J. B. Biggley
[played by Rudy Vallee, left]: “Ideas? That's what I look for. I keep
hiring a lot of fellows who are supposed to have brilliant ideas, but not one
of them will ever do what I tell him.” — How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967), based on the
novel by Shepherd Mead, adapted into a Pulitzer and Tony-winning musical with
book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, music and lyrics by
Frank Loesser, movie written and directed by David Swift
In an effort
to build industry word-of-mouth before awards season, the musical dramedy La La Land premiered to North American audiences for the first time in
September 2016, at the Telluride and Toronto International Film Festivals,
earning such rapturous approval that it became the film to beat for Best
Picture Oscar.The film’s
promoters forgot an important lesson, however: don’t peak too soon lest
naysayers pick it apart and allow competitors to overtake it. So it proved in
the end the following winter, when La La Land walked off with six
Oscars except the one most coveted: Best Motion Picture of the Year.
All of
that seemed far away when these early audiences responded positively. At
Telluride, for instance, the film was greeted with two mid-movie ovations (following
the freeway and Griffith Park sequences) and another 20-second one at the end.
What
elicited the affection of these and later audiences? Certainly stars Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, displaying the same chemistry they brought
to Crazy Stupid Love and Gangster Squad, as well as a months-long
pre-shooting dedication that allowed them to surmount their lack of much prior
vocal and dance training.
But the
film also functioned as an irresistible double love story: not just between the
two attractive young people at its center, but with the city that served as the
focus of their entertainment dreams.
Writer-director
Damien Chazelle and cinematographers Linus Sandgren and Tom Cross might
not have produced the grittiest cinematic depiction of Los Angeles, but they
did produce one of the most heartbreaking: a place that forces you to choose
between love and ambition. “That's L.A.,” says Ryan Gosling’s Sebastian, a jazz
pianist struggling to open his own club. “They worship everything, and they
value nothing."
For one reason or another, I didn’t watch La La Land when it was released. It might have stayed that way except that, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed on YouTube a clip of an upbeat early song from the film, “Someone in the Crowd,” featuring Stone’s Mia stepping out with her roommates to attend a Hollywood party where they can be seen and network.
I was hooked, and I’m sure
you would be, too, if you haven’t seen the movie already.
Neither
Stone nor Gosling are professional singers or dancers, so you won’t find the
pyrotechnics in a Cabaret, All That Jazz, or Chicago. But
you won’t find the cynicism rampant in those Bob Fosse musicals, either. This
is unapologetic, heart-on-its-sleeve romanticism, with the lovers literally
soaring above ground in Griffith Observatory in the “Dancing in the Stars”
scene.
Moreover, Stone and Gosling, having trained intensively for their roles (with Gosling, a neophyte on the piano, practicing for months so he could perform the jazz tunes himself with no CGI or hand double) acquit themselves marvelously.
And
Chazelle, with help from choreographer Mandy Moore, have drawn the best
possible lessons from those MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, as
well as the poignant French 1964 “sung-through” musical, The Umbrellas of
Cherbourg.
What led Moonlight
to overtake La La Land in the Best Picture contest?
All the
advance word-of-mouth for the latter also provided opportunities for backlash,
focusing on how the film seemed crafted to capitalize on Academy voters' penchant for rewarding movies about actors (most notoriously, Shakespeare in
Love over Saving Private Ryan); on how it was more a retro musical
than a movie with original content; and how, in violation of jazz history, it
depicted a white musician induced to compromise his pursuit of pure craft by an
African-American tastemaker (John Legend, inexplicably playing guitar onscreen
rather than his familiar piano).
On the
other hand, Moonlight came to embody an underdog spirit—particularly
following the November 2016 Presidential election, when the film’s entirely
African-American cast (a first in the Academy’s nomination history) and its LGBTQ
theme represented defiance of what Hollywood deemed Donald Trump’s reactionary
politics.
I have not
seen Moonlight so I can’t comment on its merits versus La La Land.
But the atmosphere of fear now sweeping the entertainment industry constitutes
a far different environment from what existed a decade ago, it’s possible that
a different Oscar voting outcome might occur today.
I suspect that the moviegoing public would, if given a chance, vote for La La Land, in any case. Box-office grosses are never to be confused with value.
But during
their theatrical runs, La La Land grossed $504.6 million worldwide,
while Moonlight pulled in a considerably more modest $65.3 million, even
with the help of that Best Picture statuette from the Academy.
Homer Simpson [voice
of Dan Castellaneta]: “Frosty Krusty Flakes are what got him [Bart] where
he is today. It could be one of these chemicals here that makes him so smart.
Lisa, maybe you should try some of these.”
Marge Simpson [voice
of Julie Kavner]: “Homer!”
Homer:
“I'm just saying, why not have two geniuses in the family? Sort of a spare in
case Bart's brain blows up.” —The Simpsons, Season 1, Episode 2, “Bart the Genius,” original air date Jan. 14, 1990, teleplay by Jon Vitti,
directed by David Silverman
There are a couple of reasons why I thought of using this quote today besides, most obviously, because of Labor Day.
After 10 years, I finally got around this past week to watch La La Land. For much of the movie, Emma Stone’s character Mia has her dreams of being an actress dashed repeatedly, in just the “discouraging and humiliating and disappointing” fashion recalled by Ms. Field.
I also recently read a book called Hollywood Unions, edited by Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola. It covers numerous occupations, most like the blue-collar, less prestigious jobs in which Field’s parents struggled to make ends meet.
Unions represent an estimated 331,000 workers in the film and television industry, most of whom will experience economic uncertainty rather than the glamour of Oscar night. Even the most successful actors will be quick to say that they might be lucky to receive one call-back out of 100 auditions.
Less than
a week after assuming control, Raines threw the paper’s overwhelming resources
into the biggest story that he and other journalists had ever covered: the 9/11
terrorist attacks.
At first,
it seemed to vindicate his philosophy of
“flooding the zone,” or devoting saturation coverage to a major news event, day
after day. In his first year at the helm, The Times won Pulitzer Prizes,
including the first given to its metro desk since the 1950s.
But more
than he or his acolytes realized, all that celebration and self-congratulation
were not entirely warranted.
First, the
staff responsible for producing the prize-winning stories (including its
ongoing special section, “A Nation Challenged”) had been largely picked and
guided by predecessor Joseph Lelyveld.
Second, as
noted in Eric Boehlert’s Salon post-mortem on the scandal that ended
Howell’s reign, top editors’ direction of the DC bureau’s news coverage “represented
an unprecedented attempt to micromanage the newspaper and infuriated editors
and reporters, many of whom began to flee to other papers and other jobs.”
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the newspaper who had selected Raines for the top editorial post, should have taken more seriously a December 2022 Newsweek article warning of newsroom rumblings about this direction.
He must have
sensed that, for all his friend’s talent (a Pulitzer Prize winner himself, for
a 1992 Times Magazine essay about his family’s maid, Grady Hutchinson,
in the segregated South of his childhood) and experience (bureau chief stints
in Atlanta, London, and Washington), Raines needed to relax his management
style.
According
to Ken Auletta’s June 2002 New Yorker profile, “The Howell Doctrine,”
Sulzberger not only cautioned Raines that he could not employ the star system
he had used as Washington bureau chief, but confided in associates "that
he would have blocked Raines’ promotion [to executive editor] if Sulzberger was
not convinced that he had changed.”
But you might as well ask a leopard to change its spots. It wasn’t enough that Raines thought he had a mandate from Sulzberger to make the paper “smarter, livelier, and more appealing to the geographically diverse and demanding national audience on which its future depends,” as he put it in a May 2004 Atlantic Monthly account of his tenure.
He also saw a conflict between “the
senior editors who endorsed these improvements and traditionalists on the
newsroom floor and among mid-level managers.” The latter, he claimed, “wanted
the paper to stay the way it was.”
The
members of the latter faction went unnamed. There is every
reason to think that the claim was fatuous, a grope in the dark by a former
journalism giant too blind to understand how his own failings led to his
departure from the job he craved and the paper he loved.
In his
first day on the job, Raines thought he was sending a symbolic signal to staff
by putting on his desk a copy of the Charles Gaines 1972 novel Stay Hungry,
the application of which seemed obvious to him in a competitive news environment.
But he
missed the other signals that the newsroom picked up about his imperious manner
in fielding questions at breakfasts and lunches, including an expression that
even friends thought made him look like “an angry hawk.”
Terms
other than “flooding the zone” might better describe the coverage that Raines
soon assigned to some topics, with the most polite being “crusade.” “Obsession”
would fit even better. “Hobbyhorse” might have worked especially well in some
instances:
* The
verdict was most mixed on the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal. No
doubt, an institution to which one in five Americans belonged at the time
needed to be scrutinized, and there was no doubt that exposing the misdeeds of
individual priests and the coverup by the hierarchy prevented countless future
crimes. But the number of collective column inches, the lack of oversight on
individual stories, and the secular viewpoint of the paper’s staff and
readership raised real questions about objectivity and even anti-Catholic bias.
(For instance, assuming that TV showrunner David Kelley was “raised Catholic,”
it headlined a review of one of his scripts about the abuse scandal, “A
Catholic Writer Brings His Anger to 'The Practice'”—and needed to run a
correction when it turned out that Kelley was, in fact, raised Protestant.)
Moreover, Raines’ motives for propelling the coverage were hardly pure; Martin
Baron, executive editor of The Boston Globe, later told Roy Harris for a 2008 article for Poynter that he heard his
counterpart at the Times was “annoyed that we were onto the biggest
story of the year and seemingly headed to a Pulitzer,” and determined that his
paper would cover it at the national level and consign the Globe to
local stories about the scandal.
*The Bush
administration claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of
mass destruction was certainly covered in depth, but without the skepticism it
deserved. A 2004 “Editor’s Note,” after an internal investigation, concluded
that Judith Miller’s stories on this justification for the war buildup that “information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now,
was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged” by senior
management at the time—an assessment that Raines predictably took issue with.
* Campaigning
incessantly for the Augusta National Golf Course to open to women was
hardly the most consequential story in Raines’ tenure, but it was certainly the
one that provoked the most ridicule. The revelation of spiked columns by two
writers who disagreed with the position only made matters worse.
But the Blair
fiasco represented a fundamental challenge to the Times’ credibility
that could not be ignored.
What
Raines’ friends and defenders downplayed, in noting that other journalists were
not forced out of their positions or faced such dire damage to their
reputations for their misdeeds, were the sheet multiplicity and breadth of
Blair’s transgressions, including fake quotes; locations supposedly visited
even as he sat in his Brooklyn apartment; details invented from photographs and
other news reports; and passages plagiarized from other reporters.
An exhaustive, nearly 7,500-word post-mortem that, to his credit, Raines authorized, concluded that at least 36 of Blair’s final 73 stories filed before his resignation were tainted by fraud.
Worse, high-level figures such as Washington editor Jill
Abramson and metro editor Jonathan Landman had been raising red flags, with Landman even warning, in a blunt April 2002 memo, “We have to stop
Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”
Five works
elapsed after Blair's firing before Sulzberger took further
action. When Raines could not contain the mushrooming scandal or the newsroom muttering
that had now become a cacophony, he and managing editor Gerald Boyd were forced
to resign.
The
disappointment must have been enormous when Raines finally grasped that he
would function as an agent of change at the Gray Lady in a far different
fashion than he expected.
Largely because of the Blair scandal, the Times instituted the ombudsman position (or, as they called it, a “public editor”), an independent watchdog who investigated reader complaints of inaccuracy and unfairness.
Six journalists performed that
function for the next 14 years, until the paper decided that the rise of social
media helped maintain accountability. (I still think that was a mistake.)
In Andy
Robinson’s July 2017 retrospective on the position in the Columbia Journalism Review,
Margaret Sullivan, the penultimate Times public editor, noted the
scandal epitomized “so many issues that were and still are happening in
newsrooms: the effort to diversify the staff, people who find mentors, the
pressure that reporters are under, the intense pressure that they’re under at
places like The New York Times, the things that can go wrong, the way
that in the new age you could simply be talking to your editor on your cell
phone, and they wouldn’t know where you were.”
I first
encountered the work of Lurie in the mid-Seventies, with her biting academic
satire The War Between the Tates. Though she had written four prior
novels, this was the first to attract widespread attention—enough for it to
land on the bestseller lists and to be adapted into a 1977 TV movie starring Elizabeth
Ashley, Richard Crenna, and Annette O'Toole.
For anyone
wanting to know what how the nation’s campuses were roiled in the late Sixties
by the Vietnam War, women’s lib, and the sexual revolution, this insider’s
take, with its cool irony, remains an excellent place to start.
Many
neophyte authors follow the mantra “write about what you know,” but I was
unaware until I started researching this post just how closely Ms. Lurie
followed that.
Several of
her novels (including The War Between the Tates) feature characters from
Corinth University, a school that shares a classical association and upstate
New York setting with the institution where Ms. Lurie taught for decades,
Cornell University.
Her female
protagonists (the same age, within a few years, of Ms. Lurie) are often
involved with children’s literature—her academic specialty. She couldn’t help
but regard with tart disdain how these books were viewed by her colleagues, as
in this passage from Foreign Affairs:
“For the
truth is that children’s literature is a poor relation in her department
–indeed, in most English departments: a stepdaughter grudgingly tolerated
because, as in the old tales, her words are glittering jewels of a sort that
attract large if not equally brilliant masses of undergraduates. Within the
departmental family she sits in the chimney-corner, while her idle, ugly
siblings dine at the chairman’s table –though, to judge by enrollment figures,
many of them must spout toads and lizards.”
With all
of that said, readers should be careful not to construe her fiction as directly
autobiographical. Maintaining the kind of ironic distance she was able to keep
towards her characters would have been difficult, if not impossible, if they
derived entirely from her experiences and emotions.
For
instance, like Erica Tate in The War Between the Tates, Lurie suffered
through the collapse of her marriage to another academic. But, while the
marital conflict in the novel was brought to a boil by an extramarital affair,
Lurie’s marriage deteriorated as her first husband underwent a conversion to
Roman Catholicism—a spiritual orientation that, as the child of religious
skeptics, she had little or no use for.
Over the
years, I have wondered why Ms. Lurie was unable to sustain her mid-career
popularity. Some of it may relate to the fact that creators of so-called
“literary fiction” don’t work in genres where they can become “brand authors.”
But I
suspect most of the problem instead rests with her frequent recourse to the
academic environment she knew so thoroughly—a setting outside the experience of
many common readers in the U.S. Throughout most of her career, her popularity
was higher in the U.K., where writers such as A.S. Byatt, Kingsley Amis, David
Lodge, and Iris Murdoch have enjoyed success with “campus novels.”
Readers
who do try Ms. Lurie will find a fiction writer able to put her literary
influences to use in contemporary contexts:
*Her
consistently wry narrative voice (you can practically see her narrators
raise their eyebrows) is reminiscent of Jane Austen.
*With his
“international novels” (featuring encounters between innocent Americans and
more jaded British), interest in artists, and midlife fascination with the
supernatural, Henry James provided Lurie with another template.
*And her
intense study of children’s literature led Lurie to plumb the complex
personalities and frequent fears of the very young.
Above all,
Lurie exemplifies the tendency of so many writers—no matter their time or
nation—to write from a personal wound. With Lurie, that wound began even before
childhood, in birth. As she wrote in a 1982 essay for The New York Times Book
Review:
“I was a
skinny, plain, off-looking little girl, deaf in one badly damaged ear from a
birth injury, and with a resulting atrophy of the facial muscles that pulled my
mouth sideways whenever I opened it to speak and turned my smile into a sort of
sneer. I was clever, or, as one of my teachers put it, ‘too clever for her own
good,’ but not especially charming or affectionate or helpful. I couldn't seem
to learn to ride a bike or sing in tune, and I was always the last person
chosen for any team.”
The
precocious but lonely child took refuge in books, especially, at that young
age, fairy tales. To her joy, she discovered her own personal superpower: “With
a pencil and paper I could revise the world.”
It made
the difference in her life, which ended six years ago in a hospice in Ithaca,
NY.
Lurie
would be delighted to know that admirers of her fiction are celebrating the
centenary of her birth on both sides of the Atlantic this month. In New York
City, the 92nd Street Y will host “Alison Lurie at 100” on Tuesday, September 15, featuring authors Bruce Handy,
Joanna Rakoff, and Micah Perks in conversation with Cody Upton.
And in London,
the British Library hosts “An American in London: A Celebration of Alison Lurie”
on September 29, with speakers including Amanda Craig, Elly Griffiths, and Dame
Margaret Drabble.
Unlike Britain, most U.S. museums charge admission
fees. But Sir Ben’s point remains well taken: museums are a “tremendous
force for public good” in terms of what they can teach visitors. Let’s keep it
that way.
In the two
decades since Terkel’s remarks, I would have to say that the “assault upon our
intelligence” has grown more relentless, and, in important ways, has even
breached longtime defenses.
