Paul Iorio -- home

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-224505802011-09-09T06:04:32.304-07:00Paul Iorio -- homePaul Ioriohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08705568747562061407noreply@blogger.comBlogger11100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22450580.post-1139939105835123382011-09-08T03:41:00.000-07:002011-09-08T16:54:14.781-07:00><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lWFUb5JyDA4/TbRi5LYrTUI/AAAAAAAACzU/SPan1zJj3Oo/s1600/scapaulin2000s.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 183px; height: 200px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lWFUb5JyDA4/TbRi5LYrTUI/AAAAAAAACzU/SPan1zJj3Oo/s200/scapaulin2000s.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5599208971176725826" /></a>I'm Paul Iorio, an arts and entertainment writer/reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Phoenix, The Huffington Post, The Toronto Star, Newsday, The Village Voice, Spy magazine, Details magazine, the online edition of Playboy magazine, New Times, Cash Box magazine and other publications. (This list does not include the papers that have run my syndicated stories or the international publications that have published my reporting for Reuters.) My photography has appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post and other publications. (Photography site: <a href="http://www.paulioriophotos.blogspot.com/">http://www.paulioriophotos.blogspot.com</a> And my original music has been aired on leading alternative radio stations like KALX, KCRW and WFMU. (Music site: <a href="http://www.pauliorio.blogspot.com/">http://www.pauliorio.blogspot.com)</a> MP3s at: <a href="http://www.soundclick.com/pauliorio">http://www.soundclick.com/pauliorio</a>.) My daily blog on pop culture: <a href="http://dailydigression1.blogspot.com/">dailydigression1.blogspot.com</a>. My resume: <a href="http://www.iorioresume.blogspot.com/">www.iorioresume.blogspot.com</a>). And here is a letter-of-recommendation from a senior editor who worked closely with me at the San Francisco Chronicle: <a href="http://editoroniorio.blogspot.com/">http://editoroniorio.blogspot.com/</a> And here are audio excerpts of several interviews I conducted with pop culture icons: <a href="http://myspace.com/pauliorioo">myspace.com/pauliorioo</a>.) I'm based in Berkeley, California, and can be reached at <a href="mailto:pliorio@aol.com">pliorio@aol.com</a> in Berkeley, California. This website features hundreds of pages of my published writings. __________________________________________________________________ <div align="center">And now, a few hundred pages of the published writings of Paul Iorio.</div><div align="center"></div><div align="center">* * *</div><div align="center">Website Table of Contents</div> 1. published in The San Francisco Chronicle: A one-on-one interview with poet Lawrence Ferlighetti, who reveals new details about Beat-era writers. October 28, 2000. This piece benefited from the fact that I had just written a story on "Howl" for The Washington Post five months earlier that required vast research about the making of the poem. So by the time Ferlinghetti and I sat down for a beer at Tosca in the fall of '00, I was an expert on the poem and had come up with hundreds of questions I wanted to ask him. The story has since been posted on numerous websites, including academic sites ranging from The University of Pennsylvania's to the University of Auckland's (widely regarded as New Zealand's best university), where it is currently assigned reading for a lit course. It is also cited in Jonah Raskin's acclaimed book "American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl' and the Making of the Beat Generation." 2. published in The Los Angeles Times: Three-part feature on Roman Polanski's movie "Chinatown," featuring a rare exclusive interview with Polanski. (Part two presented here for the first time.) The 1999 piece was influential enough that it was later plagiarized on at least two separate occasions, most notably in a book published by John Wiley & Sons in 2000. 3. published in Los Angeles New Times: Cover feature on comedian Richard Pryor that includes my own eyewitness account of Pryor's last full-length concert ever. I'm still the only journalist anywhere to have ever written about it. (New Times's editing, which was minor (and counter-productive) to begin with, has been completely deleted here.) Here is a page of my notes about Pryor's very last full-length concert anywhere, July 24, 1996. <a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RraQ2AiGn_I/AAAAAAAAAMI/HXkum8bs8V4/s1600-h/scanpryornotes.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; DISPLAY: block; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5095419285946671090" border="0" alt="" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RraQ2AiGn_I/AAAAAAAAAMI/HXkum8bs8V4/s400/scanpryornotes.jpg" /></a> 4. published in The Toronto Star: The only story anywhere to have covered, comparatively, the immediate coverage by the major television networks of the 9/11 plane crashes. Riveting stuff. 5. published in The Washington Post: A popular feature in which physicians assess the accuracy of the medical and health information in feature films. (A lot of publications wanted to publish this one, and The Post won!) I must have interviewed or contacted over a hundred medical professionals in order to find the half dozen who are quoted in my article. Here's just one page of my rough notes on contact info for sources: <a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RsyvBcnZEeI/AAAAAAAAAiI/EEimaHTvvNg/s1600-h/scanwpostnotes.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; DISPLAY: block; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101644917300072930" border="0" alt="" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RsyvBcnZEeI/AAAAAAAAAiI/EEimaHTvvNg/s400/scanwpostnotes.jpg" /></a> 6. published in The Washington Post: A tour of notable San Francisco locations in the history of Beat poetry (particularly Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"). (I have to thank my editor at The Post for encouraging me to expand the piece with quotes from Ginsberg's personal journals.) May 7, 2000. 7. published in The Chicago Tribune: A satiric piece on Katie Couric. (I'm really grateful that my editor got the joke and ran the story, because readers seemed to truly enjoy this one.) 2006. 8. published in New Times: The very first audiotaped interview with Trey Anastasio, the leader of the rock band Phish. (In the interview, I introduced Anastasio to a band he hadn't heard of before, Widespread Panic, who (with Phish) would soon go on to form the core of the hugely popular "jam band" movement of the 1990s.) I conducted the Anastasio interview in January 1989, when he was still years away from success -- and years away from his first taped press interview. I must admit it feels like a near miracle that I thought to record such an unknown as Anastasio in January 1989 and that I managed to preserve the tape for so many years. Please note that I'm choosing my words carefully when I say this is the first taped interview with Anastasio. It's the first, not merely one of the first. No journalist (or anyone else) has ever come forward with an earlier taped interview with him (if someone has such a tape, please feel free to show it to me). And the taped interview is packed with time references that date it as a January 1989 intevriew. I actually interviewed Phish's Mike Gordon a full year before I spoke with Anastasio, but I didn't record that one; I did, however, save a handwritten letter Gordon sent to me, dated March 8, 1988, which I've scanned and posted on this site (I'm quite certain no music journalist anywhere has correspondence with Gordon that dates that far back!). By the way, coming eventually to this website: the entire transcript of my January 1989 interview with Trey Anastasio! 9. published in The New York Times: A satiric piece on How Not to Blow Your Oscar Speech. (Nicely improved by an editor who rightly deleted a speculative section of the piece!) 10. published in The San Francisco Chronicle: Six separate mini-profiles of celebrities Dick Cavett, Edward Norton, Anne Heche, Daphne Rubin Vega, Carroll O'Connor and Jessica Alba. (Most of these profiles are presented here in abridged versions.) My Anne Heche profile marked the first time Heche had ever been linked to Ellen DeGeneres in print. For the record, I spotted Ann and Ellen together on April 5, 1997, and interviewed Heche about Ellen on audiotape the next day. I filed my story on April 7, and the article was available on newsstands in the San Franicsco area on April 17. The story was released elsewhere on April 20, 1997. So here is where one of the big celebrity stories of the nineties started, with this entry in my notebook, which I wrote at 5pm on April 5, 1997 (it's the first of several pages of notes): <a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RrVDRgiGn7I/AAAAAAAAALo/-fLQ9qtjKJc/s1600-h/scanellenann.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; DISPLAY: block; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5095052521509396402" border="0" alt="" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RrVDRgiGn7I/AAAAAAAAALo/-fLQ9qtjKJc/s400/scanellenann.jpg" /></a> Also, Dick Cavett's childhood remembrance of fellow Nebraskan Johnny Carson (my piece later formed the basis of a 2005 People magazine article). 11. Unpublished: An investigative report about jihadist Internet messages posted before the 9/11 attacks that suggest others had foreknowledge of the attacks. My findings are exclusive and have never been published anywhere else but here. The story was written, reported and researched in 2004 and 2005, and the final version here was written on April 25, 2005. 12. The Austin American-Statesman -- One-on-one interview with moonwalker Alan Bean, published (and later syndicated) by the paper (July 18, 2004). 13. Details Magazine: A controversial satiric piece about organized religion called "Choosing My Religion," in which I actually converted to the world's great (and not-so-great) religions -- all of them! Published in October 1994. In my opinion, this is one of my funniest pieces, and judging from the response, some readers thought so, too (see letters-to-the-editor below, published in Details). <a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/Rre-qAiGoDI/AAAAAAAAAMo/XYLtd1eeQ-w/s1600-h/scandetailsmag.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; DISPLAY: block; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5095751132299829298" border="0" alt="" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/Rre-qAiGoDI/AAAAAAAAAMo/XYLtd1eeQ-w/s400/scandetailsmag.jpg" /></a> 14. Cash Box Magazine: Grammy-winning composer James Mtume and I locked ourselves in the bathroom at the New York offices of Cash Box magazine for this interview on December 18, 1986 (it ran in the magazine on January 24, 1987). One of the good things about writing for Cash Box was that no editor ever edited or revised or re-wrote any of my stories in any way (though there were one or two pieces where lines were mysteriously deleted or altered). And the results are here to see -- a solid body of work that includes stories that still resonate today. 15. Previously Unpublished: A brief verbatim exchange I had with actor Mel Gibson in 1999 in which I challenged him about his religious beliefs. 16. Spy Magazine: The popular "Dylan-o-Matic," which presents a method by which anyone can create their own Bob Dylan lyrics. It's still circulated on the Internet, even though it was published in the pre-Internet era by a publication that is (alas) now defunct. From 1992. I've posted a scan of the article below. 17. VARIOUS PUBLICATIONS: Reviews of performances by Tracy Chapman, The Pogues, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Ordinaires, and The Replacements. 1985 to 1989. The Pogues piece is particularly noteworthy because it chronicles the band's very first trip to the U.S. in interviews with the original bandmembers and in a review of its first American show (which took place at around 3am or so in downtown NY). 18. SPY MAGAZINE: The Disneyfication of America. Satire (and some serious investigative reporting) on All Things Disney (including reportage about the creation of America's first Disney town, Celebration, which has since become a real place). The last half includes an all-too-real (and funny) conversation with someone at Disney about planning a Disney wedding. The published version of the Disney piece was badly botched by my editor (the guy changed the word "Disneyland" to "Disney World," for starters!), who published the piece without running his changes by me. The article here comes from my original draft. 19. PREVIOUS UNPUBLISHED: Published here for the first time, a story that reveals new details about the recent private life of reclusive author J.D. Salinger. You'll read it only here (probably because many newspapers and magazines are, frankly, afraid of Salinger's legendary litigiousness). 20. THE WASHINGTON POST: A tour of obscure San Francisco locations, including photos by me. (March 24, 2002). I've included a scan of the story here. 21. PARTIALLY PUBLISHED IN THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: A one-on-one interview with Woody Allen, conducted in Beverly Hills on December 3, 1999. (Unpublished until now, though a small part of it was used in a story I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999.) 22. Cash Box magazine -- Exclusive interview with Ray Davies, leader of The Kinks. 23. THE WASHINGTON POST -- Exploring Kurt Cobain's Seattle, 2002. This is the original draft I submitted to The Post in May 2002 (give or take a few lines), not the version that was edited in Nov. '02. 24. UNPUBLISHED -- My audiotaped interview with activist Abbie Hoffman, several months before his suicide. In the interview, one can see how Hoffman was rapidly unraveling. 25. The San Francisco Chronicle -- A profile of film director Pedro Almodovar. [This is from the manuscript I submitted via email to the Chronicle; anyone who compares it to the published version will see exactly how lousy some of the editing at the Chronicle was back then (though, truth be told, they were some of the friendliest people you'd ever want to meet -- though, truth be told again, friendly ain't enough, especially when staffers have made errors in your last seven stories and are about to make an eighth, while trying to spin their way out of being blamed for it)]. 26. LOS ANGELES TIMES, OTHER PUBLICATIONS -- Brief profiles of Barry Sonnenfeld, John Woo, Andy Partridge, Warren Zevon, Troy Garity (the first story about Garity in any publication) and David Rabe. 27. The San Francisco Chronicle -- An essay on The Paranoid Movie genre, with a scan of the Paranoid Movie Game gameboard that I designed and conceived for the newspaper. 28. Unpublished interview with Robert Goulet. 29. Unpublished travel story (with photos) about traveling alone as a teenager behind the Iron Curtain 31 years ago. 30. The San Francisco Chronicle -- The Making of "Jaws." Fresh interviews with the filmmakers reveal new details about the film. 31. The San Francisco Chronicle -- Essay on how the British lift bits of American pop culture and then sell it back to Americans as something new. 32. New York Newsday -- The Recycling of Woody Allen. (Note: This was wholly my piece, from idea to execution, and bears my sole byline, though in the print edition there is a nearby byline of another writer, in larger type, referring to other articles adjacent to mine, yet that other byline sort of makes it look like this was a co-written or co-researched piece, which it was not.) 33. SPY MAGAZINE -- Why It's Not So Smart To Be Smart Anymore. Humorous (but solid) investigative reporting. 34. PUBLISHED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME -- "The Poetry of Borat Sagdiyev" -- Who knew he was a poet, too? 2007. 35. REUTERS -- My scoop about the reunion of Sly Stone's band The Family Stone. Reveals new details about the reclusive Sly Stone. Syndicated in major publications, including Billboard magazine. 36. THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- Profile of film director Mimi Leder. 37. THE NEW YORK TIMES -- A Jack Nicholson Quiz. 38. NEW YORK NEWSDAY -- Yet another Jack Nicholson Quiz. 39. PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED -- Exclusive interview with film director M. Night Shyamalan. The only interview with Shyamalan about "The Sixth Sense" conducted before the release of "The Sixth Sense" (apparently nobody else thought the movie would be a hit!). 40. PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED -- Exclusive interview with the late Nigerian pop star Fela Kuti (it may be the first one-on-one conducted after his release from prison in 1986). 41. PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED: Humor: Little-Known Popes in Papal History. Published here for the first time. 2007. 42. The East Coast Rocker -- "We Must Send These Fundamentalists a Clear and Sharp Message..." An editorial on the Salman Rushdie affair (and on religious fundamentalists from Falwell to Khomeini), which I wrote in March of 1989 after attending a PEN reading of Rushdie's work in Manhattan that had been interrupted by a bomb scare. Published in The East Coast Rocker newspaper on March 29, 1989. (Thanks to editor Jay Lustig for allowing this controversial piece to run as I wrote it.) 43. "THE BUZZ," AN ORIGINAL FEATURE FILM SCREENPLAY BY PAUL IORIO. This is a fictionalized story of a non-fiction murder case that I solved in 1990 (see resume). "60 Minutes" and "The Village Voice" were both interested in doing a story based on my findings at the time -- until key sources became too afraid to talk on the record. Ultimately, with so many sources off the record, I found the only way I could tell the tale was to create this fictionalized version. By the way, the screenplay is currently an inactive project business-wise (meaning that I'm not trying to sell it anymore), so there is of course no conflict of interest in my writing about movies for various publications (the screenplay was written before I reported about movies professionally). Also, "The Buzz" is about a set of characters who I think would be interesting even if they weren't caught up an unsolved murder investigation. I definitely didn't want the story to be a typical whodunit that reveals in the last ten pages that the murderer is actually the nun or the butler! I wanted it to resemble real life, where we sometimes know full well whodunit but can't get anyone to listen to the truth or can't get otherwise decent people to side with the good guys. These days, in fiction it's a surprise when the person who you think did it actually did do it. Copyright 1995. I started writing it in 1990, initially calling it "Number One Bullet," but wrote most of it in '94 and '95. I also revised it in '97 and further revised it in 2003, and that latest version is presented here. I've posted "The Buzz" here: <a href="http://thebuzzscript.blogspot.com/">http://thebuzzscript.blogspot.com/</a> 44. S i n g l e R o o m O c c u p a n c y Original Feature Film Screenplay by Paul Iorio I've posted a scan of the entire 130-page manuscript of "Single Room Occupancy," published here for the first time and available nowhere else. This is the copyrighted version I wrote in 1995 and 1996. There was movie industry interest in the script at the time, though it was never made into a feature film, and I'm not actively trying to sell it anymore. The plot, which really intensifies in the last 50 pages or so, is about the sabotage of a reformist political candidate in Hoboken, New Jersey, and it is fiction. Keep in mind that every word of this was written before Thanksgiving 1996 -- many years before "The Sopranos" was even conceived -- so you can see how it preceded that program in terms of subject matter (e.g., the NJ mob milieu) and characters (e.g., my character Diane Milano was invented and copyrighted long before Meadow Soprano was!). I've posted "Single Room Occupancy" here: <a href="http://pauliorioscreenplays.blogspot.com/">pauliorioscreenplays.blogspot.com</a> . * * * Some of the articles are presented here in original manuscript or updated versions. All writing, reporting and research in all stories presented here by Paul Iorio (and there were no co-bylines on any of these pieces). All research in all Q&As by Paul Iorio. (Resume follows at the end.) I've conducted countless interviews and asked countless questions as a journalist since 1984 and have always come up with and asked my own questions, which have always been based on my own research and reporting and natural curiosity and spontaneous thinking. (There have been only three minor exceptions to this: in 1996, my editor suggested I ask O.J. Simpson a particular question; in 2000, my editor suggested one -- only one -- of the many questions that I asked Woody Allen; and in 1999, my editor again suggested I ask actor Will Smith a particular question.) My journalistic methods and work habits were most accurately described by a senior editor at The San Francisco Chronicle -- my main editor at The Chronicle -- who wrote this assessment in a letter of recommendation after working with me for three years in '00: "Paul has an original way of approaching a story. His writing rarely needs much editing. And best of all, he is completely reliable." (See complete text of letter of recommendation at www.resumesidenotes.blogspot.com.) Here are the stories! (By the way, please be wary of editors who claim to have contributed any writing or reporting to these pieces. They didn't. As the cliche goes, success has many fathers...)_ There are stories of mine that are not included here that were more collaborative, but those articles are limited to the following: my stories for Reuters from '97 to '99, which I reported and co-wrote (as opposed to reported and solely wrote), as is the custom with most wire service reports in general. One other exception: a breaking news story I wrote for The Boston Phoenix in 2007, which was collaborative (and, by the way, those people at the Phoenix are first rate!). Everybody quoted in all stories spoke on the record and on audiotape. ________________________________________ Stories, Written and Reported by Paul Iorio(searchable text, below) * * * [FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE] Lawrence Ferlinghetti on "Howl" The Birth of Beat Pop Culture By Paul Iorio If the birth of the beat generation could be traced back to one event, it would probably be the first public reading of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" 45 years ago this month at the now defunct Six Gallery in San Francisco. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Books published the poem in 1956, was in the audience that night and recalls the reading as an electric event that galvanized the area's literary and arts community. "Nobody had ever heard anything like that before," said Ferlinghetti, sipping a Bass ale at the Tosca Cafe in the city's North Beach neighborhood. "When you hear it for the first time, you say, 'I never saw the world like that before." "Howl," widely regarded as one of the great works of 20th-century American poetry, is a 3,600-word torrent of unusually vivid and hellish imagery written in the long-line style of Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and echoing the rhythms of jazz. It has also become one of the most popular poems in U.S. history, having sold nearly a million copies in its City Lights edition -- very rare for a book of poetry. The poem, the target of a landmark obscenity trial in 1957, also helped turn publisher and bookseller City Lights into the center of the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1950s. At the time of the Six Gallery reading, on Oct. 7, 1955, Ginsberg was living on Milvia St. in North Berkeley, and novelist Jack Kerouac ("On the Road") was his houseguest. On the night of the event, the two took a bus into San Francisco and then caught a ride with Ferlinghetti in his Aston Martin to the Six Gallery, a combination art gallery and performance space at 3119 Fillmore St. near Union. Six poets read that night, starting about 8 p.m. with Philip Lamantia and moving on to Philip Whalen and Michael McClure. After a brief intermission, Kenneth Rexroth, the host, introduced Ginsberg, who began his reading with the now-classic line, "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." Kerouac sat on the side of the low stage, drinking from a jug of wine and shouting, "Go!" at the end of some of the long lines. The audience of fewer than a hundred soon joined in with shouts of encouragement, exploding in applause at the conclusion, as Ginsberg left the stage in tears. (Gary Snyder had the bad luck to follow Ginsberg.) "Allen was really a master performer," says Ferlinghetti. "He could really turn the audience on." Afterward, Ginsberg, Kerouac and others celebrated at a Chinese restaurant, while Ferlinghetti and his wife returned to their apartment on Potrero Hill, to the south. "I wasn't one of his gang, I wasn't one of his group at all," says Ferlinghetti. "He sort of considered me a square bookshop owner....I was not in the inner circle at all. I was not invited to read at the 'Howl' reading because I wasn't known as a poet." (Ferlinghetti, formerly San Francisco's poet laureate, went on to become an even more popular writer than Ginsberg; his 1958 book-length poem "A Coney Island of the Mind" has sold more than a million copies.) "I sent Allen a Western Union telegram that night saying, 'I greet you at the beginning of a great career. When do I get the manuscript?" he recalls. The telegram echoed the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman after the former had read an early version of "Leaves of Grass" (but Ginsberg didn't initially catch the reference, Ferlinghetti says). Ferlinghetti did soon get the manuscript, which was subsequently revised for months by Ginsberg, who dropped a fifth part of "Howl" and added "A Footnote to 'Howl.'" The three-part poem and its "Footnote" were ultimately compiled with nine other Ginsberg poems in a book titled "Howl and Other Poems," the fourth volume of City Lights' Pocket Poets paperback series. Problems arose when Ferlinghetti, looking to save money, hired a British printer, Villiers, to print the book. This led to a customs seizure that was quickly dropped, but not before it brought the book to the attention of the San Francisco Police Department, which filed its own obscenity charges against Ferlinghetti for selling the poem. The trial, which lasted through the summer and early fall of 1957, ultimately cleared Ferlinghetti of all charges. As it turned out, the bust gave a big publicity boost to "Howl," which became a hit only after -- and probably because of -- the trial. "Allen was totally unknown until the book was busted," he says. Ferlinghetti, 81, was older than most of the beats but has outlived its leading lights, including Ginsberg, who died in 1997 at age 70; Kerouac, who died in 1969 at 47; and novelist William S. Burroughs ("Naked Lunch"), who died in 1997 at age 83. So when it comes to the beat era, Ferlinghetti is among those who have the last word. Of Ginsberg, he says: "There wouldn't have been any beat generation recognized as such if it hadn't been for Allen. He created it out of whole cloth, really. Without Allen, it would've been separate great writers in the landscape, it wouldn't have been known as the beat generation." Of Kerouac, he says: "Allen was always saying ... Kerouac was gay, but I thought that was really absurd. He was one of the biggest woman chasers I ever met." And of the beat movement itself, he's still a believer: "The beat message became the only rebellion around -- and it is still the same today. With the dot-commies and the whole computer consciousness, the beat message is needed now more than ever." [From the San Francisco Chronicle, October 28, 2000. Thankfully, my editor didn't touch a word (ok, a copyeditor did correct a typo!).] _______________________________________________________ [PUBLISHED IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES] A THREE-PART STORY ON THE MOVIE "CHINATOWN" (THE COMPLETE VERSION PRESENTED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME). PART ONE Roman Polanski on "Chinatown" (Polanski, Towne and Evans Reveal Backstage Secrets) By Paul Iorio Several months ago, director Roman Polanski watched "Chinatown" on laser disc with his wife at their home in Paris. It had been a long time since Polanski had seen the landmark film, which he directed and didn't like very much at the time of its 1974 release. At first, they planned to watch only a half-hour of it but were soon hooked and saw it through to the gruesome finale. Polanski's reaction to the film, 25-years after its release, is inexplicably modest. "I like it more now than I did then," Polanski said in a rare, exclusive interview by phone from a ski resort in the Dolomite mountains in Italy. Of course, many critics and fans have been far less restrained over the decades, hailing "Chinatown" as a near-perfect gem, one of the great movies of the last thirty years, a film that seems to improve with time and repeated viewing. It's also arguably the highest peak of Polanski's own career, which includes such formidable peaks as "The Pianist" (2002), "Rosemary's Baby" ('68), "Repulsion" ('65), "Tess" ('79), and "Frantic" ('88). The film's plot centers on private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), who is hired to investigate a supposed case of marital infidelity. Gittes soon stumbles on a government (and family) scandal in which the former head of the Los Angeles Water Department and others are found to be diverting water, stealing land, and committing murder, while nefariously re-shaping the city's boundaries. Besides Nicholson, the film also stars Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Cross Mulwray, the wife of a slain Water Department chief; and John Huston as venal tycoon Noah Cross, Evelyn's father. What does Polanski admire about the film today? "When [Nicholson] comes up to the door [of Evelyn's house] and knocks on the door [and it slams in his face]...And nothing happens. And we hold like this for a long time," says the director. "I [also] liked the scene when [Evelyn] walks out of the Brown Derby, when [Nicholson] says, 'I like my nose, I like breathing through it.' Remember? I like that shot when it starts with the page going to fetch the car and doing it in two profiles...[Today], maybe I would cut two close-ups. I don't know whether I would actually. Maybe I wouldn't." He is momentarily distracted by his baby son Elvis, who is crying loudly. "They brought my son here. You want to talk to him? He's [fourteen] months [old]," says Polanski. What would he now change about the film? "Little details here and there," he says. "The lousy reflection in the lens of [Nicholson's camera] when he's photographing Hollis and Katherine from the roof [at El Macondo]...I wanted to [film] it upside down and [was told], 'Oh they will never understand it. Why is it upside down?' Shit yes, when you see something reflected in the lens, it's always upside down! It should be upside down, it should be slightly concave. That could [have been] better." Robert Towne, 64, who won an Academy Award for his "Chinatown" screenplay, also likes the film now more than he did when it was released. He cites his own favorite scenes. "[I like] the way in which we worked the scene with that wonderful character actress [Fritzi Burr] who was the secretary for Yelburton in the Water department: [imitating her] 'Yes, yes, they own the water department!' [Imitating Nicholson] 'I take a long lunch hour -- all day sometimes.' That willingness to irritate her in order to get information: very few directors would insist on that," says Towne. Both Polanski and Towne were not fans of the picture when they saw the rough cut of it in the spring of '74. "I finished the film and I looked at the rough cut and as usual the rough cut is this very depressing moment for a director," says Polanski. "And a director who does not have experience [with] it is close to suicide at that stage. But even knowing that that very difficult moment would pass, I still was tremendously depressed seeing the rough cut. I showed it to a friend of mine...and was so ashamed when the lights came up. And he said, 'What a great movie!' I said, 'Jesus, is something wrong with him?' I truly didn't think that he could be right." Polanski says he never once thought during the making of the movie that it would become a classic. Neither did Paramount's Robert Evans, who produced the film. "Up until the time the reviews broke, we weren't sure whether we had a disaster on our hands or something that was just different," says Evans, adding that most Paramount executives openly predicted the film would fail. From its birth as a sprawling first-draft script in '73, "Chinatown" was never considered a commercial sure-shot. At first, even Polanski passed on the project (at the time, he was busy in Rome). "I really felt happy in Rome," says Polanski. "I was working there, I had a great house and a bunch of friends with whom I worked. It just wasn't interesting for me to go to make a film in Los Angeles." Besides, Los Angeles reminded him of personal tragedy; four years earlier, his wife Sharon Tate, pregnant with their child, was sadistically murdered by members of Charles Manson's gang. "I had too vivid memories of all those events of '69 [the Manson murders] and I didn't feel like going to work there," he says. But the calls from Hollywood to Rome kept coming, first from Nicholson, who personally asked Polanski to direct the script, and then from Evans, who apparently made the director an offer he couldn't refuse. Polanski was soon on a plane to LAX. What eventually followed was a pivotal eight-week writing session in which Polanski and Towne dismantled Towne's script and then painstakingly rebuilt it piece by piece. Their writing workday would begin around 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning and would last until around seven or eight in the evening -- and was usually followed by a night of hard partying. "I don't think there was a day that we worked that we didn't go out and play at night," says Towne. "The mood at night was -- it was the 1970s. We had a good time. Fooled around. I'll leave it at that." (Apparently, the after-hours carousing continued even during the shooting: "[Nicholson] could stay up until six in the morning [partying] but he would be there [on the set] at eight or nine knowing his lines like nobody else," says Polanski. "There was never any kind of problem with him.") In the day, during the eight-week re-writing marathon, Polanski and Towne were faced with the huge task of making the muddy script filmable. "[The first draft] was gigantic and could not actually be shot the way it was written," says Polanski. "But there were terrific things in it. The second draft, I remember Robert [Towne] took a long time and then it was even longer. There were many more characters and it was quite convoluted. We sat down and with discipline tried to combine some things." Towne concedes that if his first draft had been filmed as it was, "it would have been a mess." Most of the re-writing consisted of re-sequencing scenes while organizing and clarifying the complicated plot. "We took the script and broke it down into one-sentence summations of each scene," says Towne. "Then we took a scissors and cut those little scenes...and pasted them on the door of the study at his house where we were working. And the game was to shift those things around until we got them in an order that worked." "At an early stage in the writing of it, I remember...thinking, what should be revealed first: the real estate scandal, the water scandal or the incest?," says Towne. "As obvious as the answer became, that was the first question I dealt with. And I did realize the water scandal had to come first, a fairly obvious choice when you stop to think about it. But beyond that, the rest of the structural changes of significance took place with Roman, shifting them around back and forth." Polanski says he "did more of a construction, the shaping up of the plot...And also I worked on the dialogue in [a] way that people can go crazy sitting with me because I like eliminating every unnecessary word." He also put Gittes into sharper focus, partly by using a radical style of subjective point-of-view (in which he filmed much of the movie over Nicholson's shoulder). "[Most of] the events that happen are really only seen by [Gittes]," he says "You never show things that happen in his absence." Towne and Polanski argued frequently during their collaboration. "We fought everyday," says Towne. "We'd fight about how to get to a restaurant." "['Chinatown''s success] happened through a lot of arguments, fights," says Evans. "There was [backstage] warfare throughout the picture, but that's healthy." Their most substantial disagreement was about the ending of the film, in which Towne wanted Cross to be killed by Evelyn. Polanski insisted on a more disturbing finale in which Evelyn is shot dead in front of her young daughter Katherine. "We were arguing about the end and could not agree...I was adamant about it...I did not believe in a happy ending in this type of a movie," says Polanski. With the backing of Evans, Polanski eventually won the battle over the ending. "I wrote that last scene the way it is now," says Polanski. "And I sketched the dialogue and I remember in the evening I...gave [Nicholson] what I wrote down and said, 'Fashion it into your speech.' And Jack very quickly jotted a few things of his and then we shot it at literally five to midnight." (Today, Towne says Polanski "was right about the end.") Many see the tragic ending as an echo of the horror of the Manson murders on some level. That real-life tragedy also probably helped Polanski turn Gittes into a credible detective. After all, the murder of Polanski's wife turned the director into a sleuth for a time; in the months before the killers were caught, he obsessively tried to find the culprits himself. Does Polanski think his own experience trying to track down his wife's killers informed the film? "I can only tell you that every experience helps you with your work. This, of course, did to a certain degree," he says. "I am unable to tell you how much better the film is because I had certain things happen to me. Whatever you do, you learn. And each next movie has one layer more to make it richer." Towne and Polanski made other changes to the script. The opening scene where Gittes meets with his client Curly was originally written with Curly saying he wanted to kill his wife, and Gittes telling him he's not rich enough to get away with murder. And in fact the cut dialogue is missed under close scrutiny; when Nicholson's character says, "I only brought it up to illustrate a point," the audience now doesn't know what "point" he's referring to, because the previous piece of dialogue is gone. (Gittes's "point" is that you have to be rich to get away with murder.) "That exchange I miss probably as much as any in the movie," says Towne. "Because it really foreshadows [the] 'you've got to be rich to kill somebody and get away with it' [theme]. He's really foreshadowing the whole movie in a kind of nice way." Two other sequences were edited out altogether: in one, Harry Dean Stanton, playing a seaplane pilot who flies Gittes to Noah Cross's house, hints at Evelyn's secret past. In the other, Noah talks about his love of horse manure ("Love the smell of it," says Cross. "A lot of people do but, of course, they won't admit it.") By the end of the eight-week session, Polanski and Towne had created a final working script. Unfortunately, they were also no longer speaking with one another. "By the beginning of the shooting [in September 1973], Roman and I had argued to the point where I did not go onto the set. At that point it was just wiser to let him shoot the movie. But that was really largely because of the end scene," says Towne. Contrary to rumor, Polanski never tried to bar Towne from the set. "I never barred him from the set," says Polanski. "He just didn't come, because we [weren't] on speaking terms anymore by the time I started the picture." (The two have long since patched up their differences and even worked together again on "Frantic." Towne now says that Polanski is "virtually...the only director that I would willingly work for as a writer.") For the most part, the final screenplay was shot almost exactly as it was written. "Once Roman and I agreed on the script, he held everyone's feet to the fire," says Towne. "Whatever disagreements we had, they ended when the script was written. Nobody said, 'well let's try it another way.' That was the way." During the shooting, changes were frequently suggested by Dunaway -- and rejected by Polanski. "There were a lot of problems with Faye Dunaway," he says. "Faye always wanted to change something. Some nights I would...cross a couple words out. [She'd say]: 'Why are you taking it out? I don't want you to.' I'd say, 'Okay, leave it, leave it. It's not worth the fight.' Then she would come a half an hour later: 'You know what? I thought it over, maybe you're right, we should remove it.' It was like this every day. Or she would try to add something. 'Actually I don't think it's a good idea, Faye,' [I'd say]. She would start fighting about it. And it was like that continuously." [Dunaway did not respond to repeated requests for an interview for this article. But she did write about Polanski and "Chinatown" in a recent book, "Looking for Gatsby: My Life," by Dunaway and Betsy Sharkey. In the 1998 edition, she writes: "I thought Roman was thwarting me and not supporting me (during the making of 'Chinatown')," and "Roman was an autocrat, always forcing things." However, she also calls him "an auteur film maker of the first order."] Does Polanski think that Jane Fonda, who was up for the role at one time, would've made a better Evelyn Mulwray? "No, he says. "Absolutely not. I thought [Dunaway] was perfect. Nobody wanted Faye [initially]. Bob Evans didn't want her because he thought she was trouble. [But] I knew Faye; she had a fling with a friend of mine...I didn't expect to have any problems with her. So I fought for her. And I'm still very happy we had her because whatever problems we had on the set -- who cares?...I think she's terrific when I watch it now. It's really exactly how I saw the part; she was the right age, she had the right looks, her acting was just perfect for this type of character. I don't think anyone else would have done it better. Same with John Huston." Could "Chinatown" be made today in the current movie-making-by- committee era? "I don't think it could, actually," says Polanski. " It would really have to be [made by] someone who has enough muscle to pull through all those things. Studios now have an enormous amount of various executives who need to justify their existence by meddling into the creative process. And there's a great rift between the creative branch and the executive branch; [executives] are so envious of not being on the other side...And they call themselves 'creatives.' There wouldn't be an executive then who would dare to say, 'We are having a creative meeting' or 'We'll send you the creative notes.' [Imitating a movie executive]: 'After our creative meeting we came up with these five pages of creative notes which we would like you to read.'...In those times, nobody would actually use this language. The fact that they use it is very meaningful." Polanski's apparent disillusionment with Hollywood isn't the only reason he won't be showing up in town to make a film any time soon. He still risks possible arrest for having had sex with a teenage girl in the 1970s, if he returns to the States; he fled the U.S. in 1977 rather than face a probable jail term. (He now lives in Paris with his wife, actress Emmanuelle Seigner, and two children and makes films outside the U.S.) And Polanski says he is not close at all to settling his legal problems. "How can I [return to the U.S.] with the actual state of the media?," says Polanski. "I don't want to become a product...Can you imagine what it would entail showing up suddenly in Los Angeles? It would take a long time before...closure happens. And I don't think I want it enough. I have family to look after. I don't want to be in every tabloid." PART TWO SOLVING THE MYSTERIES OF "CHINATOWN"'S PLOT By Paul Iorio Decades after "Chinatown"'s release, there are still enduring mysteries about its plot. Polanski and Towne talked with me about a few of them. WHAT WERE NOAH AND HOLLIS ARGUING ABOUT OUTSIDE THE PIG N WHISTLE? Polanski says it doesn't matter what they were arguing about. "It was probably about Evelyn," he says. "They had a lot of things to argue about...It's not necessary to know what they were arguing about...Since it's only someone relating that they were arguing, we don't have to know what they were arguing about." Towne has a more specific explanation. "Hollis was saying, 'you corrupt old fart, you're still fucking around with the water department. And I'm not going to deal with you in that matter, I'm not going to build that dam, and I'm not going to tell you where your daughter is.'" WHY DOES HOLLIS BRING KATHERINE TO THE EL MACONDO HIDEAWAY IF THEIR RELATIONSHIP IS COMPLETELY INNOCENT AND HE HAS NOTHING TO HIDE? "Because [Katherine] is in town secretly, to see her mother," says Towne. "She's keeping her from Noah." WHAT MYSTERY OBJECT DOES GITTES SEE BUT NOT RETRIEVE FROM EVELYN'S POND NEAR THE BEGINNING OF THE FILM? According to Towne, the object was Noah's bi-focals (which Gittes does retrieve in a later scene). The fact that it was in the pond at the time of his first visit means Hollis had already been murdered by that morning. (Evelyn, of course, had no idea he had been killed.) WHAT DOES THE PHRASE "AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE" MEAN? The enigmatic phrase "as little as possible" turns up in the last scene and in the bedroom dialogue between Evelyn and Jake (incidentally, the two passages written solely by Polanski, though the phrase was coined by Towne). In many ways, it's the movie's defining phrase, since it points to the title, a metaphor for an insular, venal, 'we-take-care-of-our-own' type of precinct or community. "A vice cop had said to me [before I wrote the script], 'you know, you don't do much in Chinatown,'" says Towne. "He said, 'You can't tell whether you're helping someone commit a crime or preventing one, so you just try to not do much.' I said, 'Well, that's kind of an interesting approach to law enforcement.' And in fact that was the beginning" of the whole project. PART THREE "CHINATOWN" LOCATIONS Returning to the Scene of the Crime By Paul Iorio Of course, one of the big stars of "Chinatown" is Los Angeles itself. "This is a Los Angeles movie, not a Hollywood movie," says production designer Richard Sylbert, who chose the locations for the film. The sixteen main locations in "Chinatown" -- ranging from a Catalina hilltop to Echo Park Lake -- present a vision of a seductively urbane -- and corrupt -- city, circa 1939. "Robert Towne had this thing about Los Angeles, about the history of the city, and that's what makes it so profound," Polanski told me. "Without that, you would just have another detective thing. It's much more than a thriller." As Towne says: "Roman repeatedly stressed the wisdom of repeating...locations. In other words, if you've got one scene in the department of water and power, make sure you've got two. It orients an audience." Here are some of "Chinatown"'s more memorable locations. 1. Ida Sessions's Apartment. IN THE FILM: Near the end of the film, the body of the murdered Ida Sessions is shown in her apartment -- at 848-1/2 East Kensington Street (onscreen and off) -- sprawled on the floor with a spilled bag of groceries. (Sessions -- played by Diane Ladd -- was the SAG member who passed herself off as Evelyn Mulwray to Gittes at the beginning of the film.) IN REAL LIFE: Set in a hilly Echo Park neighborhood south of Sunset, the apartment house, painted light green now as then, is split in half by a central bungalow-corridor, just like in the film. Ida's place is in the back, now protected by a screen security door (which the fictional Sessions sure could've used at the time!). COMMENTS: "It was picked [because] it was completely symmetrical and had a long narrow passage in the middle of it, so that...you looked at it and said, 'There can't be any problem here,'" says Sylbert. "But once you got into that narrow corridor, the opposite happened, because narrow corridors produce anxiety. And then, of course, you get to the door and the glass is broken." * * * 2. The Mar Vista Inn. IN THE MOVIE: The Mar Vista Inn and Rest Home is where one of the most breathtaking car escapes in the film -- and in film history -- takes place. Gittes visits the home's elderly residents -- whose names are being used without their knowledge in a land-laundering scam -- and ends up fighting thug Claude Mulvihill, a former Ventura County sheriff. Dunaway saves the day, swinging her car around the famous semi-circular driveway, picking up Gittes and racing back onto Sunset as gunfire erupts. IN REAL LIFE: The Inn is actually the Eastern Star Home (11725 Sunset Blvd.), near a commercial strip in Brentwood at Barrington, and is immediately recognizable from the film. One can stroll along the famous driveway (and imagine Polanski's gunmen coming up the walk) and climb the stairs to the entrance where Gittes battered Mulvihill's skull. COMMENTS: "Every important building in this movie [had to be] white and Spanish [and] had to be above [Gittes's] eye level," says Sylbert. "And because it's above his eye level, it's automatically...harder for him to go there visually...And he's a detective. And uphill is where he's [going]." * * * 3. Noah Cross's Estate. IN THE MOVIE: Gittes has lunch here with Noah Cross, who tells Gittes to "just find the girl." IN REAL LIFE: Cross's house is actually the mountain-top Wrigley estate and horse farm on Catalina island. COMMENTS: "When [Gittes] got off the boat, he walked on to that wonderful dock where you can see the Avalon ballroom in the background," says Sylbert. "And we cut [to] the Wrigley Ranch." * * * 4. Echo Park Lake. IN THE MOVIE: Gittes and associate Duffy spot Hollis Mulwray with his "girlfriend" at the north end of Echo Park Lake. Aboard a boat, Gittes surreptitiously photographs Hollis in a nearby canoe. IN REAL LIFE: The lake looks exactly as it did 25 years ago. Its trademark bridge, visible in the film, is now creaky and red, leading to a damp island full of pigeons and palms. Located south of Sunset and north of the 101, it also sports a boat station that rents out peddle-boats by the hour. COMMENTS: Sylbert says the lake is the perfect location "if you're doing 1939 and you're after something that says 'California' so clearly, which that does, with the little bridge in it and the palm trees all around." "When you start a movie like this you begin to understand that you have to go to the old part of town," he says. "And that's why I came up with Echo Park, and that's why Ida Session's house ended up in that area, too." * * * 5. City Hall. IN THE MOVIE: Near the beginning of the film, Gittes spies on Hollis at a public meeting at L.A. City Hall in which Hollis states his opposition to the building of a risky dam project. Meanwhile, Valley farmers, irate over having their land dried up by illegal water diversion, protest by bringing sheep into the meeting. IN REAL LIFE: L.A. City Hall is located downtown on Spring Street. COMMENTS: "The meeting was shot...in the chamber. All I did was put a huge picture of Roosevelt on the wall," says Sylbert. * * * 6. The Pig 'N' Whistle. IN THE FILM: The fictional Pig 'n' Whistle restaurant appears in the film as the backdrop for an argument between Cross and Hollis Mulwray, captured in clandestine photographs by Walsh, Gittes's associate. IN REAL LIFE: This is actually the Pacific Dining Car restaurant (1310 West Sixth St.), at Witmar Street and Sixth, just west of downtown L.A. (The Dining Car was built in 1921, in the heyday of the Mulwrays.) COMMENTS: The actual eatery was the place to eat and deal downtown back when. (Sylbert took the photographs shown in the film.) * * * 7. The Brown Derby. IN THE MOVIE: After Hollis is murdered, Gittes and Evelyn Mulwray meet over lunch at this swank restaurant. Gittes spends most of the meeting being unjustifiably suspicious of Evelyn. IN REAL LIFE: The original Brown Derby, representing the elegance of old L.A., is now gone. In its place is a commercial strip called the Brown Derby Plaza (and a vacant space where the actual Derby used to be) on the 3400 block of Wilshire, across from the old Ambassador. * * * 8. El Macondo Apartments. IN THE FILM: El Macondo is the so-called "love nest" in which Gittes finds Hollis with a mysterious young woman (actually Katherine). Nicholson climbs onto the red-tile roof and shoots photos of the two in the courtyard below. (This is the scene Polanski said he wanted to show upside down, in the reflection of the camera lens.) IN REAL LIFE: The apartment building is now called Mi Casa, at 1400- 1414 Havenhurst Drive, between Sunset and Fountain. The stylish four-story Spanish structure is on the National Register of Historic Places. COMMENTS: Sylbert named it El Macondo after the name of a city in a Gabriel Marquez novel. "It was perfect, " says Sylbert. "It was Spanish, it was white, and we could get to the roof tiles and shoot down into the courtyard." 9. 1712 Alameda, Chinatown. IN THE MOVIE: Evelyn is shot to death by detective Loach in the final sequence and Katherine is whisked away by Noah Cross, in front of Khan's apartment at the screen address 1712 Alameda. IN REAL LIFE: The final scene was actually shot on the west side of North Spring Street in Chinatown, just south of Ord Street. COMMENTS: Polanski says he filmed this scene at five minutes to midnight on one of the final days of shooting after quickly scripting a new ending hours earlier. * * * 10. Evelyn Mulwray's House. IN THE MOVIE: This is Evelyn's house -- at the non-existent 1412 Adelaide Drive -- where Gittes discovers a tell-tale piece of evidence in the backyard salt-water pond. In a later scene here, he's forced to surrender the evidence to Mulvihill. IN REAL LIFE: Sources say the house is in Pasadena, at 1315 El Molino, north of Mission. COMMENTS: Sylbert says the house was an abandoned wreck before it was completely renovated and redesigned by the "Chinatown" crew, who even put in the pond. "If you watch the scene carefully, you'll notice that when you're in the backyard, you cannot see [nearby buildings]," says Sylbert. "Because in 1939, the whole image I was after was that there was nothing out there." Sylbert also chose the place because one can see in a straight line from the backyard through the house to the front entrance. "At the end of the movie, when [Gittes] is waiting for Noah Cross, he's standing at that back doorway and you can see the car with Cross pull up at the front door," he says. (The practice of shooting action in one room through the action in another room is virtually a Polanski trademark.) * * * 11. The Oak Pass Reservoir. IN THE MOVIE: The Oak Pass is where Hollis is found dead and where Gittes has his nose sliced by a thug played by Polanski. IN REAL LIFE: The location's real name is the Stone Canyon Reservoir, one of the major reservoirs near the L.A. basin. It's in the Santa Monica mountains above Bel Air and close to Benedict Canyon (not far from where Polanski's wife was murdered in real-life). COMMENTS: "The sluice that the body was in when they pulled [Hollis] up -- that's there, too," says Sylbert. * * * 12. Point Fermin Park. IN THE FILM: Early in the movie, Gittes follows Hollis to Point Fermin and watches him walk down a bluff to the Pacific, where fresh water is being dumped in the middle of a drought. This is also where Gittes puts stop-watches beneath the wheels of Hollis's car in a cul-de-sac. IN REAL LIFE: This is Point Fermin, a public park on the coast of San Pedro. COMMENTS: "I made a cut-out [of a lighthouse] about 25-feet high...It was a quarter-mile away from the camera so you could make it look like a lighthouse," says Sylbert, referring to the scene in which Gittes lounges in a suit on the bluff at twilight. (The real Point Fermin lighthouse was not in operation at the time.) * * Other locations in the film include: the "Hollenbeck Bridge," where Gittes approaches a boy on a donkey; the place is actually in the Tujunga Canyon area. The orange groves in the northwest valley, where Gittes is assaulted by farmers, are in the Fillmore Orchards, near Santa Clara. Curly's house was not in San Pedro but in Hollywood, a few blocks from Paramount studios. And Katherine's house, at the onscreen address 1972 Canyon Drive, is either in a neighborhood near Paramount or in the Hollywood Hills (where the real 1972 Canyon looks much like the celluloid one); sources conflict here. The only backlot location in the film is the barbershop. "I built a barber shop...so I could put an automobile outside the window and overheat the engine," says Sylbert about the scene in which Gittes himself vividly overheats. The Water Department offices, the Hall of Records, Gittes's office, and the room where the famous "sister/daughter" scene takes place were all studio sites. [From The Los Angeles Times, July 8, 1999; original manuscript and updated; part two of this piece is published here for the first time.] _____________________________________________ ________________________________________________ [PUBLISHED IN LOS ANGELES NEW TIMES] THE FIRST PART OF A MUCH MORE EXTENSIVE ARTICLE. Richard Pryor, At Twilight on Sunset An Eyewitness Account of Pryor's Last Two Concerts By Paul Iorio It's twilight on Sunset outside The Comedy Store between the billboards of dead icons James Dean and Frank Zappa and just down the street from where John Belushi shot his last speedball. Around fourteen comics are scheduled to perform at The Store tonight, but there are no lines around the block and no ticket scalpers on the sidewalk, despite the star power of one of the fourteen, the one whose name appears on the outdoor marquee that reads: "Richard Pryor Tonight." Pryor is about to perform what will become the last two shows of his life. It's July 17, 1996. Defying his own multiple sclerosis, he is set to take the stage at The Comedy Store, the West Hollywood, comedy club where he created his best material in the 1970s, the birthplace of his codger character Mudbone and a lot of other prime stuff. But expectations for a laugh are lower than the setting sun, since Pryor's M.S. sometimes makes him not just unfunny, but incoherent. No reporters, except this one, are on hand to witness Pryor's swan song. Outside the club, stray Sunset Strip toughs walk and loiter. Inside, a couple hundred fans file into the place, perhaps to glimpse whatever legendary fire remains or to pay respect to a bona fide comic genius or to survey the shambles of a collective youth lost to drugs, illness and the ravages of time. A solo pianist plays "We're in the Money" and other jaunty tunes. Five comics warm up for Pryor tonight. Though none could have touched him back when, the openers are now the ones evoking most of the laughter, if not the attention. The best is stand-up Mark Curry, star of the Nineties television series Hangin' With Mr. Cooper, who kills live. "Free Willy: some people thought it was about some brother in jail. 'Willy didn't do all that shit, 'know,'" jokes Curry, as the crowd explodes. And there are laughs for Argus Hamilton, the former Tonight Show regular and writer for Pryor's TV show in the Seventies ("O.J. says to A.C.: 'I told you Costa Rica not Costa Mesa!'"). By 10:00 p.m., the place is packed with Pryor fanatics and stand-up aficionados. Pryor is late but no one seems to mind a bit. An exquisitely pissed-off set by the very spontaneous Ellen Cleghorne takes everyone's mind off the delay. Then, at long last there's commotion at the back of the club as Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On?" blasts from speakers. Two massive guys carry a frail, thin, dapper man who looks, well, more like Mudbone than the person he used to be. The full house stands and applauds vigorously but in a somewhat ceremonial way, as if he were receiving some sort of lifetime achievement award. Some in the audience seem to be taken aback by Pryor's physical deterioration. The music stops, the crowd sits. It's around 10:50 p.m. and, against enormous odds, Pryor has just reclaimed the stage at the Comedy Store. Pryor is wearing a red cap and sits in his wheelchair next to a stool that has a glass of water on it. A handler puts a pair of glasses on the comedian and then leaves the stage. "These are glasses, right?" Pryor quips, calling the thick lenses "Coke bottles." The audience, which is primed to laugh, laughs. "I appreciate that you laugh at me no matter what I say," says Pryor. The crowd laughs again. One senses that Pryor, like his early mentor Redd Foxx, could die onstage clutching his heart, and the audience would roar at the bit. "I'm gonna die soon," he continues. Twenty-five years ago, that line might have kicked off a sidesplitter, like the classic in which he impersonates someone panicking during a bad acid trip by repeating "I'm-gonna-die, I'm-gonna-die" like a mantra-turned-tribal-chant. But tonight, it's decades later, and "I'm-gonna-die" means I'm-gonna-die. A sexy blonde woman in the front center row is quietly weeping, occasionally wiping tears from her face. "People ask me, 'Are you pissed off?' I say, 'Yeah!,'" Pryor says. Pryor tries to sip something but has major trouble bringing the cup to his lips. There's a long pause. "I hope you're as nice to other comics as you are to me," says Pryor. "We love ya, Rich," yells someone. "Yeah, babe," shouts another. A waitress serves the front rows, and Pryor spots her. "What're you doin'? Stealin' drinks?" he jokes. A hint of the old fire. He sips and softly says, "Shit," at something private. "Thanks for listening to me...It's been weeks since I saw my dick hard," he says. This from a guy who used to joke his cock was "hard enough to cut diamonds." "Hold the mike up to you, sir," someone shouts. "So we can hear you." "I don't want you to hear me," snaps Pryor. A long silence. "Life's a bitch," he says, drooling a bit. "And then you die?" adds a fan. "Yeah, but when?" asks Pryor. "I don't mind hanging around, but shit!" "When they said I had M.S., I said, 'I don't even know what M.S. is,'" says Pryor. "Doctor said, 'Don't worry, you will.'" A woman in the front row gets up to leave. "Where you goin', pretty lady?" Pryor asks. The moment recalls a scene from the movie "Lenny," where the Lenny Bruce character shouts, "Where're you going?" to fans leaving a lousy show of his. But this isn't "Lenny," and he isn't Lenny. Bruce died alone, broke and blacklisted; Pryor is dying with lots of friends and fans -- and at least some money. So when he says, "Where you goin', pretty lady?," the woman smiles at him and says apologetically, "I'm going to the bathroom." "I told my mom, 'Dad is fucking everyone in the neighborhood.' She said, 'Just be glad he isn't fucking you,'" jokes Pryor. Fans laugh. He pauses. "Bear with me." The audience is now silent enough that unrelated laughter from an adjoining room can be heard. Out of the blue, Pryor says, "Thanks, Jenny," referring to his ex-wife Jennifer Lee, who he has since re-married and who handles his life and career with the dedication of a true believer. "I beat Jenny up sometimes a long time ago," says Pryor. "She's the first woman who ever hit me in the mouth. [pause] Just because I asked her for some pussy." The crowd applauds. Then, attendants come to carry Pryor offstage, the audience gives him a standing ovation, and recorded music plays. He was onstage for forty minutes. The applause seems as much for his courage as for any humor. And his raw honesty is jarring in this Age of Spin, when celebrities pay publicists nice money to hide scandals or twist them into something unrecognizable. Pryor seems proud of his imperfections -- or at least proud of not hiding them -- and freely jokes about his bad health, his lavish drug use, the brothels of his childhood, even something as reprehensible as wife-beating. No muckraker could possibly expose Pryor's dark side because the comic has already scooped them. A week later, on July 24, 1996, Pryor performs another show at the Comedy Store, literally the last performance of his life. This time he is feistier and funnier -- at first. With the small club packed again, and no journalists present (except this one) again, Pryor gets some genuine laughs when he refers to fellow M.S. victim Annette Funicello as "that M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E bitch." "Put the mike closer," someone yells. "Fuck you!," snaps Pryor, and people howl. Pryor actually seems to like it when the crowd is rude and less reverential, perhaps because he's then under no obligation to be appreciative, or maybe because he's developed a taste for hecklers. After joking about "getting pussy in the rehab ward," the show takes a steep dive. "I got a mouthful of shit," Pryor says, "and I can't..." He trails off. Pryor pulls out a piece of paper and tries for minutes to unfold it. An uneasy silence fills the place. It's almost like the scene in the movie "Born on the Fourth of July" when Ron Kovic starts a public speech smoothly, but suddenly and inexplicably stops dead as the audience watches in shock. "Take your time," someone shouts. Pryor continues trying to unfold the paper but his hands just aren't agile enough to do it. His body is progressively failing him with every passing minute. "We're not going anywhere," a guy yells. "Neither am I," says Pryor, grumbling about not having his "big-ass Coke bottle" glasses again. After several minutes, he finally finishes unfolding the paper and stares at it for awhile. Now there's a new problem: he can't read it. "This M.S. shit is getting to me," he says. A handler brings Pryor a cigarette. Pryor flicks a bright red lighter once, twice, and flames it the third time. "Could you bring me a Number Twenty?" Pryor asks someone. A Number Twenty, in Comedy Store parlance, is a martini. "Yessir," comes the response from someone in the audience. Smoke from Pryor's cigarette fills the air for an elastic, relaxed minute or so. In the spotlight, smoke hovers over the front rows like cumulus clouds that are ready to drench and thunder with electricity. But the fire and fury don't come. The crowd is silent. "You all are very patient," Pryor says. "We gotta be; we paid ten dollars," says someone, good-naturedly. "Hey, don't start no shit!," Pryor says. Through the smoke, Pryor lifts his Number Twenty feebly, as if he's Dave the aged astronaut in the time travel sequence of "2001: A Space Odyssey." With smoke and silence everywhere, the whole place seems to be caught in a time warp; a minute ago we were in 1976 (wasn't that a minute ago?) and suddenly we're transported to the present-day, where there's this old man onstage in the house of his prime. Could this really be the same guy who thirty years ago had such masterful physical control that he could impersonate a race car, run hilariously in slow motion, or convince audiences he was having a heart attack by falling to the floor? "I know I can't see, but when I wear the Coke bottles, then everybody knows it," he says. He smokes his cigarette, his breathing now audibly labored. "I'm glad I've got M.S. -- it's keeping me alive," he says. "Isn't that what you said, Jenny?" Pryor was referring to Lee's much-quoted theory that if the disease hadn't slowed him down, he'd have been killed in the fast lane by now. Onstage, Pryor's cigarette burns to his fingertips, and he isn't physically able to remove it. "Get this motherfuckin' cigarette out of my hand 'cause it's burning me!" he blurts, real pain in his voice. A handler bounds onstage to take it away. As it turned out, those were Pryor's very last words onstage in a full=length concert anywhere. He would never attempt another stand-up performance. The half-hour show ends at 11:20 p.m., as two muscular guys carry him offstage. Pryor is driven home. [Parts of this story first appeared in New Times Los Angeles in October 1996; it's also the first chapter of my book on Pryor, re-written in late 2005. Incidentally, I audiotaped Pryor's last show.] <a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RraYugiGoAI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/TRMRGj-nCF8/s1600-h/scanpryorprogram.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RraYugiGoAI/AAAAAAAAAMQ/TRMRGj-nCF8/s400/scanpryorprogram.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5095427953190674434" /></a> By the way, here is the Comedy Store program for Pryor's penultimate full-length concert, July 17, 1996. ______________________________________________________________ [FROM THE TORONTO STAR] The Immediate TV Coverage of the First Two Crashes on 9/11 (The Live Coverage Viewers Missed) By Paul Iorio By now, everyone has seen virtually every inch of television coverage of the September 11th attacks around nine hundred and eleven times. It sometimes seems as if every scrap of 9/11 footage ever shot -- whether taken upside down near Ground Zero or from faraway Rockaway -- has already been aired more frequently than the Zapruder film. But most TV viewers never got to see the most riveting 9/11 television coverage of all: the raw live footage of the seventeen minutes between the first plane crash at 8:46 and the second at 9:03 am, as seen on the morning news shows. In New York, television programming was largely knocked off the air by the toppling of transmission antennae atop the Trade Center. And on the west coast, almost everyone was asleep during the attacks, waking only in time to see the first tower collapse. So for those who missed it -- almost everybody -- there's now a website library that has compiled streaming video of all major U.S. television news programs from that morning, shown in real-time with ads intact -- plus a generous sampling from overseas media outlets. (The site is run by a non- profit online TV library called The Television Archive and can be accessed at http://client.alexa.com/tvarchive/html. Its American network feeds are from Washington, D.C., affiliates; MSNBC and the cable Fox News Channel are not included in the archive.) [Note: the website has since been deleted.] The coverage from 8:30-to-9:30-am is among the most engrossing ever broadcast -- and some of the most inadvertently telling, too, since it clearly reveals who among the anchors and correspondents got it right and who blew it, who could think on their feet and who couldn't, as the ultimate breaking news story unfolded. There are surprises. For example, Charles Gibson, co-anchor of ABC's "Good Morning America," did an unexpectedly fine job of covering the moment when the second plane hit and was the only anchor on the three major networks to immediately speak up and tell us what had happened. Others, like Bryant Gumbel, the now-departed anchor of CBS's "The Morning Show," contributed astonishingly awful reportage. The first to break the news to America was CNN, which cut into an advertisement at 8:49, three minutes after the first crash, with a live picture of the burning north tower and the words: "This just in. You are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers." "Good Morning America" arrived second, at 8:51, with Diane Sawyer saying, "We want to tell you what we know as we know it. But we just got a report in that there's been some sort of explosion at the World Trade Center." (And within a couple minutes, ABC correspondent Don Dahler was providing terrific first-hand reportage via cellphone from near Ground Zero.) Matt Lauer of NBC's "Today" would have been third, coming a half minute after "GMA," had he not dropped the ball. At 8:51, Lauer broke away from an interview to announce that there was breaking news but didn't say what the news was. "I have to interrupt you right now," Lauer told his guest, the author of a biography on billionaire Howard Hughes. "We're going to go live right now and show you a picture of the World Trade Center, where I understand -- Do we have it? No, we do not." He then cut to 90 seconds of ads before Katie Couric returned to the airwaves to report what had happened. But the real test of anchor mettle came at the moment when the second plane hit at 9:03. "GMA"'s Gibson took control forcefully and calmly within two seconds of the second collision, describing events in a brisk and firm manner, explaining what was occurring in the live footage, and rattling off facts from memory, while showing genuine emotion ("Oh, this is terrifying, awful"), as a wilting Diane Sawyer murmured, "Oh my god, oh my god." Gibson was so alert that he actually broke the news of the second collision to his correspondent at the scene, who didn't see the plane hit. And within twenty seconds, Gibson, the first on any network to mention the Trade Center terrorist attack of '93, was speaking plain truth before his colleagues did: "So this looks like some sort of a concerted effort to attack the World Trade Center that is underway." That statement may seem cautious in hindsight, but at the time was as far as any anchor had gone on the air. On "Today," Couric and Lauer were upstaged a bit by a sometimes excellent witness, Elliot Walker, a Today producer who happened to be walking near the towers when the first plane hit. Walker was already being interviewed by the anchors when the second plane crashed, and she spontaneously stepped into the lead role during the ten seconds after the impact, describing exactly what had happened, while Couric and Lauer, who had presumably seen the same thing on the TV monitor, were silent (in contrast to the talkative Gibson on ABC). By all rights, every network should have been on equal footing at 9:03, with live cameras fixed on the twin towers at the moment of impact. Still, "The Morning Show" and CNN's "Live This Morning," which had shifted to feeds from local New York stations, failed miserably in this crucial part of the reportage, their anchors seemingly confused about what was obvious to reporters on other networks. One ludicrous affiliate correspondent, picked up on CNN, cluelessly floated the idea that the two collisions might have been the result of "faulty navigating equipment." CNN fared better when its own newspeople returned to the airwaves, in time to report the Pentagon hit and the south tower collapse, which Aaron Brown covered from a visually dramatic outdoor setting some thirty blocks from Ground Zero, with the burning towers as a backdrop (a visual that has since been seen in CNN promos). Meanwhile, Gumbel proved he couldn't see the finger in front of his face on this clear Manhattan morning, while also expressing little sense of horror about what was unfolding ("wow" and "it's a terrible scene" were the closest he came). Gumbel, who seemingly had to be told about the second crash by an amateur witness ("You saw a plane?," he asked a witness, incredulously), interviewed several observers who all told him the second plane had obviously been flown deliberately into the tower. Yet he kept asking each source the same dim question: "Why do you say it was deliberate?," a question he asked no fewer than four times between 9:03 and 9:12, while repeating such phrases as vantage point and re-racking the [video] tape. (By contrast, Lauer suggested it was something deliberate at 9:05; Gibson had already done so at 9:03. Gumbel didn't come around until about 9:19.) This, from the distinguished news division of Dan Rather and Ed Bradley. If Gumbel seemed to somehow miss the crash of the second plane, he was the only anchor who thought he saw non-existent third and fourth jets approach the burning towers at 9:41. "Hold it, hold it!," said a near-panicky Gumbel to his guest. "Two jets right now, approaching the World Trade Center! We're watching! Hold on! [pause] I'm sorry, no...we can't tell whether it was a plane or a 'copter." Gumbel, who inexplicably wasn't joined by any CBS News correspondent until Jim Stewart appeared at 9:15, did hit one high note, at 8:57, when he interviewed a doorman at the Marriott World Trade Center, the hotel that used to be between the two towers. The doorman began like a cocky New Yorker ("How ya doin'?") but his voice started cracking unexpectedly as he poignantly described the trauma he had just seen: a man on fire outside the hotel. "I heard a guy screaming," said the doorman, seeming on the verge of tears. "And when I looked over, there was this guy that was on fire. So I just kind of like ran over and I tried to, like, put the fire out on him. And he was, he was, like, screaming. I told him to roll, roll, and he said he can't. And another man came over with his bag and kind of like put the flames out on him." "Today" also had raw and revealing moments. At one point, Couric read a Reuters report that opened a horrifying window on the hell that was taking place on the upper floors of the towers: "A person who answered the phone on the trading floor at interdealer-broker Cantor Fitzgerald, located near the top of the World Trade Center, said, 'Were blanking dying,' when asked what was happening, and hung up. There was screaming and yelling in the background, and a follow-up call was not answered." Several anchors and witnesses made observations that now seem perceptive and even prescient in retrospect. Couric was more correct than she knew when she noted (at 9:37) the possibility that another attack might be in the offing at any moment; one minute after she voiced that concern, the Pentagon was attacked. (And thanks to a quick and well-placed Jim Miklaszewski, Today scooped everyone on the Washington crash.) CBS's Stewart was the first to mention Osama bin Laden on the air (at 9:16). ABC's John Miller understood faster than anyone else that there was virtually no way people trapped on the upper floors of the towers could be rescued, because of the heavy smoke. Lauer was the first to note the terrorists's high level of coordination and planning. Dahler, who heard the first plane hit, correctly dismissed the early widespread notion that the aircraft had been a small prop plane. There were also moments of bad information. For instance, Sawyer tried to put something of a happy-ending on the tragedy at 9:07 by stating, "There's a small hope that the fire may have gone out from the first site" (Dahler quickly extinguished that false hope). And Couric read a report, later repeated by Lauer, that claimed a small commuter plane had hit the north tower. The tone of the anchors shifted -- almost uniformly -- as the hour progressed, from denial and confusion to horror, with disbelief throughout. After the first attack, everyone on the air seemed to take solace in the possibility that it might have been a simple accident by a pilot who had lost control of his plane and wrecked in an unlucky spot. But after the second attack, it was self-evident to virtually everyone that there was no innocent explanation for what was happening. The 8:30 hour is also fascinating because it shows the 9/11 era arriving as abruptly and violently as the edge of a hurricane after the placid eye of the storm. "[It's]...a beautiful fall morning," Couric noted before the tragedy. "A beautiful day here," said "GMA" weatherman Tony Perkins. "...It's kind of quiet around the country [weather-wise]...it's too quiet, said an inadvertently prescient Mark McEwen on "This Morning." After the attacks, the weather was mentioned only in relation to the fact that the collisions couldn't have possibly been weather-related. All told, there were no lost tempers, no crying, no real panicking on the air. There was also no single dazzling journalistic feat that might have elevated one news team far above the others (something on the order of scoring a cellphone interview with a passenger on one of the hijacked jets). That said, the best coverage clearly came from ABC (because of Gibson) and NBC (partly due to Miklaszewski), with almost everyone else way behind. [From The Toronto Star, January 4, 2003.] _______________________________________________ FROM THE WASHINGTON POST The "Howl" Tour of San Francisco By Paul Iorio Anyone looking for a unique way to visit the San Francisco area might want to try touring the places where Allen Ginsberg wrote, revised and publicly read his landmark 1955 poem "Howl." The "Howl" (self-guided) tour provides a fresh view of Beat-era San Francisco while also serving as a terrific excuse to visit some of the more obscure neighborhoods in the Bay area. "Howl," which turns 45 this year, is one of the seminal poems of 20th century American literature, a defining work of the Beat generation and the subject of an historic obscenity trial. Ginsberg, who grew up in New Jersey and lived for many years in Manhattan, wrote it after living in San Francisco for a year. (He ultimately stayed in the area for nearly two years.) He and novelist Jack Kerouac ("On the Road"), who would later join Ginsberg in Berkeley, were the most important of the Beat writers (along with William S. Burroughs). Written wholly in the Bay area, "Howl" was started on Montgomery Street in San Francisco, was finished in North Berkeley, was partly inspired by a building on Powell, was first publicly read in Pacific Heights and was published (in '56) on Columbus Avenue in North Beach. So where exactly did it all happen? Here's the guide. 1. The Marconi Hotel, 554 Broadway in North Beach. IN 1955: When he arrived in San Francisco in August 1954, Ginsberg rented a room here and stayed for nearly two months, according to journal entries compiled in the book "Allen Ginsberg: Journals Mid-Fifties." His rent was six dollars a week, according to the book "Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg" by Michael Schumacher. On one of his first nights here, he wrote in his journal: "Back alone in a Hotel and once again the great battle for survival." IN 2000: Today, the Marconi still stands across an intersection from the City Lights bookstore. The hotel, identified only by a small sign on its front door, is located next to two sex clubs. 2. Ginsberg's Apt. at 1010 Montgomery Street in S.F. IN 1955: The 29-year old Ginsberg wrote most of "Howl" here, two blocks east of the Marconi, after moving from flats at 755 Pine, 1403 Gough and the Wentley Hotel. Living on unemployment insurance, Ginsberg settled in a first-floor furnished apartment (with a view of Montgomery St.) in February '55 with his lover Peter Orlovsky, according to his journal. "I sat idly at my desk...only a few blocks from City Lights literary paperback bookshop. I had a secondhand typewriter, some cheap scratch paper. I began typing, not with the idea of writing a formal poem, but stating my imaginative sympathies," Ginsberg said of the poem's genesis in the Schumacher biography. IN 2000: The grey three-story apartment building is on the northeast corner of Montgomery and Broadway (at the point where Montgomery begins a steep incline). Walk up the street toward the north for a marvelous view of the city's east side. 3. Ginsberg's Apartment in North Berkeley at 1624 Milvia St. IN 1955: Ginsberg revised all three parts of "Howl" (and its footnote) here, moving to Milvia St. in September 1955 from his Montgomery St. place. He paid $35 a month for a cottage in the back, according to journal entries. "I have a house here...[with] a backyard cottage & private backyard, quite big, filled with vegetables & flowers," he wrote in a letter that is quoted in the book "Kerouac: A Biography" by Ann Charters. (Ginsberg even wrote a poem about his new home called "A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley," included in his pocket book "Reality Sandwiches.") Other Beat luminaries lived in the neighborhood at the time, including Kerouac, Gary Snyder and Robert Duncan. He left the cottage (and the Bay Area) in June '56. IN 2000: It's a three-story apartment house over a garage (a "dingbat," in California slang), several blocks from the University of California at Berkeley in a somewhat faded part of town. A "poetry garden" honoring Ginsberg was recently dedicated on the grounds of an elementary school across the street, according to the Berkeley Daily Planet newspaper. 4. The Six Gallery, 3119 Fillmore St. in the Pacific Heights/Cow Hollow area of S.F. IN 1955: The now defunct Six Gallery, an art gallery and performance space founded in '54, was where Ginsberg first publicly read "Howl," on October 13, 1955, a pivotal moment in Beat history. The event was described by Schumacher in "Dharma Lion": "Jack Kerouac, sitting at the edge of the platform, pounded in accompaniment on a wine jug, shouting 'GO!' at the end of each long line. The crowd quickly joined him in punctuating Allen's lines...By the time he had concluded, [Ginsberg] was in tears." IN 2000: The Gallery is long gone but the neighborhood at Fillmore and Union is thriving and commercially active, with many shops selling, coffee,cigars, pastries and real estate. (The Gallery is now a rug shop located just north of the intersection of Fillmore and Union.) 5. Mediterraneum Caffe, at 2475 Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. IN 1955: Ginsberg is said to have written and revised his poetry at this Beat hang-out near the UC Berkeley campus. IN 2000: The eatery, across from Moe's Books on Telegraph in the heart of town, still features a sidewalk cafe and indoor restaurant. 6. The Sir Francis Drake Hotel at 450 Powell St. in SF. IN 1955: The second part of "Howl" was inspired by and written at this hotel. Ginsberg once said the hotel looked like "the robot skullface of Moloch" and that he "wandered down Powell Street muttering 'Moloch Moloch' all night and wrote 'Howl II' nearly intact in cafeteria at foot [sic] of the Drake hotel," according to "Dharma Lion." The hotel, he wrote in his journals, "may be coming to eat me someday." IN 2000: The Drake is one of the city's best-known luxury hotels; on the ground floor, at Powell and Sutter, is a coffee shop and outdoor cafe called Cafe Expresso that is apparently a later incarnation of the cafeteria in which Ginsberg wrote some of "Howl II." 7. City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave. in North Beach. IN 1955: "Howl" was first published in 1956 by City Lights Books, the publishing arm of the legendary City Lights Bookstore, co-founded in '53 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who still owns it. It began as a paperbacks- only shop but eventually expanded to include hard covers and a variety of titles. In '57, Ferlinghetti and a store clerk were arrested for selling the supposedly obscene "Howl"; the subsequent trial, which decided for City Lights, made Ginsberg famous and turned his poem into a big hit. IN 2000: City Lights remains one of the best-regarded bookstores in the nation and is still owned by Ferlinghetti, now 80. (And City Lights Books still publishes on the top floor.) A handwritten sign in the window describes it as "A Kind of Library Where Books Are Sold." Another sign offers this variation on Dante: "Abandon All Despair, Ye Who Enter Here." 8. Vesuvio Cafe at 255 Columbus Ave. in North Beach. IN 1955: Ginsberg and other writers (including Dylan Thomas) frequently drank in this North Beach bar next to City Lights. Ginsberg wrote about Vesuvio in a 1954 journal poem called "In Vesuvio's Waiting for Sheila": "Here at last a moment/in foreign Frisco...listening to the vague conversation...anticipating leaning on the bar." IN 2000: Still located on what is now called Jack Kerouac Alley, Vesuvio is a well-preserved Beat shrine. The Cafe has a colorful outdoor mural on its north wall and an epigram painted over the entrance that reads, "We are itching to get away from Portland, Oregon" (a reference to a supposed "flea epidemic" of 1915, according to a Cafe flier). During a recent visit to the cafe at 8:50 on a Saturday morning, I found around a half dozen patrons already at the bar, all watching (and poking fun at) a western movie from the Fifties on the cafe's television. 9. Foster's Cafeteria at 235 Montgomery St. (the Russ Building) in the Financial District. IN 1955: In January 1955, Ginsberg mentioned Foster's so frequently in his journal that one might think he worked there. He hung out at the cafeteria mostly with Neal Cassady, Peter Orlovsky, Robert LaVigne and others in the itinerant weeks before he moved to Montgomery Street. Typical journal entries during this period include: "We go down to Foster's, I eat chili & french fries" and "We sight Neal [Cassady]'s car pulling up...in front of Foster's." IN 2000: Foster's no longer exists, but the 31-story Russ Building, built in 1927, remains an S.F. landmark. Located in the financial district, the building is home to many companies and shops. [From The Washington Post, May 7, 2000.] ___________________________________________________________________ [FROM THE WASHINGTON POST] Pulp Non-Fiction Physicians Assess the Accuracy of Medical Information in Feature Films By Paul Iorio For many, movies are a big subliminal source of medical and health information. Films insidiously teach us that people can eat fifty eggs an hour, catch fire and be thrown out of closed windows without suffering major health problems, though the uncinematic truth is a person can easily be killed by a single blow to the head. How accurate is such movie medicine? I asked a variety of medical professionals for their diagnoses. I asked about the medical info in Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," in which a gorgeous druggie played by Uma Thurman bleeds from the nose and froths at the mouth after overdosing on heroin. Her date for the night (John Travolta) panics and tries to revive her by injecting adrenaline directly into her heart. The scene may be memorable, but is it medically correct? Is it possible to resuscitate an overdose victim by stabbing her in the chest with a needle roughly the size of an ice pick? Probably not, say some doctors. According to several doctors, "Pulp Fiction"'s OD revival technique wouldn't likely work. "The likelihood is much higher that you'd hurt someone than help someone by doing that," says New York Hospital cardiologist Paul Kligfield. "It's unequivocally never the first thing to do, even in a supervised setting." Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" also features some questionable medical information. At one point, Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) talks to Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), who is suffering from a gunshot wound to his lower abdomen. "Along with the kneecap, the gut is the most painful area a guy can get shot in," says Mr. White. "But it takes a long time to die from it. I'm talking days." Does it really take days? "If you have a gunshot wound to the abdomen, the chances of having a significant injury are about 95 percent," says trauma surgeon Michael Madden, clinical director of the New York Hospital-Cornell Burn Center. He explains that if Mr. Orange's intestines had been punctured, partially digested food would have leaked into his abdominal cavity, giving him a quickly fatal case of peritonitis. And is the gut really the most painful area to be shot in? "It depends on where," says general surgeon James Mariadason. "There are people who are shot in the belly who don't feel anything until many hours later." Injury to the abdomen can be caused by less violent acts, like overeating. Doctors say Paul Newman's character in "Cool Hand Luke" was behaving foolishly when he ate 50 eggs, most of them hard-boiled, within an hour. "I think you would get a protein overload," says gastroenterologist Martin Finkel. "One would worry about over-distending the stomach and rupture." "You'd cause such an obstruction to your gastric tract that you'd have constipation for days if not weeks," adds Rose Ann Soloway, a specialist in toxicology at the National Capital Poison Center. "That's something that hard-boiled eggs do: they really slow up metabolism in the bowels." There are certainly more dangerous things to ingest than eggs. In both "Magnum Force" and "Heathers," characters die after drinking Drano-like substances. But doctors say that sort of cocktail probably wouldn't kill you, though it would inflict grievous injury. Drain cleaner "is so caustic you can't kill yourself with it," declares Finkel. "It's so caustic you can't get enough of it down." It's also hard to swallow what happens after Mickey and Mallory of "Natural Born Killers" suffer rattlesnake bites in Oliver Stone's film. The unhappy couple search for an antidote at a drugstore. Doctors explain that the local pharmacy is a highly unlikely place to find anti-venom. "The chances of finding any would be very remote," says Soloway. "It's kept under refrigeration, usually in medical centers." Another famous Stone movie bite is the one he scripted for "Midnight Express." After considerable abuse, the Brad Davis character bites off the tongue of an adversary during a fight. In real life, the victim could bleed to death or, at the very least, "speech would be affected and also chewing and swallowing might be affected," says Steven Rosenberg, an oral surgeon. A severed tongue isn't quite as perilous as the facial burns Max Cady (Robert DeNiro) sustains in Martin Scorsese's "Cape Fear." Near the end, Cady's face, wet with lighter fluid, catches fire for fifteen seconds. And, after that, he still plagues his former lawyer's family. "A one-to-two-second burn when you're on fire would probably cause significant damage. Fifteen seconds? That's absurd," says burn specialist Madden. "He would have had third-degree burns on his face. That means all layers of the skin would have been burned...The third-degree burns will not kill him but the smoke inhalation might." Of course, not all films are medically incorrect. Believe it or not, doctors insist that it is plausible that the Harrison Ford character could have made that famous leap to the river in "The Fugitive" without being injured. And the leeches covering Humphrey Bogart's body in "The African Queen" would have resulted in a loss of only a pint of blood, leaving him strong enough to take on the Germans. And it doesn't take a doctor to understand why movie-within-a-movie star Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) emerges unscathed from a vicious fight in Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo." The reason? Baxter is in fact a bona fide fictional character. "I don't get hurt or bleed," Baxter says in the movie. "My hair doesn't muss. It's one of the advantages of being imaginary." [From the Washington Post, October 16, 1994.] _______________________________________________________________ PUBLISHED IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE April 25, 2006 (in the print edition and online) Streaming Katie's Consciousness By Paul Iorio If Andy Rooney gawks at my gams one more time I'm going to flip, and I hope Bob Schieffer doesn't call me a "talented gal" again, but maybe CBS can still show my legs in side-to-side banter with correspondents, and if Lara Logan tries to upstage me I swear I'll send her packing to CNN, and I hear they let you yell a lot behind the scenes at "60 Minutes," so there's a good side to all this, but please, sources, don't give me any forged National Guard documents, and I really hope that Duke lacrosse scandal doesn't turn into the next Jennifer Wilbanks disaster -- did I use the word "alleged" enough? I'll have to rerack the tapes -- and if I do fall like Connie Chung, maybe I can get a regular guest spot on "The New Adventures of Old Christine," a "Rhoda" for the Oughties, and don't forget the 31st anniversary of the "Chuckles the Clown" episode of "Mary Tyler Moore" is coming up, and it has been almost 54 years since the "Vitameatavegamin" episode of "I Love Lucy," and maybe I can set up a confrontation with some old guy at CBS a la Bobby Riggs vs. Billie Jean King, but out here on the plaza, I sometimes wanna click my heels twice and say there's no place like a bank where I can deposit $300,000 a week, because this is Katie talking, or is it the more elegant Katherine, the more refined woman who I used to want to be? Sort of how Alexis Glick seemed before Al Roker started being hostile toward her -- look, I don't want to talk about what happened to Alexis, OK, because this is Katie, and I want my bagel with novy not cream cheese, so take it back, OK? I'll miss Matt and I'll miss Ann Curry even more for being the Successor to Katie Who Everyone Knew Could Never Succeed Me, someone who would scrub the base of the Prometheus statue while I was interviewing Tyra Banks -- unlike Alexis Glick, who I don't want to talk about -- so remember to always hire a weak number two who could not possibly replace you, a good insurance policy, and coming up in this half hour: Remember "The Jetsons" -- "Stop this crazy thing!" -- well, flying cars may be finally coming to a carport near you in another 50 years, says one expert, and Matt, guess what song this lyric's from: "There were clouds in my coffee, clouds in my coffee," and yes, it's "You're So Vain" by Carly Fiorina, unfairly fired by Hewlett-Packard, and also in this half hour, we'll talk to a woman who finds a diary in her attic that proves her husband of 17 years is a lying cheat with three wives, and what she did and what you should know about husbands who don't always tell the truth, and have you ever played paper-rock-scissors, a game I always lost in the schoolyards of my youth, where the anger hardened so that Katherine, the elegant Katherine on an isle untouched by man, soon became the brilliantly blunt and fabulously direct Katie, who could beat the boys at their own game and rub their noses in it -- "...7, 8, 9, 10, you owe me a Coke!" -- and in this half hour, a man has a moment of truth, when he realizes his wife is actually the stronger and smarter one -- what a brilliant man, wouldn't you say, Matt? -- and later: she was a whistleblowee and he was the whistleblower, and five years later they're happily married, and see how this couple made it work because of one brave woman, and gas is now over $4 a gallon, so I'm going to have to take on a second job to pay for it, Matt, because 300K a week doesn't go as far as it used to, and in "Today"'s jewelry segment, doesn't this diamond encrusted iPod look smashing, Matt, and while I'm sitting on this couch stuffed with emeralds, attended by assistants who serve my bagel with novy not cream, I almost feel like Katherine...but back to Katie, and coming up: What's love got to do with it, our guide to women who say marriage is a great way to get rich not love, and have you married a Keystone Husband, a mate who can't seem to do anything right? Well, you're not alone, and we'll talk to the founder of a new website, geenadavisforpresident.com, who is trying to organize a write-in campaign for Geena Davis for president in 2008, and maybe I can lure Ann Curry over to CBS as permanent substitute anchor. [Published in The Chicago Tribune, April 25, 2006.] __________________________________________________________________ FROM NEW TIMES THE FIRST TAPED INTERVIEW WITH TREY ANASTASIO OF PHISH By Paul Iorio Believe it or not there was a time when Phish was not one of the most successful concert acts ever. Of course one wouldn't know that, judging by the Phishmania surrounding the band's twentieth anniversary celebrations. Phish's exact birthday is December 2, 1983, when an early version of the band played its first gig at the University of Vermont in Burlington. But the group didn't establish its current lineup -- bandleader Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, keyboardist Page McConnell, and drummer (and namesake) Jon Fishman -- until 1985. The group's lean years were quite lean. Through the mid-Eighties, Phish played mostly universities in and around Vermont to little or no notice. By early 1989 it was not even the best-known band in Burlington, whose most famous musical exports at the time were post-punkers the Hollywood Indians, Pinhead, and Screaming Broccoli, and alternative popsters Undercurrent. In a previously unpublished interview with Anastasio that is presented here -- apparently the earliest existing audiotaped interview with the band leader -- he was clearly proud that Phish's shows were attracting a few hundred fans on some nights. He was also excited about new material he was developing for a tape that would soon become "Junta," the group's first album, which they released themselves around May 1989 (and which was re-released by Elektra Records in 1992). At the time of this interview, which took place in late January or early February 1989, the band hadn't yet sent out its demo to record companies, and the rock press outside of the Burlington region hadn't so much as mentioned the word Phish in print. It would be a year and a half before it signed to independent label Absolute A-Go-Go for a brief period -- and nearly three years before Elektra signed them. I found out about the group only because I was exploring the Burlington rock scene in 1988 for the East Coast Rocker, a New Jersey-based music newspaper (in fact my first interviews with Mike Gordon date back to an astonishingly early January 1988). I asked dozens of Vermont bands to send me tapes. Among them was Phish, which mailed a 1987 demo featuring four originals ("Golgi Apparatus," "Fee," "David Bowie," and "Fluffhead," all of which later appeared on "Junta") and two covers. I eventually wrote about the group for the newspaper's July 19, 1989, issue, calling Phish "an unlikely combination of the Grateful Dead and Steely Dan" in a story that is one of the first to mention the band in a publication outside the Burlington area. But my Anastasio interview was never used in that story or any other piece for fourteen years. Until now. Since then, Phish's sound has evolved into an inspired mix of unpredictable rock and jazz elements, open-ended song structures, and deliberate sonic weirdness that recalls the Grateful Dead's experimental "Aoxomoxoa." On peak albums such as 1996's "Billy Breathes," the group seems as if it is trying to capture the very sound of freedom itself through soaring vocal harmonies and McConnell's cascading keyboard playing. Though it has never had a massive hit on the order of, say, Nirvana's "Nevermind," and is not as culturally resonant as the Dead, it has become a wildly successful -- and lucrative -- concert act. And the quartet is known for pushing the boundaries of live performance to the level of conceptual art, with playful shows that make imaginative use of things like vacuums and the Beatles' white album (which it reportedly once played in sequence from start to finish live). Initially not a critical favorite, the general consensus today is that Phish is one of the most significant rock groups of the past dozen years. But back in early 1989 Anastasio, then 24, was still toiling in obscurity. In this edited transcript he speaks candidly (and is obviously not coached by publicists), opening a rare window into the early evolution of Phish and the making of its first album. So here is Trey Anastasio, on tape, in my January 1989 interview with him: PAUL IORIO: WHAT DOES THE DEMO INCLUDE? TREY ANASTASIO: Now we've pretty much got an album. We've got almost two albums' worth of material recorded. We've only got one day left of recording. What it includes is more originals. All fairly new songs, newer than stuff on the old [six-song] tape [from 1987]. Two of them are very new; we just finished them. Two of them are things we've been playing for a while but haven't gotten around to recording. We're a lot happier with it than with the demo. When we choose stuff for the album, I think the only thing on the demo that'll make it onto the album is "Fee." IORIO: YOU WRITE THEM ALL, RIGHT? ANASTASIO: Yeah, pretty much. Mike [Gordon] writes songs as well. One of Mike's songs that's going to be on the album is called "Contact." Actually it might not be on the album. See, we're having a hard time deciding what to put on the album. And I think that's the first thing we're going to do is talk with record companies and tell them we have all these songs. HAVE YOU STARTED THE PROCESS OF SENDING THE [DEMO] AROUND TO RECORD COMPANIES? Yeah, we've only just started talking to people [at record companies]. And we haven't really sent it out yet. We wanted to finish this last song. We [are performing on] three nights -- tonight, tomorrow, the next night -- in Vermont. And then we're going to Boston. And we're doing a mixdown on "Let's Go Out to Dinner and See a Movie," another Mike song. We talked to a guy at Rounder Records, we have a connection there, and they seemed pretty interested. [The band would eventually be signed by Elektra Records, not Rounder, in late 1991, after a short time with Absolute A-Go-Go in 1990.] WHAT ABOUT THE GRATEFUL DEAD COMPARISONS? IT SEEMS LIKE A LOT OF PEOPLE MAKE THOSE? People are definitely starting to make the [Grateful Dead] comparisons less. But as far as those comparisons, there's nothing really wrong with it, considering that they're one of the most successful bands anywhere now. But the thing that's different about it is the kind of music we're writing now, the newer stuff is sounding less and less like that. No one in the band listens to the Grateful Dead very much. DID YOU GROW UP LISTENING TO [THE GRATEFUL DEAD]? I had a phase where I listened to them. I was more into Led Zeppelin in high school. I was a Led Zeppelin fanatic and so was the drummer [Jon Fishman]; he went to see them all the time and followed them around. When I got to college -- the last year of high school and into college -- I got into a little bit of a Grateful Dead phase but [grew] out of that and went into a sort of jazz phase. I mean I've seen Pat Metheny as many times as I've seen the Grateful Dead. MIKE [GORDON] WAS TALKING TO ME ABOUT THE JAZZ ASPECT OF...YOUR MUSIC IN THE SENSE OF IMPROVISATION. DO YOU DO LONG EXTENDED JAMS? Yeah, we've kind of been cutting [the jams] down to like one per set, two per set. But we do do that. That's definitely where the Grateful Dead connection comes in. As well as the fact that a lot of the people that come down to see us are hippie types. YOUNG HIPPIES OR OLD ONES? Umm ... young hippies. More like college -type hippies. You know what I mean? But actually when we play in Boston -- this is one of the great things that's happening to us in Boston right now -- it's not really that way. We're getting a different type of crowd. When we first started, we had much more of a Dead sound, even through that demo with "David Bowie," that song. So our following up here [in Boston and in Burlington] was definitely a "Deadhead" type following. And it still kind of is. HOW DO [FANS] HEAR OF YOU? Word of mouth. ARE YOU GETTING PEOPLE WHO SHOW UP AT ALL YOUR GIGS? Oh, yes. Definitely. ARE YOU FAMILIAR WITH A BAND CALLED WIDESPREAD PANIC? No, I'm not THEY'RE A BAND FROM ATHENS, GEORGIA, THAT HAS A FOLLOWING SIMILAR TO WHAT YOU'RE DESCRIBING. THEY REALLY GO VERY FAR INTO LONG-FORM JAMS AND ATTRACT A LOT OF DEADHEADS. It's a great thing. I was talking to some girl from the BU [Boston University] paper [in a non-taped conversation], and she said the closest she had seen in crowds was actually the Radiators. I've never seen the Radiators. The word of mouth thing is working out real well. I think there's also a lot of people who like us because we do -- have you heard "Fluffhead" on the demo? -- a lot of stuff that's pretty different. [But] that's where the Dead connection really ends. A large bulk of what we do ... we don't play the same three chords over and over again. We do a lot of variety. Like last night, we did a couple jazz songs, "Take the A Train," "Satin Doll." Things like that. And then we'll do in the same set maybe a Led Zeppelin song. BUT YOU LEAN HEAVILY TOWARD ORIGINALS. But almost all originals. Usually not more than three or four covers. WHAT DID YOU DO BY ZEPPELIN? We did "Good Times, Bad Times." SO WHAT'S YOUR NEXT STEP? We're definitely going to keep playing live. But the album thing is important for a lot of reasons. We're pretty much done recording it. Like I said, we've got so much material recorded we could put out a double album. So I guess the next step is to try to get signed to a label, even if it's an indie. I think we'll do all right. Because if the distribution isn't that great, we've got such a big following -- we've got a mailing list now, we've got a hotline, and I think we'll be able to sell it ourselves. <a href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RrUFxwiGn5I/AAAAAAAAALY/uGOt5_ttC0I/s1600-h/scanphishlttr.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RrUFxwiGn5I/AAAAAAAAALY/uGOt5_ttC0I/s400/scanphishlttr.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5094984905839255442" /></a> I actually interviewed Phish's Mike Gordon a full year before I spoke with Trey, though I didn't record that one; however, Gordon did send me this handwritten letter, dated March 8, 1988, which I've posted here. [From New Times, Dec. 25, 2003; by the way, it's a near miracle that I thought to record such an unknown as Anastasio in January 1989 and that I managed to save the tape for so many years.] ___________________________________________________________ FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES How Not to Blow Your Oscar Speech By Paul Iorio Winning an Oscar causes people to do strange things in public. It inspires honorees to perform one-armed push-ups, to kiss statuettes, and to lose not only their shoes but their heads on the way to the podium. Few have truly mastered the art of the acceptance speech or can hit just the right balance of grace, wit, gratitude and -- most important -- brevity. Should one tell a joke, make a political statement, offer a verbal love letter? Or is it best to hold back and say little? Whom do you thank? And how? This is, after all, probably the largest audience a person will ever address (particularly if the category is make-up), so it's a big opportunity. "There's about one thousand million people watching you," the actor Paul Hogan once said, "and you remember: one wrong word, one foolish gesture, and your whole career could go down in flames." But that needn't happen this year if award winners simply remember the past and follow these pointers: -- Go Easy on the Effusiveness. The Oscar can cause winners to thank everything in (and out of) sight. Avoid this tendency. Cautionary tales include the speech of John Patrick Shanley, accepting the award for best original screenplay for "Moonstruck" in 1988, who thanked "everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life and everybody who I ever punched or kiss." Also, Robert DeNiro in 1981 thanked "Joey LaMotta, even though he's suing us" (he won for best actor for "Raging Bull"). And at the 1980 ceremony, Robert Benton, accepting the best director award for "Kramer vs. Kramer," said: "I would like to thank all the people at Columbia past and present." And Ben Burtt, the sound effects editing winner in '83 ("E.T."), even acknowledged "various otters and horses." -- Avoid Politics. No, your win is not a mandate to negotiate with the Serbs in Bosnia. But some winners get that impression. In 1973, Marlon Brando refused a best- actor award for "The Godfather" and sent an activist for native Americans, Sacheen Littlefeather, in his stead. Vanessa Redgrave mentioned "Zionist hoodlums" in her remarks in 1978, and was booed for it (she won the best supporting actress prize for "Julia"). -- Relax. Just because there are a "thousand million people" watching is no reason to be nervous, though nervousness might be the only natural response. Even the best of 'em lose it. Meryl Streep dropped and briefly lost her copy of her speech on stage in 1983 when she accepted the award for best actress for "Sophie's Choice." And Geraldine Page couldn't find her shoes when her name was called in 1986 for the best actress award for "The Trip to Bountiful." -- Don't Overdo It. In an acceptance speech, as in a love letter, it's best to dial back a bit when the feeling is especially strong. What might seem like an honest airing of healthy emotion at the time often sounds out-of-control on rewind. Sally Field's 1985 effusion is the gold standard of modern public embarrassment: "I can't deny the fact that you like me right now, you like!" Second place goes to Jack Palance for his one-armed push-ups in 1992. -- Nervousness Can Cause Incoherence. Even the sometimes lucid Jack Nicholson mystified everyone in 1984 with his cryptic ramble upon winning the award for best supporting actor for "Terms of Endearment." "I was going to talk a lot about how Shirley [MacLaine] and Debra [Winger] inspired me, but I understand they're planning an interpretive dance later, to explain everything about life," said Nicholson, adding: "All you rock people down at the Roxy and up in the Rockies, rock on." And Jodie Foster nearly missed coherence in 1989 with "My mother...taught me...that cruelty might be very human and it might be very cultural, but it's not very acceptable" (she won the best actress prize for "The Accused"). -- Use the Phrase "Without Whom." "Without whom" is the perfect poignant phrase for any winning Oscar speech. Everyone's life includes a "without whom," so by all means mention yours. When Steve Tesich won the prize for best original screenplay for "Breaking Away" in 1980, he used two "without whoms" in the same speech. In 1975, Carmine Coppola -- co-winner of the Oscar for his original score for "The Godfather, Part II" and father of the film's director Francis Coppola -- offered a fresh spin by saying that without his son, "I wouldn't be here. However, if I wasn't here, he wouldn't be here, either." -- Get Grandiose (Pretend It's a Nobel). It probably feels like a Nobel prize from the podium, so go with the feeling. Marcel Ophuls did in 1989, when he said "There are whole countries to thank." And Laurence Olivier's acceptance of an honorary prize in 1979 sounded like this: "In the great firmament of your nation's generosities, this particular choice may perhaps be found by future generations as a trifle eccentric." -- "You Know Who You Are." The phrase "you know who you are" can save many minutes of speech time. Anjelica Huston used this time-saver in her speech in 1986, thanking "the entire cast and crew of 'Prizzi's Honor' -- I don't want to mention any names; you know who you are." Warren Beatty should've used the phrase when he named 14 names in 1982 and thanked "so many more." -- Try True Wit (But Only as a Last Resort). If the Oscar host can usually be consistently funny, why can't the winners be, too? Some can. Dustin Hoffman, for instance, looked at his Oscar statuette from the podium in 1980 and observed, "He has no genitalia, and he's holding a sword." And Stirling Silliphant, winning the best adapted screenplay award for 1968 for "In the Heat of the Night," said: "I really have no speech. The Writers' Guild doesn't allow us to do any speculative writing." [From The New York Times, March 26, 1995.] ________________________________________________ BRIEF PROFILES OF VARIOUS CELEBRITIES [PUBLISHED IN THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE] Dick Cavett, in the Mountains of Marin By Paul Iorio In the green mountains of Marin County, California, talk show pioneer Dick Cavett is playing hooky from his day job as narrator of the upcoming Broadway stage version of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." "My colleagues in 'Rocky' are sweating and laboring right now, and I'm supposed to be there," he confides. "I feel like they're going to find where I'm hidden." Cavett's hiding place, at least this afternoon, is Mill Valley, where he is preparing to attend the Mill Valley Film Festival's tribute to him. At 63, Cavett is still best-known for having brought witty, literate chat to the airwaves with his ABC-TV talk show, "The Dick Cavett Show," which aired from 1969 to 1973, and a PBS series, which ran from '77 to '82 -- shows that regularly mixed artists and intellectuals with entertainers and politicians. Today, Cavett doesn't host a TV series but is still infallibly witty and spontaneous, able to come up with a funny joke at will. For example, when a clerk from a rental car company interrupts us and asks to see Cavett's driver's license, he quips: "Can't I just describe it? It's rectangular..." What does he think of the current cultural landscape? His favorite show is NBC's "Law and Order." "The early years of 'Law and Order' were as good as anything that's ever been on television -- and it took me so long to realize it," says Cavett, wearing a "Twisted Tales" baseball cap (named after the show about animals he currently narrates on the Animal Planet channel). Of his own talk show career, Cavett says his best show was the one that featured playwright Noel Coward and the legendary actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. "Jack Paar called it 'the greatest ninety minutes I've ever seen on television,'" he says. "In a way, it was as good as it can get...I was better than I was on other nights." His most famous program is probably the one in which novelists Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal nearly came to blows on the air. In that show, Mailer made a surly entrance, refused to shake Vidal's outstretched hand, and proceeded to insult Cavett, Vidal and another guest, New Yorker magazine writer Janet Flanner. "I said [to Mailer], 'Would you like another chair to help contain your giant intellect?' And he said, 'I'll accept the chair if you'll all accept a fingerbowl,'" he recalls. "Mailer didn't quite get what he meant out; a re-write would've done it." "Then [Mailer] said the thing that I didn't know till then would anger me most: 'Why don't you just read the next question off the question sheet,''" he says. Cavett's famous response was "Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine?" When the Mailer show was aired in Germany, where Cavett has a sizable audience, the translator had difficulty translating the retort. "They were baffled," he says of the Germans. "'Something about a moon on a shining stick.'" Other noteworthy moments in Cavett's career include candid appearances by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, a show in which segregationist governor Lester Maddox walked off in anger, and one in which publisher J.I. Rodale died during a taping (after saying, "I expect to live on and on"). He says network executives never objected to the controversy his shows generated. "I think they were kind of tickled by the publicity," he says. Cavett's observations about his celebrity guests are always fresh. On Andy Warhol: "He had two tape recorders on at dinner...He said, 'One is recording the other.'" On Johnny Carson: "To me, he's still the guy who I first saw do a magic trick in [a] church basement in Lincoln Nebraska, when I was ten or twelve." He also recalls coming upon a dissipated Judy Garland in the mid-Fifties and initially mistaking her for a cleaning woman. The last ten years have not always been kind to Cavett. His three-million dollar house in Montauk burned down a few years ago, and he has recently suffered from clinical depression. But he does seem genuinely happy to be performing in "Rocky Horror," though he jokes, "I thought I was going to be the guy who wore women's underwear and garters and high heel," referring to the role that Tim Curry played in the film. He's also considering a return to his roots as a stand-up comic with some sort of one-man show. "I probably will" return to stand-up, says Cavett. "Even revisit my old act and comment on it...if I could remember my old act." When I ask about his reaction to the countless Cavett wannabes and imitators over the decades, he answers by recalling an exchange between Cary Grant and a fan: "A fan said, 'I would give anything to be Cary Grant.' And [Grant] said, 'So would I.'" [From the San Francisco Chronicle, October 9, 2000; original manuscript.] _______________________________________________________ In 2005, I submitted this story (unsolicited) to People magazine, which bought my idea so that it could then have one of its staff writers do its own version of the piece, which appeared in People on February 7, 2005. Dick Cavett Remembers The Great Carsoni, Nebraska Magician By Paul Iorio Dick Cavett, the former talk show host, remembers a Johnny Carson very few people ever saw first-hand: Carson the Nebraska magician. The two both grew up in Nebraska, though Carson was 11 years older. When Cavett was 12, in 1948, he and three of his friends went to see Carson, who called himself The Great Carsoni in those days, in the basement of the Westminister Church in Lincoln, Nebraska. To the pre-pubsecent Cavett, Carson was already a local big shot, having landed his first radio show on KFAB in Lincoln. Cavett and his friends arrived at the church a little early for the performance and visited Carson before his show. “My three friends and I went around to see him before the show, which you never do with a magician,” Cavett told this reporter in unpublished remarks from an exclusive interview, conducted in October 2000. “We should have known better. But we were magicians, we thought. And he gave us this really curt look as he was setting up his stuff....He said, 'Oh, you guys are magicians? You like to do this kind of stuff?' And he [showed us] a dazzling display of card fans and shuffles and one-handed shuffles. It takes about 20 years practice to do a one handed shuffle...He showed us how to do a better double lift and to deal seconds. He was great.” Then Cavett and his buddies took their seats in the basement for the magic show -- and they were in for a big surprise. “We watched the show [with] all the church people,” continued Cavett. “And [Carson] said, ‘There are three guys in the audience I'd like you to meet.’ And he named us. ‘And they are young magicians.’ And we felt like we were on the Ed Sullivan Show. You might say, but he wasn't Johnny Carson then. But he was to us because he had a radio show in Omaha. And I think his 15 minute TV show came on a couple years later.” The show ended and Cavett remembers seeing Carson make a celebrity exit. “We watched him leave in what I think was probably a '44 Chevy and go off glamorously in the night to be a star,” recalled Cavett. “Back to Omaha and stardom. Probably with a low spare tire in the back.” Cavett tried to explain the psychological reasons behind Carson’s magic habit. “It's the syndrome of many kids who did magic as a hobby,” said Cavett. “Magic is a great answer to the kid who feels a little socially inept and can stay home and do something totally absorbing and then have an amazing effect [in public]. The first time, people go, ‘How did you do that?’ You can be hooked.” Of course, he would later become friends in adulthood with Carson, who reportedly had few friends by choice. “We didn't hang out a lot together, but with Johnny if you hung out at all....” Cavett trails off, but his implication was that anyone who hung with him even infrequently saw him more than most. “He can apparently totally entertain himself without hanging out with the boys and yet he likes to play poker and he has a regular poker table.” They were also professional rivals for a time, when Cavett hosted “The Dick Cavett Show” on ABC opposite Carson’s NBC talk show. But it was an apparently friendly rivalry. “Johnny Carson was always my best ally, he was always a friend, and I could call him with problems when I started out and ask him what do you do when Bobby Kennedy's just been shot. How do you do the show?,” he said. He recalls a dinner he once had at Carson’s house. “We had a great time, had dinner at his house and then we went out,” he said. “His house looks like an Olympic venue, the one he had then. Tennis goes up miles over that way, a pool over this way, and then a great house of weights. Drums. A telescope.” But even in 2000, Cavett still seemed amazed that he witnessed the Carson magic at such an early stage. “To me, he is still the guy who I first saw do a magic show in Wesminister Church basement in Lincoln, Nebraska,” he said. “...So it sort of floors me that I first met him back there.” [unpublished, though it was the basis of a 2005 People magazine article.] ____________________________________________________ [PUBLISHED IN SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE] Edward Norton, After Hours By Paul Iorio Edward Norton has just finished a long day working with Brad Pitt on the new David Fincher movie, "The Fight Club," and stops in at Red, a West Hollywood restaurant, for a late night cup of tea with me. We take a table in an outdoor cafe area but the lousy faux jazz-fusion blasting over the speakers is too loud for conversation. Norton tries talking over it, but the music is clearly getting on his nerves. "Let me get them to turn this stupid music off," he says, slightly pissed and standing up. He walks inside Red (this is the second time he's tried to get them to turn it down). Through the window I can see him talk rather intensely with someone. Suddenly the music quiets considerably. It's as if Norton has briefly turned the restaurant into his own movie set, even controlling the soundtrack. And it's this sense of control, of dominating his environment -- whether giving a performance on camera or an interview in a cafe -- that has become a Norton trademark. Tonight, he's eager to talk about the movie that much of Hollywood is talking about, the controversial "American History X," in which he stars as a reformed neo-Nazi. As Norton admits, the film is not everybody's cup of tea. It's a full of graphic violence, tough dialogue and an unsympathetic central character. "The film is not an easy entertainment, that's not what it's [meant to be]," says Norton, sipping tea. "It is not going to be an easy sit. It's not sort of an escapist entertainment. But I think it's a film you'll still be very much talking about over dinner two nights later." Norton, 29, could've avoided controversy by choosing a safe surefire studio blockbuster as his next project. One must remember how recently The Edward Norton Phenomenon emerged. His career didn't evolve gradually through years of work in bit parts and b-movies. His debut film, "Primal Fear," was a big hit that earned him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor. In quick succession came the acclaimed "The People Vs. Larry Flynt" and Woody Allen's musical-comedy "Everybody Says I Love You." But he says he acts partly because it's a way of not choosing to be just one thing in life. "I've always had a hard time choosing between different potential modes of existence, and acting is a really fun way of being an experiential dilettante," he says. "You can dip for awhile into all kinds of diverse realms of experience and expression and then escape without any of the consequences of actually having chosen it as a life. And I like that....It's like the way I might have been." [From the San Francisco Chronicle, October 25, 1998.] _________________________________________________________ [PUBLISHED IN THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE] Anne Heche, Pioneer [the first story anywhere to link Heche with Ellen DeGeneres] By Paul Iorio Ellen DeGeneres drives up to the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills in a new Porsche Carrera, gets out and smiles wide. And why shouldn't she smile? She's on the cover of Time magazine this week and stars in the most talked- about TV show on the air. But there's another reason for the big grin: she spots a friend across the driveway. Her friend, actress Anne Heche, looking glamorously lithe, waves and walks over to her. Heche and DeGeneres hug and talk, all laughter, blonde hair and charisma. As the spring sunlight comes through the trees at a late- afternoon angle, Heche is full of motion and warmth, juggling conversations with DeGeneres and a couple others. Almost everything that makes Heche a compelling movie star is evident in this moment with DeGeneres; Heche is impossible not to watch as she energetically deals with several people at once, exuding a mixture of control and affection. Heche, 27, has the personality of someone who has had to fend for herself from a very young age. And it comes across onscreen and off. For example, in the film "Volcano" she's pushing a bus, dragging bodies from the path of a lava flow, rescuing patients at a hospital and making suggestions to Tommy Lee Jones's character. She seems hyper-competent. So it's no surprise to discover that in real life Heche (rhymes with the letter 'h') actually did have to fend for herself from a very young age -- from the age of 12, when her father found out he had AIDS. She helped support her family by appearing in dinner theatre productions in Ohio. "At twelve years old, I didn't understand that every kid didn't go out and earn money for their family," she says, taking a cigarette from a hard pack. "My dad was a closet homosexual," she continues. "Because he wasn't willing to admit to himself and others that he was that, he ended up destroying himself." When Heche talks about DeGeneres's coming-out on TV, her enthusiasm is clearly informed by hard-earned wisdom. "It's incredibly brave," she says of DeGeneres. "Ellen's a pioneer in this world where there's never been an admittedly gay lead actor on television." [From the San Francisco Chronicle, April 20, 1997; original manuscript, updated and abridged.] _____________________________________________________________ [PUBLISHED IN THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE] Remembering Jonathan Larson (and an Awful Phone Call) By Paul Iorio Daphne Rubin-Vega, the actress who played Mimi in the original production of Jonathan Larson's musical "Rent," remembers an awful phone call. "[Actress Idina Menzel] called and was really upset," she recalls. "And I could tell by her voice something was wrong. Then she said, 'Jonathan.' And I knew. I knew. You just know." The news was that the thirty-five year old Larson had died suddenly and unexpectedly of a ruptured aorta in his Greenwich Village apartment. It had happened a couple hours after the final dress rehearsal for the workshop production in 1996. When she starts to talk about Larson's death, Rubin-Vega, normally exuberant and feisty, becomes quiet, talks slowly, looks down at a fixed spot on the floor and puts on a black jacket. When she zips up the jacket, she's now completely dressed in black. "[Cast members] walked to the New York Theatre Workshop and...everyone cried," she recalls, referring to the hours after his death. "And it wasn't just out of, how could this person who is always in your life and in your face everyday all of a sudden be gone. But it was, like, what are we gonna do about this show? It's not finished. It was, like, it's not done." The cast quickly channeled its grief into making "Rent" one of the most successful musicals in recent Broadway history. The show has gone on to win Tony awards, Obie awards and the Pulitzer prize for drama, while its soundtrack became the fastest-selling Broadway CD of the decade. While grateful for "Rent"'s success, Rubin-Vega was also initially ambivalent about all the attention. "After Jonathan died, [the curious] started to swarm, and it was sensationalized," she says. "This very organic high- voltage thing became a sideshow attraction, a freak show." Rubin-Vega, who joined the production in 1993, remembers "Rent"'s evolution. She says the 1994 workshop version of the musical was very different from both the 1996 New York Theatre Workshop production and the show that exists today. "'Glory' was called 'Your Right Brain,'" she says. "It was the same melody but it was another song and was about other stuff...'Without You' was sung by the lesbians. 'Seasons of Love' was there. 'Rent' started the show but the actual songs were in different places. There was so much editing going on. Songs were cut, verses were cut." In her dressing room, she eagerly offers an example, belting out a playful verse deleted from "Out Tonight": "You want to be an alley cat?/Well, let's act like we've got nine lives/Let's cut off all our hair and wear ugly glasses/You wanna act like a brat?/Pick up men who cheat on their wives?/Let them spend like a millionaire/And leave them flat on their asses." Sometimes it's hard to know whether she's primarily a singer or an actress. If she had to choose only one career, which would it be? "Don't ask me to choose," she says, and then turns the question on me. "If you can only choose one testicle, which one would it be?" "The right one, it's the one I like," I joke. She laughs for a long time about that. One thing's for certain: she has been heavily influenced by Larson. "I'd go to his house and hang out and play music and pretend I was as prolific a writer as he was at the time but actually have him help me bang out stuff...He was always game to write and play." But she's not satisfied with simply talking about Larson; she breaks into song, reciting an original unrecorded lyric about him called "Graduation Day": "If you were here today you would/Hear the sound of people shouting for more/How can anybody say you're not around?" [From the San Francisco Chronicle, February 28, 1999; original manuscript and updated.] __________________________________________ [FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE] Jessica Alba, at the Dawn of Her Stardom By Paul Iorio It seems as if Jessica Alba, who stars in the new Fox series "Dark Angel," can't escape her beauty anywhere. When the sexy 19-year-old actress walks down hallways, people stare admiringly. Even during my recent exclusive interview, someone walked by the private area where we were talking and, apropos of nothing, said, "See you, pretty woman." At the time, Alba was busy talking about Malaysian princesses. And Alba does have the fluid, flawless beauty and grace of a storybook princess -- except it's for real. That's probably part of the reason why she was chosen by no less than director James Cameron ("Titanic") to star in "Dark Angel," which Cameron created with Charles Ehglee. In the futuristic series, set in the year 2020 in the U.S. Pacific northwest after a quasi-nuclear catastrophe, Alba plays Max, a genetically altered superwoman pursued by the military officers who made her the way she is. The show, which airs on Tuesday nights starting October 3rd [2000], also stars John Savage ("Deer Hunter") as military leader Lydecker, and Michael Weatherly as Max's ally Logan. Cameron says Alba got the part because of her strong audition. "She didn't hold back in the auditions," Cameron said at a press conference. "You could see [other actors] sort of backing up and off balance." Alba clearly enjoys playing Max, a role that allows her to use her special genetic powers to batter and decimate assorted bad guys. "[Max] can physically do whatever she wants," says Alba. "She realizes, yeah, I can go kick someone's butt...but she has fun with it." Alba comes to her role from a diverse background. She was born in Pomona, California, and grew up mostly in southern California, Mississippi and Del Rio, Texas, the daughter of a U.S. Air Force officers. "My father's family...two generations ago were all Mexicans and came to California and settled," she says. "My mom's dad is from Denmark and her mother is from Montreal." At age 15, she lived in Australia for around a year to be in the TV series "Flipper." And at age 16, she studied acting in New York under playwright David Mamet and actor William H. Macy. "My main acting teacher was Bill Macy," she says, "and he taught me not to act." She says her influences include Susan Sarandon, Sally Field, Olympia Dukakis and Jessica Lange. And she has been influenced by Cameron, who has released nothing as a producer or director on the big or small screen since "Titanic" -- except "Dark Angel" (which is not directing). "It really reminds me of my roots as a guerilla film maker...doing films in 21 days, really rapid fire," said Cameron. Some critics are already saying that Alba is better than "Dark Angel" itself. "I've never heard that before," she says. "I hope we can make the show better and lighter." Alba's next project is the feature film "The Sleeping Dictionary," co-starring Bob Hoskins and Brenda Blethyn and directed by Guy Jenkins. "It's a love story between an English officer and a Malaysian princess," she says. Of course, it goes without saying who plays the princess. [Published in The San Francisco Chronicle; from my original manuscript of September 13, 2000; published on 9/24/00.] _____________________________________________________ [FROM THE S.F. CHRONICLE] Carroll O'Connor's Blues By Paul Iorio When the grieving gets tough, the tough get...creative. That could be Carroll O'Connor's credo these days. When his son Hugh killed himself while on cocaine two years ago, O'Connor was devastated. But he soon converted his mourning to energy, bounding back with a fireball of anti-drug activism. Now he has emerged with a haunting play, "A Certain Labor Day," which will make its premiere in San Francisco. O'Connor is the author and star of the two-act play; he appears as a washed-up labor leader whose younger son has a problem with booze. And, yes, he freely admits his real-life son was the model for the alcoholic character. "If my son had not killed himself, I would have asked him to play the part of Tony," O'Connor says, his eyes reddening and filling with tears. He pauses, stares downward and shakes his head: "He was an addict, he was an addict." He drifts briefly into fond remembrance: "He was a lovely character, Hugh was. There wasn't a mean bone in his body." In the play, the anguish does sometimes seem autobiographical. At one point, O'Connor's character is desperate as he talks about his son: "Help me! How do I reach this beautiful kid of mine? Why is he lost?...Why am I in hell before I'm dead?" O'Connor sips ice water on this Saturday evening in a Westwood church where he's rehearsing the drama. "A play should center on a crisis," he says. "If the crisis overcomes the people, it's a tragedy. If the people overcome the crisis, it's either a melodrama or a comedy." George C. Scott was originally set to co-star, but dropped out because he needs "a little aorta operation," says O'Connor. O'Connor plays Gerry Maher, a relic of post-war American liberalism, a sort of politicized Willy Loman, who is "living helplessly in a mean time [of] no ideals, no ethical guidance, just strategies for personal glory." That also happens to be O'Connor's own view of the 1990s. "But that doesn't make me a doomsayer," he says. "Because I've lived long enough now at the age of 73 to see the country take several changes. I'm old enough to [have] listened to people say, 'the country is ruined.' Then it turns out not to be ruined." He is similar to his character in some ways. Both are politically liberal. Both have no patience with racism or anti-Semitism. Both are in their seventies. And both are solid supporters of unions. "The first union I ever joined was at 17-years old," he says proudly, quickly naming eight others he has joined since. O'Connor comes off kind of like a liberal trapped in the body of a conservative, with a lifestyle that seems almost old-fashioned in contrast to his politics. Unlike others in show business, he's been married to the same woman, college sweetheart Nancy Fields, for 46 years; and it's obvious they're still in love with each other. He hates drug use. He dislikes pretension. He's fond of straight talk. His jokes are funny but they're not really jokes; they're sharp insights. He is by turns outspoken, passionate, persuasive, and lots of fun -- a natural populist. Truly, success has not gone to his head or even near it. O'Connor's roots are in the theater, even if his success has been mostly on the small screen (with TV's "All in the Family" and "In the Heat of the Night"). He appeared in his first play around 50-years ago, at his alma mater, the University of Montana. In the early Fifties, he moved to Ireland and performed in much of western Europe. Among other things, his experience abroad mercifully allowed him to miss the worst of Joe McCarthy's red-baiting in the U.S. "I went to Ireland in 1950 and didn't come back till '54," he says. "I was lucky. I was away in those years when they were hunting [leftists]." When he returned to New York, he found occasional work as an actor in the theater and later in movies (most notably as a doomed gangster in the '67 cult film "Point Blank," a trucker in '62's "Lonely Are The Brave," and as Casca in the '63 re-make of "Cleopatra"). But Broadway has never been hospitable to him. "I've been a flop on Broadway twice," he says. "Once in '83 with 'Brothers' [which he directed] and 'Homefront' in '84. So, I'm not crazy mad to run back to Broadway." O'Connor sees "All in the Family," the blockbuster TV show in which he played the bigoted Archie Bunker, as a series of one-act plays produced weekly for thirteen years. "I always thought we were doing these little plays on 'All in the Family,'" he says, adding candidly: "I take credit for being the one who was driving every week towards a little play....I don't say that everybody else was going another way. But I was the principal. We used to sit around the table and I used to say, 'Now, why would anyone want to see this?...What human truth or crisis makes it worth watching." What is his favorite episode of "All in the Family"? "There was one very important one, where Archie and Mike get a little boozed and they discuss the origin of racism," he says. "...Archie and Mike were locked in a liquor room, a storeroom." He expresses his affection for "American laboring guys" like Bunker, even as he observes that "a lot of people in trade unions...are very conservative-minded." O'Connor, who worked as a longshoreman in his youth, adds: "They really don't like working shoulder-to-shoulder with black people...They still have their racism to overcome." [Published in The San Francisco Chronicle, September 21, 1997.] ___________________________________________________________________ FROM THE AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN 35 Years After the First Moonwalk... A Practical Guide to Walking on the Moon Alan Bean Describes What It Really Feels Like to Walk in the Ocean of Storms By Paul Iorio In the 35 years since humans first walked on the moon, the concept of moonwalking has changed from a scientific activity seen in indistinct video images to a possibly practical matter. With space tourism in the air everywhere, and private companies making or planning their first forays into space, moonwalking has become something that the average person could possibly do in the very near future. People are beginning to think of visiting the Sea of Tranquillity the way they used to dream of visiting the Gobi desert or the Himalayas. Questions are being asked. What sort of camera works best on the moon? Can your space suit be punctured by sharp moon rocks? Is it possible to jump too high? Only a dozen Earthlings have known the answers to those questions in a first-hand way, and they are the 12 who walked on the moon between July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong first set foot in the Sea of Tranquillity, and December 1972, when Gene Cernan became the last person to moonwalk. Alan L. Bean, the fourth person to walk on the moon, describes his experience with a painterly sense of detail and color, perhaps because he's the one moonwalker who is also an accomplished visual artist. He visited the moon nearly thirty-five years ago, in November 1969, as part of the crew of Apollo 12, which included the late Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr., and Richard F. Gordon. (Bean was also a resident of the space shuttle Skylab II in 1973.) On October 13, 1998, Bean spoke about the practical and aesthetic aspects of moonwalking in an unusually vivid (and exclusive) interview that had been unpublished until now [July 18, 2004]. Here is an edited version of it: IORIO: WHEN YOU STEP OUT ON THE MOON, WHAT DO YOU SEE? BEAN: It looks bright outside but you're fairly dim inside...It's like coming out of the house at night onto a patio that's super brightly lit...You're saying, "Look at this! This looks so different than when I was inside.'" It looks scarier. You're saying, "Look at this place, it's not like any place on Earth. And I hope my suit doesn't leak because if it does, I'm dead. And look at those rocks. And look, there's Pete [Conrad, Commander of Apollo 12] over there, jumping up and down -- that looks like fun." And then you let go of the ladder to start to move and you start to wobble around, and you think, "I'm going to fall down and I don't want to; I might cut my suit." ...If you've looked at TV [footage] of Apollo 11...you'll see they're bouncing around continually at first. It's easier to stand up when you're bouncing around....If you try to stand still in a spot, it's much more difficult than just kind of moving around a little bit, because naturally you'll move in the direction you're leaning, and that'll keep you from leaning farther. IF YOU HAD FALLEN, COULD YOU HAVE PUNCTURED YOUR [SPACE SUIT]? BEAN: We worried about it, we worried you could. You've got a cover layer over it but we said, "Those rocks are sharp." It's funny: you know things and yet you don't know them until they really happen...I fell down a couple of times on the moon -- most people did -- because there are dust layers there, and under the dust are rocks, and it's like you’re running through snow, and there are rocks under the snow that you don't see. You trip every once in a while. But with light gravity, things fall much more slowly, so when you trip you start to fall down much more slowly. Sometimes you can run under your body and catch yourself, where on Earth you would've really fallen down. Nothing happens real fast like on Earth. ,,,To get up, just give it a little push with your hands and you'll stand right back up again. The first time I tried to stand, I gave a push with my hands and nearly went over backwards I pushed so hard... Someday, when they have the Olympics up there in a big dome, it'll be fun. It'll be fun to watch the high jump, because they're going to jump fifteen feet or something, and they're going up very slowly and keep going up and up, almost like a football. Then they're going to come down very slow....No telling what pole vaulting would be like up there! DID YOU HAVE THE TEMPTATION JUST TO JUMP AS HIGH AS YOU COULD [ON THE MOON]? BEAN: We did that, but don't forget we were in these bulky suits, so even though you could jump and go up a long ways, it was so slowly that you went up and were pulled back. What I found was the problem was not jumping up high but...the minute you jumped off the ground, you never pushed through your center of gravity really perfectly. On Earth, you jump up and land right down again, so it's no problem. But [on the moon], you're going up, and all of a sudden you see you didn't push through your center of gravity, and you see you're starting to lean to the left. When I was running [on the moon], I always felt that I was over-rotating forwards, backwards, left or right, and each time I landed I would think, I've got to hurry up and land, I'll never make it." And then when I would touch down, I would push off and try to make a correction in the other direction. Then I would overcorrect. [laughs] So it was like I was reeling across the moon....It was a constant balancing act almost. You had to look where your foot was going to land every time. You couldn't run and look ahead, because you'd go into a crater. You had to make sure you didn't step on rocks or twist your ankle...It would be fun to do it in a bubble without the suit on. YOU SAID EARLIER THAT, VISUALLY, IT'S LIKE NOTHING ON EARTH. BUT IS THERE ANY POINT OF COMPARISON?...IN YOUR SEVEN AND THREE-QUARTERS HOURS [ON THE MOON], WAS THERE ONE MOMENT WHEN...YOU SAID, "THIS LOOKS LIKE THE MOJAVE"? BEAN: It looked like volcanic fields that we had practiced on in Hawaii and Oregon and Ireland and Mexico and some in the southwest [U.S.]...except there's a lot more dirt around [on the moon]. With the dirt on Earth, the rain washes most of it away, particularly the fine stuff, so usually the volcanic fields...have more rock exposed. Up there, the rocks are around but all the little chips that have been knocked off the rocks are still there. So I thought, initially, it looks sort of looks like volcanic fields....However, it never looked like any place on Earth because of the incredible sun, because the sky is a patent leather black instead of a nice blue and because nothing moves up there. The only things that moved when we were up there were the two of us and our shadows. Nothing else moves. We'd never been to places like that on Earth. Even in the desert you can look up and see maybe a wisp of a cloud go by....It's so still, so dead. I never for one second felt like this could ever be a place on Earth, even though parts of it looked like other places we'd been. It's an unearthly place, an out-of-this-world place. AND YOU TURN AROUND AND LOOK AT THE EARTH...AND IT'S THIS BLUE WATERY MASS? BEAN: You're on this [moon] that's black and white and the whole universe is black and white, except on Earth. And there is this blue and white marble. And also, it changes. You do some work and look at the Earth an hour later, and it has moved 15 degrees. So some clouds have moved to the right, the part that was in the shadow 15 degrees has come out. WHAT'S IT LIKE UP THERE [ON SKYLAB]? YOU WERE THERE FOR FIFTY-NINE DAYS IN CRAMPED -- BEAN: We weren't cramped -- we had a big Skylab. I've never heard anybody come back from space for no matter how long and say, "Well, we didn't have enough room." Because when you can float around...it always seems like you have enough room. I've never heard an astronaut say the spacecraft was too little, but I've heard lots of astronauts say, "We need better food" or "We've got to invent a better sleeping bag" or "We've got to get bigger windows because we can't see out." As [lunar module pilot] Bill Anders on Apollo 8 said, "It's like going through Yellowstone Park in a tank and looking out the little window." ...People complain about the fact that it's kind of messy up there for pooping and urinating. It's like camping out [but] not as much fun as on Earth. WHAT [FEATURE] FILM BEST CAPTURES THE SPACE EXPERINECE? BEAN: "Apollo 13," easily. "Apollo 13" was as good a movie as could be made about space flight as I knew it. [From the Austin American-Statesman, July 18, 2004] ________________________________________________________________ UNPUBLISHED (PRESENTED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME) Alarming Pre-9/11 Messages Foreshadow Attacks In Chat Rooms, Hints of Coming Hijacker Attacks and Other Plots By Paul Iorio Newly uncovered messages, posted on an Islamic extremist website before September 11, 2001, show that militants were talking up terrorist plots similar to those of 9/11 prior to 9/11. There was also talk of staging a nuclear 9/11 in which multiple couriers would smuggle a small piece of a nuclear device into the U.S. and assemble it here for detonation. The postings, uncovered by this reporter and then investigated by both the elite Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and the United States Capitol Police (CP), raise disturbing questions about whether others knew about the 9/11 attacks beforehand and whether recent terrorist acts might have been partly coordinated through private Internet message boards. The Capitol Police learned about the messages, which (among other things) included explicit and violent death threats against three U.S. Senators, from this reporter in April 2004, a few months before the CP closed roads around the Capitol amidst widespread speculation that there had been threats on individual members of Congress and Senators. (Without having contacted the Capitol Police, I was phoned by two special agents of the CP on April 22 and asked to be called back "immediately" about the postings I had uncovered; the CP probably found out about my findings because I had contacted members of Congress for comment on the messages.) The documents come from a leading Islamic information and discussion website, http://www.ummah.com/, which calls itself "The Muslim Directory." A participant in its chats, in the months before 9/11, calls for the assassination of three U.S. Senators and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and advocates action similar to the hijacking and anthrax attacks that occurred weeks and months after the messages were posted. There is also advocacy of a rail attack similar to the one that occurred years later in Madrid. One participant in the Ummah discussions, whose screen name is Abdullahmuaz, suggested as early as November 2000 that militants use a hijacked airplane as a missile. "The hijacking could've been used so wisely," he wrote in 2000, referring to a hijacking in November 2000. "The Russian hijacked plane could have...flown to Gaza..it had to first land in telaviv so that they didn't suspect...but they didn't realize what would happen if the lone hijacker felt sleepy, etc....I am giving you ideas, you have to modify them...if I give you the exact plan..you will be caught before you even carry it out..." [The messages here are being quoted with their original idiosyncratic spelling and syntax.] Clearly, Abdullahmuaz, in almost every posting, seems to be coaching fellow militants as if he were advising or guiding those who were about to stage attacks. An interview with an agent of the JTTF focused partly on the possibility that Abdullahmuaz might have coordinated attacks through his messages. In a 2004 interview, the JTTF agent was more alarmed by another finding: a message I uncovered that was posted at 9:46 PM (ET) on September 10, 2001, on the usenet service Deja News. It's a sort of fundamentalist Muslim death sermon titled "Death" by a Sharif Muhammad in which he quotes a passage from the Koran: "'Wherever you are, death will find you out. Even if you are in towers built up strong and high.’" Muhammad then says the same thing in his own words: "No matter how long one lives, nothing will save him/her from death. Strong towers won't save him." And he talks about the nobility of being a martyr for Islam, echoing the beliefs expressed in the letter found in the luggage of hijacker Mohamed Atta and distributed to his fellow terrorists. "[Death] emboldens the believer to do Jihad," writes Muhammad. "...The most honorable death is to die for the cause of Islam, to be a martyr of faith." Abdullahmuaz also wrote messages in the period just before 9/11, one of them endorsing the idea of a poison attack on America a few weeks before the anthrax letters were sent. In another message, Abdullahmuaz plots a nuclear 9/11. "Another very good option would be to try to smuggle in small nuclear devices into the US each small piece brought by a different courier and then assembled in the US," he wrote. The messages uncovered here were posted on an Ummah.com message board and preserved in Ummah's 2001 archive, which was accessible through a back door to the Internet called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, a search engine capable of retrieving vanished websites from years ago. (To find a past site, simply type a URL into the Wayback Machine and click on links to Internet pages dating as far back as 1996.) The Ummah messages presented in this story were found through the Wayback Machine. In order to find these messages, this reporter put the URLs of more than a hundred Muslim extremist and al Qaeda websites into the Wayback. The founder of the Wayback Machine, Brewster Kahle, says there have been no instances in which documents obtained through the Wayback machine were later shown to have been unreliable in some way. "Our data is reliable," he says. "The stuff here is used in court," Kahle adds. The Ummah website still exists today but in a much tamer form. Even Ummah's formal categories of discussion have been revamped; some chat groups in the pre-9/11 months were subtitled "...crisis, war and Jihad"; by contrast, one chat category is now called “quiet and peace," and there is no mention of jihad as a suggested topic. (Representatives of the site would not answer a request for comment for this story.) The messages quoted here were found on a private message board labeled "protected"; they were blocked to those without a password, but the blocking was not always effective enough to keep this reporter from accessing some of the messages. It is little wonder the documents are labeled private and protected: the messages often involve violent and specific threats. Few are more graphic than a posting from Abdullahmuaz from June 11, 2001, that says, “George Tenet Gun Him Down... make it a suicide thing.” He also posted a series of less explicit messages in the months before September 11th that seem to allude to the terrorism to come. “Americans we made them focus on infrastructure,” Abdullahmuaz wrote on May 9, 2001. “All their energies and efforts would focus on infrastructure, while we hit them you know where.” It's unclear what he means by the phrase "you know where." “[An attack] has to be massive on scale to have effect,” he wrote on April 24, 2001. “Their civilians. their children. it doesn’t have to be army personnel. go for what is easy." In a call to action on the same day, he wrote: "Let's give it to them now -- all fronts." And he returns repeatedly to the idea of using poison as a weapon. "Poison them as a nation..arsenic..anything slow would do," wrote Abdullahmuaz on April 25, 2001. "Their water supply should be another target..if you could open a gas pipeline and pump cyanide or just something cheap like carbon monoxide even, that would be good..this is a good recipe for spies amongst you as well." "Keep quiet or do something big...poison their water supply.. [mess up] their air traffic or rail control...bomb their ammunition depots..set fires..fires are so f-----' easy...you guys are not thinkin," he wrote on April 7, 2001. His advocacy of a "rail control" attack is worthy of note in light of the train bombings in Madrid on March 11, 2004, which many have called "Spain's 9/11." The poisoning of the water supply has recently been shown to be an al Qaeda plan. Representatives of the CIA, the U.S. Homeland Security department and the 9/11 Commission were approached for comment about this report but did not respond. [Unpublished; presented here for the first time; this final version was written on April 25, 2005, updated 2009. I should note that even the greatest investigative reporters would agree that a journalist is a citizen first and a journalist second, and they would also agree that if a reporter uncovers an apparent plot of this sort, he should report it immediately to law enforcement (providing, of course, that it does not violate any confidentiality agreements with sources.] _________________________________________________________ [PUBLISHED IN DETAILS MAGAZINE] Choosing My Religion Converting to the World's Great (And Not-So-Great) Religions -- All of Them By Paul Iorio If everything were to go wrong, it's somewhat comforting to know organized religion would take you in -- no matter who you are or what you've done or what you really believe. But first you must convert. What religion is best for you? Which one offers a sensible plan for eternity, no-fault redemption, praying that gets results, easy admission to heaven, and a moral contract that's non-binding? To answer these questions, I set out one morning to convert to the world's great (and not-so-great) religions. Within hours, I grew certain of only one thing: becoming holy was not the best way to expand my sexual options, since many faiths prohibit even the most mundane erotic activities. Islam, for example, forbids masturbation. "It's a sin," says Abdul Hai of the Islamic Center in Chicago. "You can't even masturbate with your wife?," I ask. "How come you do masturbating with your wife?," says Hai. "Mutual masturbation -- that would be okay, right?," I ask. "I don't think so," says Hai. So for those sometimes feel sex is too private to do in front of another person, Islam is clearly not the way to go. Muslims also bar lechery. "Even if you gaze at the face of a woman out of lust, it is forbidden," says Muhammed Salem Agwa, an imam at the Islamic Cultural Center in New York. (Sunnis and Shiites largely agree on such lifestyle issues.) I then tried the Mormons. First thing I found was they take marriage very seriously. Not only do they nix sex before marriage, they believe in marriage after death. This, of course, raises the question of whether one can file for divorce in eternity. "As far as getting a divorce in the eternities, I don't think so," says an elder of the Church of Latter-Day Saints. "If you lasted until the eternities with your marriage, it's pretty much going to last forever." "But if you do get a divorce in eternity, do you split the soul 50:50?," I ask. "Good question," he says. "I never thought of that. I'll have to think about it." Judaism actually regulates the penis itself; circumcision is recommended for converts. (For the uninitiated, adult circumcision is usually performed under a local anesthetic and requires several stitches you know where.) Next, I checked out the best ways of getting to heaven. For Catholics, I found the password to heaven is a simple, "I'm sorry." Evidently, the deal for Catholics is this: Commit any sin during the week, confess on Sunday, and you're pardoned, no matter what the offense. Catholics can even envision forgiveness for Adolf Hitler. "If at the end, Hitler had been truly sorry for the things he had done, then the possibility of forgiveness is there in a theoretical sense," says Father Kevin Madigan of the Blessed Sacrament Church in Manhattan. "Is there any point of evil beyond which you say, 'No amount of repentance will redeem you?,'" I ask. "No," says Father Madigan. Catholics aren't the only ones with a loose forgiveness policy. Listen to Pentecostal pastor Donald Lee of the Healing Stream Deliverance Church in New York: "One of the people we're affiliated with is Son of Sam," he says, sounding a bit like Dan Aykroyd's E. Buzz Miller character on the original "Saturday Night Live." "We've prayed with him a number of times, and he's really strong now in the Lord." "That seems way over the top," I say. "If Son of Sam doesn't go to hell, then who does?" "He doesn't go to hell because he's totally repented. In this case, he really meant business with God," says Lee. "What sins won't you excuse?," I ask. "When you experience the power of God and then you blaspheme it, you mock it," Lee explains. Other religions have their own quirky, irredeemable acts. What sin do Lutherans consider unforgivable? "To die in unbelief," says Dale Hansen, the pastor at St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Manhattan. "But then if I believe before I die, I'm forgiven my previous unbelief?," I ask. "That's right," says Hansen. With this much forgiveness going around, heaven must be mighty crowded, right? Not according to Jehovah's Witnesses, who claim heaven has a tight guest list of exactly 144,000. Apparently, admission depends on who you know. Each apostle gets to bring along 12,000 guests, says Elder Eugene Dykes of Kingdom Hall in Columbia, South Carolina. Despite stiff competition for admission to heaven, one can still have a shot by following as many religious rules as possible. Among them are the Ten Commandments, which raise complex ethical questions. For instance, would I be considered unholy if I break the First Commandment by believing Al Green is God? "Oh, no, no, no," says Adriano Hernandez of the Broadway Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Manhattan. "Al Green is a great guy, but he's not the supreme being of the universe," notes Glenn Evans of the Singles' Ministry of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. "Believing Al Green is God means you're going to become a total servant of Al Green," says Father Madigan, "and whenever he calls you on the phone and wants you to do something, you're going to do that. I don't understand how you can worship Al Green as a god." "I think you're pulling my leg here," says the very smart Leslie Merlin of Brick Presbyterian Church in New York. If the Ten Commandments are strict, just think of Judaism, with its additional 613 commandments. How do you know if you're violating, say, commandment 537? "It's hard," admits Rabbi Jacob Spiegel of the First Roumanian American Congregation. "We don't expect you to." Most orders of Judaism don't expect adherence to their dietary laws. One commandment forbids Jews to consume meat and any milk product at the same meal, which rules out something as innocent as coffee with milk after a burger. But Rabbi Simcha Weinberg of the Lincoln Square Synagogue slyly reveals a loophole: "You could have the coffee first." Islam's food restrictions are so strict it's a wonder someone hasn't marketed them as a diet plan yet. Among the regulations, most devotees must fast from dawn to dusk for one month a year. Does that mean not even a Slim Fast or a megavitamin? "You cannot even take a drop of water once you start fasting," Abdul Hai says sternly. Praying is a good way to get your side of the story across to God. And God reportedly understands every prayer in every tongue -- including tongues. Pastor Donald Lee demonstrates his fluency in tongues: "When the spirit comes into you, you'll be speaking in tongues -- cora ba shinda da ba sa -- like that. Like right now -- kara sheek a ra da ba da sheev ba ra sa. When I pray in tongues -- cora da shotta -- it gives the Holy Spirit a chance to dig deep." But don't try imitating Pastor Lee, which of course I know you're dying to do. "You could imitate me, but it wouldn't be by the Holy Spirit," he says. "It would just be mechanical." Islam requires Muslims to take comfort in prayer five times a day and to turn toward Mecca when doing so. "Suppose I turn toward San Francisco," I say. "Does that negate my prayer?" "You can have a compass and you keep it with you," responds Muhammed Salem Agwa. Because I didn't have my compass with me, I decided to try another religion. What about Christian Science? At the very least, it's a super way to save on healthcare. I checked out a service in Greenwich Village. The congregation, looking like people who wash their hair with bar soap, sings Hymn 31, a four-four ditty with catchy lyrics like: "What chased the clouds away? Twas love, whose finger traced aloud a bow of promise on the cloud." Then it's open-mike time at the church, and a Christian Scientist with a comb-over shaped like a gerrymandered congressional district says, "I have a healing to share." Though the Scientists believe faith can cure any ailment, this service was causing me sudden nausea. I left for the Hare Krishna house on Second Avenue. Approaching the Krishna center, I expected a lot of shaved heads and chanters in neon orange robes. Instead, I found an almost irreverent get-together of twentysomethings vaguely resembling Billy Bragg and Sinead O'Connor. I investigated the Krishnas further. Which Vishnu god gives me the best return on my worship? "Kirshna," says Akunthita Dasi of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in Chicago. Must my cremated ashes be scattered on the Ganges River, or will the Hackensack or Potomac do? "We just throw ashes in the lake here," says Chakra Pani of the Temple of Understanding near Limestone, West Virginia. Seeking something more earthly, I tried an Orthodox Jewish Minchah service at Congregation Talmud Torah Adereth El in Manhattan. In a tight basement with bars on the windows, men wearing hats turned the pages of the Torah backward and spoke Yiddish in an emphatic fast-motion ritual. I made a contribution and quickly left. Equally daunting was a Catholic Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Inside, worshipers repeated "I shall not fear" as a cop patrolled the north aisle and an usher prodded me with a long-armed collection basket. Then everybody shook hands with one another on cue and filed out to the sound of a barely audible organ. A nearby Buddhist meditation service was a breath of fresh incense -- at first. But then someone told me I was meditating incorrectly and needed formal instruction. (In Zenspeak, I didn't know what I wasn't doing.) My head was spinning in a spiritual vortex. I wondered: could I simultaneously shave my head, get circumcised, genuflect, speak in tongues, pray with a compass, and stop masturbating? It may be worth trying. It would certainly improve my chances of getting to heaven. [From Details magazine, October 1994; this is the way I originally write it.] <a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RszMw8nZEfI/AAAAAAAAAiQ/3L4xYfqnO8E/s1600-h/scanreligionexpenses.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RszMw8nZEfI/AAAAAAAAAiQ/3L4xYfqnO8E/s400/scanreligionexpenses.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5101677619181064690" /></a> I interviewed hundreds of sources and attended dozens of religious services for this story. Here's but one page of several that itemize 32 pages of phone calls I made for "Choosing My Religion" (above). (By the way, it ain't easy to rack up 91 bucks of calls by making mostly local calls!) __________________________________________________________ FROM CASH BOX MAGAZINE Locked in the Bathroom with James Mtume, Grammy-Winner By Paul Iorio To get some privacy for our interview, James Mtume, the Grammy-winning composer, suggested we lock ourselves in the bathroom at the offices of Cash Box magazine in Manhattan. So we did. "We're in the bathroom now," said Mtume. "You've got to be honest in the bathroom." And the honesty started flowing like water from a faucet as I took my seat on the toilet, and Mtume leaned up against the bathtub. "On television, name one black show that's not a comedy," said the musician, composer and former Miles Davis sideman. "You've got ten seconds." We went down the list and couldn't name a single one. The point he was making is that on TV and in feature films, blacks are virtually shut out from serious drama. Mtume sees this as a major problem, and it's one of the reasons he was attracted to composing the soundtrack of the film "Native Son," among other projects in his career. "The interesting thing about me having the opportunity to score 'Native Son' is that it's only the second time they've given a black composer full scoring rights to do what they want in a serious movie -- other than Quincy Jones," he said. Mtume wanted to do something different with film scoring. "I said, 'What can I do on a film score that's gonna make my stuff different from the stuff that pisses me off from all the other composers who are staid and stale," he said. "You've got guys who do the same thing for every movie because nobody gets on them about it." Mtume tried a novel approach and went hunting for sounds to sample. "I went to a tenement house in Brooklyn and paid the maintenance guy to turn on his furnace," he said. "And I sampled the sound and fed it into my computer." "Then I took broken glass, threw it against the wall and sampled the sound. I sampled my heartbeat. I sampled fingernails down a blackboard. Then I put a kind of Hitchcock string thing on top of the broken glass, the heartbeat and the furnace," he said, tapping the side of the bathtub. The soundtrack also includes a rap track reminiscent of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "The Message." "Rap is a very serious art form, though a lot of people try to dismiss it. My concern is the content; I would like to see more meaningful content in rap." Mtume is currently writing a symphony that fuses European and African classical traditions with scratch, deep funk and even heavy metal. "It's never been done before," he says. "I've got one movement that's a sixty-piece orchestra accompanying a funk rhythm band. Then there's another movement that involves a group rapping over a thing like Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring.'" Mtume, who once had a number one single, beat out even Sting to be the composer of "Native Son." "I'm associated with the smooth, pretty stuff but they'll be no more straight Mtume albums," he says. Sensing that someone might want to use the bathroom, we decided to wrap up the interview. "This is really hip, coming to the bathroom. I hope you know that," said Mtume. Then he sampled the sound of warm water running in the sink, and we both laughed. [From Cash Box magazine, January 24, 1987] _____________________________________________ SPY MAGAZINE a scan of my December 1992 article for Spy magazine, the "Dylan-o-matic." <a href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RrPO3giGnzI/AAAAAAAAAKo/ehl4JYMjh5I/s1600-h/scandylanonatic.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RrPO3giGnzI/AAAAAAAAAKo/ehl4JYMjh5I/s400/scandylanonatic.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5094643056507264818" /></a> _____________________________________________ VERBATIM EXCHANGE WITH MEL GIBSON PUBLISHED UNTIL NOW Mel Gibson on Moses By Paul Iorio Mel Gibson has long had a reputation as a devout Catholic and firm believer in God. So, when the subject turned to religion during a roundtable talk in 1999, Gibson revealed the depth of his religious faith, defending the Ten Commandments -- or at least the Fifth Commandment -- as if it were literal and rigid law, though he seemed confused about whether there were exceptions or not. In this one-on-one exchange, I asked Gibson whether the American revolutionaries of 1776 portrayed in his film “The Patriot” were morally correct (by Moses' morality) in killing British troops. This was his verbatim response: IORIO: IN [“THE PATRIOT”], KILLING IS OK AND JUSTIFIED AND MORALLY RIGHT IN MANY CASES, AS IN “BRAVEHEART.” IS THOU SHALL NOT KILL TOO VAGUELY WORDED TO BE OF ANY USE? GIBSON: Uh, no. WHY NOT? GIBSON: Because you shouldn't kill. YEAH, BUT IN THIS MOVIE, WOULD YOU SAY IT WAS WRONG TO KILL THE BRITS? GIBSON: It's not wrong to kill if you've got a good reason. THEN THAT VIOLATES -- GIBSON: No it doesn't. -- THOU SHALL NOT KILL. GIBSON: [Not] just for the hell of it. [laughter] It doesn't say thou shall not defend thyself, you know. BUT AS A COMMANDMENT, IT'S TOO VAGUELY WORDED ISN'T IT? GIBSON: [pause] Ah, it's succinct. Look, I'm not going to f--- with Moses here. [laughter] ____________________________________________________ [FROM VARIOUS PUBLICATIONS] Live in Concert! Reviews of Performances by Tracy Chapman, The Pogues, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Ordinaires, and The Replacements. The Ordinaires at CBGB, April 19, 1986. By Paul Iorio The Ordinaires, a nine-piece band from the lower east side, played a sophisticated collage of instrumental music at CBGB that was the aural equivalent of a high-speed walk through Manhattan, absorbing Tompkins Square funk, Madison Square Garden rock, radios in middle-eastern delis, Indian restaurant jukeboxes, ghetto blasters, uptown jazz, clubland pop, and the cacophony of New York streets, all of it seamlessly connected in a non-stop style that knows no boundaries, just like Manhattan neighborhoods which merge one into the other, with their dissonant jazz mixing harmoniously with such arena rock as Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir," which they played by weaving the song's instrumental passages together until one wondered how the song could have ever been done otherwise, which is typical of the band's power, a power that turned CBGB into a Lincoln Center recital hall when Barbara Schloss soloed on the violin, and into a Bourbon Street dance floor when Fritz Van Orden tore loose with some celebratory alto sax counterpoint, leading me to believe this band is so hungry, so eager, so able to express the world around them, that they'll bend rock 'n' roll into a hundred different shapes until somebody cries uncle. [From Cash Box magazine, May 3, 1986.] * * * Tracy Chapman, Live at Carnegie Hall, November 28, 1988. By Paul Iorio Before describing what happened at Tracy Chapman's Carnegie Hall concert, let's first picture the opposite of a Chapman show: Chapman struts onstage in spandex and spikes, followed by her band ("My love boys," she growls), which includes Mark "The Animal" Mendoza of Twisted Sister, and Philthy Animal of Motorhead. "Yo, New York! We're Tracy Chapman and the Love Boys. Are you ready to par-tay?! I can't hear ya. I said, are you ready for some maniac music?!" She blasts into an ear-splitting version of "Money (That's What I Want)," taking a solo in a duck-walk with her Strat between her legs, segueing into a metalized "Material Girl." Swigging from a fifth of Jack Daniels, she belts "Louie Louie," turning it into a 12-minute garage odyssey. When confused fans shout for the sensitive urban vignettes on her debut album, she roars back: "I - I - I just wrote those to make it big! The whole shy thing was to get me some attention, get me some -- " Philthy Animal finishes the sentence, while pulling the ends of a dollar bill: "...to get some sympathy," he chortles, breaking into the opening chords of the Stones's "Sympathy for the Devil." For the set-closer, Mendoza plays Jagger to Chapman's Turner for some bumpin' 'n' grindin' on a sizzling "Proud Mary." As the band leaves the stage, one front row fan loudly requests "Behind the Wall," Chapman's sensitive a cappella tale of domestic violence. To which Mendoza, visibly annoyed, retorts, "Sure, I'll play it. BANG! ZOOM!," he yells, slamming his palm with his fist. Chapman laughs rudely. The fictitious scenario above seems, er, unlikely, if only because Chapman, at age 24, has already defined an unusually sure and definite public persona. Honest and shy, she set a reverential tone at Carnegie Hall, where she played solo on a stage that was bare except for a microphone stand and two small speaker monitors (not even a chair or extra guitars). This allowed the audience to see and hear her as she must have appeared on street corners in Boston back when. [From the East Coast Rocker, December 7, 1988.] * * * The Jesus and Mary Chain at the Ritz, NYC, March 15, 1986. By Paul Iorio One of the exhibits at the 1976 Bienale in Venice, Italy, was a conceptual art piece consisting simply of a mop and a bucket. It caused a storm at the time, with critics and artists arguing its merits all the way to the gondolas in the Grand Canal. Many people missed the point, think the artist was merely trying to represent a mop and bucket; they didn't see he was presenting an actual mop and bucket. That work changed the way I see the everyday paraphernalia of the modern age, which is one of the things great art should do. Ten years later, I still don't see a mop and bucket the same way. The Jesus and Mary Chain likewise jar out perception of the world, making us hear the aural quotidian a bit differently. Like that mop-and- bucket artist, the Jesus and Mary Chain are not representing this noisy corner of the 20th century in their music; they are creating a piece of it. The squeak of subway wheels, the boom of construction sites, the airplanes overhead: the band puts such white noise over a candy-pop core to form an original and explosive mix. Their 35-minute show probably changed more lives than longer shows by any twenty top-40 band. On the way back home from the show, for example, the brakes of the taxi I was riding in squeaked. "Sounds like Jesus and Mary Chain," I said to my friend, and we both laughed. But our laughter belied something significant; our perception of everyday noises -- the roar of the 20th century down Third Avenue -- had changed. [From Cash Box magazine, March 29, 1986.] * * * The Pogues at The World, February 28, 1986. (The band’s first U.S. visit, recounted in reverse chronological order.) By Paul Iorio 1. Mere Anarchy is Loosed Upon the World. It's 3:15 a.m. at The World in New York, and The Pogues have just ended their first show in America. It sounds like the Easter Rebellion of 1916 must've sounded, as the crowd, with raised fists and bottles, demands an encore. The band returns with "Navigator," and vocalist Shane MacGowan sings it in a voice twice his 28 years, swaying drunkenly, his eyes fixed on some spot midway between orchestra and balcony. One half expects him to break into Gaelic or tears as his phrasing makes lines like "for to shift a few tons of" sound like "for the ship of Lufthansa." A terrible beauty is born. 2. Twenty Minutes Earlier. It's mid-set. This could be the show's turning point. Until now, the crowd has been amused but a bit complacent about the band. Jem Finer tries some banjo on "Jesse James," and Cait O'Riordan sings "I'm a Man You Don't Meet Everyday." The audience begins to see the light. A fiery instrumental follows, and the crowd bounces and dances. 3. Twenty Minutes Earlier. The Pogues open with "The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn" and the audience is not impressed. One guy dances a mock jig. People laugh. They eye the band with a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun. Then MacGowan scores with three consecutive blasts: "Old Main Drag, " "A Pair of Brown Eyes" and "Dirty Old Town." The crowd leans forward. 4. The Previous Day. All eight Pogues pile into an office on West 57th Street in New York. They're feisty, anarchic and one hour late. Cait O'Riordan snoops through my pre-interview notes behind my back and blurts, "Shane, he's going to ask you about the IRA." The band looks at me with a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun. MacGowan talks about booze instead. He says he likes Italian white wine, dry martinis and stout. He has vomited onstage three times, he says. "I started drinking when I was about six," he says. "I started to have a serious drinking problem when I was about 14." O'Riordan is less forthcoming when asked whether she and Pogues producer Elvis Costello are an item. "It's not true," she says unconvincingly. [The two would eventually go on to marry -- and divorce.] What sort of guy is Costello? "He was fat," she says, munching on her tuna fish sandwich. And what kind of guy is MacGowan? "He's a lunatic," says Jem Finer. "He's just a normal guy, a regular jock." MacGowan smiles through ruined teeth and slouches on the couch like some rough beast, his hour come 'round at last. [From Cash Box magazine, March 15, 1986.] * * * The Toll at The Bitter End, NYC, February 2, 1989. By Paul Iorio Sure, the Doors were great, but they weren't exactly a funk band. With the exception of several songs, the group was noted less for its groove than for the rantings of Jim Morrison. Morrison, of course, was a Presley for comparative lit majors, a model for generations of poetically inclined singers from Jello Biafra to Richard Hell, who have wailed loudly over, and sometimes without relation to, ace back-up bands. It's not a pretty picture, I admit. The conscious mix of poetry and rock often sounds contrived. The assumptions are wrong. After all, rock itself is a jab at "high art" forms like poetry, an attempt to erase the line between high and low forms. By fusing "poetry" and "rock," one is conceding the distinction. But if in the course of rocking out, one happens to stumble into poetic language -- aka, memorable language -- that's another matter altogether. Just don't try it as a conscious concept unless you're a Morrison or a Patti Smith. I'm not reviewing the Toll's show at the Bitter End because I think the band gets away with it; in some ways they do and don't. And I'm not much interested in the band's lyrics, which traffic in Morrisoniana, only less psychotically and with an odd and disconcerting predilection for the wrongly-placed comma ("The quiet stairs, echo beneath, my weighted frame"). But Brad Circone, the vocalist, is a star. It's not his voice, which is rather unremarkable, but his antics, his barrage of physical self-abuse and adventurism that is at once startling, dangerous and possibly litigious. He is impossible to ignore, much like Iggy Pop, David Lee Roth, or an armed kidnapper. In fact, it's quite dangerous to ignore him. Circone swings his mike stand at fellow bandmates and audience members (one swipe at the press section nearly caused one or two senior level job openings at major publications), flings himself with bone-breaking force to the floor, falls back-first onto wooden chairs, jumps on tables and thumps a mike on his forehead to create percussion. The audience, many of whom must have once seen the Red Hot Chili Peppers or various hardcore bands pull such stunts, were anything but bored. Circone's bandmates chugged on with workaday, we're-used-to-this-guy looks on their faces. Meanwhile, club personnel scurried about -- I think this happened while Circone hung over the crowd by a ceiling pipe -- having insurance-anxiety attacks. But no, he wasn't finished. Circone raced to and fro, as if practicing for Giants Stadium or looking for the mechanical cherry picker, the suspension cable, the (dare we say it?) glass spider. Alas, it's only clubland, so he had to settle for intimacy. He poured hot wax from a flaming candle on his face, letting it drip and harden into stalactites. "This is the sperm of ages," he intoned, Morrison dripping from his voice. And then it dawned on me: The Doors. Would the Toll incite decency rallies nationwide? Would Circone be able to sell his poorly comma-ed lyrics to undergraduates seeking the new Lizard King? It depends on the "quality of the music," some stodge might say. Forget the music! The music was fantastic, I guess, I really don't recall; I was too busy dodging the base of the mike stand at regular intervals. It was exciting rock theatre, the music was just the soundtrack. The title of their debut album, "The Price of Progression," tells much about the meaning of their fusion of arty lyrics and rock 'n' roll. Note the word "progression." It's what they call a "flag." Conjures images of prog- rock, no? The Morrison/Hell(/Circone?) axis of poetry-rock may be the verbal equivalent of prog-rock. Prog-rock, as I remember it in high school, was a way to listen to the stereo without feeling guilty about not studying trig. After all, King Crimson's "Larks Tongues in Aspic" and Rick Wakeman's "The Six Wives of Henry VIII" somehow seemed educational, what with their pompous titles and all. Listening to them made you feel as if you had been through a tedious night reading Chaucer and Spencer. In college, prog-rockers often graduated to jazz fusion. Others were driven to prog out of personal desperation. A couple guys in my dorm, who had previously listened exclusively to J. Geils and Hall & Oates, dropped out and turned to Weather Report, which they listened to solemnly, as if it were penance or a way to finish a degree. After all, dropping out and listening to the Stones and the Stooges all day might have made them feel they were really on a slide. Because the Toll's 10-minute-plus opuses are so "significant" (that bit about "the sperm of ages"; those commas), and are about as danceable as "The End" or Jim Carroll's "City Drops Into the Night," which is to say not very, one wonders whether that famous Morrison/Hell(/Circone?) axis serves the same penance function as prog-rock. Still, revealing the possible motivations of a particular audience does not discredit the music it listens to, I think. If the Toll inadvertently expose the Door's lineage as neo-prog, then perhaps the whole genre should be reconsidered with a favorable ear, if only because pretentiousness with this much energy and vitality makes for such a good night out. [From the New York weekly newspaper Downtown, March 15, 1989.] * * * The Replacements Live at the Ritz, in New York, February 8, 1986. By Paul Iorio The Replacements are from Minneapolis, where the Mississippi River begins its long run, and though the band members may look like a bunch of regular guys, when they get beneath the spotlights, they're something like that big river under the moon in that their sound flows and roars and shines, and the applause crashes like a cresting wave. The Replacements are a force of nature, and as we all know, nature either never knows when to stop, or knows exactly when to stop. Maybe "knows" is the wrong word because these guys seem possessed by their talent, by an accidental brilliance that comes and hoes at the whim of some internal form of chaotic order. But as I said, on the surface they appear pretty regular. There's Bob Stinson, lead guitarist, looking like the older member of a teenage gang, in his shorts that expose pale, flabby and hairless legs. There's Paul Westerberg, the brains of the operation, with his heroin physique, resentful voice, and mid-Seventies arena-rock hair-do. There's shy Tommy Stinson, the bassist, who must have been all of eight or nine when the Ramones first hit. And there's Chris Mars, a teenage rock 'n' roll drum machine who looks like an actor who would be cast to play a drummer in a movie about a mid-Sixties garage band. This is what grows up around that river. They opened their Ritz show with Kiss's "I Want to Rock 'n' Roll All Night" and closed with Alice Cooper's "Eighteen." Their roots are clearly in mid-Seventies rock, and why not? Everyone has topical influences. Some artists today were influenced by the Beatles. The Beatles were influenced by Chuck Berry, Chuck Berry was influenced by the Orioles, the Orioles were influenced by regional blues, regional blues was influenced by the songs of slaves, the songs of slaves were influenced by African-provincial songs, ad infinitum. Originality is a foolish illusion; we tend to call artists "original" when we can't figure out where they drew their inspiration from. Only one question applies in pop music: does it hit you between the eyes? The Replacements do. Though they seemed more comfortable playing cover tunes, they were most electric on their originals. "Bastards of Young," "Waitress in the Sky," and (especially) "Hold My Life" (from the "Tim" album) fit right in with "Let It Be" classics like "Answering Machine" and "Unsatisfied." Like that big river coursing toward its upper reaches, the band got a bit tired near the end of the set. Most songs starting clocking in at two minutes or so. Westerberg cut short "Galveston" after only one verse. They ran out of songs. They stopped playing. [From Cash Box magazine, February 22, 1986.] ___________________________________________________________ FROM SPY MAGAZINE The Disneyfication of America By Paul Iorio Once upon a time, Spy magazine speculated about what would happen "When Disney Ran America." It imagined Michael Eisner as president of the United States, theme parks taking over cities, that sort of thing. Fictional stuff, absurdly funny at the time, too silly to take seriously. Except now, nobody's laughing. Almost every sector of America has been Disneyfied to some degree, it seems. Disneyfication has come to every multiplex cinema, where Disney flicks regularly rule, and at the highest reaches of pop music, where Michael Jackson literally lives in his own theme park. It's in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, gambling theme parks that somehow seem less real than Toon Town. It's in shopping malls, those insulated mini-kingdoms that are spawning their own fairground attractions. It's even in national defense, where the "Star Wars" strategic defense initiative stands as the Pentagon's great, unrealized hope of Disneyfying outer space. And now, finally, American history itself is about to be Disneyfied. Plans for a theme park near historic Manassas, Virginia, are expected to be approved by a county board, thanks in no small park to a stunningly expensive lobbying campaign that included the giving of Mickey Mouse neckties to lawmakers. With Manassas virtually conquered, what's next for Disney? A crucifixion wonderland in Jerusalem? A line of condoms made of flubber? How about a Disney town? Believe it or not, Disney currently plans to develop and build an actual town (projected population: 20,000) in the Florida wetlands. The town is being designed as a sort of 1950s American smalltown of white picket fences, clapboard houses and soda shoppes. The proposed community, just south of Orlando, will sport the vaguely creationist-sounding name of Celebration. It's not going to be "the kind of place where everybody has to wear mouse ears," says Leanne Hand of the West Group, which handles public relations for Celebration. (Disney wouldn't comment for this story.) So what will Celebration be like? "What I see is a 1940s Florida-type community," says Chris Colombo, superintendent of the school board of Osceola County, where the town is being built. "You're going to see houses that as a kid I can remember very clearly. You're going to see upward- mobility type individuals." The vision of Celebration, in others words, seems to look simultaneously to the past and to the future, or, rather, to a future as imagined by Disney in the past, when an old-fashioned futurism of flying cars and magic potions prevailed. Blurring the line between fantasy and reality even further, Disney appears to be applying theme-park principles to Celebration: citizenship will include free admission to Disney World and EPCOT center. Not surprisingly, the town is also spawning a -- you guessed it -- theme school. "You're going to see classes taught that are theme-oriented rather than age-oriented," says Colombo. "Can you imagine a kindergarten student holding hands with a high school student, looking at the flora and fauna?," he asks. "Are you familiar with the term 'exceptional student'? You're going to see those students mixed in with whatever's called regular students." There is also a question about the potential demographic makeup of the town. The descriptions of Celebration ("like your hometown"; "a 1940s community") combined with Disney's sometimes conservative corporate culture lead one to wonder whether there will be much ethnic diversity in town. After all, wasn't Florida racially segregated in the 1940s? Racially speaking, isn't the town likely to be, er, snow white? Again, Disney wouldn't comment on this or any other aspect of the town. But Hand assured us that "Whoever happens to get in line and buy the house first gets to own the house." Hand explained Disney's reluctance to talk to me. "If you look at [Spy magazine], you have to admit -- I'll admit it, I've read it before -- it's a satirical magazine," she says, as if revealing some unspeakable truth. After I told her that all sides would be fairly represented, she told me: "What I'm gonna try to do is get some copies of Spy, because [the powers-that-be at Disney], not being hip and not with the program, don't know much about it." Then Hand inadvertently revealed that the ultimate in Disneyfication had occurred: a county commissioner, she reported, "had his assistant call us and say, 'I have this message from some reporter and y'all handle it, 'cause it's about Celebration. Now what we need to do is tell him to call you if you want to talk to him.'" And with that, the Magic Kingdom inched closer to absolute power, showing that even the government now comments through Disney. PART TWO: PLANNING A DISNEY WEDDING. Ultimately, Disneyfication invades even the sanctity of our rituals, to the point where you can now have your wedding "themed" by Disney (as in, an "Aladdin" theme or a "Snow White" theme) and presented at Walt Disney World. (Still no word on plans to market Disney Divorces or Fairy Tale Funerals.) Since Disney reminds us to tie the knot with imagination -- even though the Disney theme park brand of imagination is conventional and banal -- I decided to find out how far the company would go to make my wedding plans come true, whether they would (in Disneyspeak) put the icing on the street of dreams. I phoned Disney's Rebecca Miller about planning my upcoming wedding to, er, Minnie. Here's a transcript of our conversation: IORIO: I'm thinking in terms of a kind of "Fantasia"-type [wedding]. MILLER: Absolutely. In fact, we have a ballroom at the Contemporary [Hotel] called the Fantasia Ballroom. The types of things we can do from a decor standpoint, as far as adapting whatever movie it may be -- certainly a Disney movie -- there's no limit. IORIO: Have you ever done a Dumbo wedding? MILLER: Never done a Dumbo wedding. I can say I've never done a Dumbo wedding but we've done "Aladdin" themes. We have done a very elaborate "Beauty and the Beast" theme wedding where we've done literally a stage show. IORIO: What about at the reception having a flying elephant in the sense of a helium-filled elephant in the reception area over the crowd? Possible? MILLER: Possible, if we have one. What we draw a lot from are existing things that have been in past parades. I don't know if we have a huge Dumbo. Doesn't mean we can't create it. However, I have no idea where to even tell you we're looking at cost-wise for that kind of thing. IORIO: Here's another one that we were thinking of, because it's a personal favorite of my fiancee's, and that is the "Snow White and the Three Stooges" movie. And don't laugh. MILLER: [laughs] IORIO: That just happens to be an old '62 movie that she likes. Now, the Three Stooges, however, aren't -- MILLER: Ours. IORIO: Aren't yours -- exactly. But is it possible to get...Manny, Moe and Shemp or whatever? MILLER: You mean actors? IORIO: Yeah. MILLER: Sure. I wouldn't see why not. That's something that our talent booking people would do, would put a call out or certainly do a talent search for people who could appropriately play those actors, if you will. With our resources being as vast as they are, I don't see that would be a problem. IORIO: In terms of Dumbo's ears, can you get those? I know you have Mickey Mouse ears. MILLER: I do not know the answer to that question. If it is an existing product, we can; when you get into copyright things and to things that are very character-oriented that way, then it's probably not something in mass quantities that we could have produced. IORIO: And here's another idea in terms of adding some realism into it. If we could get, like in a controlled container, cute mice, for example, maybe ten of them or something. I don't know how appropriate that would be at the reception. MILLER: Again, I don't know about -- I mean, we have rules and things like that. You mean, just having them sit there? IORIO: Like Mickey Mouse. I don't know, I'm trying to picture how it would even be -- MILLER: If you're talking mice, let's say from a Cinderella standpoint, what some of the Cinderella brides and grooms have done in the past is to have Minnie and Perla -- Is it Minnie? Is it Perla? -- the mice that make Cinderella's gown...We have those characters... IORIO: But in terms of real mice, though -- MILLER: Might be a little -- not saying we couldn't do it, but would they -- you -- they wouldn't run around, right? IORIO: No, not at the [reception]. They'd be contained in a -- MILLER: Cage. IORIO: A transparent container of some sort. MILLER: I could look into it. Again, some of these are requests I've not yet had, but no request is too extreme. What it takes is a little legwork on my part, to make some phone calls and to see if something like this is even available. IORIO: Okay. MILLER: There are some things like that that may become issues. Yeah, because people who want their dog to act as a maid of honor or as best man or whatever, and unfortunately those requests have to be denied because pets are not allowed. They are in the kennel location only; they're not allowed in the resort. IORIO: Why don't we wait until I get to discuss this with -- MILLER: With Minnie. IORIO: With Minnie. Let me discuss it with her and then we'll proceed. A FEW DAYS LATER, SHE GOT BACK TO ME. IORIO: The one other thing I had down was the idea of the transparent container of mice. Is that going to be prohibited? MILLER: The only thing that was kind of brought up to me was that perhaps there would most definitely be a sanitary condition -- not certainly that they'd ever be running around, but you'd have animals where you're serving food. Do you have a number [of mice] that you're thinking of? IORIO: I was thinking around ten of them in a transparent box or container [placed] near the bandstand area. [My fiancee] was thinking in terms of, if we could pin ears, Mickey Mouse ears, to actually have them be Mickey Mouse mice. Cute little mice of a certain size may not be a problem; you could get some regular paper Mickey Mouse ears, it would seem to me, and clip them in a non-injurious fashion to the actual ears of the mice. MILLER: The only concern I would have being that we were doing it is that I don't know if we would want a real mouse to be in the likeness of Mickey Mouse because we have Mickey Mouse, you know what I mean? Mickey Mouse himself can come! IORIO: So why have a fake one? MILLER: Right, why simulate it with a real mouse when you can have the genuine article there? [From Spy magazine, September 1994.] __________________________________________________________ PUBLISHED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME Salinger Turns 90 in January What the Townspeople Think About J.D. Salinger By Paul Iorio J.D. Salinger will turn 90 in January, which means he has now lived for 56 years in the tiny town of Cornish Flat, New Hampshire, in seclusion. By all accounts, he’s still as reclusive as when he was when je first moved to town on January 1, 1953, back when President Truman was still in the White House. The author moved there around 17 months after the release of his first and only full-length novel, “The Catcher in the Rye,” at a time when he was “tremendously relieved that the season for success of ‘The Catcher in The Rye’ is over,” as he told the Saturday Review magazine in 1952. Little did he know the season had just begun. The townspeople of the Cornish Flat area seem to have grown accustomed to him and usually leave him alone to live with his day to day life with his wife, a quilt and tapestry designer around half his age, in a house near a covered bridge (how fitting it's a covered bridge!) that leads to Vermont. (He moved down the road to his current Cornish house after divorcing his previous wife in 1967.) Most people in the area do not talk about him or to him. But some do. "People know who he is, yet he acts like nobody knows who he is," says Lynn Caple, who runs the nearby Plainfield General Store, where Salinger and his wife occasionally stop in to buy the New York Times and other items. "Very straight-faced guy," says Caple. "I've only seen him smile once. I've been here four years." Other neighbors, like Jerry Burt of Plainfield, have actually been to his house, which he says is at the end of a long driveway and atop a hill on hundreds of acres owned by the author. "We would go over to watch movies in his living room and have dinner with him," says Burt, who claims he hasn't seen the author since 1983. "He's got a big living room with a deck that looks out over the hills of Vermont, way up high, very private," he adds. Burt recalls one dinner party at Salinger's house twenty-some years ago at which Salinger, who is said to enjoy health food, served meatloaf. "No Julia Child," he says of Salinger's cuisine. And the conversation was rarely literary. "He talked about movies and the gardens and his children," he says. The books Salinger usually talked about were not novels but non-fiction works related to “health, being your own health provider -- and gardening." Of course, none of the guests dared to mention “Catcher.” "You'd never even think to do that if you were around him," he says. "He'd just give you a look. He's a very tall man and stern looking. You just know not to do that. He'd probably show you the door and say, 'Don't come in.'" “He never talked about his work except to say he wrote every morning faithfully,” he says. “And he said if I was ever going to be a writer, I would have to do that.” He also says Salinger has a big safe -- like a "bank safe" -- where he keeps his unpublished manuscripts. "I've seen the safe, I've looked in it. And he told me that he kept his unpublished [work] there....It's huge," says Burt. "You could have a party in there." At one get-together in the 1980s, Salinger screened Frank Capra's 1937 film "Lost Horizon," about a group of people who find a paradise called Shangrila tucked in a remote corner of the Himalayans. "He liked all those old things, those old silents, Charlie Chaplin," he says. (His description of the Salinger party almost resembles the scene in the 1950 movie “Sunset Boulevard” in which a has-been screens old movies for friends in a remote house.) Another neighbor, this one in Cornish, is much more circumspect about what she says about Salinger and takes great pains to defend him. “He has been a wonderful neighbor,” says Joan Littlefield, who lives close to him. “The minute we moved into the neighborhood, he called and gave us his unlisted number and said, ‘We’re neighbors now.’” Littlefield spontaneously defended the author against some of the allegations in the memoir by Salinger’s daughter Margaret A. Salinger, “Dream Catcher: A Memoir” (2000). That book claimed, among other things, that Salinger was involved in offbeat health and spiritual practices, such as drinking urine and Scientology. “This thing about telling him to drink his own urine or something that I heard that somebody wrote about,” said Littlefield. “...I think that if any of these reporters did some research into Ayurvedic medicine or the medicine of China or the Far East, they would probably find out that the medicine people over there recommend this sort of thing.” (Ayurvedic medicine provides alternative health treatments -- including urine drinking -- that have origins in ancient India.) Littlefield defends Salinger on smaller issues, too. “Absolutely ridiculous things have been written about him, like that they had two Doberman attack dogs,” she says. “For Pete’s sake, they had two little Italian hounds of some kind that looked like Dobermans, and they were skinny and tiny as toothpicks!” (Our requests for an interview with Salinger went unanswered. The author is famous for not granting interviews and has given only around six interviews, some of them brief and grudging, to reporters since the release of “Catcher.") Most other people in the area see Salinger only when he's out in public, if at all. “He’s great looking for his age,” says photographer and area resident Medora Hebert, who has spotted him twice. “He’s dapper, very trim.” “It was a long time before I could actually recognize him because he looked so ordinary,” says Ann Stebbens Cioffi, the daughter of the late owner of the Dartmouth Bookstore, Phoebe Storrs Stebbens. But Salinger himself has said that he thinks others don’t see him as ordinary. "I'm known as a strange, aloof kind of man," Salinger told the New York Times in 1974. And some agree with him: "He's a very strange dude," says Hanover resident Harry Nelson. Burt agrees: “He had a weird sense of humor,” he says. What emerges as much as anything is that the author is a serious book lover and serial browser who shops at places ranging from Borders Books to the Dartmouth Bookstore. “He was uninterrupted during his hour or two of browsing for books,” says a person answering the phone at Encore! Books in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, describing his own Salinger sighting. “He does come in reasonably frequently,” says someone who answered the phone at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, New Hampshire, around 20 miles north of Cornish. “He’s a pretty good customer here but doesn’t really say anything to us.” "He frequented the Dartmouth bookstore," says an employee of Borders Books Music & Cafe in West Lebanon. "I talked to people who worked over there one time; they say he wasn't very nice, wasn't the most cordial person. So I kind of keep my eye out for him here, go my own way." Adds Medora Hebert, "One of my daughter's friends was a cashier at the Dartmouth Bookstore. And they warned him, 'If J.D. Salinger comes in, don't talk to him, don't acknowledge him.'" And there have been many reports of Salinger browsing the stacks at the Dartmouth College library. “I’ve talked with people who have met him in the stacks and whatnot,” says Thomas Sleigh, an English professor at Dartmouth College. Salinger is also said to enjoy the annual Five-Colleges Book Sale at the Hanover High School gym, a springtime sale of used and antiquarian books that raises money for scholarships. In Hanover, as in Cornish, he keeps to himself. "My wife [says] Salinger always said hello to Phoebe and no one else," says Nelson, referring to Phoebe Storrs Stebbens, who was a year older than Salinger (and incidentally shares the same first name as a major character in “Catcher”). And area booksellers say Salinger’s books are displayed just as prominently as they would be if he were not a local. Then again, Salinger doesn’t have many books to display, since he’s published only three besides “Catcher,” all compilations of short stories or novellas that had been previously published, mostly in The New Yorker magazine. His last book, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction,” was released in January 1963. His previous books were the bestsellers “Franny and Zooey” (1961) and “Nine Stories” (1953). (By the way, The New Yorker magazine actually rejected "The Catcher in the Rye" when Salinger submitted it as a short story/novella that was substantially similar to the novel, according to Paul Alexander's book "Salinger: A Biography.") In 1997, he had planned to publish a fifth book, essentially a re-release of his last published work, “Hapworth 16, 1924,” which appeared in The New Yorker in June 1965. The book’s publication was ultimately scuttled. But “Catcher” eclipses everything else he’s done -- by a mile. It’s one of the most influential 20th century American novels, a coming-of-age odyssey about high school student Holden Caulfield, who wanders around New York after being kicked out of prep school. And it's arguably the first novel to convincingly capture the voice of the modern, alienated, American teenager. "Catcher" was successful in its initial run but not nearly as successful as it would become by the end of the 1950s, when it started to turn into a freakish cult phenomenon. To date, it has sold more than 60 million copies worldwide and continues to sell hundreds of thousands more each year. Over the decades, the book has appealed to a wide range of readers that even includes certified wackos (John Lennon’s killer had a copy on him when he was captured). So it’s not surprising that Salinger has had to fend off obsessive fans even at his private Shangrila of Cornish Flat, which has a population of under 2,000. “People approach him a lot,” says Burt. “And they stole clothes off his clothesline. They stole his socks, underwear, t-shirts. And they’d come up on his deck. It’s a huge picture window that goes across the front of the house looking out to Vermont...And he said he’d get up and open the drapes and people would be standing there looking in. It really pissed him off.” And there was also a much publicized scuffle outside the Purity Supreme grocery store (which he used to jokingly call “the Puberty Supreme,” according to two biographies) in 1988, in which Salinger reportedly mixed it up with a couple photographers who tried to take his picture. But for the most part, people in the area don’t bother him. “People in Cornish are quite protective of him,” says Cioffi. “I can’t think of anyone who will tell you a word about Salinger,” says a woman who answered the phone at the Hannaford Supermarket in Claremont. Apparently, Cornish is the perfect place to go if you vant to be alone. “This is also a part of the country where [writer Aleksandr] Solzhenitsyn lived in his enclave -- and his kids went to public schools,” says Bob Grey of the Northshire Bookstore in faraway Manchester Center, Vermont, referring to the Nobel laureate’s former home in Cavendish, Vermont, which is around 20 miles from Cornish. “It’s the kind of place where, if you’re going to move to be left alone, it’s not a bad place to be.” [all writing and reporting by Paul Iorio; published here for the first time.] _______________________________________ THE WASHINGTON POST <a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RrPnOAiGn0I/AAAAAAAAAKw/S91IW94vipQ/s1600-h/scandoggie.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RrPnOAiGn0I/AAAAAAAAAKw/S91IW94vipQ/s400/scandoggie.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5094669831333388098" /></a> Published by The Washington Post (March 24, 2002), with one of my photos seen here (of an eatery in San Francisco). ___________________________________________ PUBLISHED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME Woody Allen Interview (Exclusive One-on-One Conducted December 3, 1999, in Beverly Hills) By Paul Iorio QUESTION: A LOT OF ACTORS SAY THAT YOU TEND TO GIVE GENERAL DIRECTION [ON THE SET]...IS THAT WHAT YOU DO TO ELICIT PERFORMANCES? ALLEN: Yes, sometimes I don't talk to them at all. If they have a question, of course, I answer it. But I don't tell them anything. I give them the script or their part of the script and they read it and if they agree to do the movie, I assume they understand their character, what they're getting into. And then they show up on the set and very often they do it and they do it beautifully. Maybe once or twice I have to correct them. But usually I don't say anything to them unless they're doing it wrong. Or if they're very far from what I wanted. But their instincts are good. If you hire Sean Penn or Dianne Wiest or Hugh Grant or Michael Caine, you don't want to mess them up. They're great and they do what they do. So I rarely speak to them. And very often in direction, I'll say, faster, louder, do less -- that's one of my big directions -- or I'll say to them, "Look you have to come home into the apartment and she's cooking dinner and you have to tell her you're leaving her for another woman or something and you have to go from making dinner to getting a gun to shoot her. And you make it happen. I don't know how to tell you to make it happen. You just have to convince me and make it happen." And they do. They make it happen. The actor is a very, very strong tool to have and you don't have to burden them with a lot of talk and conversation. [WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE BEEN] A JAZZ MUSICIAN OR A MOVIE MAKER? ALLEN: I would've hands down been a jazz musician. Because there's no art form that I could conceive of that would be more pleasurable to be good at, to have a gift in, than music. The response is so direct. I'm in a much more cerebral art form. Automatically I've got to sit in a room and think and plot characters and analyze their personalities and make sure things work out...But a musician is gifted; he just kind of picks the horn up and plays or sits at the piano and plays. You can be completely illiterate and the emotion is so -- When you see these kids at a rock concert, there're ten thousand kids out there with their shirts off, the emotion is so -- You'll never get that [at] a play of Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee or Eugene O'Neill or Arthur Miller. You will never get that kind of response. You get a certain kind of response. Or a film by Bergman or Fellini or Kurosawa or Truffaut or von Stroheim. But music, it knocks you out instantly. It's such a delight. If I could've had Bud Powell's talent, I would've been very very happy with my life. WOULD YOU HAVE RATHER BEEN A FILM MAKER IN THE SWING ERA OR TODAY? ALLEN: No, no, today is better. Because if you were not a foreign film maker in those years, you were strapped into the studio system of film making. And there was really no personal expression at all. You had to fight and fight and fight. And I know they refer to that as the golden age of movies but really when you think of it in the United States, it was golden in that there were so many movies made. The biggest thing in America was film. But all those films, those thousands and thousands and thousands of films, there were really very few good ones. Now you may say, "Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Orson Welles." But if you add them all together -- all these terrific film makers and their work, and each one had to fight so hard to make a good film -- and you add them all together, they're still a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of films that were made. IF YOU WERE TO NAME YOUR FIVE FAVORITE [ALLEN] FILMS, WHAT WOULD THEY BE? DO YOU AGREE WITH THE CONSENSUS THAT "ANNIE HALL" AND "MANHATTAN" ARE YOUR TWO BEST FILMS? ALLEN: No, not at all. They're my two most middle class successful films. They massage the prejudices of the middle class. And so they're popular and people like them. But "Husbands and Wives" is much better than both of those films. "Zelig" is a better film. I prefer "Bullets Over Broadway," maybe even "Manhattan Murder Mystery." "Annie Hall" was just a likable trifle that people liked at the time and "Manhattan" as well. But they're not nearly as good as some other films. From my point of view, they may be more popular but you can't equate the popularity of a film with the quality of the film. Very often your most popular thing is not your best piece of work. BUT ANDREW SARRIS MIGHT SAY THAT "MANHATTAN" IS YOUR BEST. VINCENT CANBY WOULD PROBABLY SAY "ANNIE HALL" AND "MANHATTAN" -- ALLEN: They might say that. I don't know if they would say that. I mean, they might. Certainly Vincent Canby has reviewed other films of mine as well or better than ["Annie Hall"], he was more enthusiastic about other films. So I don't really know. There were a lot of people who went crazy over "Bullets Over Broadway" when I put it out. It got some of the best response I ever had. But in terms of popularity, you're always going to be more popular doing a nice contemporary film about relationships that people can identify with. And films that are fun but not too challenging. BUT YOU MUST WATCH THEM OCCASIONALLY -- ALLEN: No, no, I've never seen any film of mine after it came out. I made "Take the Money" first in 1968, I've never seen it again. Nor have I ever seen "Annie Hall" again or any film of mine. Once I put it put, I just don't ever want to see it again. Because I know I would be sitting there, thinking, oh if I could only do that over. If I could only get the money and call in all the prints and do that over. DO YOU REGRET HAVING MADE A MOVIE? ALLEN: I don't regret having made them. I think some have come out better than others. There are two specific points of view: mine and the audience or slash critics, the public. There are films that I've made that are considered a great success because I had an idea and I wrote it and I shot it and I realized my vision and then nobody liked it. SUCH AS? ALLEN: "Stardust Memories," for example, was a film of mine, a very unpopular film that to me just realized my vision perfectly. On the other hand, I've had the opposite come true where I've made a film like "Hannah and Her Sisters" that was wildly popular, for me, and I was very disappointed in it when I was finished, only disappointed in that I had a certain vision that I wrote. HOW CAN THAT BE? EVERYBODY LOVED "HANNAH." ALLEN: Right, but I had a different thing in mind. It's a different animal for the public than it is for me. I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, oh god, I wanted to do this and I wanted to do this, I can't do it, I've got to compromise and I've got to change that character and that's not how her story can end and this isn't working. And when it was finished, I put it together as best I can and put it out and it was very successful, very entertaining to people. But for me personally, if they knew what I set out to do, they would say, "Oh, I see why you have failed, because if this is what you wanted to do, this is not it." WHAT WERE YOU TRYING TO DO? ALLEN: There were a number of things in the characters that I was trying to do, and the picture ended too neatly for me. I wanted to make it much more that Michael Caine was back with Mia but going through the motions. I mean back because Barbara Hershey had married someone else and he's still completely in love with her. And he was just sort of back with his wife now, like a man who has some extramarital fling with some woman and he's crazy about her but he can't seem to bring himself to leave his wife...And he gets along with his wife, it's a partnership, but it's doesn't have the same [feeling]. And I couldn't get that feeling into it. I got a more of a cop-out feeling into it at the end where he was sort of back with Mia, more contented, less anxiety ridden. And this for me was a big negative. Whereas in "Purple Rose of Cairo," I got it exactly where I wanted it. In fact, the studio called me, it was United Artists, and they said, "This is a wonderful picture. Do you have to have that ending on it?" And I said, "The only reason I did the picture was so I could have that ending on it." I don't know if you remember or not, but the ending was that Mia was forced to choose between the real guy or the guy from the screen. And she chose the real guy. Because you can't choose the fantasy in life because that way lies madness. So she chose reality. And the guy crushed her. The guy dumped her and went off. Because you're forced to choose reality and reality so often hurts you. But they would have liked her -- like at the end of "Splash" when he married the mermaid -- to go off with the screen figure or to go back into the screen or to do something where the audience went out with a happy feeling. But that was a picture that I just felt that I landed right on the dime. And to me, that was maybe my most perfect picture. "CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS" IS SOMETHING THAT COULD'VE HAD A LOT OF ALTERNATE ENDINGS. ALLEN: But that was the ending that I wanted. That he hires someone to kill the person and gets away with it and has no sense of remorse about it. And is completely fine. He has a wife and family. Because when I made that picture, my intellectual concept to begin the picture was that there is no justice in the world, no god, no justice in the world, and that if we don't police ourselves, if we don't have a conscience, then nobody is going to police us. So one person could commit a murder and be torn up by it completely...And another guy could commit a murder and -- if he gets caught, he gets caught and too bad for him. But if he doesn't get caught, he commits the murder and he's fine, he's enjoying his life. I mean, the world's full of people out there that have done the most unscrupulous things, including murder, and live the most wonderful lives. And there's no god to punish them, if they don't have a moral sense themselves. So the movie ended the way I wanted: I wanted Martin Landau to have eliminated this woman who was bothering him by having her killed. And having a perfectly good life with his family, and if it doesn't bother him, it's not going to bother anyone if he's not caught. BUT YOU HINT AT THE FACT THAT IT CHANGES THE CHEMISTRY OF A PERSON WHEN THAT HAPPENS. IN OTHER WORDS, HOW CAN HE CONTINUE TO LIVE THAT FAMILY LIFE -- ALLEN: But he does. He's there with his wife and daughter at the wedding and he's absolutely fine. He's aware of what he's done in the story. But he's absolutely fine. And he's living in a nice house, with a beautiful wife and a nice daughter. And the other story, the subplot about me, Mia and Alan Alda: the fact that I had wonderful intentions all the time doesn't mean a thing in life. Alan Alda had the more important thing: he was a success. And even though he was a jerk, he was successful. And people pay off on success. They don't care about your good intentions. Now, you can say that's a personal thing, for me as a film maker, and it is. And it also operates for everybody else in life. The audience does not want to hear what wonderful intentions I had with a film. Is the film good or bad? If it's good, they like it. If the next guy's got a good film, they like his film. They don't care what your intentions are, that you wanted to do something great. And they didn't care about my intentions as the character in that film. They liked Alan Alda because he was successful and exciting, even though he aimed low. YOU MENTIONED EARLIER "BULLETS OVER BROADWAY." WHY HAVEN'T YOU YET WRITTEN ANOTHER FILM WITH DOUGLAS MCGRATH, SINCE THAT ONE TURNED OUT SO WELL? ALLEN: I don't usually collaborate. The only reason I did it that time, Doug was a good social friend of mine, as Marshall Brickman was a social friend and Mickey Rose, who I went to school with. I write by myself most of the time because I enjoy it. Then after a number of pictures, it gets lonely always writing by yourself, so just to break the mold I'll call somebody up. And usually it's a friend, and [I'll] say, "You want to work on a picture" and they'll say, "Sure." And the experience of writing, just for a change, is not quite so lonely. Because when I do that for four or five pictures in a row, it means I've been doing it for four or five years. That's the only reason. Some time again, I'll call somebody, either Doug or Marshall Brickman, and say, "Want to work on a picture?," and usually they do want to do, because we have fun anyhow, so why not? OF THE SEVEN PICTURES THAT YOU CO-WROTE, WHAT WERE THE MAJOR PARTS THAT YOU DIDN'T WRITE? FOR EXAMPLE, "BULLETS OVER BROADWAY": WHAT DIDN'T YOU WRITE THERE? IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE THAT YOU DIDN'T WRITE ANY OF IT. ALLEN: That's what a collaboration is. When I collaborate with someone, we sit in a room like this and we talk and talk and talk about characters and ideas and where things should go. Then when it comes time to actually write the script I go in a room by myself and actually write the thing because I've gotta say it or I've gotta direct it. They can then go home, they don't have any more obligation. I want it the way I want it at that point. So it always feels like me, because I'm the one always doing the writing. But the formulation of the picture in a collaboration is done by two people. So, many ideas I might not think of, were it not for the other person. You know, you can never trace the origin of something. I'll be siting with Doug or Marshall and he'll, say, "Pitch a funny idea about pickpocketing." And then I'll say, "I saw a movie the other day on television and there was a pickpocket in it and there was a great car chase where the car burst into flames." And then we write a joke about a car bursting into flame. I never would've thought of that movie, and you can't trace it back. WITH "ANNIE HALL," WERE THERE ANY PARTS THAT MARSHALL BRICKMAN SOLELY WROTE? ALLEN: Yes, Marshall Brickman and I collaborated on the whole thing. We both did it together. That picture wouldn't exist without him. We collaborated on every idea about Alvy and Annie and how it goes and where it goes. All the hard work is that. To me it's easy to write a script. I can usually can write it in, like, two weeks time. Because all the hard work is done before. All the hard work is done, where Marshall or Doug and I will walk the streets or sit in my living room and say, "What about this?" that doesn't lead any place." "What about this?" Then we're silent for fifteen minutes. And somebody says, "Maybe we should rethink this and start over. Maybe he shouldn't be a banker. Maybe he should be a jockey." That's the tedious stuff. When it's all worked out, then I can get in a room and write it in two week's time. It's nothing. YOU WENT BACK TO MARSHALL BRICKMAN WITH "MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY." IT CAME RIGHT AFTER THE SPLIT WITH MIA FARROW. WAS THAT A CONSCIOUS ATTEMPT TO DO [A LIGHTER COMEDY]? ALLEN: No, not at all. There's no calculation in the sequence of movies for me... As a matter of fact, "Manhattan Murder Mystery" was written long before that. It was going to be me and Mia, she was going to be the girl in it. And then when all that happened, she dropped out and Diane [Keaton] came in and took over. But that was not even written after that. That was written during our best time. YOU DID A DOZEN FILMS WITH MIA FARROW. HOW DO YOU NOW ASSESS THE FILMS YOU MADE WITH HER? ALLEN: One thing about Mia, she's a very underrated actress. She's a wonderful actress, she's got a very good range. She can play comedy. She can play serious things. And she's a very convincing actress. I did some of my best movies with her, like "Purple Rose" and "Zelig." No, I feel I was very fortunate professionally in my lifetime to have had a professional relationship with Diane Keaton and Mia. Because they both gave me great work. There was a tendency, I feel, for the public to take Mia for granted and figure, well, she was from Hollywood. But she was a much much more complex interesting actress than she has been given credit for. When she did "Broadway Danny Rose" with me, I thought she was just wonderful. And knowing her as well as I knew her, I was able to tap her capabilities...If I just saw her on the street, I wouldn't have known she could ever do "Broadway Danny Rose." She's a wonderful actress. [Most of this interview had never been published until now; a small part of it appeared in my San Francisco Chronicle story on Dec. 19, 1999.] _________________________________________________________ CASH BOX MAGAZINE Ray Davies on The Kinks (Interview Conducted in December 1986 on West 72nd St. in Manhattan) By Paul Iorio IORIO: WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE STRONGEST PERIOD OF YOUR ENTIRE CAREER? "MUSWELL HILLBILLIES"? DAVIES: "Muswell Hillbillies" was a really strong album in the sense that it worked as an album and yet it worked as an overall concept. And it said a lot about a period in time, about a place where I did grow up, and it worked as a piece of sociology as well as an album. It had some great songs on it. I would say "Muswell Hillbillies" is a good album. WAS THAT ALBUM REALLY SPARKED BY YOUR FAMILY BEING MOVED OUT OF CALEDONIAN [IN A FORCED RELOCATION] -- DAVIES: It was generations before me. The book you read was kind of not accurate. It was generations before me. What it was about was the movement from the inner cities to the suburbs. That's what's apparently happening a lot in America in towns where industry brings people into cities. Cities are built for industry, and then there's no need for the industry anymore and there's no need for the people. WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST TO SOMEONE CAUGHT IN A DEAD END LIKE THAT? HOW DID YOU GET OUT? DAVIES: Music. That's how a lot of people still do....It's music or nothing now though. When I started, it was music or the factory. Now it's music or nothing. YOU'VE GOT A SONG "WORKING AT THE FACTORY"...SAYING THAT MUSIC SAVED YOU FROM THE FACTORY YET...[THE MUSIC BUSINESS] IS SORT OF LIKE THE FACTORY ITSELF. DAVIES: That's more like my rebelliousness against the industry that I've been involved in...All bands, when they start, they...make a tape and think it's great. And to them, rock 'n' roll is freedom. It certainly was for me and a lot of people like me...It was freedom from the sort of factory I was involved in -- not literally a factory. I was a college student and I saw a dead end. It's freedom from any dead end; the factory is a metaphor for a dead end. Soon [The Kinks] became part of what has become an industry now, and people depend on sales figures and reports from stores and all that. It just starts off with an innocent piece of tape, with the band trying to make music, and it gets taken out of our hands. I find myself in a sense being in an industry that's out of my control, and being dictated to by an industry. And that's the subjective meaning behind the song. So you trade one factory for another. DO YOU SEE ANY REALISTIC SCENARIOS FOR A REALLY FULFILLING ADULT LIFE? I MEAN, THERE'S THE FACTORY AND THEN THERE'S THE FACTORY: IS THAT WHAT YOU'RE SAYING? DAVIES: The only compromise is to be a starving artist but that's not realistic to me....I don't like the business side of it but I have to live with it and tolerate it because it's a necessary evil.....Fortunately, the Kinks have never been a spendthrift band....They don't have their Porsche cars and in a sense they're a working class band. And that's good. HOW ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR BROTHER. HOW MUCH OF THAT IS STAGED AND HOW MUCH IS FOR REAL IN TERMS OF FIGHTS ONSTAGE? DAVIES: I don't think you can stage a relationship like that. I'm not that sort of person -- and I don't think Dave [Davies] is -- who can capitalize on it to the extent that we will manufacture a rift between us or an argument or an explosion at a gig. I'd rather that there wasn't a volatile relationship but there is....If I could manufacture it, I'd manufacture it the other way and play it down. Sometimes...it makes the music very exciting. Other times, it just dissipates what I'm trying to do. IF DAVE WERE NOT AROUND, DO YOU THINK THE TENSION THAT CREATES YOUR SONGS WOULD MAYBE DISSIPATE? DAVIES: I think that a relationship, if it's very intense, a compassionate relationship, will inspire creativity. I know a writer, he's a scriptwriter, who was married to this woman, and they used to fight all the time. Real violent quarrels. But his writing was great. Unfortunately, she died of cancer, and he remarried, and now he's got a very safe home with a wife who doesn't speak, and his work is very dull. IS THERE ONE PARTICULAR ALBUM THAT YOU WISH YOU HADN'T RECORDED? DAVIES: Yeah, there's a couple that on them there's a few really good songs. Ummm. [pause] I'm sure there is. Yeah, "Preservation." "ACT 2"? DAVIES: Yeah, the double album. Not because I don't like it but because now is the time to do it. I wasted all my [theatrical] ideas then... [HAVE] YOU EVER CUT VOCALS DRUNK OR IS THAT [BOOZINESS] JUST PART OF THE AMBIENCE YOU WANT TO GET ACROSS? DAVIES: No, I have done vocals drunk. I have done vocals in various states, emotional states. Sometimes you just go in there like first thing in the morning, and it's the best vocal -- first take, when you're learning it. I do the best vocal when I...sit down and sing it for the first time. ...DO YOU WRITE IN A STUDIO OR AT HOME, ON GUITAR, WITH A BAND -- DAVIES: I'm one of those people who writes when I have to. But I make notes all the time. I have no one place where I write because I do travel a lot. I love traveling. I think I write best in transit. I'm not one of those people who says, "I'm taking January off and I'm going to write," and I go away to an island and come up with all these great songs. Can't do it. And I'm not a very technical guy. I've got one of those four-track machines but don't know how to work it. THERE'S ONE STORY I READ WHERE YOU WOKE UP ONE MORNING [IN 1968] WITH THE LYRIC OF "WATERLOO SUNSET." IS THAT HOW IT HAPPENED? DAVIES: Yeah. [Nods head.] 'Cause I'm one of those writers that carries ideas through, thinks of lines and writes them down and doesn't resolve it, and when they wake up, they've got it. I did the last verse of "Lost and Found" that way. Woke up and there it was...It's not that it's inspiration from a heavenly body. It's just that I finally worked it out. I READ WHERE, FOR THE INTRO OF "LOLA," YOU SAID YOU NEEDED A GRABBY BEGINNING LIKE YOU HAD WITH "YOU REALLY GOT ME." DAVIES: Yeah, that's right. We had this twinkly beginning that sounded like Donovan, some folky beginning, and I wanted power chords on it, but it was kind of a tough song for that. I thought they were great chords on the front, and I built them up with the National Ovation guitar...I bought one of those for about a hundred dollars and used the Martin guitar and just double tracked those and gave it those powerful sounds. And it's the intro that makes it. The first thing I learned from making records is make the first ten seconds as great as possible. If you can hold their interest for thirty seconds or a minute, you've got a hit. But that was a long time ago. What you've got to do now is bore people with a repetitive rhythm pattern for a couple of minutes. Then they're hypnotized into believing it's great...Giorgio Moroder did a whole album with the same rhythm all the way through. Did you know that? NO, BUT THE REPETITION IS RIGHT. YOU DID DO [THE DISCO SONG] "SUPERMAN" THOUGH. DAVIES: That was half a send up.... ....Ike Turner came to our studio once and he said, When everybody thinks of four beats to a bar, he thinks of two. So instead of going one-two-three-four, he goes one [pause] two. So you are going slower, it's more solid. [pause] What's happened to Ike Turner? HE RECENTLY DID A PRESS CONFERENCE WHERE HE EXPLAINED, "NO, HE DIDN'T BEAT HIS WIFE." DAVIES: He should do an album called "Beat The Wife." [Posing melodramatically, he savagely mocks Ike Turner, singing:] "Yeahhh, beat the wife." HE DID COME OUT OF A REHAB CENTER BUT HE COULD -- DAVIES: [joking] Call it "Beat the Wife" and have tracks on it like [crooning] "I Didn't Mean It, Baby." [pauses] That's sad. I don't think [Tina Turner] would've happened without him. But she just outgrew him. I find her really inspiring.... YOU WERE QUOTED IN ONE BOOK AS SAYING THAT, FROM '73 TO '76 -- THAT WHOLE PERIOD OF CONCEPT ALBUMS -- YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO WRITE THOSE THINGS. DAVIES: I should have taken a sabbatical and had about two or three years off and done something else. But the problem with them was "Preservation" would have been a hit show in a theatre -- I'm convinced -- if we'd been able to tour it as long as theatre companies do tours and work it as long. Sometimes it takes a year for a show to develop. But we had to come up with another album. So I found it difficult to function in the music industry and do the artistic things I wanted to do. Theatre and the rock industry do not actually gel time- wise. WHAT EXACTLY WAS GOING ON IN YOUR LIFE DURING THAT THEATRICAL PERIOD? DAVIES: Things were going alright. But I think I had trouble communicating what I wanted to do with the record company. I went to them [in '74] and said, "I really think we should make visual albums." This was RCA Records. And they said, "We don't see that happening." And they couldn't find a place for me. You've got to fit in a format because if you don't, you become quirky, in the back bin at the record shop. The quacky bin. Or the loony bins. There's a loony bin shop for bands like us. HOW MUCH DID THE PUNKS SPUR YOU TO DO "MISFITS"? DAVIES: It definitely inspired me to write "Misfits" because if you wrote anything at all poetic in 1977 or '78, you were crucified. So I went out and wrote a poetic song. WHAT REALLY HAPPENED THAT MADE IT SO YOU COULDN'T TOUR [IN THE U.S.] FOR FOUR YEARS IN THE SIXTIES? DAVIES: Managers at the time had a disagreement with a promoter that we didn't really know about. I was about eighteen, nineteen, it was my first time in America. I remember the first time I came to New York; I stayed in my hotel room. I was too scared to go out. But there was something we didn't know about...and we got banned. And it was only lifted after we apologized for something we didn't do. Then we came back and had to start from scratch. Because though we [had] had hits, people weren't in tune with what we were doing, because the first time we came here we had all those heavy rock 'n' roll hits....As we couldn't come here for four years, there was a big hole in our career. BUT HERE YOU WERE WRITING YOUR BEST SONGS [DURING THE BAN]... DAVIES: Well, I felt anger. It was just a real frustrating time [when] we couldn't get back. That's why I moved here in '78 and decided to give it a crack here [in New York]. HOW HAVE YOU MANAGED TO MAINTAIN A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF INNOCENCE AFTER ALL YOU'VE BEEN THROUGH? DAVIES: First lesson I learned is to make people laugh at something, because if you can be witty, it's the biggest weapon ever. That's why I write sort of tongue in cheek lyrics. There's no point in trying to blow people away with your guitar, and power chords don't do anything except give you a headache. But if you can hit someone with wit and a good lyric, it's better. A lot of my songs were inspired by...bad situations. So come out laughing! [From Cash Box magazine, February 14, 1987.] <a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/Rraf6AiGoBI/AAAAAAAAAMY/9zazr-qXIpo/s1600-h/scankinks.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/Rraf6AiGoBI/AAAAAAAAAMY/9zazr-qXIpo/s400/scankinks.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5095435847340564498" /></a> I've been a Kinks expert for as long as I can remember; I saw my first Kinks show as a teenager, on May 8, 1977 (see ticket stub), and snapped this photo of the concert (above); and I've attended and reviewed numerous other shows by the band since then. ____________________________________________________ FROM THE WASHINGTON POST Exploring Kurt Cobain's Seattle By Paul Iorio More than eight years after his suicide, Kurt Cobain's stature and influence as a pop icon have only grown. Today, Cobain and his band are enjoying something of a revival, what with the recent release of new Nirvana albums and the publication of Cobain's journals. And in Seattle, Cobain's last hometown, mourners still gather in the park next to his former house to light candles and write graffiti. That house and other places related to Cobain have made Seattle a sort of grunge Liverpool, drawing tourists who might not otherwise visit the city. Never mind that Cobain started his short life in Aberdeen, Washington, more than a hundred miles south of Seattle in the lumber belt. The important thing is he thrived and died in Seattle, where he also drank too much, played too loud, got too famous, bleached his works, blew his cookies and -- oh, yes -- performed and recorded some of the most inspired and influential rock 'n' roll of his generation. For those interested in where Cobain rose and fell so memorably, here are the main Seattle landmarks. A. Cobain's House (171 Lake Washington Blvd. E) This is the million dollar-plus mansion in a pricey part of the Madrona district where Cobain shot and killed himself on April 5, 1994 (the deed was actually done in an adjacent greenhouse that has since been torn down). Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love (who no longer lives there), moved into the 100-year-old house, for which they paid $7,000 a month, in January '94, and the neighbors included Peter Buck of R.E.M. and Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, according to Charles M. Cross's book "Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain." The three-story house is not actually on Lake Washington but across the street from houses that are (it's the same lake on which Microsoft mogul Bill Gates lives, in a house about 50 times more expensive than Cobain's). On that property, on the morning of April 5th, after smoking a cigarette, sipping root beer and injecting an apparently lethal dose of heroin, Cobain put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, according to the Cross book. Though he died in a city full of Nirvana fans, Cobain's body wasn't found for three days -- and only then by a stranger, an electrician who had come to work on the house. A great way to see the neighborhood is to walk south from Cobain's place along the boulevard, where there are terrific views of the lake and (on a clear day) of distant Mt. Ranier and other snowcapped peaks of the Cascade range. B. Viretta Park (next to Cobain's house) The park is the closest thing there is to a Cobain gravesite, which is how mourners seem to treat it (though Cobain was cremated and his ashes scattered in locations elsewhere). Viretta's two benches are fascinating unofficial memorials, covered with heartfelt graffiti written mostly in the manner of a high school yearbook tribute or a get-well message for a friend's cast. Messages range from the irreverent ("Death with violence -- excitement right here") to the poignant ("I wish I could've meet [sic] you") to the intimate ("Alysia and Egan love you"), and there are a few anti-Courtney missives. The scrawlings continue on the railing of the stairway that leads to the top of "Kurt's Park" (as one fan calls it), where the best views of the house are. C. Crocodile Cafe (a club, restaurant and bar at 2200 Second Ave.) The Crocodile, owned by the wife of rocker Peter Buck, has a reputation as the CBGBs of grunge, though in reality no single Seattle club qualifies as the launching pad for that movement. The Croc wasn't even around for the first wave of grunge, but it was right in the path when the tidal wave hit. That tidal wave was the release of Nirvana's "Nevermind," which hit stores around five months after the Croc opened its doors in April '91. (The tsunami also included hits by Seattle bands Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, all released in the same three-month period as "Nevermind.") Still, Nirvana never appeared here in the lean years and in fact played the club only once, as an unannounced opening act for Mudhoney on October 4, 1992. For Nirvana's concert at the club, the Crocodile was given several pages of detailed instructions ("touring specifications") by an engineer acting on the band's behalf. Among the directions (leaked exclusively to me): "Ultra- expensive mikes have no place on a Nirvana stage. Have spares ready." Today, the Croc, a nearly 500-seater in the somewhat artsy Belltown neighborhood, still features top alternative acts like the Knitters and Mark Eitzel, with occasional shows by major bands (R.E.M. played the club last year, and Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who still lives in the area, shows up occasionally). D and E. Sub Pop Records (Original location at 1932 First Ave.; currently at 2514 Fourth Ave. between Vine and Wall streets.) Sub Pop is the independent record label that recorded some of the first releases by grunge bands like Soundgarden, Mudhoney and Nirvana. Its first Nirvana offering was the '88 single "Love Buzz" (the band's version of a Shocking Blue song), followed in '89 by the album "Bleach." The indie issued a few more Nirvana singles before major label DGC signed the band in January 1991, according to Rolling Stone magazine. (Nirvana's first Sub Pop recording contract, dated January 1, 1989, is on display at the Experience Music Project.) Anyone who wants a glimpse of the urban landscape of the early grunge period should visit the company's original digs on First Ave., from which you can see in a single glance the Moore Theater (where the band gave key early shows) and the former site of the Vogue (where Nirvana first performed in Seattle). Its current offices have marvelous window displays featuring vintage pictures and posters from past and present Sub Pop and northwest acts like Nirvana, Beat Happening and Sunny Real Estate. (There's also a sign for the Sub Pop Mega Mart, a label retail shop that has been closed for over a year.) F. Experience Music Project (in the Seattle center, the 72-acre site of the Space needle and other landmarks.) The Experience Music Project (EMP), a rock-and-roll museum founded by billionaire entrepreneur Paul Allen and designed by Frank Gehry, has a grunge exhibit that includes lyrics to early Cobain songs (including "Downer"), one of Cobain's guitars, posters for the band's early shows and other memorabilia. To the west of the EMP, at the current site of the International Fountain, is another Nirvana-related place: the park where the public memorial for the rocker was held on April 10, 1994. The outdoor vigil attracted an estimated 5,000 mourners and is perhaps best remembered for Love's taped reading of (and commentary on) Cobain's suicide note. Footage of the event can be seen in the 1996 documentary "Hype!" G. The OK Hotel Cafe (212 Alaskan Way S) The club, now shut down due to the damage caused by last year's 6.8 earthquake, is where Nirvana first publicly performed their seismic mega-hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The three-band show, on April 17, 1991, was a benefit for a Cobain friend who was in trouble over traffic tickets; Nirvana began its set with cover songs before ripping into "Teen Spirit," according to "Heavier Than Heaven." "I didn't know what they were playing, but I knew it was amazing," a DGC promotion representative is quoted as saying in the book. "I remember jumping up and down and asking everybody next to me, 'What is this song?'" (Nirvana's performance of it in "Hype!" is said to be from this OK show.) The club, which had been open since the mid-Eighties, is also famous as one of the settings for Cameron Crowe's 1992 film "Singles." The brick building is now boarded-up and braced, and its sign hangs in the EMP. Visiting the place is a great way to see both Pioneer Square (an important location in Nirvana history) and the effects of the temblor. H. The Central Tavern (207 First Ave.) Just as Pioneer Square calls itself the place "where Seattle begins," so the Central is the place where Nirvana began -- or at least the spot where Nirvana was first booked to perform in Seattle. Central employees say the date of the band's first booking was April 17, 1988, a week before Nirvana's first real performance in Seattle, at the Vogue (though someone else who was there remembers it as an August show). All agree the gig was notable for the fact that nobody showed up to listen. According to Jim Anderson, who did sound for the show, Kurt & Co. arrived before any of the other three scheduled bands. But the only people in attendance were Anderson, a bartender and a doorman, so Nirvana refused to perform. "[A member of Nirvana said], 'We're not going to play for nobody,' and they packed up their stuff and walked off stage," says Anderson. The Central was also the site of another Nirvana gig -- on June 4, 1988 -- that finally convinced Sub Pop execs to sign the band, according to the Cross book. The Central, around a block from the site of the OK Hotel, was an early venue for grunge bands, but changed its focus to the blues in the Nineties before recently reverting to its rock roots. (A Seventies sign for the club -- reading "The Central Tavern and Cafe: Seattle's Only Second Class Tavern" -- is on display at the EMP.) I and J. The Vogue (original location at 2018 First Ave.; currently at 1516 11th Ave.) Sources say the first Nirvana performance in Seattle happened here on April 24, 1988, back when the club was a couple doors down from Sup Pop. Performing for a Sub Pop showcase, Nirvana (featuring Dave Foster on drums), played 14 songs and sounded to some like Cheap Trick, according to the Cross book. Though only a handful of people attended, Cobain was so nervous that he vomited in the parking lot next to the Vogue before the show, writes Cross. Cobain himself describes the evening in a letter never sent to a friend (and quoted in the Cross book): "And so after the set, a [Sub Pop executive] excitedly shakes out hands and says, 'Wow, good job, let's do a record,' then flashes of cameras go off and the girl from [fanzine] Backlash says, 'Gee, can we do an interview?' Yeah, sure, why not," writes Cobain. Today, the Vogue is in the Capitol Hill neighborhood and presents dance, techno and rock shows. Its original building in Belltown is a clothing store/hair salon called Vain that's close to many shops and eateries (nearby is the Virginia Inn restaurant, with outdoor seating overlooking the waterfront). K. Moore Theater (1932 Second Ave.) The Moore, which claims to be Seattle's "oldest remaining theater," is the next big step up for alternative bands graduating from clubs like the Crocodile to theaters like this one that seat around 1,500. Nirvana played the Moore relatively early in its career, on June 9, 1989, as a four-piece group (with Jason Everman on guitar, Chad Channing on drums, Cobain and Novoselic) opening for Mudhoney and Tad, and promoting "Bleach," according to the book "Cobain," by the editors of Rolling Stone (Little, Brown). (A poster for that show is on display at the EMP.) A year later, they were the opening act for Sonic Youth, an early and avid champion of the band. L. Re-bar (1114 Howell St.) This downtown dance/cabaret/rock venue was the site of the the release party for "Nevermind" on Sept. 13, 1991, from which the band was bounced because of unruly behavior. Today, the club's co-owner freely admits he threw the guests of honor out of Re-bar, claiming they were drunk on booze brought in from elsewhere and were throwing food, though it's unclear whether he knew who he was ejecting at the time. It's worth noting the partyers were celebrating the release of an album that the record label thought would sell only around 50,000 copies at best, according to Rolling Stone magazine; it went on to move over 10 million units, making it one of the best-selling rock records of all time. [From The Washington Post, November 10, 2002; this is the original draft I submitted to The Post in May 2002 (give or take a few lines), not the version that was edited in Nov. '02.] _______________________________________________________________ UNPUBLISHED The Unraveling of Abbie Hoffman (Caught on Tape) An interview with the legendary activist, several months before his suicide. By Paul Iorio IORIO: WELL, LET'S SEE. YOU -- HOFFMAN: I make it up as I go along. I call it verbal diarrhea...I go about 17 hours a day on five hours sleep. I can't wait to [he drifts off]. AND YOU GET PAID ONE DOLLAR A YEAR FOR THIS ENVIRONMENTAL -- HOFFMAN: I gave 'em back the dollar. Now it costs me $4,000. The [unintelligible] costs $7,000. I'm saving up to $30,000, so I can sue the U.S. Army for fraudulent ads on TV. I don't believe you become a super brain surgeon or an electronic engineer by joining the army. I think you learn how to clean toilets and kill people, see.... That's where most of my money goes. I don't think I had $11,900 net last year, according to the IRS. I don't own any property. I don't even have medical insurance. I have nothing: bonds, stocks, any of that stuff. I mean, I aint Mother Teresa; obviously, I'm having too good of a time to be her. But then again, I don't have a big sponsor like she does. WHY DID YOU TRY THIS BOOK, "STEAL THIS URINE TEST"? WHY THE SUBJECT OF URINE TESTS? HOFFMAN: I wish it had been someone else, a conservative like William Safire. I did it because I knew about this story, I knew the tests were fraudulent for three or four years. I felt they'd be laughed out of existence, which they would be if there weren't this drug hysteria. And two years ago, I knew there was a tremendous expose in a fraudulent industry. I waited for someone else to write it....And I had seven publishers who turned me down.... It's not a pro-drug book. Only television hosts call it pro-drug, because they haven't read it. I've never met a television host in America who has read a book. YOU'RE PROBABLY RIGHT -- HOFFMAN: I am right. I am. You can tell. If you're a serious writer, and someone's interviewing you about the book, you can tell within three questions whether they've read it or not. YOU BRING OUT A LOT OF INTERESTING FACTS IN THE BOOK, LIKE -- HOFFMAN: You can also tell whether they have an IQ below or above 80. And how much their haircut costs. And that's about it. That's TV, the worst drug in the country. This book tour is what's getting me really riled up about it because here's a book [that's] serious investigative journalism. And you go on [TV] following a snake charmer, and you're out to talk about one of the complex issues in the world, which is drugs. And the first question will be, "How is Amy Carter?" Or, "Are you on drugs?" Or, "Where is Jerry Rubin these days?" Or, "How does it feel to be an ex-sixties radical?" [laughs] WELL, LET'S GET DOWN TO PARTICULARS. ONE OF THE SERIOUS CHARGES [YOU MAKE] IN THE BOOK IS THAT MELANIN -- HOFFMAN: I know what you're going to say, that melanin will cross react as marijuana resin. In the book it says that that's not true...Yes, poppy seeds will cross react as opium, but you would have to eat about three bagels....Impassive inhalation of up to two weeks: if you're at a Grateful Dead concert and you don't smoke any grass, and you take the test, [he snaps his fingers] -- Bing! It'll spot you just as fast! There are internal enzymes. And then there are an unknown quantity that we don't even know about... ...People can beat the test just by using some of the chemical additives that I mentioned -- that's what the book's about, how to beat the test! You've got to fight fire with fire, the ridiculous with the ridiculous. But you've got to pee in a cup to prove you're a good American! ...In 1968, the whole world was watching the United States; today, they're all laughing. I mean, every country in the world has a drug problem, but we're the only ones with a stupid urine test. Where people watch you urinate in a cup, and that's supposed to prove that you're a good productive worker. I mean, it's all a fraud! ABC, The New York Times, The L.A. Times: don't you think they'd know better? DIDN'T IT OCCUR TO YOU THAT MAYBE IF YOU HAD WRITTEN A BOOK ABOUT YOUR SEVEN YEARS UNDERGROUND -- HOFFMAN: It would have been easier. People would've got up and said, "What drug are you on now?" This book had to be written, this is my...most important serious book. [Urine testing] is an attempt to break every union in the country, to get workers fired regardless of civil rights acts or whatever... This is crazy! This is crazy! This is the most serious invasion of our privacy in our lifetime....If the general public knew the width of these tests and how they were used as a mass surveillance device, I mean, they'd be up in arms. Sometimes the people hate the government -- they're never there when you need them. You know, they're coming in their bladder! [Hoffman stands up, picks up a box and leaves the interview without even saying goodbye.] IORIO: WELL YOU'VE GOT TO GO, I GUESS -- [Hoffman carries the box away, and stuffing falls all over the place.] "Is this any way to run a business?," he shouts angrily at no one in particular, walking away with the box. He committed suicide several months later. [Unpublished interview -- several quotes first appeared in my article on Hoffman for the East Coast Rocker newspaper. By the way, the ending of the interview is unedited and verbatim and transcribed from an audiotape that I still have.] _________________________________________________________________ FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE All About Almodovar By Paul Iorio The sexual and cultural revolution of the 1960s came to Spain very late, delayed by the oppressive regime of Francisco Franco. By the time Spain arrived at the party, in the late 1970s, the festivities were almost over and about to be displaced by the Age of AIDS. So the art films of director Pedro Almodovar were sort of like Spain's way of making up for sexual lost time. In almost every one of his films since the early Eighties, his characters have had very passionate and sometimes kinky , sex onscreen, as if HIV had never existed. His recent films, however, are more carnally conservative and emotionally richer. "All About My Mother" (1999), "The Flower of My Secret" (1995) and the gripping "Live Flesh" (1997) are more mature and less brash than earlier movies like "Tie Me Up! Tie Me down!" (1990) and "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" (1988). "All about My Mother," his thirteenth picture, is earning some of the best critical notices of his career. ["All About My Mother" would go on to win the best foreign film Oscar a few months later.] But Almodovar is reluctant to call it his best movie. "I don't think I've made the best movie of my life," he says. "Because that means the rest is just downhill. But it's true it is one of the most important movies [I've done]." "All About My Mother" stars Argentine-born actress Cecilia Roth, who plays a hospital worker whose son is hit and killed by a car; she spends most of the rest of the film trying to track down her son's long-lost father, now a transvestite living in Barcelona, to tell him the tragic news. As in almost all his films, the story (written by Almodovar) is told through sharply drawn and memorable female characters. Some critics have compared him favorably to director Ingmar Bergman with regard to his talent for creating complex and credible roles for women. The reason he understands women so well may be that he grew up -- first in rural La Mancha and then in Madrid -- with a closer relationship to his mom than to his macho dad. "It's true that I listened to the women, the neighbors and friends of my mother," he says of his upbringing, speaking through a translator. "I did pay more attention to the women than to my father's life...I refused to [identify] with the...machismo in the place I was living." "So in a natural way, I felt more interested listening to the women than in actually going to watch the men smoking and drinking," he says. "Even though the women seemed to be completely submissive to men, they actually managed to rule the house...Perhaps for that [reason], the women of my movies are so strong and autonomous." Another formative influence on his film making was, of course, the totalitarian Franco regime, which ruled until Almodovar was in his mid- twenties. Back then, the government created such fear that the director says he had recurring nightmares about the police, nightmares that stopped only when Franco died in 1975. "I had nightmares, always dreaming I was escaping from something," he says. "Always, the police were running behind me. I had [that dream] a lot of times before Franco. And when Franco died, it disappeared completely." He recalls the day-to-day impact of Franco's despotism. "If you're discovered in the street [by the police] and you don't have your identity card, it's --" He pauses and gasps a bit in horror at the thought, leaving the sentence unfinished. "We lived in an atmosphere of fear." Still, he managed to live a fairly ordinary life in those days. In his teens and twenties, he worked for Telefonica, the national telephone company, while making Super-8 shorts on the side. When Franco died and censorship was eventually lifted in the late Seventies, Spain (and Almodovar himself) came alive with intense creative activity in a cultural Renaissance known as La Movida. The director soon became the leading pop cultural figure of post-Franco Spain. Almodovar's first films were released in the early Eighties, but he didn't come to real international notice until his fourth film, "What Have I Done to Deserve This?!" His popularity exploded in 1987 with his seventh picture, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," nominated for a best foreign film Oscar. But the movies he made in the early Nineties are generally considered to be of uneven quality. In 1995 -- after quitting casual use of recreational drugs -- his career began its current resurgence, with the release of "The Flower of My Secret," "Live Flesh," and "All About My Mother." Though he's openly gay, Almodovar makes films that do not usually have gay themes (with the notable exception of the 1986 cult favorite "Law of Desire," Antonio Banderas's breakthrough as an actor). Visually, his movies put a fresh light on the details of small lives, sometimes revealing the Cubism in everyday life and making the quotidian look downright abstract. In his films, we see characters in split mirrors and split windows, through corrugated glass and rear-view reflectors, often refracted and warped. He tends to control every part of a film's production, from set design to cinematography. Sometimes he'll visit a movie location before a shoot to check out all the novel visual possibilities of a place. For example, while shooting "The Flower of My Secret," he visited the offices of a Madrid newspaper, one of the locations in the film. And he found that the glass wall of the office reflected images of people in multiples of three and four, a visual effect that became intriguing when two people were reflected simultaneously. So he shot a scene between a writer and her editor in which their reflections in the glass mix together until they look like one person -- an apt metaphor for their actual relationship. Is that Almodovar's idea of a special effect? "To me, there is no better special effect than a good line of dialogue," he says. He's also one of the few directors who actually seems to prefer to work on a low budget. "Strangely, now that I could afford to go to bigger budgets, I realize I'm much more interested in the close-ups and the medium shots, and that's the kind of film making that you don't need a big budget for...I [wouldn't want] to make a movie with a big budget. I don't need it." [From the San Francisco Chronicle, December 18, 1999; this is the original manuscript I submitted via email to the Chronicle; anyone who compares it to the published version will see exactly how lousy some of the editing was at the Chronicle back then ("arrived to the party" in the lede is just one of their brilliant edits!). _______ ____________________________________ VARIOUS PUBLICATIONS PROFILETTES Brief profiles of Barry Sonnenfeld, John Woo, Andy Partridge, Warren Zevon, Troy Garity (the first story about Garity in any publication) and David Rabe. By Paul Iorio I. Barry Sonnenfeld Enjoys Punching Will Smith Director Barry Sonnenfeld and Will Smith have terrific chemistry together professionally and personally -- perhaps too much chemistry. Onscreen, their partnership has produced "Men in Black," one of the biggest films of the Nineties. Offscreen, their idea of having fun is fist-fighting, good-natured but intense fist-fighting, the kind that can result in an emergency room visit. While shooting "Wild Wild West," for instance, their fighting had serious consequences: at one point, Sonnenfeld was knocked unconscious by Smith and, in another fight, the director literally broke his hand punching the actor. Sonnenfeld has two white pin scars on the side of his right hand to prove it. "Somehow I hit him so hard I ended up breaking my hand, my fifth metacarpal in five places. In fact, you still can see where the pins were," said Sonnenfeld in a one-on-one interview in his hotel room, showing the scars. "Will [was] trying to teach me how to box," says the director. "You know, Will's a large powerful man and I'm a Jew. So we would take turns hitting each other in the shoulder...But the thing about Will is, Will can only play one way. And that's full out. There's an on switch and an off switch. There's not a rheostat where you can dial him down forty percent." "My shoulder was completely black and blue and yellow and red and puffed up and disgusting [from his punches]," he continues. "And Will hit me and I decided this time I'm gonna really hit him back hard..." And that's when the metacarpal thing happened. At a press conference later that day, I asked Smith about their bouts, and he told the story a slightly different way, while revealing another fight they had had months before. "What happened was, we were shooting one of the fight scenes," explained Smith. "And Barry has never been in a fist fight in his life...So he sent someone out to get boxing gloves and he's saying, 'Will, I'm watching you and I swear, I think I can take you.' So he puts the boxing gloves and the headgear on. We're playing around, he's throwing punches....I throw a left hook...and he froze and he didn't put his hands up and he didn't duck and didn't block. And he took a full left hook on the chin." Sonnenfeld's version seems more uncensored, which fits: he has a tendency to tell the truth no matter who it might offend. In this era of handlers and lawyers sanitizing virtually every celebrity utterance, it's somewhat refreshing to hear Sonnenfeld speak his mind without hesitation or euphemism. "The United States isn't fun anymore," he says. "It used to be a fun place to live. You can't do anything now. Between lawsuits and -- you can't joke around, you can't have a good time. Just like a really boring place. We're becoming Germany." Sonnenfeld developed his irreverence growing up in the Washington Heights section of upper Manhattan. His upbringing was ultra-sheltered. "I was once paged at Madison Square Garden by my mother during a rock concert at two in the morning with the announcer saying, 'Barry Sonnenfeld, call your mother,'" he says. He attended NYU, eventually getting a graduate degree in film. After meeting film makers Joel and Ethan Coen at a party in the early Eighties, he worked for them as a cinematographer on "Raising Arizona," "Blood Simple" and Miller's Crossing." "When I was at NYU film school, if anyone asked me what kind of movies I'd be directing, first of all I'd say, 'I wouldn't be directing, I'd be a Federal Express delivery man,'" he says. "Because I never thought I'd ever get in the film business." [From the San Francisco Chronicle, June 27, 1999.] * * * 2. John Woo Says He Has Never Fired a Gun If you see a movie in which people fight with balletic grace and commit violent acts that are as tightly choreographed as some Broadway musicals, that can only mean one thing: John Woo directed it. Even in the least of his films -- say, "Mission Impossible 2" -- the action imagery is memorable. In one scene in that summer blockbuster, Tom Cruise's character jumps on one of the villains and twists him into the ground like a corkscrew; in another, two motorcyclists (who are about to crash head-on into each other) simultaneously jump off their bikes and collide in mid-air. Woo says the motorcycle scene was inspired by the 1953 film "Knights of the Round Table." "There are two knights and they are both on horses... and they're holding long spears and they charge into each other and collide with the spears and they stick each other," says Woo. "So that idea came from ['Round Table']." But most of his ideas of onscreen violence seem to come from his own experience; Woo grew up in the slums of Hong Kong (after moving from Canton, China, at age four), and spent much of his childhood fending off assaults from gangsters and thugs. "The place I grew up was pretty rough," he says. "I [had] to deal with the gangs almost every day. They tried to make me join them. So I [had] to fight back very hard. I almost got beat up everyday. First thing in the morning, I [had] to grab something -- a stick or iron bar or brick -- and use it as a weapon before I left home." Woo was rescued from the slums by financial assistance from an American family, which enabled him to get an education. He began making feature films in 1974, starting with kung-fu movies, moving to comedies, and progressing in the late-Eighties to the innovative action films that have become his trademark. His Hong Kong movies "Bullet in the Head" (1990) and "The Killer" (1989) are considered his best by many (including Woo himself); his most recent films, "Broken Arrow" ('96) and "Face/Off" ('97), are his most commercially successful. In '92, he moved to Los Angeles, where he now lives with his wife and three children. He traces much of his cinematic style to his childhood fondness for dance and musicals. "I loved dancing so much that [that] gave me the inspiration when I'm creating action scenes," he says. "I've never...fired a gun, [so I'm] just using my imagination. And I like watching martial arts movies. So I feel like I'm making a musical and a martial arts film." [From the San Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 2000.] * * * 3. XTC's Andy Partridge on God. Over a cup of tea at Warner Bros. Records in New York, Andy Partridge, the reclusive leader of the band XTC, talked about the furor over his controversial song "Dear God," which had just been released. The song, which calls the Bible "junk" and says God is "always letting us humans down," caused listeners to call in bomb threats when it was aired on radio stations in Florida and Texas. "At the radio station in Florida, a man phoned in and said, 'If you don't take that record off the air, I'm gonna bomb the station, and I mean it!," says Partridge. "One of God's little henchman doing his stuff." But Partridge is not one of those pop stars who gives contrite interviews after a controversy and says how sorry he is if he offended anyone. No, he stands by what he wrote -- and says he should've come on even stronger. "It didn't get over my opinions in as pointed a way as I wanted to get them over," he says. "The record seems to be working, because people listen to it or are reacting against it, so somebody up there likes me," says Partridge, laughing. Clearly, he is no fan of religion. "God must be a real mean character," he says. "If there is a god, he's not this kind of famous aged English actor. It's not Sir John Gielgud saying, 'Come in, my boy.'" "What does God do? He wakes up in the morning and says, 'I think I'll wipe out a busload of Sri Lankans today," says Partridge. "I mean, that's really benevolent." His view of heaven? "You can imagine what a lazy place heaven must be," he says. "You can't get a drink, no sex, no nothing. And the art music -- aghhh!" [From Cash Box magazine, July 4, 1987] * * * 4. Warren Zevon, On Meeting Bob Dylan For the First Time. (Conducted in July 1987 in New York.) IORIO: DO YOU WRITE ON PIANO? ZEVON: I actually write more on guitar. It depends on what year it is and what my circumstances are. DO YOU MEAN YOU'LL WRITE ON PIANO IF THERE'S A CERTAIN TYPE OF THING GOING ON IN YOUR LIFE? ZEVON: Like a residence! A PIANO'S A PERMANENT THING. BUT THERE SEEMS TO BE TWO STRAINS OF SONGS, AT LEAST: THE "RECONSIDER ME"S AND THE MORE FLAMBOYANT SONGS. DO YOU COMPOSE ONE TYPE ON PIANO AND THE OTHER ON GUITAR? ZEVON: I think that the answer is yes, the way you're implying your question. It kind of comes from the characteristics of the instruments. "The Heartache"'s a piano song, for sure. "Boom Boom [Mancini]"'s a guitar song, though sometimes I end up switching instruments. For the most part, that's true: there are piano types of songs and guitar types of songs. HAVE YOU EVER TRIED TO WRITE A NOVEL? ZEVON: Never. BUT YOUR LYRICS READ [LIKE A NOVEL]. IT SEEMS YOU MIGHT HAVE TRIED POETRY OR A BOOK. ZEVON: No. [pause] I had a friend...a journalist, who said to me, You ever try writing prose? And I gave him the same answer: it was all I could do to squeeze out barely enough lyrics. He said, "You should at least keep a journal." And I said, "No, no, no, I can't do that." And he said, "Just write down what you eat and eventually you'll be filling a page." So I wrote down what I ate but don't write a lot more than what I ate. WHO WAS THE BIGGEST POP MUSIC INFLUENCE ON YOU WHEN YOU WERE GROWING UP? DYLAN? ZEVON: Yeah, I had the first Dylan album. I was going through the evolution you make in folk music, which is to start with the Kingston Trio and work your way back to the sources until you get to the cardboard covered albums, the Folkways stuff, which is where it all comes from....Here this guy exploded in the midst of all that. Dylan was undoubtedly the largest influence. DYLAN PLAYS ON "THE FACTORY": HOW DID YOU MEET UP WITH HIM? ZEVON: He just came down one day. SIMPLE AS THAT? ZEVON: I had never met him. He had been one of my heroes, for sure. He invented my job. And I walked into the studio about two months into the [sessions for "Sentimental Hygiene"], and the receptionist said, "Bob Dylan's waiting." There he was. And he said, Well, I like your songs." And I said, "I like your songs, too, Bob." [laughs] And he told me that he'd known about them, since we had a mutual friend in T Bone Burnett, and he introduced him to the songs. I took him in and played the roughs for him, and a couple months later, when we needed a harmonica, we asked him to do it. [From Cash Box magazine, July 18, 1987] _______________________________________ FROM THE LOS ANGELES TIMES 5. The Latest Actor from the Fonda Dynasty (The first story anywhere about Troy Garity) Troy Garity has a lot of family heritage to live up to. His father, politician and former anti-war activist Tom Hayden, made history by leading demonstrations against the Vietnam War during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. His mother is actress Jane Fonda. This month, Garity, 25, is following in the footsteps of both sides of his family. He's not only acting in his first feature film -- "Abbie!," a biopic about yippie founder Abbie Hoffman -- but he's appearing in the movie as...his father. "I'm very proud to play my father," says Garity as he eats green grapes at a restaurant on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. "My father literally risked his life to make...the world a better place for me to grow up in." And Garity seems equally proud of his mom's side of the family. This latest actor from the Fonda Dynasty is an unabashed fan of the Fonda movies, which now span 63 years of cinema, from Henry's "The Farmer Takes A Wife" in 1935 to Troy's small part in "Abbie!" ("'Klute' is brilliant," he says of the 1971 picture for which his mom won a Best Actress Oscar. His uncle Peter's "Easy Rider"? "Loved it," he says. His grandad's "The Grapes of Wrath"? "I like 'El Norte' better than 'Grapes of Wrath' because I can relate to it more," he says.) How good an actor is he? "The work that he has done on this movie is very powerful...and has nothing to do with his heritage," says Robert Greenwald, the director of "Abbie!" "It has to do with his talent." He's becoming an actor at around the same age as his famous relatives; Jane made her screen debut at age 23 ("Tall Story"), Peter at 24 ("Tammy and the Doctor"), and cousin Bridget at 24 ("Aria"). (Hayden claims Garity, as a seven-year old, was also in "On Golden Pond.") And he's also just two years younger than Hayden was at the time of the Chicago riots. Though he obviously has no first-hand memories of the Sixties, he does vividly recall the aftermath, growing up in the Santa Monica family of two leftist legends. The Fonda-Hayden household was often under siege for political reasons, according to Garity. He remembers that his parents had to staple chicken- wire to all the windows because people kept throwing things at the house. On some mornings, Hayden or Fonda greeted the new day by checking the family car for bombs. When traveling, they had to contend with hostile picketers at the airport shouting threats at them. "[People were] talking about feeding my family to the whales," recalls Garity. [Hayden and Fonda are now divorced; Fonda did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.) This is the era that Greenwald ("The Burning Bed," "Sweet Hearts Dance") is trying to recreate in "Abbie!," which stars Vincent D'Onofrio as Hoffman [the film was eventually released as "Steal This Movie"]. The movie tells the story of the protests outside the Democratic Convention that nominated Hubert Humphrey for president on August 28, 1968. In real life, the demonstrations turned violent as Chicago cops beat and clubbed protesters and others -- Hayden himself was thrown through a closed window at the Conrad Hilton -- in what a government report later called "a police riot." The film also dramatizes the chaotic Chicago Seven trial, in which Hayden, Hoffman and five others were charged with conspiring to disrupt the Convention. The trial ended with acquittal for all on the conspiracy charges, though five were convicted of trying to incite a riot. All convictions (except those for contempt) were overturned on appeal in 1972. Nine months later, Hoffman was arrested on unrelated charges of selling $36,000 of cocaine to an undercover police officer; he became a fugitive in 1974, surrendered to authorities in 1980, served a brief jail term, and committed suicide in 1989 at the age of 52. "Abbie got banged up a lot, he got hurt a lot, he had alot of guts," says Hayden. "He would have highs and lows and be fighting all kinds of inner demons all the time." Unlike Hoffman, Hayden emerged from the turbulence of the trial with his well-being intact, his eye on public office -- and a newborn son. (In fact, Troy was actually present at the final Chicago trial that cleared the Seven of contempt in '73.) In many ways, Garity looks and sounds much like his dad circa 1968. The deliberate cadence and careful pacing of his speech, the Zen silences and dry wit, and his love of political heroism are all pure Hayden. Greenwald notes the family resemblance. "We're sitting in the very first rehearsal on the first day and one of the actors who plays a scene with [Garity] turns to me and says, 'Boy, it's uncanny the resemblance that Troy has to Tom Hayden,' and didn't know. So I pull Troy aside and said, 'Troy, let me ask you a question: how do you feel? Do you want me to tell people or would you rather people not know?' And he...turns to me and said, 'I'm proud of my dad; I want everyone to know.'" "There is an uncanny resemblance," agrees Hayden. "I think he's quite a handsome guy and I always thought I was the ugly one in the crowd." Hayden also sees another family link: "He has some of Henry Fonda's qualities: he sketches and paints." Garity may have been a natural to play his dad, but he still spent time researching the role. "He followed his father around for a week in the house, kind of imitating him and getting down his mannerisms," says Greenwald. "It's such a wonderful father-son story." "I watched about eight hours of old videotapes of my father [in preparation for the film]," says Garity. "We had some really nice talks about...his personal life." ("What a great therapeutic experience for a father and son," says Hayden, who was estranged from his own father for many years.) "He's got to be his own man...I don't want him to be a carbon copy of me," says Hayden, adding drolly: "[Except] for this week [when he's shooting the film]. Everyone is entitled to one week when their son is them." Garity -- who grew up in Santa Monica on the border of Venice -- never sounds so much like his father as when he gets passionate about a political issue, such as the troubles in Northern Ireland, where Garity recently served as a peacekeeper. But he declares he'll ever run for public office, despite the fact that he's already involved in community organizing and gang intervention programs. "I'll never run for office, I don't have that ability," he says in a way that seems to invite someone to contradict him. Somebody interjects that he already sounds like a political candidate, denials and all. Garity smiles, looks a bit flattered and changes his tune somewhat: "I haven't defined my platform yet." [From the Los Angeles Times, September 1998.] * * * FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE 6. David Rabe Considers...Suicide In his new two-act play, "A Question of Mercy," David Rabe explains in explicit detail how to reliably and painlessly kill yourself. "What you must above all do is take little sips [of water], and only one [barbiturate] at a time or you will vomit them up," says the doctor to an AIDS patient in the play. "Tiny, tiny sips. As little water as possible...You must not take them too fast or with too much water...And yet, you must not go too slowly. That's the paradox. Because if you go too slowly, if you take too much time, the drug begins to effect you and slow you before you're finished." If this sounds medically accurate, that's because it is. The play is about a real-life case of doctor-assisted suicide that was first reported in an article by physician Richard Selzer in The New York Times Magazine. But don't mistake "Mercy" for a simple tract for assisted suicide. In fact the work can be interpreted as both opposing and favoring euthanasia. How does Rabe feel about assisted suicide? "My own feeling is that a doctor who makes a regular practice of it, I'm not so sure about," says the 58- year-old author of such plays as "Hurly Burly" and "Streamers," and of feature film screenplays for "Casualties of War" and "I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can." "But for [a patient] who requested it, I don't have any moral condemnation of it at all. I have serious questions about the legalization of it...I fear it would be used to empty hospital beds." Has Rabe ever considered killing himself? He pauses, and answers carefully. "Suicide is in a lot of my plays, one way or another," he says, as if just now realizing that fact. "What does that mean? Have I ever seriously [considered suicide]? No. Has [suicide] crossed my mind? Sure." Suicide turns up in many of Rabe's plays, including "Mercy," "Streamers," "Sticks and Bones," and "I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can." In "Mercy," Rabe makes a fresh point about the subject: one can't will death by suicide, because one can't will an unknown entity, which is what death is; even our best knowledge about death is still speculative at best, he notes. "That's what [the doctor in the play] is saying: 'you are delivering yourself to something [through suicide], but you really don't know what it is.' And nobody knows for sure." Rabe first became acquainted with death during the Vietnam War, when he served in the Army at a hospital in Long Bihn, tending to the freshly wounded and dying. "The worst times were when [the mass casualties] were so large they were not only -- " He stops the sentence, as if knocked off course by a traumatic memory. "I remember once we had to move out of our barracks and make room for casualties." Vietnam is clearly the demarcation line between then and now for Rabe -- and the key to understanding his life and work. Before Vietnam, Rabe was an Iowa innocent, a graduate of a Catholic high school and a Catholic college in his Dubuque hometown, the son of a history teacher turned meatpacker. His big early ambition was to be a pro football player (he's 6'2"). By the time he received his draft notice in '65, he was living in Pennsylvania, a recent drop-out from the graduate theater program at Villanova University. And he supported the war. When he returned from Vietnam in early 1967, he was fundamentally changed. He had left his Iowa innocence and devout Catholicism back in the rice fields and had come to oppose the war. He became involved in Hinduism. And he now saw a huge gap between his new level of life experience and the astonishing degree of naivete in those who stayed home. He also clearly saw there was no threat to America whatsoever posed by the Viet Cong. "You come back here after Vietnam, it was obvious that everything was just fine [in the U.S.], there was no real threat, it was an imagined threat that was then manipulated for whatever purpose," he says. "I still don't know what the purpose was, the real purpose. I always think there was something under it that has still never come to light." Still, Rabe is no pacifist. His idea of a real-life war hero is a guy like Hugh Thompson, the U.S. Army helicopter pilot who courageously aimed a machine gun at his fellow American soldiers to stop them from murdering Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968. "That's an amazing guy," says Rabe of Thompson, showing more enthusiasm than at any other point in the interview. "He came in, he saw chaos, saw what it was and trusted his own recognition. See, that's the hard part...trying to find the recognition and finally trusting it." (Not surprisingly, Rabe's favorite Vietnam-related film is "Platoon.") Rabe became the "playwright laureate" of the Vietnam war (as the New York Times put it) on the basis of his first plays: the Obie-winning "The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel," the Tony-winning "Sticks and Bones," "Streamers" and "The Orphan." His initial success was astonishing; his first two works -- "Pavlo" and "Sticks" -- ran simultaneously at the Public Theatre in New York in 1971 (at the time, Shakespeare was the only other playwright to have had two plays running at the Public at once). Within three years, four of his plays were in production, thanks in no small part to producer Joseph Papp, with whom Rabe has had a stormy relationship. But his best-known work about the war is probably his feature film screenplay -- adapted from an article by Daniel Lang for The New Yorker -- for the Brian De Palma film "Casualties of War" (1989), a movie he disowned at first but then grew to embrace with reservations. While he stands by much of the film, he still dislikes three things about it: the scene in which Michael J. Fox's character hits a fellow soldier with a shovel; the ending, in which Fox speaks with a Vietnamese stranger near a bus stop; and, most important, the fact that Fox starts off morally appalled at his colleagues, instead of gradually evolving into a soldier at odds with his comrades. For all the success of his war works, Rabe's biggest hit on stage is a non- Vietnam play, "Hurly Burly," which has just been made into a feature film written by Rabe. "Hurly Burly" premiered in 1984, first in Chicago, then in New York, where it ran for more than a year on Broadway and off. Produced five years after Rabe married actress Jill Clayburgh, the play examines lives of "cunning desperation" among show-biz wannabes in Los Angeles, where he lived intermittently in the 70s and 80s. (He now lives in Connecticut.) With white hair and an alternately intense and leisurely manner, he comes off a bit like a pugnacious professional golfer. And he talks somewhat like golf, too; he has periods of conversational silence followed by strokes of fierce brilliance. Rabe's next project? "I'm a little between things, but I've got a lot of things started," he says. Expect a wait for whatever it is; Rabe is a notoriously slow writer. "[Joseph Papp] once compared me to an aircraft carrier that took a long time to turn around. And that's sort of true." he says. "Writing is a glacial process for me." [From the San Francisco Chronicle, May 31, 1998; in the published version, a Chronicle editor took time out of his busy schedule to unilaterally replace one line in the story, thereby creating an error that wasn't in the piece I wrote.] ____________________________________________________________ FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE The Paranoid Movie Genre Essay and reviews by Paul Iorio The modern Paranoid Movie was born with Alfred Hitchock's "North by Northwest" in 1959 and became a booming industry some time after the release of Oliver Stone's "JFK" in 1991. By now, the genre has become somewhat formulaic, and no Paranoid Film is complete without these elements: 1) There is a scene in which a character furtively searches a vault, desk or file room for some key piece of damning evidence. 2) There is a scene in which the character is almost always caught by a surprise visitor to the vault, desk or file room ("Witness," "Silkwood," "The Firm," "Murder at 1600," "The China Syndrome"). 3) There is a scene in which someone confronts a person who claims to be a victim of a conspiracy, and skeptically asks: "Who is THEY?" 4) There is a scene in which a character is said to be a patsy for a larger operation ("JFK," "Shadow Conspiracy," "Murder at 1600"). Some Paranoid Movies are actually Conspiracy Movies, but everyone lumps them together anyway. What's the difference between a Paranoid Movie and a Conspiracy Movie? A Conspiracy Movie is a Paranoid Movie in which a character is the victim of a real plot, not an imagined one. So if someone is being chased by inner demons, it's a Paranoid Movie; but if someone is being chased by a pick-up truck, it's a Conspiracy Movie. Cary Grant's character in "North by Northwest" is the victim of a conspiracy; Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny" is the victim of paranoia. Salman Rushdie is the target of a conspiracy; Margot Kidder is the victim of paranoia. The target of a conspiracy can sometimes appear paranoid to those who don't know better. For example, a moviegoer who enters the theater during the scene in "Breakdown" in which Kurt Russell's character forces a truck to pull over might think Russell is acting paranoid. And his behavior does resemble paranoia in every way but one: his crisis is real. And there are films in which a real conspiracy causes someone to become paranoid or to appear that way ("Gaslight," "Guilty By Suspicion"). Not every film with a conspiracy in its plot is a Paranoid Movie, however. "Face/Off," for example, may seem like one but isn't, because its plot does not link up to something larger or more resonant than the dramatic action. Because Paranoid Movies rely heavily on plot, they must have plots that are convincing at every turn. Hitchcock was probably best at plotting the far-fetched (his "North By Northwest" is a classic example). Other conspiracy classics do not wear as well. John Frankenheimer's "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) and "Seven Days in May" (1964) have fundamental flaws (see sidebar). The Watergate scandal spawned numerous Paranoid Movies, many of them about political sabotage ("The Big Fix," "The Parallax View") but none (except perhaps "Chinatown") as gripping as the nonfiction film about Watergate itself, "All the President's Men." The most controversial Paranoid Movie of all time, the one that rouses the most passion, is Oliver Stone's "JFK," in which Stone accuses every president over a 14-year span of being involved in some way in the president's assassination. Some of the best Paranoid Movies are those that just happen to have conspiracies in them, movies that implicitly factor in such theories in the course of telling a story. The "Godfather" films, for instance, take corrupt collusion between law enforcement and the mob as a given. Likewise, in "City of Hope," director John Sayles shows a reflexive understanding of how city machines work. One possible reason we invent conspiracy theories is they make life more interesting. If someone is eavesdropping, then truly we are not alone. When life is boring, a little paranoia can spice things up. Here are the top ten Paranoid Movies of all time: "THE CAPTIVE CITY" (1952) -- Parts of this film seem remarkably contemporary in portraying how a corrupt city machine can mess with the press. The rest of it goes way overboard, however. Still stands as an earnest early try at the sort of movie made mostly after Watergate. "NORTH BY NORTHWEST" (1959) -- Probably the greatest of all conspiracy classics, from Alfred Hitchcock, who virtually invented the genre. Though nearly perfectly crafted, it does have one minor mistake: Why doesn't Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) call upon his three drinking buddies at the Plaza, shown at the beginning, to corroborate his tale of abduction? "THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE" (1962) -- John Frankenheimer gave moviegoers a double dose of paranoia with the back-to-back release of this film and "Seven Days in May" in the early Sixties. Today, "Manchurian" wears less well than "Seven Days." The flaw here is central: brainwashing techniques (without drugs) are not nearly as effective as the movie suggests. "SEVEN DAYS IN MAY" (1964) -- Still gripping, even though it's hard to believe the president of the United States would refuse to use scandalous love letters against a general plotting a coup. Perfect material for an Oliver Stone re-make. "MAGNUM FORCE" (1973) -- Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) battles a rogue element in the police department in this popcorn flick written by John Milius and Michael Cimino. It's more or less believable until the ending, when Briggs (Hal Holbrook) drives away with Callahan after vowing to arrest him (why wouldn't he take him into custody?). "THE CONVERSATION" (1974) -- Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is the best surveillance man in the West, despite that pesky conscience of his. But the work he does for a client is too seamy even for him. "CHINATOWN" (1974) -- Very close to a perfectly plotted film. To those who've seen it 50 times or more: What does Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) really mean when he twice says the phrase "as little as possible"? "JFK" (1991) -- For a moment, assume filmmaker Oliver Stone's theory is correct, that Clay Shaw of the CIA arranged the Kennedy assassination and set up Lee Harvey Oswald as the designated patsy. That still doesn't mean Shaw did it at the behest of the CIA -- a crucial point. (To illustrate: if you work for General Motors and rob a convenience store, that doesn't mean you robbed the store for GM.) Incidentally, why would Shaw have wanted to attract police attention to -- rather than divert attention from -- Oswald, who had apparent links to the CIA himself? "THE FIRM" (1993) -- Pin it all on overbilling. The ending might well be the most implausibly plotted for a movie this good (and until the last 20 minutes, it's riveting). "UNLAWFUL ENTRY" (1994) -- An underrated thriller that's more or less believable. Terrific tension between Kurt Russell and Ray Liota. <a href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RrT2EwiGn2I/AAAAAAAAALA/7T9C98OHfwA/s1600-h/scanparagame.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp3.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RrT2EwiGn2I/AAAAAAAAALA/7T9C98OHfwA/s400/scanparagame.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5094967640070725474" /></a> [The Paranoid Movie Game, which I conceived and designed and wrote for the paper; the only elements not authored by me are the drawings within the boxes.] [From The San Francisco Chronicle, July 27, 1997; the "paranoid movie" coinage and idea came from me, as did the Paranoid Movie game board that accompanied the published piece.] _______________________________________________________________ PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED INTERVIEW Robert Goulet, on "Camelot" By Paul Iorio In an exclusive interview never published until now, Robert Goulet spoke to this reporter about "Camelot," candidly revealing secrets and new details about the play's original Broadway reign. Here is an edited transcript of that interview, conducted on July 14, 1999: IORIO: YOU WERE VIRTUALLY UNKNOWN IN THE THEATER WORLD AT THE TIME [OF THE PREMIERE OF "CAMELOT"] IN DECEMBER 1960? GOULET: December 1960, is when we opened. But before that, I had been doing mostly television and radio. WERE YOU [INITALLY] OVERWHELMED BY THE ["CAMELOT"] EXPERIENCE? GOULET: Of course I was. It was something brand new, and Broadway was something I had always dreamed of....It was a quintessential moment of my life. RICHARD BURTON EVEN SAVED YOUR JOB AT ONE POINT? GOULET: No, he didn't...I gave a strange reading [at the audition]...I figured, ok, I'm going back [home] to Toronto on the next flight. But [Burton] heard me sing and, two hours later, said, "The voice of an angel." And the job was kept. WHAT WAS RICHARD BURTON LIKE IN THOSE DAYS? GOULET: We didn't hang out but we had a wonderful time together. I was allowed one question [for Burton] a night. The performances started at 8:30 in those days, and Richard would get there at ten to eight every night. I already had my make-up and my costumes on and was ready to go...And I could swear he had just awakened at 7:30, just got in a car and came over. And he'd be putting on his make-up. He didn't want to be bothered with me at that part of the night but I wanted to learn something about theater and film...and get his lore from him. And he said, "One question a night and that's it." And every so often he'd give me a yes or no answer or say [shove] off. He'd always get himself a big glass of vodka and tonic. THE "ED SULLIVAN SHOW" WAS THE TURNING POINT FOR "CAMELOT"? GOULET: We were not the biggest of hits in "Camelot" [at first]...."The Ed Sullivan Show" brought us on about a week and a half after we had opened and gave us 17 minutes -- Julie [Andrews], Richard [Burton] and me. And the next day, [fans] lined up around the block, and "Camelot" was a hit. So Sullivan saved our lives as well. AND GOULETMANIA FOLLOWED. I READ ONE ACCOUNT FROM THE EARLY SIXTIES THAT SAID YOU COULDN'T EVEN GET IN THE STAGE DOOR BECAUSE FANS WERE MOBBING YOU. GOULET: That happens to everybody when they first become noticed....It didn't manifest itself upon me in any manner I couldn't handle or understand. It was just something that happened. THERE WAS PRESSURE AT THE TIME TO MAYBE QUIT AND DO MOVIES. I HEAR YOU WERE MAKING $750 A WEEK, IT WAS SIX NIGHTS AND TWO AFTERNOONS A WEEK. GOULET: Eight shows a week, yes. You have the seven-fifty right, yes....Richard had to buy himself out, he had one month to go , and he wanted to do "Cleopatra," literally and figuratively, and so he had to pay his way out. And he did. But my manager at the time...said, "Let Bobby out to do [television]"...And I went out and did all those [TV] things but I had to add it on to the end of my ["Camelot"] contract. WAS THAT "CAMELOT" THE BEST OF ALL THE "CAMELOT"S YOU'VE DONE IN REVIVALS AS ARTHUR OR AS -- GOULET: I have no idea, because I played Arthur on several other occasions later in life....I don't know what that "Camelot" performance was like because I didn't go out front to see it...It seems to me it was a damned good production [on Broadway]. AFTER "CAMELOT," YOU DID CLUBS AND...WENT ON TO WIN A TONY. BUT AT THE SAME TIME, MUSIC WAS CHANGING. GOULET: At that time, yes, it was changing. From '64, when the Beatles came in, it really changed from there on in. WHAT IS YOUR VIEW OF ROCK 'N' ROLL TODAY AND MUSICAL THEATER INFUSED WITH ROCK 'N' ROLL? HOW DO YOU VIEW IT, AND CONTRAST IT WITH WHAT YOU THOUGHT OF IT THEN. GOULET: I never thought of [rock] much, because it wasn't my kind of thing. Elvis got out there and moved his hips, and I never moved my hips. I got out there and told stories and sang from my heart. And a lot of stuff that I heard was a lot of noise. But some of it is not noise, some of it is very damned good. But I don't listen to it, because I listen to jazz and classical music primarily. I never listen to myself for one thing. On the radio I'll hear myself singing and...half the time, I'll say, "Pretty bad." The other half, I'll say, "Not bad." IS THERE ONE MOMENT IN YOUR CAREER THAT YOU CONSIDER...YOUR PEAK? GOULET: I think the song that I enjoyed doing so much, more than any other, was "This Nearly Was Mine" from "South Pacific." [Goulet sings:] "One dream in my heart, one love to be living for." With a French accent. And I let that thing fly. I brought it down half a tone in the arrangement and opened my mouth and let it fly. I couldn't wait to get into that song. I just loved it. It's an important song anyway. BUT NOT "SOLILOQUY"? GOULET: Oh, "Soliloquy," of course. Are you kidding?! "Carousel" was my favorite musical of all time. IN YOUR CAREER, YOU'VE EXPERIENCE A LOT OF UPS AND A LOT OF DOWNS.... GOULET: I separated from my wife, I lived alone on my boat, a yacht, for four-and-a-half years, and it was a little bit down. But I had a lot of friends coming in and spending time with me...And I was pretty much on my own. Things were pretty much in a trough. But I didn't think so. I just kept on working, and kept on doing what I had to do. DO YOU FEEL A SPECIAL CONNECTION TO THE JFK ERA, GIVEN YOUR PART IN THE QUINTESSENTIAL JFK-ERA MUSICAL, "CAMELOT"? GOULET: Of course, they called his run of the presidency The Camelot Presidency, and they opened at the same time we did. We opened December [3rd] and he was inaugurated [in] January. SO IT COINCIDES [ALMOST] EXACTLY. IN FACT, THERE WAS AN OPENING NIGHT [FOR ANOTHER PLAY] YOU DID THAT COINCIDED WITH THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, I READ. GOULET: ....Everyone was scared we were going to be bombed that night and destroyed and I said, "Why worry? If it hits us, we won't know what happened anyway. So don't be concerned. Go out there and do your show." YOUR LIFE HAS BEEN THE-SHOW-MUST-GO-ON, IT SEEMS. GOULET: Oh yeah. We all have to die. I'm not afraid of dying. I just don't want to have a terrible death, a painful death. And I'd like to live a little longer, so I can do a few more things with my kids and with my career. But we all have to go. So don't be so damned scared, don't be so damned nervous about it. Just be prepared to say goodbye. [Completely unpublished until now; interview conducted on July 14, 1999.] __________________________________________________________ Unpublished until now... Traveling Alone by Local Train Behind the Iron Curtain During the Cold War Thirty-one years ago, as an adventurous 19-year-old college student, I traveled alone by local train behind the Iron Curtain, journeying non-stop from Florence, Italy, to Istanbul, Turkey, crossing the entire length of both the former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and venturing through Thrace and European Turkey. And then I took the whole trip again in reverse. The non-stop journey spanned fifty-two hours, two time zones and over a thousand miles (one-way) in August 1976, following the route of the original Orient Express -- though this was no Pullman sleeper. The train was a ramshackle thing, barely better than refugee boxcars for much of the voyage; through most of Yugoslavia, I couldn't even find a seat and had to sleep on my suitcase in the crowded corridor. At the time, I wrote in my journal: "I sat on [my] suitcase. Like everyone else on this [train], I slept but was awakened by people constantly stepping [over] me." Also, no food or beverages were sold onboard, and Americans weren't allowed to exit before their destination, so U.S. passengers were left with nothing to eat or drink except whatever they had brought with them. In my case, that amounted to a bottle of bad carbonated Lambrusco wine that I had bought in Trieste for 700 lire (a little more than a dollar in 1976 currency) and some stale cheese-bread (don't ask) I bought from someone on the train at the Belgrade station for a thousand lire (around a buck and a half). At least the nausea took my mind off my thirst and hunger! I also soon found that the tough reputation of the cops of communist Eastern Europe was well-deserved -- though I was skeptical about that fact before the trip. As I joked in my journal when I passed into Slovenia: "I must be in Yugoslavia by now. It's dark, so I can't see the oppression and lack of liberty." (It was also, incidentally, too dark to see that I was missing what some call the best scenery of the region: the Julian Alps of Slovenia.) My attitude was less jokey several hours later in Zagreb when the Yugoslav police took me off the train for no apparent reason (probably because I was one of only two Americans on board the train that day), forcing me to leave my luggage onboard. Through the language barrier, I think the cops were claiming I didn't have a transit visa -- even after I showed them my transit visa. As I wrote in my journal at the time: "And so off the train I went, amidst [severe] stares of Tito/Khrushchev faces (they all seem to have that look)," I wrote in my diary. The only other person booted from the train was the other American, a bearded hippie who claimed to be a Stanford University student; he started getting loud about what he called the fascist behavior of the cops, and I asked him to shut up before he got us in deeper trouble. We were detained outside a small side building, a sort of mini-police station, where an officer confiscated my passport. After waiting for around ten minutes, the train made noises as if it were starting to leave Zagreb, and, impulsively, I bolted toward the tracks, even though I didn't have my passport and hadn't been given an ok from the police to re-board. But no one stopped me. And just before I reboarded, some stranger handed me my passport. "Mysteriously received my... passport again as...I was running back to the train and was handed it by a man," I wrote in my journal. "Mysterious totalitarian forces at work." I didn't see the Stanford student get back on the train and assumed he was now in the clutches of some nasty Croatian cops. As the train left Zagreb, I sat down and started writing about what had just happened. But a Yugoslav police officer came into my train car and stood a short distance from me, staring at me in a menacing way. When I put away my pen and paper, he walked away. Through the train window, parts of northern Croatia looked sort of like a Communist Norman Rockwell painting, with peasants, in classic red style, harvesting a field by hand with sickles. As the train approached Belgrade, the landscape became increasingly urban in a very gray way. "The entrance [to Belgrade] is utterly filled with trash, and as you approach it, one sees drab but...modern buildings and a superhighway," I wrote in my diary. [NOTE: I'll soon be posting a photo I took of Belgrade from the train.] After Belgrade, the scenery became unexpectedly spectacular, thanks to the thrilling peaks of the Balkan Mountains (one of the most underrated ranges in all of Europe). But just before Bulgaria, the landscape became downbeat again, full of "empty roads, solemn faces, dreary check points," as I wrote at the time. Despite the oppressive presence of police and soldiers, the civilians on the train were lively and uninhibited throughout the Balkans. At one point, in southeastern Serbia, five very friendly rural Serbians (with a couple black puppies) insisted -- absolutely insisted -- that I take a picture of them and their dogs, so I did. In return, they gave me a couple Yugoslav cigarettes, three swigs of vodka -- and their addresses so I could send them the pictures. [NOTE: I took a photo of them and will post that pic soon, too.] Just before the Bulgarian border, I found a seat in a compartment that was like a mini-United Nations. I sat across from a confident and exuberant Libyan man (with extremely white teeth) who said he was on his way to study electrical engineering in Bulgaria. Also in the compartment were a soft-spoken guy from Copenhagen and two French men (one of them looked like rocker Ron Wood, the other said he was a Sorbonne professor of Islamic civilization and French). They were talking to each other in English, French and other languages. As the train crossed into Bulgaria at Dimitrovgrad, I experienced the hospitality of its cops and border guards, widely regarded as the most ruthless in all of eastern Europe at the time. With rifles at the ready, the Bulgarian guards were harsh and humorless. "At the Bulgarian border, the guards had Hitler mustaches, as all traces of Western Europe (as well as humor or smiling) disappeared completely," I wrote after entering the country. We soon passed through Sofia, which seemed like an extremely insulated and subdued city; the locals at the train station, in old-fashioned clothing and uncomfortable-looking shoes, approached the train and gawked curiously as if they were looking at visitors from another planet. Several hours later, at the exit border -- the tense checkpoint near the three-way intersection of Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece -- the armed Bulgarian cops became even more unfunny than they had been at the entry border. "Long wait at the Bulgaria/Turkey border," I wrote that night. "Soldiers all around checking bags, shining lights....It is pitch black and probably midnight." In the distance, I saw the silhouette of a tank. A rumor, later proved false, circulated that the train was being delayed because war had broken out between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus. After an anxious period, we were finally allowed to proceed into western Turkey, back into NATO territory. "The train starts into the Turkish black night, soldiers waving goodbye, and I go back to my compartment and sleep," I wrote in my diary. To my surprise, a few yards away at a train window, there was that Stanford student who I had mistakenly thought was left behind in Zagreb the day before; he was looking out the window and singing the Rolling Stones's "Satisfaction." It was a few hours before sunrise on my third day of travel, but Istanbul was still over 12 hours away. After Bulgaria, entering western Turkey felt like someone had opened a window and let in light, air and birds. I was now in westernmost Turkey, aka Thrace. "At sunrise, I wake and see...Turkey," I wrote in my journal. "The train is moving at a snail's pace, stopping every twenty yards or so. The scenery is unlike anything I've seen before. The mountains are sometimes rocky or green or barren like a desert... There are great stretches of huge yellow sunflower fields stretching for [what looks like] miles. The people all wave as the train goes by, and the animals get more exotic and plentiful: goats, gazelles, unnamables, roosters, huge flocks of sheep. After the monochromatic Balkans, Thrace seemed to come alive in vivid Technicolor. Fifty-two hours after boarding the train in Florence, I arrived in Istanbul at three on a hot afternoon in August, burping Lambrusco, profoundly tired and somewhat dehydrated. I checked into a cheap hostel ($5 a night) in the Sultanahmet neighborhood where American hippies -- who had almost certainly taken a plane, not a train, to Istanbul -- were outside singing Paul Simon's "Homeward Bound" as someone played guitar. After five days in Istanbul, it was time to return to Florence. I considered taking a quick flight back, but (being a broke student back then) went to the train station and took the whole trip through the Balkans all over again. This time, I fell sick just before the Bulgarian border and remained that way all the way home (and for a week after returning to Florence), sleeping through most of the ride back. In retrospect, I now see that the big risks of the trip came not behind the Iron Curtain but in Islam (for example, some guy chased me down the street with a stick in Istanbul for shooting pictures of veiled women gathered in a doorway; another man almost became violent when I didn’t bow and scrape at Istanbul’s Pavilion of the Holy Mantle, where the Muslim Prophet Muhammed’s hair and teeth are on display). All told, my advice to anyone considering a travel adventure like this: take the plane! [Published here for the first time.] <a href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/Rrl0SAiGoHI/AAAAAAAAANI/uRyCeuGcS1c/s1600-h/scanistanbulcollage.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/Rrl0SAiGoHI/AAAAAAAAANI/uRyCeuGcS1c/s400/scanistanbulcollage.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5096232306075934834" /></a> Above are various items from my trip behind the Iron Curtain to Istanbul; at center is my Bulgarian visa; clockwise from the top left is a card for the hostel I stayed at, a pack of Turkish cigarettes, an August 1976 calendar, my own notes about entering Bulgaria, a ticket to the Topkapi, and a couple logos for regional publications. -------- <a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RroJaAiGoJI/AAAAAAAAANY/dPAjfXTX5C0/s1600-h/scanistanbul.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_XMXWvqNY2Kc/RroJaAiGoJI/AAAAAAAAANY/dPAjfXTX5C0/s400/scanistanbul.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5096396270747426962" /></a> Above: my photo of Istanbul's Galata Bridge, August 1976. __________________________________ FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Reconsidering "Jaws" By Paul Iorio When Steven Spielberg's "Jaws" was released 25 years ago this summer, it was upstaged by its own mechanical shark and then by its unprecedented commercial success. Today, after decades of repeated viewing, it's easier to see the movie for what many think it really is: a quality thriller in league with such Alfred Hitchcock classics as "The Birds" and "Psycho." What emerges from my own interviews with the film makers is that one of the best things to have happened during the making of "Jaws" was the malfunctioning of the main mechanical shark (and the two supporting sharks). "The shark didn't work," actor Roy Scheider, who plays police chief Martin Brody, tells me. "And that left us with weeks and weeks and weeks to shoot, to polish, to improvise, to discuss, to enrich, to experiment with all the other scenes that in a movie like that would [usually] get a cursory treatment." "What happened was, [Robert] Shaw, [Richard] Dreyfuss and Scheider turned into a little rep company," he says. "And all those scenes, rather than just pushing the plot along, became golden, enveloping the characters. So when the crisis came, you really cared about those three guys." Those "three guys" are by now familiar to moviegoers everywhere: Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss), an aggressive scientist from a wealthy family; Quint (Shaw), a veteran fisherman unhinged by past trauma; and Brody (Scheider), a phobic police chief from the big city trying to assimilate in small town Amity ("A fish out of water, if you'll excuse the expression," quips Scheider). Spielberg's problem in getting the shark to work was also one of the main reasons he didn't show the fish until very late in the movie (eighty minutes in, to be precise). This contradicts the generally accepted explanation that the delay in showing the shark was a purely aesthetic strategy meant to enhance audience anticipation and suspense. "The shark didn't work," says screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, echoing Scheider's words exactly. "It was a difficult piece of mechanical equipment....It malfunctioned most of the time [so] we had no shark to shoot." Spielberg and Gottlieb got the idea for withholding a glimpse of the monster until the end from the b-movie "The Thing," says Gottlieb. But the decision was more along the lines of, 'this is a way we can get around the fact that our main prop isn't working' rather than 'this is a choice that we would've made in any case,' according to Gottlieb. Gottlieb's screenplay was based on a best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, though the finished film differs from the novel in significant ways. Benchley initially wrote a couple drafts of the screenplay, before Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Howard Sackler ("The Great White Hope") took on the task, writing a couple drafts of his own. Finally Spielberg brought aboard Gottlieb, a comedy writer and actor who had won an Emmy for his work on TV's "The Smothers Brothers Show," to write the final script. Others also contributed to the screenplay, including Shaw, Scheider, Spielberg, and writer John Milius ("Apocalypse Now"). The script was another element that was inadvertently helped by the shark-related glitches, since the downtime gave Gottlieb more time to write and revise. And the screenplay did undergo lots of changes. Hooper's character (which was almost played by Jan-Michael Vincent instead of Dreyfuss) changed from a womanizer who had an affair with Brody's wife to that of the monomaniacal scientist in the film. Quint (almost played by Sterling Hayden) developed "from this crazy lunatic to this guy with a real reason to hate sharks," as Scheider puts it. And Brody (a role originally sought by Charlton Heston) became an everyman rather than a conventional action hero. "Every aggressive and macho impulse I had in my character, [Spielberg] would grab me and pull me back and say, 'No, don't talk like that, don't speak like that. You are always afraid, you are Mr. Humble all the time,'" recalls Scheider. "He would say, 'What we want to do is gradually, slowly, carefully, humorously build this guy into being the hero of the movie.'" The first scripts did not include the part of the film that Spielberg and many others consider to be the movie's best: the nine-minute sequence on the Orca that starts with the three main characters comparing scars, progresses through Quint's Indianapolis monologue, and ends with the three singing sea songs together. How exactly did that sequence evolve? "Howard Sackler was the one who found the Indianapolis incident and introduced it into the script," says Gottlieb. "Scar-comparing comes out of a conversation that Spielberg had with John Milius. John said that macho beach guys would try to assert their manliness and would compare scars...So Steven said, 'Great, let's see if we can do something with that.' So I wrote the scar-comparing scene." Meanwhile, several writers took a crack at Quint's Indianapolis speech, in which he tells of delivering the Hiroshima bomb aboard a ship that subsequently sank in shark-infested waters. "Steven was worried about the Indianapolis speech," says Gottlieb. "My drafts weren't satisfactory. Sackler's draft wasn't satisfactory to him." "The conventional historical inaccuracy that has found its way into most of the literature about the movie is that Milius dictated the speech over the phone and that it's basically Milius's speech. I was on the phone taking notes and the speech is not Milius's speech. It's close, it's got elements of it. But what Milius was working from was my drafts and Sackler's drafts." [Milius did not respond to our request for comment on this.] Gottlieb remembers the moment when the Indianapolis monologue was officially born. "One night after dinner, Spielberg, me, [and others] were talking about the movie," he says. "Shaw joined us after his dinner with a wad of paper in his pocket. He said, 'I've been having a go at that speech. I think I've got it now.'...The housekeeper had just packed up; she dimmed the lights as she left. Shaw takes the paper out of his pocket and then reads the speech as you hear it in the movie....He finishes performing that speech and everyone is in stunned silence. And finally Steven says, 'That's it, that's what we're going to shoot.'" "It took two days to shoot that scene," says Gottlieb. "Shaw was drunk one day, sober the other. What you see on film was a very clever compendium of the two scenes....If you watch that scene, listen for the tap [on the table] because that's where it cuts from sober to drunk. Or drunk to sober, I don't remember which." And indeed there is a tap on the table by Quint that splits the two parts of the Indianapolis monologue. Shaw appears to be drunk in the first six minutes of the sequence and sober in the last three minutes. (For those who want to locate the splice on video, it happens at the 91-minute mark, between the phrases "rip you to pieces" and "lost a hundred men.") By all accounts, the shoot at sea, off Martha's Vineyard, was nightmarish and difficult. Originally, Spielberg expected to spend only 55 days on the ocean but ultimately stayed for 159. At times, there was tension and conflict among the cast and crew. At one point, Gottlieb fell overboard and risked being sliced by a boat propeller. Further, Spielberg insisted on having a clean horizon during the Orca sequences, in order to emphasize the boat's isolation at sea. If some vessel happened to be sailing in the background of a shot, Spielberg would have one of his crew drive a speed-boat a half-hour or so away to the offending craft to ask the sailor to consider taking another route. "A lot of times there was no other way to go, so they'd say, 'Fuck you,'" says Gottlieb. "So we had to wait for the boat to clear the horizon." And if the film makers wanted some food while they waited, they had to settle for turkey and tuna sandwiches that had somehow lost their freshness in the heat and salt water at the bottom of the boat. They'd sip coffee that was sometimes four-hours old. And occasionally, the waves would cause the boat to pitch and bounce in place ("Not a great thing early in the morning on a sour stomach," says Gottlieb). "You'd go home at the end of the day sea-sick, sunburned, windburned," says Gottlieb. But when the main shark worked, it was a wonder to behold, says Scheider. He recalls the moment when he knew the movie was going to succeed: when he first saw the shark sail by the Orca on the open sea. "They ran [the shark] past the boat about two or three feet underwater," says Scheider. "And it was as long as the boat. And I said, 'Oh my god, it looks great.' I remember that day. We probably all lit cigars." When the movie finally wrapped, nobody knew for sure whether it would succeed or fail. The first clue came when they brought the film to technical workers for color-timing purposes. The techies, who were looking at the film only for purposes of checking the color density of the negative, were almost literally scared out of their chairs during certain scenes. "Guys in the lab were jumping," says Gottlieb. "So we started to have a feeling." Still, nobody was certain how the general public would respond. The tell-tale moment came during a sneak preview of the film in Long Beach, California, in the late spring of '75. Gottlieb remembers driving to Long Beach in a limo with his wife and Spielberg. "We gave Steven...tea to calm him down on the drive," says Gottlieb. "He was so nervous." His nervousness apparently subsided about three minutes and forty seconds into the screening when the invisible shark ripped apart its first victim. The audience went nuts, drowning out dialogue for the next minute or so. "You could tell from the crowd reaction that it was going to be a very important movie," he says. When the lights came up after the screening, top executives from Universal Pictures quickly headed straight to the theater restroom -- "the only quiet spot in the theater," says Gottlieb -- and proceeded to change the film's release strategy on the spot. Realizing they had a massive hit on their hands, the execs immediately decided the movie would not be opened in a normal gradual fashion, but in wide release. Amidst the summer toilets of Long Beach, movie industry history was made that night. "The idea of opening a picture simultaneously on 1,500 to 2,000 screens was unheard of," says Gottlieb. "After 'Jaws,' it became standard. Every studio had to have a big summer picture." By mid-summer, the film was taking in a million dollars a day. Within a couple months, it had become the biggest grossing movie of all time. Today, its domestic gross stands at around $250 million, making it the 13th top grossing movie of all time. "I see it the same way I saw it then," says Scheider. "It's a very good action adventure film...Plus it's well-directed, it's well-acted, it's beautifully shot, it's got a great score and a fabulous story. So why shouldn't it be a classic movie?" [From the San Francisco Chronicle, May 28, 2000.] _______________________________________________________________ FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE The Pop Culture Echo Essay by Paul Iorio Every few years, Americans hear an echo from across the Atlantic, the echo of borrowed U.S. pop culture booming back at us from England. By now, the pattern is familiar: Americans invent a piece of pop culture but don't seem to fully accept it until the British adapt, refine and sell it back to the U.S. as something new. For example, Americans invented the modern television game show decades ago with such daytime fare as "Jeopardy" and "Wheel of Fortune." But the most popular U.S. game show of all time came to us from Britain, which created "Who Wants to be a Millionaire," their prime time version of our invention. Likewise, in 1964, the Beatles arrived in America playing the U.S. rock of Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Carl Perkins -- American music that was never more popular than when it was played by the British. And in the 1970s, the English refined the U.S. sit-com with "Till Death Do Us Part," which Americans then adapted into the TV classic "All in the Family." "I would call it a vast cultural laundering operation," says pop culture expert Robert J. Thompson, a professor of Television, Radio and Film at Syracuse University in New York. "When the potential of [American pop culture] really begins to be seen, it's sent over to England to be laundered, to go to finishing school, and then it comes back in the form of the British invasion," he says. In other words, Americans might produce a Chuck Berry, but they won't fully accept him unless he has a British accent. It may come down to the fact that Americans are simply suckers for a British accent, and it hardly matters whether it's Cockney or West End, because millions probably can't tell the difference anyway (and sometimes even confuse British and Australian dialects). In the States, a British accent can make a b-level talent (David Frost, say) seem like an A-list one and make a moderately educated person seem downright erudite. (There are exceptions, of course; a British accent hasn't helped to make Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione appear any more intelligent or refined, for instance.) When it comes to the British, Americans apparently have a cultural inferiority complex, says Thompson. And the complex is not entirely unjustified, considering the British have a vast and rich literary tradition that spans many centuries and includes Shakespeare and Chaucer. It's fitting then that the British are a major force on Broadway; at the time of this writing, there were at least six Broadway productions -- including "Miss Saigon," "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Copenhagen" -- that have roots in the U.K. "The Anglo influence is still incredibly powerful in this country," says Thompson. One reason may be that the U.S. has simply not been around as long as the U.K. and so has not been able to establish cultural traditions that are as enduring or influential. Thompson agrees, saying: "America is having longer traditions, it's an older country [than it was] and it should maybe begin to behave like the old country." "But there are so many things that keep knocking us off-track, like geographic mobility...History has never kicked in in this country," he says. Still, one might argue that Britain's achievements are mostly in the past, while America's are those of the present. "One of the great functions of the United Kingdom is not so much what we import from it," he says. "But how it takes American culture, adapts it...and brings back an organism that is better able to survive not only over there but here as well." [From the San Francisco Chronicle, November 26, 2000; initiated idea.] ________________________________________________________ FROM NEW YORK NEWSDAY Play It Again (and Again), Sam By Paul Iorio Woody Allen comes up with such memorable one-liners that it's no surprise other writers steal from him. In fact, his lines are so funny that even Allen can't resist taking a line from himself now and then. Here are some examples of self-plagiarism in his films: WOODY RECYCLING #1: MARY: "I could go to bed with the entire faculty of M.I.T." (from "Manhattan.") VANESSA: "I [slept with] the entire Tau Epsilon Phi fraternity at Yale." (from "Play it Again, Sam") ANDREW: "You were...sleeping with the...entire infield of the Chicago White Sox." (from "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy") * * * WOODY RECYCLING #2: ALVY: "Hey, don't knock masturbation." (From "Annie Hall") MICKEY: "Hey, you gonna start knocking [masturbation]?" (From "Manhattan") SANDY: "I am an absolute expert [on masturbation]." (from "Stardust Memories") LEONARD: "I teach a course...in [advanced] masturbation." (From "Zelig") * * * WOODY RECYCLING #3: IKE: "I'll turn into one of those guys that sells comic books outside of Bloomingdale's." (From "Manhattan") MICKEY: "I'll wind up like the guy with the wool cap who delivers for the florist." (From "Hannah and Her Sisters") * * * WOODY RECYCLING #4: DICK: "I...had the foresight to buy Polaroid at eight-and-a-half." (From "Play It Again, Sam") SALMON: "I bought Xerox at eight-and-a-half." (From "Take the Money and Run") * * * WOODY RECYCLING #5: FREDERICK: "I can't go out...I'm liable to kill someone." (From "Interiors") FREDERICK: "I just don't want to be around people. I don't want to wind up abusing anyone." (From "Hannah and Her Sisters") * * * WOODY RECYCLING #6: JILL: "What were you doing lurking around outside the cabin, anyway?" IKE: "I was spying on you guys." (From "Manhattan") ANNIE: "What were you doing following me around for, anyway?" ALVY: "I'm following you and David." (From "Annie Hall") TINA: "You know about [the white roses] because you spy on me." JOHNNY: "It's not spying when you care about someone." (From "Broadway Danny Rose") * * * WOODY RECYCLING #7: NARRATOR: "He rents a car and attempts to run her over." (From "Take the Money and Run") MARY: "Did you hear the one where he tried to run her lover over." (From "Manhattan") * * * WOODY RECYCLING #8: SANDY: "The universe is gradually breaking down. There's not gonna be anything left." (From "Stardust Memories") ALVY: "The universe...will break apart, and that will be the end of everything." (From "Annie Hall") * * * WOODY RECYCLING #9: DICK: [consoling Ike after argument about a TV show] "Take a 'lude." (From "Manhattan") RON: [consoling Mickey after argument about a TV show] "You want a 'lude?" (From "Hannah and Her Sisters") [From New York Newsday, March 1, 1992; all quotes from Allen scripts. (Note: This was wholly my piece, from idea to execution, and bears my sole byline, though in the print edition there is a nearby byline of another writer, in larger type, referring to other articles adjacent to mine, yet that other byline sort of makes it look like this was a co-written or co-researched piece, which it was not.) ] ____________________________________________________ FROM SPY MAGAZINE Why It's Not So Smart to Be Smart Anymore (The Dumbification of America) By Paul Iorio Roman Polanski and Salman Rushdie are on the run. Woody Allen is being hounded. Even Enrico Fermi is being called nasty things. Almost everywhere, genius is being demonized and devalued. In movies, for instance, a villain must be more than just an evil, violent psychopath; to be truly feared and vilified today, it helps to be a genius. The gold standard of celluloid evil genius is, of course, Hannibal Lecter of "The Silence of the Lambs," who has spawned smart and wicked imitators ranging from Tommy Lee Jones's character in "Blown Away" (who quotes T.S. Eliot) to John Lithgow's bad guy in "Cliffhanger," who comes off like the headmaster of a country day school. Meanwhile, idiocy is being celebrated as something noble and pure in movies like "Forrest Gump" and "Regarding Henry." In real life, the new outlaws are geniuses like Allen, Polanski, and Michael Jackson -- all accused, and one convicted, of a sex crime. Other recent pariahs include scientific icons J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, irresponsibly called neo-traitors in a best-selling book; any artist funded by an NEA grant (some of whom have been condemned as perverts on the floor of the United States Senate); and computer wizards like the dazzlingly sociopathic Kevin Mitnick, who raised major cyber-hell by penetrating impenetrable computer systems at several corporations. Clearly, being smart isn't such a smart idea anymore. In fact, it seems as if some brainy people have had to dumb down just to stay employed. For a time, even Meryl Streep, for example, abandoned big ambitions to become a regular gal and action movie star (how long before she starts calling herself Mary Streep?). Mario Cuomo tried, unsuccessfully, to keep his job by running TV ads featuring an endearingly inarticulate supporter who mispronounced his name as "Como," as in Perry, instead of Cuomo, as in Aquinas. The trend can also be seen in TV ads like the one in which an announcer asks something like: "Who's smarter -- this woman who shopped at Sears or this prize-winning astrophysicist?" Why does braininess have such a bad reputation these days? Simply put, we don't like to be reminded there may be others who know more than we do. As David Denby explained in his review of "Forrest Gump": "A smart film hero, of course, would risk offending the many Americans who now get angry if there's even a hint that they've been outclassed." Conversely, we're flattered by smart villains because we want to believe that we are the victims of clever people, that we are locked in battle with an exalted adversary, and not some dumb thug with a brick. Oddly, the public doesn't seem to mind those who pretend to be smart but are not smart (aka, the faux smart). In fact, lots of people prefer faux smarts to the real thing, the same way some prefer fake wood to real wood because fake wood doesn't rot, warp, or attract termites. Faux genius comes without demons or neuroses; and it requires none of the tedious work of actually writing a real novel or making a real film. All you needs is the paraphernalia and accouterments of intelligence (say, nonprescription eyeglasses), and you, too, can successfully mimic a smart person. Plus, by being faux smart, you're spared the vilification of the truly brilliant. The first stop on the road to faux intelligence is a degree mill. Unlike traditional universities, which make you do excruciatingly difficult things (like studying), degree mills will quickly and easily add a cheap string of important-looking initials to the end of your name. So why bother enrolling in a big-name school, when you can just as easily buy a degree in a few hours from a school whose name sounds equally prestigious to the inattentive and badly informed? If you aren't smart or affluent enough for, say, Bennington, try Barrington in Burlington, Vermont, and see who can tell the difference on a resume. "If you look at the name of the college...it appears that the name could be mistaken by, let's say, foreign students for one or two other colleges that are located in Vermont," says Robert Lorenz, an education specialist with the Vermont Department of Education. "Bennington College comes to mind. And there's a Barring -- Burlington as well." The name also threw someone at the U.S. Department of Education. "Barrington, not Bennington?," asked Education's Stephanie Babayak. "[Degree mills] are very smart about giving themselves names that are very close to legitimate institutions," says Charles Andersen of the American Council on Education. Can one at least assume that Barrington is located in the heart of Vermont academia? Only if you consider Park Avenue South in Manhattan to be part of Vermont. And when we called the school, we reached someone in...New York. "In the beginning, our understanding was that they would be located in Vermont," Lorenz says. "Upon investigation, their 800 number appears to be answered in the New York City metropolitan area. And their [Vermont] address turns out to be a mail drop." Posing as a prospective student, we soon discovered that Barrington was virtually selling honorary degrees. "If you're interested in [an honorary degree], yeah, there would be a donation involved," says Steven Bettinger, president of Barrington. "You'd get a certificate and everything" for a total of $1,400. Bettinger then says that "a donation alone can't get the degree," but adds that the only other major requirement is the passing of a credential evaluation. "That would be a resume and anything else you could add...any military, just about anything." As far as actual programs of study, Bettinger says: "We also have a Ph.D. program, which, you know, obviously you would do some work." Barrington is evidently breaking the law by granting degrees of any kind, because it has not yet received approval to do so from the Vermont Department of Education. Lorenz told us the matter is being reviewed by the office of the state's Attorney General. "Barrington registered as a correspondence school, and that is not the same as having approval to grant degrees," says Lorenz. "My understanding is that they are offering baccalaureate degrees after taking seven courses and they offer no hassle from teachers, no hassle from quizzes, and an open book final exam." This College of Faux Smarts may be heading into legal trouble. "Granting a degree without state approval would violate state law and be subject to a fine of $1,000 per day," says Lorenz. Even honorary degrees? "There's no distinction in the law between an honorary degree and another degree." Some states are not nearly as strict about education as Vermont. Hawaii, for example, is said to have some of the most lax regulations in the United States. To understand this first-hand, we looked into the Eurotechnical Research University, which is not located in Europe but in Hilo, Hawaii. We think. Whatever Eurotech might lack in conventional credibility, it more than makes up for in mystery. Two of its representatives mentioned up-front that the school has a separate college of martial arts, which, as anyone knows, is the backbone of a small technical university. Eurotech also lists a Hawaii address but has a Texas phone number and an administrator in Michigan. The school's president, Robert Simpson, tries to clear up the mystery with this explanation: "I commute to Hawaii to Australia to Florida and Texas." What's a possible reason for their Hawaii affiliation? "If you're filling station, you can start awarding degrees in Hawaii," says Dave Stewart of the American Council on Education. I pressed Eurotech's president about the fastest way to get an MBA. "Let me get to the bottom line: that degree will be ready [in about three months]," he says, after hearing very little about my background. He went on to explain that the master's program consists of two "modules," each with classes that use texts, assignments, and possibly an audiotape. And all tests are open- book, even the final. "That's the way busy people can get through it," he says. But Simpson draws the line at selling honorary degrees, insisting I stick to the school's rigorous Euro-Hawaiian module regimen. "We were gonna do [an honorary degree] for the President of Turkey," he says. "But my predecessor died in the middle of the process and by the time I found out about it, it was too late." "Why the president of Turkey?," I ask. "I have no idea," says Simpson. Seeking something a bit less Euro-Hawaiian, I tried Summit University, a "non-residence" university with central offices in Louisiana and provosts in Ohio, Delaware and New York. One advisor, Kenneth Onapolis, offered a passionate defense of the fast degree/faux smarts ethos. "Anybody can earn an MBA by going to school...," Onapolis says. "There's an easy way of doing it and there's a hard way of doing it." The easy way? "We submit you with an examination that is equivalent to the master's degree program that a university would offer...It's computer graded...We expect you to go to libraries, contact relatives, friends, business associates, colleagues, whatever, to get the answers to the questions." And so, without having to put up with pesky grades and studying, students can receive a master's degree after passing a single test and paying a few thousand dollars. Still, faux smarts must be about more than just taking open-book tests and mixing with the Euro-Hawaiian elite. It probably wouldn't hurt to have some sort of professional degree from a professional-sounding school. So I contacted the Southern California University for Professional Studies (SCUPS), which, in spite of its traditional Ph.D. programs, was all too glad to strike a deal. SCUPS offered to sell me an honorary law degree for $10,000 flat, despite my lack of any prior legal experience. All we had to do, according to Lorrie Weiland, an admissions counselor with the university, was send in a resume, any certificates that I held, and a one-page explanation of why I wanted the law degree. "The first honorary degree we gave was to a gentleman from Korea," Weiland says. "Why Korea?," I ask. "We've had three different individuals fly in from Korea for degrees," she says. "Why Korea?," I ask. "We're worldwide," she says. "But yet all from Korea?," I say. "It just happened," she says. "We just started doing it, and it just happened..." "So who are they? Businessmen?," I ask. "Businessmen, yes. They were all businessmen," she says. "Did they make a contribution to the university?," I ask. "Yes, oh, yes. You'd pay the same [for the honorary law degree] as you'd pay for the [actual degree]," she says. SCUPS, along with Eurotech and Barrington, are not officially accredited schools, unless you count their ostensible "accreditation" by an organization called the World Association of Universities and Colleges (WAUC). "[WAUC] is not an accrediting association that's recognized by either the Commission on Recognition of Post-secondary Accreditation or the U.S. Department of Education, which are the only ones that count in this county," says Education's Dave Stewart, an expert on degree mills. [Since this article first ran, the Commission has been supplanted by another agency.] "I have a number of inquiries on [SCUPS], one from a student who said he's been trying to track it down. The last address I have for them is Las Vegas, which figures." We called WAUC president Maxine Asher and asked her about the curious Las Vegas address. "I lived in Los Angeles and after the earthquake in January [1994] I moved to Las Vegas to get away from the earthquake," she says. "Well, I set up everything there but then I moved back to L.A., but things were working so well that I'm going to leave it in [Las Vegas] with the legal office in Switzerland. It's not a good reason but that's what happened." Wait a minute? Legal offices in Switzerland? Operations in Vegas? Between this Swiss-Vegas connection and Summit's Euro-Hawaiian alliance -- not to mention all those Korean gentlemen -- faux smarts appears to have truly gone worldwide. But faux genius can't ever be fully achieved with mere Swiss-Vegas schmoozing. One also needs the faux accomplishment of, say, a book deal from a vanity press. And by no means is there a shortage of companies eager to publish virtually anything for a price. Under the pen name of Jonathan Swift, I called Marketing Director Dan Heise at Evanston Publishing and presented him with a modest proposal. "Jon Swift is the name I write under," I told him. "I have two ideas that are kind of controversial...One is a non-fiction book on the medical ramifications of cannibalism. It would be about what parts of the body you would ignore [while eating]. For example, don't eat this, eat that; if you want carbohydrates, eat that. Almost a practical guide to [cannibalism]." "How would you go about assessing the value of something like that?," asked Heise. "Through doctors," I said. "Have doctors say, 'Well, this would be something you'd want to avoid, this would be poisonous, this part would provide carbs, protein, et cetera.' Start with the premise that [the movie] 'Alive' started with..." "Something that people had an interest in, however morbid," said Heise. "They ate it up." "Precisely," I said. "Would you have a problem with that?" "I don't think we would," says Heise. "That sounds like -- although it would be controversial, it doesn't sound like it would be patently offensive or derogatory towards anyone. So I think it's definitely going to be taken into consideration." "Here's the other one, and that is, like, one of those novelty books," I said. "It's the wit of someone who is not really known for anything except being very, very serious, and that is the wit of Saddam Hussein." "God, that would be hilarious," says Heise. "Believe it or not, you would be surprised, people who have covered this guy in Baghdad, they have collected a lot of quips from him," I said. "The wit and wisdom of Saddam Hussein!," says Heise, laughing. "Like, when the Republican Guard was defeated, he turned to someone and said, 'Frankly, I'd rather be in Port Palma" or something. When his oil wells were being bombed, he said something to the effect -- I don't have the exact quote in front of me -- but something like, 'A couple million gallons here, a couple million gallons there, it starts to add up,'" I said. Heise laughs. "It'd be a cute fifty-pager," I said. "To tell the truth, I think that would be a hot, a hot item!," says Heise. "It depends on the reaction you'd get from distributors and chain stores, et cetera. Because if they don't like it, then it's not gonna go anywhere. But it seems to me to be the kind of thing that would definitely get people's attention, and that's what you've got to do in this business. Especially if you made it something like a $6.95 impulse item or even a calendar." I then shopped the same ideas to Vantage Press, the premiere vanity publisher, making our pitch to Vantage Editor Walter Kendall. "My idea is a compilation of...the wit of Saddam Hussein," I said. "Many of the people who have covered him in Baghdad understand that he is really a first-rate wit, and they have compiled some [quips] from press conferences... Would you have a problem with something like that?" "Not that I imagine," said Kendall. "The other idea, which is kind of chancy, is, if you've seen the movie 'Alive,' it broaches the subject of cannibalism," I said. "I've actually done about 100 pages of a book [on] the real story on [cannibalism]: what part of the human body would be 'forget it, don't eat it'...Is that something that would create any type of problem?" "Well, not theoretically," said Kendall. "...Based on the subject, I wouldn't see a problem. But we'd have to see the book before we make a final determination." "Are there any subjects that you don't approach at all?," I asked. "Well, we don't do pornography," said Kendall. "And we don't do things that are libelous." Having closed my second faux book deal of the day, I took stock. Cannibalism is in, libel out; Saddam is in, pornography out. Does that mean I could write about eating Saddam but can't libel him? Trying to make sense of all this, I looked back upon the several hours of my academic/publishing career. To achieve faux smarts, it seems, all I had to do was scrape together around $15,000. That breaks down this way: I could buy a quick MBA, after taking open-book tests, for roughly $3,000; an honorary doctorate for $1,400; and an honorary law degree for $10,000. With that money, I could afford to publish my vanity books on "A Practical Guide to Cannibalism" and "The Wit of Saddam." Hold on. Was that offer from Vintage or Vantage? And was that school Bennington or Barrington? In Vermont or Hawaii? Or Zurich? Oh, never mind. Those are minor distinctions to the faux smart. As Spinal Tap's Nigel Tufnel once put it, "There's a fine line between clever and stupid." [From Spy magazine, January 1995.] ____________________________________________________________ PUBLISHED HERE FOR THE FIRST TIME The Poetry of Borat Sagdiyev By Paul Iorio Yes, Borat Sagdiyev is a faux journalist and documentary maker, but who knew he was a poet, too? Hard to believe, but a close listen to what Borat says in the movie "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" reveals a hidden poetry that is unmistakably, uniquely...Boratian. Here are eight examples, taken verbatim (or virtually verbatim) from the picture: King of the castle, king of the castle Have a chair, have a chair Go do this! Go do this! King of the castle * * * * Do not fear me, gypsy All I want from you is my tears Please give them to me or I will take them... I will look in your treasures, gypsy * * * * I came to America to learn lessons... But what had I learned? Suddenly I realized I had learned that if you chase a dream Especially one with a plastic chest You can miss the real beauty in front of your eyes * * * * Will you please teach me how to dine like gentlemen? ...Is it polite to greet people when I make entry? ...Should I pay interest in people around the table...? ...What do you do? ...What do you do? * * * * I have no friends I am alone in this country Nobody like me My only friend...he take my money and my bear And he leave me alone Not only this: The woman I love, the reason I travel across the country She had to do something terrible on a boat And now I can never forgive her Is there anybody who can help me? * * * * I arrive in America's airport With clothing, U.S. dollars And a jar of gypsy tears to protect me... * * * * In Kazakhstan it is illegal for more than five woman to be in the same place Except for in brothel or in grave * * * * I took a bus to Los Angeles with some friends of Mr. Jesus I have arrived Happy times. [Published here for the first time, January 22, 2007.] ____________________________________________________ [FROM REUTERS] The Original Family Stone Reunites, Without Sly and Larry New Details Revealed About Sly Stone By Paul Iorio Sly Stone's disappearance from the music business is one of the more mysterious chapters in recent pop history. After making a string of hit singles and albums as leader of American funk-popsters Sly and the Family Stone from 1967 to 1973, he fell dramatically off the charts and into an abyss of drugs, jail, rehab and musical inactivity. He hasn't recorded an album since 1982 and hasn’t been in touch with some close friends and colleagues in many years. But Sly's reclusion hasn't stopped his former bandmates from making music together again. The original Family Stone, the band that backed Sly from 1967 to 1971, has reunited in the recording studio for the first time since 1971. The line-up includes all the original members that recorded such pop classics as "Everyday People" and "Stand," minus bassist Larry Graham and, of course, Sly Stone. The sessions mark the first time in thirty-two years that five of the original members of the group have recorded together. So far, the Stone sessions have spawned around 16 original songs, in various states of completion, with titles like "I've Got News For You" and "Sooner or Later." The tracks are being written and sung mostly by Sly's brother Freddie Stone (born Fred Stewart) and sister Rosie Stone (born Rose Stewart, aka Rose Banks), and the album is being produced by Freddie Stone and drummer Greg Errico. The band does not yet have a recording contract. "When I play a track for somebody, within 20 seconds they have a big smile on their face," says Errico. "It sounds like it's the next [Family Stone] record." "This is a whole new thing again," says trumpeter Cynthia Robinson, alluding to the title of Sly and the Family Stone's 1967 debut album. The reunion began around a year and a half ago when the Family Stone gathered in New York to accept an R&B Foundation award. “Everybody was there but Sly,” says Errico. “We [wondered], are we going to...put the group back together? Everybody decided to do it. We waited for Larry about three or four months. After saying, ‘Yeah, he wanted to do it,’ he never responded.” Of course, the unspoken, and unlikely, hope is Sly will come out of retirement and decide to join the Family again. Expectations for that are low. "I'll put it like this," says Errico. "The [car] is on and running and idling, and the seat's warm, and whenever he wants to come sit in it, he's more than welcome. But he's been a recluse for the last 20 years or so." Why is Sly, now 59, such a hermit these days? "I don't understand it,” says Errico. “...Your guess is as good as mine." The reunited line-up includes Robinson, 57, a sort of Ringo Starr of pop trumpeters in that she plays with endearing simplicity. Errico, 56, is a somewhat flashy drummer, responsible for some of pop’s most indelible beats. Freddie Stone, 56, is the main guitarist and occasional singer. Rosie Stone, 56, is the band’s female vocalist, heard on such tracks as “Everyday People” and “Everybody Is a Star.” And Jerry Martini, 59, a high school pal of Sly’s, is the saxophonist. Bassist Larry Graham, 56, whose baritone vocals and percussive bass playing were an important part of the group, is replaced by Rusty Allen, who played on Sly and the Family Stone’s 1973 album “Fresh” after replacing Graham the first time around. (Graham, also the founder of Graham Central Station, has been collaborating with Prince for many years.) Whether or not Sly ever re-emerges again, his band’s place in the pop pantheon is permanent and central (the band was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, but didn’t perform at the induction ceremony). The group, after all, helped to invent modern funk by mixing soul and rock -- and politics and partying in equal measure. The band also smashed cultural stereotypes; it had a black rock guitarist, a white funk drummer, and songs that have always aired across radio’s racial divide. Most of the Stone are blood relatives from or near Vallejo, a small town between the San Francisco Bay Area and California wine country. That’s where Sly (born Sylvester Stewart), Freddie, and Rosie grew up; Graham, their cousin, was raised 25 miles to the south in Oakland, California. Robinson, who had a child with Sly, is from Sacramento, California, where she played trumpet in her high school band; she met Sly after “he got kicked out of all the schools in Vallejo” and was brought to Sacramento to attend school, she says. The original band is captured in its prime in the “Woodstock” concert film, which provides a ten-minute glimpse of the band's most famous concert, its 3am set at the 1969 Woodstock festival. Errico says the band's label, Sony, is considering releasing a Sly and the Family Stone live album of a 1968 show at the Fillmore East. “[The concert] really captured what the magic and the essence of the group was about,” Errico says, adding that the set list is identical to the first part of the recently released double-CD set “The Essential Sly and the Family Stone.” Most agree the group’s best works are its 1970 "Greatest Hits" collection, which included non-album singles, and the 1969 album "Stand," almost all of which is included on "Greatest Hits.” On those albums and elsewhere, one can hear Sly’s penchant for musical clarity, says Robinson, recalling the session that produced the single “Thank You (Falenttinme Be Mice Elf Agin).” "He made sure stuff wasn't cluttered, that good lines weren't covered up by other good lines," says Robinson. Robinson says the band's old songs always originated with Sly, who would write the material before coming into the studio. "He and Freddie used to work together... at home, creating the songs," says Robinson. “Then he would give everyone their parts by playing the riff on his keyboards.” At the 1970 session for "Everybody Is a Star," for example, Sly played the opening melody on his organ in order to show Robinson what to play. Did Sly ever score parts for the band? "No, no, no, no," says Robinson. "[Sly] never went that slow. He's very aware that if you learn to read it, then it's very hard to memorize it." Often, the drums were recorded last. "I'd...come in and do the drum parts again when the songs were finished," says Errico. "...The drums would be the last thing [recorded]." Moments like the famous drum rolls that open both "Stand!" and "M’Lady" were also Sly's idea. "Sometimes Sly would say, 'Hey, play a lick for the opening or do a roll,’" says Errico. "Or sometimes I'd say, 'Put this there.'" For now, the Family Stone plans no live shows until after the new album is finished, though several members -- Errico, Martini, Robinson and Rosie Stone -- are performing with others in the San Francisco Bay Area in a funk jam band called the Funk Family Circus (formerly the Stone Family Circus). The Circus recently played a Marin County, California, nightclub, reportedly performing such Sly Stone hits as “Thank You,” “Everyday People,” and “I Want to Take You Higher.” “If you think about it,” says Errico, “that’s a hard legacy to live up to, what we’ve done in the past.” [Published and syndicated by Reuters, July 2003; this is the original manuscript I submitted to Reuters.] _____________________________________________________________ FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES The Jack Nicholson Quiz (You Know What He Means?) By Paul Iorio Jack Nicholson started his career as a sort of streetwise older brother to baby boomers. While everyone else was innocently preaching love in the 1960s, Mr. Nicholson was teaching us the pleasures of experience, punctuating his revelations with a trademark phrase; "You know what I mean?" "You know what I mean?" spices even the blandest lines, adding a knowin resonance, a leering innuendo. Mr. Nicholson could probably create a provocative double-entendre by attaching the phrase to almost anything, even "Jingle Bells" ("Jingle all the way, you know what I mean?"). How well do you know what Mr. Nicholson means? Match the line to the movie. 1. "She crossed her legs a little too quick, you understand what I mean?" 2. "I'll be seeing you on the outside, you know what I mean?" 3. "It only gives us a week to do it, you know what I mean?" 4. "I'd get a new sign...neon, something flashy, you know what I mean?" 5. "Twenty-five dollars is not too bad; no razor blades, you know what I mean? WHICH MOVIES ARE THE ABOVE LINES FROM? A. Easy Rider B. The Postman Always Rings Twice C. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest D. The Last Detail E. Chinatown ANSWERS: 1-E; 2-C; 3-D; 4-B; 5-A [From The New York Times, June 12, 1994.] _______________________________________________________ FROM NEW YORK NEWSDAY Yet Another Jack Nicholson Quiz (A Few Good Tantrums) By Paul Iorio Nobody in the movies throws an onscreen temper tantrum quite like Jack Nicholson. From his 1969 breakthrough "Easy Rider" to the present day, Nicholson has been a role model for those who aspire to lose their temper with some style. Below are three lists: memorable tantrum scenes, the memorable lines that followed and the films they appeared in. Simply match the scene with the line and with the film. NICHOLSON DOES THIS: A. A waitress refuses to serve Nicholson a side order of toast. He argues with her and says one of the lines below before throwing plates and silverware to the floor. B. After being punched by a police detective, Nicholson pulls a gun and growls one of the lines below. C. He chops through a locked door with an ax and announces himself with this line. D. Construction workers have neglected to build a door linking Nicholson's house to the kitchen. He yells this line. E. When Nicholson tries to leave a craps game with his winnings (over the objections of other players), he has an outburst that ends like this. F. A bartender won't serve Nicholson's companion a beer. Nicholson has words with the bartender and roars this line. G. He argues with his wife about overspending and shouts this. H. While kissing his date in the water at the beach, he gets his hand caught in her outfit. She wrests his hand loose and scolds him, and he responds with this. I. He is insulted by a customer in a barbershop and this is his retort. J. The nurse won't permit Nicholson and his fellow patients to watch the World Series, and he shouts this. * * THEN NICHOLSON SAYS THIS: a. "Heeere's Johnny!" b. "Who is this bimbo, Barney?" c. "I'm not drunk anymore; the pain sobered me up." d. "Aw, c'mon, you're not going to say that now." e. "I can't afford a fucking dream house." f. "Good meeting with you." g. "Now how the fuck did this happen?" h. "Maybe you need a change." i. "I am the...shore patrol." j. "You see this sign?" * * MATCH THE TANTRUM AND LINE TO THE MOVIE: 1. "The Two Jakes" 2. "Heartburn" 3. "The Postman Always Rings Twice" 4. "The Last Detail" 5. "Chinatown" 6. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" 7. "Five Easy Pieces" 8. "The Shining" 9. "The Border" 10. "Terms of Endearment" ANSWERS: A,j,7; B,h,1; C,a,8; D,g,2; E,f,3; F,i,4; G,e,9; H,e,10; I,b.5; J,d,6. [From New York Newsday, January 3, 1993] ____________________________________________________ FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Mimi Leder Takes Charge (and a Wonderful Call) By Paul Iorio Mimi Leder remembers the day she received a call from Steven Spielberg asking her to direct a feature film. "I've got a big action movie that spans four countries and four different languages and I want you to direct," Spielberg told her in the call, according to Leder. "Well, what makes you think I can direct action?," asked Leder, who had never helmed a feature before and whose main prior experience had been directing television's "E.R." "You do it everyday on 'E.R.,'" said Spielberg, according to Leder. "I do drama," said Leder. "No," said Spielberg. "You turn your drama into action by the way you move your camera." Given that Spielberg usually gets what he wants, Leder soon became the film's director. The result was "The Peacemaker," starring George Clooney and Nicole Kidman, the first release from DreamWorks Pictures. Obviously, Spielberg was quite impressed with Leder's Emmy- award winning work on "E.R." After all, she is responsible for what many critics consider a bona fide television classic: episode number eighteen of "E.R.," also known as "Love's Labor Lost," in which a pregnant woman arrives at the hospital with a minor infection and leaves in a body bag. Producer Norman Lear is said to have called the episode "the best hour of television ever made." TV Guide says it's "almost too painful to watch." "'Love's Labor Lost' is why Mimi got this job," said Clooney at a press conference following my one-on-one interview with Leder. "Steven saw that episode and thought she directed an action film in an hour episode inside a hospital room. And he thinks she could handle any kind of action after that." Still, Clooney, not Leder, was the first major player Spielberg contacted when he started to put together "The Peacemaker." "I got a letter from Steven Spielberg attached to the script, and he said, 'It's our first movie for Dreamworks: are you interested?,'" recalls Clooney. "So that piques your interest right off the bat." Around a month after the letter, Clooney got another call from Spielberg. "We're thinking of going with Mimi. Do you like that?," Spielberg asked, according to Clooney. "I was shocked," says Clooney of the selection of Leder. "I thought they were gonna get an old pro...For them to get a first-time director was really ballsy." The pairing of "E.R." colleagues Leder and Clooney seemed smart, at least on paper, to many; their chemistry together had produced quality television, after all. Yet the two couldn't be further apart in terms of personality. Clooney is generally genial, humorous, mischievous, loquacious. Leder is laconic, steely, restrained, a very cool head. In this interview, one could actually see her grow cooler as tension increased. In a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Clooney even calls Leder "passive- aggressive." Leder takes vigorous exception to the characterization. "I'm completely not passive-aggressive at all," she says, becoming passive and a bit, well, quietly aggressive. "She's somebody who can really bust my chops a little bit and that's a good thing," says Clooney of Leder. "We have fun. I'll say, 'I'd really like to do this [onscreen].' And she'll say, 'You could do that; a television actor would do that.' At one point, when I killed a guy [in the film], I said, 'I've got to shoot him.' And she wanted the guy to live...And I said, 'I guess [that would be right] for a chick director.'" Leder found that filming in th