.)

Heroin recovery is a lifelong challenge, and the typical relapse rate is 90 percent, which is hard for people who are addicted but which provides recurring business for operators of treatment facilities.  (Addicts without insurance, presumably a lot of them, are out of luck.)

"American Relapse" set out to expose this cynical for-profit/treatment nexus. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, Florida in 2017 passed legislation that clamped down on the worst excesses of the treatment rackets just as filming was under way.  Since then, there have been hundreds of arrests and prosecutions and many facilities closed.  The current situation may not be perfect, but it is demonstrably better.  In other words: Never mind.

Besides the scams, the movie focuses on Allie and Frankie, two recovering addicts who have devoted their lives to getting current addicts into treatment.  This work is heroic; once addicted, users wear out even the most devoted parents and siblings by stealing and lying.  And while public agencies provide "services" to drug abusers, they are no substitute for individuals who understand addiction and who commit themselves to helping individual addicts, even over extended periods.   

Still, you don't need to see the movie to get the latter message.  Allie and Frankie were featured doing the same work in "Dopesick," a Vice network series that covered the same ground for two seasons and still can be found online.


Seattle Is Dying



Here's an hourlong documentary from a local news station that you can watch right here.

For those who have not spent time in West Coast cities recently, it's an eye-opener.  For people who have visited Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and/or coastal Southern California, it rings true.

The presenter opens by talking about homelessness in downtown Seattle and then dismisses the idea; The problem, he says, is addicted people living on the streets.

The movie shows the street people and their behavior, and also police and other citizens expressing their frustrations at laws not enforced and public safety under threat.  There is the repetition of the recent estimate that Seattle agencies spend about $1 billion annually -- or $100,000 per homeless person per year -- with no apparent effect on the homeless population or the situation on the streets.

A woman who has lived on the streets for several years tells an interviewer that the homeless are addicts -- "100 percent," in her experience.

The documentary ends describing a seemingly effective program in Rhode Island, where addicts are removed from the streets and kept in a previously empty military facility while they are treated with substitute drugs -- methadone, suboxone, vivitrol -- that, taken over the very long term, may help them maintain sobriety and resume normal lives.   It may not be a cure-all, but it sounds more promising than anything cities are doing on the other side of the country. 


Note

Let me add some other data points to this stew:

-- As of last year, San Francisco was distributing 400,000 syringes per month to street addicts and deploying 10 or 11 employees full time to collect the thousands of used syringes that were not dropped off in official city disposal containers.

-- I have visited Los Angeles County Superior Court morning sessions twice since January.  (It was a private matter; I am neither a felon nor a court officer.)
          The first time, the judge made the same offer to two different men who had been arrested for actionable possession of non-trivial amounts of meth or heroin: 1) go into drug treatment at government expense,  or 2) take a felony conviction and go to prison for 16 months.  Both men chose the prison option.  California prisons are full now, and many felons serve their sentences in city and county jails.  Because the jails are also full, a 16-month sentence is actually much shorter, generally ranging from two weeks to two months as old prisoners are cycled out to make space for incoming prisoners.
        On my second visit, a man made his first appearance after being apprehended with 72 grams of meth or heroin.  The amount suggested he was a distributor or a street seller with a sizable clientele.  The frustrated judged rolled his eyes and then released the man on his own recognizance and with a court date.

Maybe Later:  Thoughts on Homelessness
   

MovieMonday: Apollo 11

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the only manned landing on a celestial body not named Earth comes this commemorative documentary of that NASA achievement.

Using film from NASA's archives, director Todd Douglas Miller shows us eight days in July 1969, from the towing of the Saturn V rocket bearing the Columbia and its lunar lander, Eagle, to their takeoff platform, then through the launch, mission and return to earth.

To the extent there is narration, it comes from late television anchor Walter Cronkite with some added back-and-forth between the astronauts and engineers in Florida and Houston.

Perhaps to its credit, the movie does not gloat about US dominance in the space race.  The astronauts land, and, yes, plant an American flag, but speak of peace and representing all earthlings in the pursuit of science.

There are also scenes of crowds assembled to watch the explosive liftoff and the helicopters and aircraft carrier waiting to pick up the three-man crew after splashdown in the Pacific.  There is not excessive fawning over astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, who make a point of acknowledging the contributions of hundreds (thousands?) of others whose planning and tracking made the whole thing possible.

Ultimately, the film is an homage, like a television news production but with more camera angles.

A couple things are missing.  First is technical context.

Almost everyone in the US today has stronger computing power on a cellphone or laptop than the entire NASA team did for that ambitious moonshot.  I'd have liked to know more about the size of the team, and the overall effort that went into the whole Apollo 11 project, piece by piece.

In this, I am like Alex Heeney of the thoughtful Canadian website Seventh Row.  He said this in his article about the movie:

     "It keeps you immersed in the action, but at a great cost: most of the time, you don’t know what’s happening beyond the basics. A simple animation was created for the film to help the audience track the flight-path and the key maneuvers, which is extremely helpful.
      "But even as a trained engineer and space enthusiast with a fair bit of background knowledge on the mission, I had trouble following all the intricacies. I felt like I needed footnotes for each scene."

The second missing piece is historical context.  We learn that in 1961 President John F. Kennedy committed the country to a manned lunar landing before 1970.  After his assassination in 1963, the Florida space center was renamed for him and the project continued, perhaps with understandably greater urgency.

Still there are questions, unrelated to Kennedy, that deserve consideration:

  -- Could the Apollo 11 mission have been accomplished faster and more efficiently without live astronauts?   Would the project have been less valuable with the same mounted photo equipment and with machines instead of astronauts scooping up lunar soil and rocks? 

  -- Were Americans so enamored of beating the country's then-enemy, the USSR, which also was said to be pursuing a manned landing, that the risk and cost of Apollo 11 was worth it?
     
Manned space exploration is dangerous, and it was known to be dangerous before before Apollo 11.  In 1967, three astronauts died in the Apollo 1 spacecraft during on-the-ground training before their scheduled flight.

Since 1969, there have been worse casualties.
   -- In 1986, all seven team members of space shuttle Challenger died shortly after a failed takeoff.  One of the team was the first "teacher in space" who had prepared lesson plans for the mission; school students around the country saw the explosion on television in their classrooms.
  -- In 2003, the seven-member team of Space Shuttle Columbia died during an equipment malfunction as the shuttle was near landing on earth.

We now talk of travel to Mars undertaken by private companies, but there has not been a second manned lunar landing, which suggests that such research is not critical in the larger NASA scheme.   We participate in the earth-orbiting International Space Station and have launched far more ambitious unmanned probes to observe and research far more distant parts of our universe.  

Few would question the value of space exploration, but it seems fair to ask whether identifying it with heroic astronauts adds value to the enterprise.


Note:

Here, from a Redditor post last year, is a pretty nice (albeit inexpensive) rendering of the Apollo 11 spacecraft from takeoff to landing.

MovieMonday: Fyre Festival Documentaries

Sometimes a bullshit artist is just a bullshit artist.

Above is the teaser for one of two documentaries released within four days of each other this month.  The subject in each is a failed "music festival" that arguably got more attention than it deserved when it embarrassed its originator and backers back in April 2017.

The Fyre Festival concept was the idea of 25-year-old Billy McFarland, who is described in one of the films as "an aspiring entrepreneur turned con artist."  His thought was to gather some really elite people for a luxy music festival on an island in the Bahamas. It didn't come off so well; in fact it was a disaster that could have been predicted from the get-go.  McFarland is now in federal prison.

The movie referenced above is the version Hulu bought.  It was made by offbeat documentary director Chris Smith and goes on at some length about how gullible millennials were attracted by Fyre's social media promotion campaign and who wanted to attend because of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out.) It includes portions of an eight-hour interview with McFarland, for which he was paid an unspecified amount of cash and in which he says nothing of interest.

In addition to limning the FOMO concept, "Fyre Fraud" interweaves footage from cartoons and vintage black-and-white film snippets, plus an interview with a psychologist who explains that McFarland is a "con man" and describes helpfully the characteristics of con men.  Well, duh.

The whole thing runs for 96 minutes, but it feels longer.

The other documentary appears to have been launched after the announcement of the first one and was snapped up by Netflix.  It tells the same story and uses much of the same social media footage.

It has more interviews with people who worked on the Fyre festival -- the promotion team, a "music festival consultant,"  the Fyre "producer" who looks old enough to know better but shares a vulgar anecdote anyway and the employees who seemed to know all along that things weren't going well but who just kept hoping that a great big rabbit would jump out of a hat before the disappointed customers arrived.

It's one minute longer than the other production, and it too goes on longer than it should.

Critique

Fyre is not the first failed music festival.  It is remarkable for its promotional excesses --  like paying "influencer" Kendall Jenner $250,000 for a single Instagram post -- and its abject failure to grapple with the basic issues of staging a large event in an offshore location that required lodging, food, water, toilets and electricity.

The documentaries offer the rest of us a chance to enjoy a little schadenfreude as hoity-toity types suffer a very bad weekend.  All fine and good.

What they do not do is put the essential question to the many people involved in the effort:  What the heck were you thinking?  A Manhattan socialite, the wife of hedge fundie, raised $4 million for the project and declined to be interviewed.   So did McFarland's partner, Ja Rule, the rapper who talked a big game until the whole Fyre thing blew up and then faced no criminal consequences.  (There is appropriate sympathy for Bahamian workers who didn't get paid, and apparently a crowd-funding effort has reimbursed a heroic small restaurateur who fed legions of hungry people without reimbursement.)

Even the attendees should be asked the question.  By the time McFarland came up with his Fyre inspiration, his earlier enterprise -- an exclusive metal Magnises credit card thingie for millennial influencers -- was in deep trouble and had earned an "F" rating from the Better Business Bureau.

Really.  What WERE all those people thinking?

MovieMonday: Three Identical Strangers

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."*

This oft-quoted philosophical observation describes the concern of this documentary about the fates of identical triplet boys who were raised by different families and only met by coincidence when they were 19 years old. Two of the triplets are still alive and trying to make sense of it all. 

The boys were born in 1961 to a 17-year-old girl in New York City.  Six months later, a well-regarded adoption agency placed them with three different families -- one prosperous, one middle-class and one working-class -- and never told the families that each boy had two identical brothers.  

The film opens with the remarkable story of how the boys came to find each other.  They reveled in the discovery and became close, enjoying each other's company during a yearslong flutter of media fame.  

What was learned later was that they had been separated by design and that the adoption agency had cooperated with a scientist who tracked the each boy's development for comparison with the others.   The young men and their parents were rightly angry about the withheld information and about the triplets' use as "lab rats," as one of them puts it.

Studies of identical siblings separated as infants are valuable to scientists and ethicists.  They offer clues to how much of our personalities, and indeed our lives, are determined by our genetic backgrounds, by our childhood circumstances and by our own efforts.  Even so, the circumstances of the triplets' research remain indefensible. 

(The adoption agency closed years ago, and not just because single motherhood and abortions became common.  The agency had been sued at least twice; once for failure reveal to adoptive parents that their son was born to two schizophrenics who mated in an insane asylum and, in another another case, not revealing that a child had been born to an alcoholic mother and a heroin-addicted father.  
         In addition the agency separated at least 12 sets of identical twins and assisted with research of their personalities as they were being raised by different families.  The twins-triplets research data and information have been stored and barred from release until 2065; a movement is afoot to open the records to the adoptees and their families.)

The movie continues with revelations of the triplets' differences and difficulties over years and discussions with journalists, relatives and the remaining two siblings.  It ruminates on the relative influences of their DNA and their childhoods.  

This personalization frames the issue well, for the triplets' case, but the movie ends with a conclusion that I'm not sure I trust.  Reality, as we know, is complicated stuff.  

Still, the story is a good one.  It is nicely filmed and paced, and it examines an issue that concerns us all.  

MovieMonday: The Wrecking Crew

This was a slack week at movie theaters in my neighborhood, and I so stayed home and watched this documentary about Southern California session musicians in the early rock and roll period.  

Think about some modern pop and rock songs -- "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from Nirvana in 1991, "One Step Closer" by Linkin Park in 2000, or 2016's No. 1 Billboard single, Justin Bieber's "Love Yourself."

Are people going to be familiar with these songs 50 years from now?  Does hearing any of these make you want to tap your foot or hum along?

Now think about some popular songs of 1966:  "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys, "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra, and "California Dreamin'" by the Mamas & the Papas.  

We still hear those 50-year-old songs today.  Heck, I ran across a millennial recently who had heard "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'", a less distinguished hit from that same year.

Why do those old songs resonate?   My guess is that the melodic lines were stronger and the supporting musical arrangements were better.  For the latter, we can thank the Wrecking Crew.

This documentary, made in 2008 and then punched up a bit for theatrical release in 2015, sets the Wrecking Crew in context.  It was made by Denny Tedesco after the death of his father, guitarist Tommy Tedesco, a Wrecking Crew regular.

The film includes interviews with composers, producers and the musicians themselves, and it explains how the ad hoc Wrecking Crew stable influenced, punched up and enhanced popular music for a remarkable moment that lasted 10 or 15 years in the rock, pop, soul and R&B genres.

The beginning coincided with the relocation of much music production from New York to Los Angeles, and it was pushed along by surfing culture and Phil Spector's Wall of Sound-enhanced LA productions, including "Be My Baby."

Dennis Wilson, the driving force of the Beach Boys, is interviewed in the movie.  When he heard that song for the first time, he says, "I was so impressed I pulled my car over to the side of the road to listen.  It just blew me away."

Subsequent Beach Boys numbers were recorded by Wrecking Crew members because they were better musicians than members of the band.  (This also was noted in "Love and Mercy," the 2014 Wilson biopic.)  A member of the Birds rock band notes that Wrecking Crew musicians could knock out a new song in a few hours while the band itself once played a song 77 times in the recording studio before getting a satisfactory result. 

Among the people featured in the movie are bass guitarist Carol Kaye, a real character; Earl Palmer, a jazz drummer who acknowledges he made much more money from rock music than jazz; Hal Blaine, a drummer with a fun backstory; and New Orleans-raised horn man Plas Johnson, who provided the sax solo for the Pink Panther theme.  There are many others, all thoughtful and interesting.

Anyway, the movie explains the whole story and showcases some really talented insiders in good detail.  It's worth a look.  

Another Movie

"Standing in the Shadows of Motown," a 2002 film gives the background for a similar group musicians, the ones who backed up Detroit recordings starting in 1959 for Berry Gordy Jr.'s influential record productions.

The Motown star roster was long and distinguished -- Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, the Isley Brothers, the Four Tops, Martha and the Vandellas, the Supremes and Marvin Gaye, among many many others --  and the production values of the records they produced were excellent.

But perhaps because Detroit musicians worked for a single studio (while in LA there were various companies) they were treated less well, paid less money and left behind when Gordy upped stakes and moved his company to Los Angeles between the late 1960s and early 1970s.