I emailed Dracula’s people because I was heading to Romania, for a global democracy forum that I help lead.

While I’m in Bucharest, I asked, could I take the train up to Transylvania and spend a day chopping it up with the Count? After all, he’s been around for 600 years and has seen many, many dark times for governance and democracy.

In reply, I got a cryptic text telling me to arrive by midnight at an address in Beachwood Canyon, high in the Hollywood Hills above L.A. The place was invisible from the street, and so dark I had to turn on my iPhone flashlight to find the door.

But then, at my knock, the world’s most famous vampire opened the door. He ushered me to a chair in a room lit only by fireplace.

Dracula: Welcome to my castle in the air. Now, can my servant Renfield get you something to drink? Want to join me for a pint of O-negative?

Me: Thanks, but I’m fine, Count.

Dracula: Please, call me Vlad. And suit yourself (pouring blood into a glass). I need a drink from a stiff before discussing democracy these days.

Me: I hoped we’d be meeting in Eastern Europe and talking about June’s European elections and rising authoritarianism there. What are you doing in L.A.?

Dracula: Romania will always be home, but many decades ago, I realized that Hollywood would never stop calling. I used to stay with my friend Bela Lugosi, right down the street, but he got tired of the LAPD knocking on the door asking for me every time some teenage girl got a hickey. So, I had this place built. It’s small for a castle, but I never went and had a family like Gomez Addams.

It’s more than paid for itself. To date, more than 80 films have been made about me. Yes, those Netflix execs—who suck more blood in a half-hour pitch meeting than I have in my whole existence—don’t pay well. But it’s amazing how much work my fellow vampires at CAA can get me for uncredited script doctoring and story consulting.

I advised the cast during the New Orleans shoot of Renfield, a 2023 comedy with Nicholas Cage playing me. Nick and I hit it off. I’m not saying he’s a vampire—I respect his privacy—but I will say he didn’t have to do much to get into character.

Me: Do you see the story of Dracula having an impact on how the world runs?

D: Sometimes I worry I have too much impact. Porphyria—which they call the vampire disease, because you have trouble with sunlight and sometimes must retreat into darkness—used to be considered rare. Now, with everyone up half the night on their screens, people are becoming more like me.

Despair has its own calms, I suppose. And I enjoy a long night. But the fact that we’re so atomized makes democracy and self-government quite difficult.

Me: Vlad, you’ve been around longer than anyone living. In human form, you lived as the ruthless ruler of Wallachia in the 1400s, famous for your cruelty toward your enemies. Then, vampires became an obsession in the 1700s, and you emerged publicly in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, and have been famous ever since. In all that time, what has changed the most in how humans govern themselves?

D: What’s changing the most is the very nature of what it means to be human. And that’s changed self-government and everything else.

We not only live longer, but we never go away. I died in 1476, yet I’m still around, sort of human. AI means that humans can stay alive digitally long after our human bodies are dust. We are all vampires now.

Which means that humans need to take a much longer view and build more flexible institutions. Because humans and vampires alike are changing so fast. Look at me. I started as this figure of fear—of violence, of disease. I was the bad, undead guy. But now in popular culture, I’m the cool Gothic mainstay, an outsider. Just look at how I’m portrayed by younger, better-looking actors.

The secret of my success is flexibility: I don’t fit into categories or labels. I’m good and I’m bad, real and unreal, dead and alive. And this makes me emblematic of what the British literary historian Nick Groom, in The Vampire: A New History, calls our “vampirocene era… in which the human race has the transformed the world, but in doing so has also lost its primacy.”

Me: Vampirocene? So, you’re saying the world is getting better?

D: It’s definitely more open, inclusive and democratic. I know that sounds strange—Dracula, optimist. But that’s only because so many people are still thinking too short-term.

Look at Romania. Just two generations ago, we were ruled by a far crueler villain than I ever was, Nicolae Ceaușescu, a communist dictator who built a society nearly as totalitarian as North Korea. But we learn from failure, not from success. Now Romania is in the European Union and the eurozone, and we have a real democracy, despite the pressures coming from that other Vlad, who impaled far more people than I ever did, running Russia.

Me: Aren’t you worried about potential right-wing gains in June’s European elections?

D: Sure. The world seems full of good men—but there are monsters in it.

There are always people trying to scapegoat democracy for our problems. There are always tyrants trying to kill off democracy.

Just like there are always people who hate vampires. Some hate us so much that, like that Buffy chick, they seek to slay us.

But no matter how hard they try to kill us, we vampires keep coming back, because people want us. Take Interview with the Vampire—it was a book, then a movie, and now it’s a TV show, all huge hits!  The same thing is true of democracy. Look at Turkey—its national government goes theocratic and authoritarian, and yet its cities respond by becoming more democratic.

Democracy and vampires have a lot in common.

Me: Do you really think that vampires can inspire a more democratic world?

D:  If an undead guy with a story as ugly and bloody as mine can still bring magic into the universe, then I’m quite sure that the living can collectively recognize that knowledge is stronger than memory, and conquer Earth’s scariest problems together.

The post In Midnight Interview, Dracula Sees Bright Future for Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The new film Civil War is a historic cinematic achievement. British director Alex Garland has made a movie that might be worse than a real American civil war.

Perhaps that was Garland’s intention. His film is a series of horrifying set pieces—Abu Ghraib-style torture by gas station attendants, government aerial bombings of civilians, summary execution of journalists, a massive California and Texas invasion of Washington, D.C.—that seem to add up to a warning. If we don’t steer away from our current path of polarization and political conflict, Garland suggests, this could be the end of the United States.

There’s established logic in this message. Early in the film, I kept thinking of the late, great Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran, who wrote in his anti-existentialist 1973 masterpiece The Trouble With Being Born: “When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.”

But Civil War never provides the illumination or certitude that inspires action. It’s too Hollywood, which is to say that it’s too unoriginal and too violent, with too many guns.

Indeed, the film is so over-the-top that it feels uncomfortably, well, Putinist. These days, the Russian and Chinese governments, and their media organs, routinely promote the idea that the U.S. is headed for, in the words of former Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, a “bloody civil war which [will] cost thousands upon thousands of lives.” Civil War brings that propagandist vision to cinematic life.

If the U.S. does see another civil war, it will almost certainly not involve the new film’s vision of warring armies advancing to a final shootout at the White House. Nor is it likely to involve fights between groups of states, like the California–Texas alliance the film depicts. Those visions—like much of this film, where the internet rarely enters the story and the main characters are traditional still photographers—are anachronisms, owing more to the 1860s Civil War than to 21st-century realities.

Indeed, the real challenge of the next American civil war will be perceiving whether it is a war at all. Such a conflict won’t separate soldiers from civilians. It will be fought with cyberattacks, misinformation and disinformation, and psychological warfare. The battlegrounds will be political and legal, with warring factions seeking to cancel each other’s rights and prerogatives. It will also be diplomatic, because an American civil war would be, by definition, a world war. Our enemies will fund and fuel our conflict, while our allies will send emissaries to intervene and negotiate peace.

The fighting will not be between states, because the conflicts in our society are not primarily geographic. Our most bitter fault lines are around ideology, race, gender, age, class, education, and immigrant status. A civil war will map those divides within our metro regions, within our cities, even within our neighborhoods.

For these reasons, it’s time to retire the idea of California “secession,” even for those of us who are sympathetic to making California independent by peaceful means. Let’s face facts: The Golden State is never going to break away and fire on Camp Pendleton, like South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter in 1861. And we certainly aren’t going to send troops to march on Washington. We have no military, and no offensive warfare beyond Gov. Newsom’s Fox News appearances.

No—if California ever becomes an independent nation, the more likely path will be through a U.S. government meltdown.

Unfortunately, that scenario now seems possible. It is easy to imagine a fascist president, with a compliant Supreme Court and a cowed Congress, using his military to punish cities and communities whose actions he doesn’t like. It’s also possible to imagine such a president invoking executive powers to shut down Congress (as Donald Trump attempted on January 6) or government agencies that won’t bend to his command.

In such a circumstance, California, without representation in Congress, will have little choice but to take on national duties. Behaving more like countries, California and other unrepresented states might drift naturally to formal breakup, the current republic ending not with war but with written agreements between states and a disintegrated federal government.

To make a believable movie about such a real American civil war would require a filmmaker with the virtuosity of the late Akira Kurosawa, whose 1950 film Rashomon famously tells one story from multiple, contradictory perspectives. Perhaps the San Fernando Valley auteur Paul Thomas Anderson could pull off such a film (he used a similar technique in Magnolia). Maybe Drew Goddard, writer-director of the Lake Tahoe noir Bad Times at the El Royale, could manage it.

Garland’s film never comes close. We never get to know the civil war’s combatants, some of whom seem like cartoon villains. Instead, the director tells his story through the narrow perspectives of four journalists driving from New York to Washington. All but the main character, played by Kirsten Dunst, come off as callous, selfish, or vaguely ridiculous.

As the president is about to be executed, one journalist asks the soldiers to wait a second because “I need a quote.”

The film feels unimaginative because the idea of another American civil war is actually an old one. For example, Marvel made a much smarter film in 2016 about what drives us to war when feuding superheroes devoted to Captain America and Iron Man turned on each other in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.

But watching this Civil War, I found myself thinking of the 1997 satire The Second American Civil War. That cable TV movie, with scenes filmed at Los Angeles City Hall and the State Capitol in Sacramento, envisioned a future that looks too much like our present, with Idaho sparking a civil war in a country badly divided by race, immigration, politics, and media nonsense.

Like Garland’s film, it hid from the harder questions by putting journalists at center stage. But for all its goofiness, that 27-year-old film was the wiser, more relevant, and more responsible movie.

“The country is falling apart,” says a TV producer in the satire. “We don’t need exclamation marks.”

The post A Movie That Might Be Worse Than Civil War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Which region is the greater threat to humanity: Northern California or Southern California?

That’s the most urgent question raised by 2023’s great cinematic contest between Oppenheimer and Barbie.

Sure, these are entertaining films about a physicist and a doll. But both movies are also, in no small part, California-based stories about global nightmares, about the Earth-altering threat of bombs and bombshells alike.

Embedded in those nightmares are warnings about the damage that Northern and Southern California can do when we send our ideas out into the world.

Oppenheimer is the Northern California nightmare. While much of Christopher Nolan’s film takes place in New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were built, the most important moments occur at Berkeley, where J. Robert Oppenheimer was a professor from 1929 to 1943.

It’s there that he meets the Manhattan Project’s military chief, Leslie Groves, and befriends the physicist Ernest Lawrence (the Lawrence of the Bay Area’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab), who becomes a crucial collaborator in the Manhattan Project. In fact, the lab in New Mexico that produced the nuclear bombs ended up being managed by the University of California.

The whole endeavor is a quintessential Bay Area enterprise. Very smart people from around the world come together to rapidly create a disruptive technology, without fully appreciating its perils and complications until it’s too late. Oppenheimer has prompted comparisons to how Silicon Valley is now making available artificial intelligence tools available without understanding their consequences.

Among the nuclear age’s cultural and commercial products was Barbie (born in 1959). She, and the new film about her, are Los Angeles nightmares.

The director, Greta Gerwig, is a Sacramento kid who shares her home city’s loathing of all things L.A. So, her film pins most of the damage that Barbie has done on Southern California, where she was invented and manufactured.

Barbie, like Los Angeles itself, is a sun-splashed comedy with a dark noir heart. The central joke of the film is that when Barbie, in unexpected existential crisis, leaves the seeming perfection of Barbieland for “Reality,” it turns out to be L.A. Amid the city’s most unreal Westside precincts (especially Venice), Barbie learns of the impossible expectations her example places on women.

Barbie’s would-be boyfriend Ken, who is confined to hanging around the beach in Barbieland, discovers the possibilities of patriarchy after he falls in love with the phallic glass office towers of Century City. And when Ken takes those supposed Southern California values back to Barbieland, that utopia of feminism (with a set design that resembles Palm Springs) collapses. Soon, the various Ken dolls have imposed a bizarro dictatorship of men, who subjugate the various Barbies, who’d previously served as president and controlled the Supreme Court.

It might be wrong to think too hard about a movie as addled and antic as Barbie, but the film does reflect the Hollywood work realities of the women who made the movie. Gerwig, star-producer Margot Robbie, and their colleagues have had to navigate an entertainment industry dominated by dim-witted Kens. (The rest of L.A., thank goodness, is a bit more egalitarian, as Mayor Karen Bass and the all-female Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors can tell you.)

Both films, however, feel more than a little soulless. Barbie, for all its righteous feminism, is a corporate vehicle for selling dolls. It misses opportunities to make light of the cynicism of this American moment, when corporations try to talk like social movements, and social movements often behave like corporations. The anxieties of Barbie are firmly upper-middle-class and higher; none of the women or men of the film worry about what worries most Angelenos—scratching out a living in a too-expensive place.

Oppenheimer is even more callous. It’s a film about nuclear weapons that doesn’t show their victims. We never see the human horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which is why the film can’t get screened in Japan), or the damage people endured because of their proximity to the testing of such weapons, from the South Pacific to Central Asia.

This distance from real-life human concerns is what makes both films so unsettling—and so convincing as apocalyptic documents.

Together, they offer a two-part scenario for the end of humanity. First, we grow divided and isolated from each other because of the unattainable lifestyles and cultural expectations that Southern California creates and promotes. Second, we kill ourselves with the technologies masterminded by Northern California.

The post Will SoCal’s Barbie Doll or NorCal’s Bobby Oppenheimer Destroy the World First? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2009, soon after the fourth Indiana Jones film came out, the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) awarded Harrison Ford with the Bandelier Award for Public Service in Archaeology.

In his speech, Ford expresses his gratitude to the AIA and for the work archaeologists are doing today to “understand and interpret the past to learn from it and enjoy a better future.” But he added, “it is quite disarming to see that the Indiana Jones films have been an inspiration to archaeologists.”

I was thinking about this speech while watching the previews for the latest Indiana Jones film, where Ford takes his last bow as Dr. Jones, the archaeology professor-cum-international treasure hunter. Three decades since 1930s-era Nazis sought to take over the world in Radars of the Lost Ark, they’re back in this fifth installment, The Dial of Destiny, set in the late 1960s, which finds them once more in pursuit of a powerful artifact (this time, a time-traveling device they can use to change the past).

Who better than Indy to save the world again? But if our now-aging hero is deservedly beloved for his penchant for punching Nazis (and his “healthy respect” for snakes), his own exploits also further what Ford recognizes as the dangers of archaeology as a tool of empire.

The real-life Nazis were, of course, infamous for coopting archaeological practices in service of the state. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Nazi-sponsored archaeological digs took place throughout Europe and North Africa to further the racist ideology of the Third Reich and destroy or suppress any material that did not support their imperial doctrine.

One of the Third Reich’s primary endeavors in these expeditions was to find any evidence that would support the myth of an ancient Aryan race, the pseudoscientific theory first popularized in the 18th century by French aristocrat Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, among others, and operated as a central ideology of the Third Reich.

Nazi archaeologist Hans Reinerth, the head of the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce, one of the Nazi Party organizations tasked to appropriate and loot cultural property, was explicit about such an agenda:

German archaeology is for me … indigenous, blood-bound Germanic and Indo-Germanic prehistory. Our spadework has the preeminent goal …of illuminating our hitherto neglected indigenous prehistory. Anyone who opposes this effort … is a pernicious threat to the German people and should be fought accordingly.

Such expeditions were also intended to justify the state’s territorial aggression and expansion. For instance, after Hitler invaded Poland in 1940, Wolfram Sievers, the managing director of Ahnenerbe, another SS organization that sought to find evidence to justify Nazi racial superiority, had the idea of sending a representative to Poland to seize any material that would retroactively establish the Nazis’ right to the land and endorse the annexation.

But while the crimes of Nazi archaeology were numerous, as archaeologist Bettina Arnold warns in her study of race and archaeology in Nazi Germany, what the Third Reich was doing was neither a “uniquely German phenomenon nor something we can safely relegate to the past.”

Modern archaeologists are forever disavowing how the Indiana Jones franchise equates Indy’s treasure hunting to serious academic archaeology to distance the fictitious looter from their field. (There’s a great McSweeney’s list that jokes about the many… many reasons Dr. Jones would have been denied tenure as a professor in mid-20th century America.) But Indy’s wont of looting priceless artifacts is also part and parcel of the history of Western colonial plunder conducted under the auspices of archaeological research.

Even Jones’s creator, George Lucas, first described Indy as “a grave robber,” hired by museums “to steal things out of tombs and stuff.” And despite in-movie quips by Indy’s museum director friend in Radars of the Los Arc about how he’s sure that everything Dr. Jones acquired for his museum conformed to the fictional “International Treaty for the Protection of Antiquities,” the museum was always more than happy to take the stolen goods Indy procured for it.

This story remains true to the real-life history of acquisitions, even following the landmark 1970 UNESCO convention that pioneered international return and restitution of cultural property.

“When I first entered the world of curators, it was the Wild West, ‘1970’ notwithstanding,” as Gary Vikan, a curator who came up in the 1980s, told the New York Times last year in an essay suggesting that the “Indiana Jones Era Is Over” for U.S. museums. “Curators and museum directors wanted to get important works,” Vikan continued. “You wanted to be the one that gets that icon, that sculpture, that bronze.”

While the repatriation movement to decolonize museums has continued to gain steam leading to the introduction of more legal protections for cultural property, from the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990 to the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law (UNIDROIT) Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects in 1995, countless national treasures—from the Benin Bronzes to the Elgin Marbles—remain separated from their countries of origin. As human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson pointed out in his 2019 book, Who Owns History? Elgin’s Loot and the Case for Returning Plundered Treasure, “mighty ‘encyclopedic’ museums, like the Met and the British Museum” continue to “lock up their precious legacy of other lands, stolen from their people by wars of aggression, theft, and duplicity.”

The latest Indiana Jones movie, interestingly, takes place in 1969, just one year before the watershed 1970 UNESCO convention. But the ethics of looting were already established before Indy came up in the field, as evinced by British Prime Minister William Gladstone’s condemnation of the seizing of treasures from Maqdala in Northern Ethiopia in 1868. Addressing the House of Commons, he said he “deeply lamented, for the sake of the country, and for the sake of all concerned, that these articles … were thought fit to be brought away by a British army.” Going back all the way to 70 CE, Roman magistrate Gaius Verres was already being put on trial for plundering Greek temples during his reign as governor of Sicily.

Indiana Jones’ favorite lament—“That belongs in a museum!”—should ring hollow today. But though the Indy era may be ending at the box office, whether the “Indiana Jones Era” of museum practices is truly over, as the Times crowed, has yet to be seen. That same Times article also included musings by critics who bemoaned the loss of “treasures that showcase a country’s artistic brilliance from an international capital like Washington, where they are much seen, and send them to remote, uncertain settings.” (Whether they mean the metropolises of cities like Cairo, Lagos, and Santiago is unclear.)

It suggests there’s a ways to go before the chapter of pillage and plunder glorified by the Indiana Jones franchise fully closes. But with the new release debuting this holiday weekend, at least we can still enjoy Ford, now 80 years old, continuing to do what he does best: dodge snakes and perform the important public service act of punching Nazis.

The post Is the <i>Indiana Jones</i> Era Really Over? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Shell-adorned bikini tops. Fishtail skirts. Starfish accessories. Seafoam green eyeshadow. Expect to see all of this and more riding the waves of Disney’s latest live-action blockbuster, The Little Mermaid.

In other words, “mermaidcore”—the personification of aquatic glamor and physical beauty—is back.

Since antiquity, mermaids have embodied our fantasies of the briny deep. Inscrutable, various, and generally scantily clad, these half-fish, half-woman mythological creatures are shapeshifting female figures known the world over, from the sirens of the Aegean, to the jiaoxiao of the South China Sea, to Africa’s Mami Wata, often traced to the coast of Guinea. Historical accounts of mermaid sightings continued to flourish on through the 1800s. While none ever produced a real mermaid, hoaxes like P.T. Barnum’s “Feejee Mermaid”—a Frankenstein-ed monkey head sewn onto a fish’s tail—were plentiful, capturing the public’s attention and coin.

But as the industrial revolution’s rising tide traded wonder for rationality, “real” reports from the ocean began to quiet. Rather than disappear into myth, mermaids performed their next act of transformation: moving from the water to the stage and silent screen. The early 1900s productions that resulted popularized what I’d argue to be the first mermaidcore. And the skimpier and transgressive fashions inspired by them played a tangible role in helping girls and women traverse societal barriers in style and sport.

Of all the early mermaid tales, it was Neptune’s Daughter that might have captured the public imagination the most. Staged in the Hippodrome, the famed New York theater that boasted a stage 12 times larger than its Broadway counterparts, the show was an instant hit when it debuted in late 1906. Audiences flocked to see the actresses playing mermaids dive into an 8,000-gallon clear tank filled with water. People were astounded by how they were able to stay underwater for so long. While the “day of miracles and the belief in miracles is past,” as one reporter commented, the theatrical effect in Neptune’s Daughter kept the illusion intact. To maintain the fantasy, rehearsals were conducted with utmost secrecy, with management threatening to fire anyone who gave away the gimmick (submarine chambers) that allowed actresses to linger below the surface. Such precautions paid off. “No spectacular invention or innovation of recent years has aroused such popular interest or awakened such widespread curiosity as the mermaid scene,” observed the New York Times.

A silent film production of Neptune’s Daughter followed in 1914, shot on location in Bermuda, and starring champion swimmer and actress Annette Kellerman, “the Australian Mermaid.”

Swimming, long considered a “masculine domain,” had opened up to women relatively early in Kellerman’s home nation. Around the 1830s, middle-class women swam recreationally, and by the time a young Kellerman entered the pool at 9 years old, a burgeoning competitive scene had started up. Because Kellerman was bowlegged, her parents had put her in swimming lessons as a form of physical therapy. While she was weak on land, in the water, she found she was athletic and graceful. She began winning swimming and diving titles against girls and boys. By the time she made her way to the U.S., in 1906, she had already attempted to swim across the English Channel and was well on her way to achieving international fame.

But when Kellerman arrived in America, she found women’s swimming culture was stuck in Victorian times. Because there was no long-distance swimming to be had, she first made money doing water stunts in vaudeville performances. She also began campaigning to change American swimwear. As she reasoned, if women wanted to enter the pool, they first needed the freedom to abandon the cumbersome bathing costume of wool skirts, blouses, stockings, and swim shoes that was literally weighing them down.

The best costume is the cheap, ordinary stockinette suit, which clings close to the figure, and the closer the better. It should be sleeveless and there should be no skirts. Skirts carry water and retard the swimmer. They are very pretty and appropriate for the seaside, but not for the swimming pool. Stockings may be worn if they fit tightly, but under no circumstances should shoes be used.

That excerpt comes from the 1907 article “Swimming Hints,” one of many editorials Kellerman authored to encourage more women and girls to lose their bulky swim costumes and adopt a modern one-piece swimsuit.

But perhaps nothing did more to change the conversation than her mermaid motion pictures.

Kellerman made her U.S. film debut in 1911, starring in two Vitagraph shorts, The Mermaid and Siren of the Sea, which catapulted her to stardom. Because the fantasy scenes she starred in filtered her form-fitting swimwear “through a fictional layer,” as author Christine Schmidt put it in her 2013 book The Swimsuit: Fashion from Poolside to Catwalk, Kellerman was able to transcend the norms of the day. Through her mermaid persona, the star could help neutralize “any suggestion of indecency” that her outfits might have otherwise engendered had she appeared in them on screen.

The public watched with fascination. Kellerman was heralded by the press at the time as being “the most perfectly formed woman in the world.” And an audience hungry to be just like her followed her every move, eager to copy everything about her, including, in time, the trademark “Annette Kellerman suit.”

By 1914, the very same year Kellerman starred in Neptune’s Daughter, America’s premier amateur sporting league, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), officially permitted “mermaids,” as they called competitive female swimmers, to participate in sanctioned competitions. And by the time Kellerman’s film career wound down a decade later, most women were starting to wear the same one-piece “Kellerman suits” the star first championed at the turn of the century.

Mermaidcore, of course, wasn’t alone in opening up the waters for women, but it undeniably lent its sparkle to the cause, paving the way for them to transform their reality on land.

Today, this glamor can continue to offer us a way to shapeshift through fantasy. After all, as Kellerman herself once put it, to become a mermaid is to simply “see a woman make a fish out of herself.”

The post Welcome Back, Mermaidcore appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It’s film awards season, which means movie lovers and Academy/Screen Actors Guild/Nickelodeon-watching kid voters alike have been busy sorting out the best films from last year.

Many of the most hyped-up contenders of this year’s (or any) film awards season are truly worthy of the honors they seek. Whether it’s because of their unique, high-concept plot, sublime acting performances, perfectly executed action thrills, or some other form of excellence, they deliver on their promises.

And then you have the other films up “for your consideration”—and those that really, really thought they would be. You know the ones I’m talking about. They’re tailor-made to give the appearance of depth, typically through shamelessly grandiose performances, clunky attempts to tackle Big Important Issues, or both. (And possibly a fat suit.) It’s these try-hards for whom the insult “Oscar bait” was first invented.

But in the midst of all this excellence, whether actual or ruthlessly engineered, it’s worth sparing a thought for the supposed lesser films and actors with no hope of taking home a tiny statue this year. These are the movies released on a random Friday in January—the film industry’s de facto “dump month”—or sent straight to streaming jail without even a half-hearted promotional campaign. Or better yet, made completely outside the Hollywood system by amateurs with little more than a camera and a handful of wacky ideas (and the results to show for it). Because if you’re willing to wade through the muck of these kinds of films, you may be pleasantly surprised by what they can teach us—not about badness, but instead about what passes for “good.”

For my money, there’s no better teacher than the cult film The Room, a 2003 cinematic catastrophe I find so fascinating that I edited a whole book of essays about it. Written, directed, starred in, financed, and produced by Tommy Wiseau, an untrained filmmaker of ambiguous Eastern European origins and means, The Room was supposed to be a deeply affecting story of a love triangle gone wrong. That was the intention, at least. The result, however, is a movie that is legendarily terrible: terribly shot, terribly written, and, most infamously, terribly, terribly acted.

Without even addressing the plot, or lack thereof, it’s easy to tick off the nearly infinite problems there are with The Room. Continuity is non-existent: one character announces, willy-nilly, that she has breast cancer, only for it to never be brought up again; another character disappears completely without explanation, only to be replaced by an entirely different character (also without explanation). Multiple gratuitous sex scenes (four!) go on for several minutes, in a movie that’s barely an hour and a half long. And, most memorably for fans, the dialogue ranges from utterly banal (“If a lot of people loved each other, the world would be a better place to live”) to strange (“Keep your stupid comments in your pocket!”) to downright nonsensical (“My Lisa’s great when I can get it”).

It’s easy—so, so easy—to dismiss The Room as nothing more than a perfect and hilarious example of something “so good it’s bad.” But if you let yourself dig below the (extremely rough) exterior, you’re left with a cultural artifact that reveals the deep-seated pretensions of the film industry. To wit: In its laughably transparent attempt to be taken seriously, it’s an accidental but deeply cutting parody of Oscar bait.

Take the performance of its star, Wiseau, playing the movie’s protagonist, Johnny. It isn’t merely big; it’s gigantic. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” Johnny wails during a mundane argument with his fiancée, gesticulating wildly for even greater melodramatic effect.

Minus the “Lisa,” this is an exact rip-off of a famous James Dean line in Rebel Without a Cause. Dean was one of Wiseau’s idols, and Wiseau’s performance can be seen as part homage to the Hollywood legend, part improvement attempt. Throughout the movie, Wiseau also channels his other idol, Marlon Brando, and his performance as the volatile Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, in particular.

Thanks to Wiseau’s unforgettable performance (and, to be fair, the performances of everyone else), The Room has become the biggest cult movie since The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That’s why fans flock to monthly screenings around the country and the world to gawk, smugly, at Johnny’s impassioned but utterly unconvincing cries. And yet, with The Room, Wiseau is doing, albeit very sloppily, what so much Oscar bait is accused of: trying really, really hard to convey pathos in an attempt to manipulate the viewer into feeling something.

Lacking even the most basic ability to develop plot and character, Wiseau goes all in with a brute force display of emotion. Like most shortcuts, the approach falls utterly flat. The louder Johnny shouts, the more he contorts his face to really show his heartache, the more the audience can’t help but laugh.

Unfortunately, the performances of Dean, Brando, and many recent, talented award nominees can’t just be mimicked for effect. There’s an alchemy to a truly moving performance that goes beyond good writing and acting skill (not that The Room remotely possessed either of those). The viewer usually knows when they’re being had.

It is exactly this Grand Canyon-sized gap between Wiseau’s intention (depicting a riveting domestic drama) and his execution (creating a surreal, seemingly incoherent work of possible outsider art) that makes the movie so “bad,” and thus so compelling. In this respect, The Room is like any other film that aimed so high but landed so low. Just much more so.

There is one important difference, though. Wiseau’s utter sincerity, no matter how absurd the final result, imbues The Room with a kind of authenticity that sets it apart. “You want to be fake? Not me. I hate fake stuff,” he told his crew during filming, according to The Disaster Artist, the 2013 memoir about the making of the film by The Room co-star Greg Sestero (and the inspiration for the 2017 film, also named The Disaster Artist). Indeed, Wiseau had so much faith in the emotional honesty of his work that when The Room was first released, he rented a Laemmle theater in the San Fernando Valley to show it for two weeks—the minimum run required for a movie to be considered for an Oscar.

If recent Oscar acceptance speeches are any gauge, more than a few actors (and directors, writers, and producers) believe they are creating something that transcends the mere label of “entertainment.” Some of them are. But more often than not, their goal is ultimately the same as Wiseau’s: to signal to the viewer that the movie they’re watching is important. Maybe even worthy of a top-flight award.

The post What Terrible Movies Can Teach Us appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The jarring musical number demonstrates how blackface minstrelsy embedded itself in popular culture long after the practice itself became taboo, and how, by cloaking its message in nostalgia, incarnations of the same hateful genre have continued to perpetuate sentimentality for a racist past to this day.

The blackface minstrel show is one of the oldest forms of entertainment in the United States. The spectacle, which began roughly around 1830 in the urban North, saw white performers blackening their faces to mock enslaved Africans on Southern plantations in a manner that depicted “the Negro” as lazy, stupid, hypersexual, and violent. These offensive performances helped white spectators justify enslavement and the general mistreatment of Black people while reinforcing already circulating myths of Black inferiority.

Blackface and minstrel shows successfully moved from stage to screen, where they proved central to many Hollywood plots for the first half of the 20th century. They elicited a strong sense of nostalgia for an uncomplicated past while maintaining a longstanding set of racial and social hierarchies. The 1927 film The Jazz Singer—the story of a Jewish blackface performer, played by and based on the life of Al Jolson—shepherded in the sound era. Through jazz music, it also offered blackface tied to sound as the key to national integration.

Over the next three decades, visible blackface within a minstrel context largely disappeared from American entertainment. But by then, the soundtracks accompanying blackface had become so recognizable that they could refer to the minstrel stage even in the absence of visual cues. The history of Irving Berlin’s song “Mandy,” famously performed by Crosby, Kaye, and Clooney in White Christmas, offers some clues as to how this came to be.

Irving Berlin wrote “Mandy” (originally named “Sterling Silver Moon”) for the 1918 army-themed live musical revue Yip Yip Yaphank. The song itself was a jaunty marriage proposal:

So don’t you linger
Here’s the ring for your finger
Isn’t it a humdinger?
Come along and let the wedding chimes
Bring happy times
For Mandy and me

Yip Yip Yaphank called for the song to be performed in blackface as a cakewalk, or walkaround. This type of number often ended minstrel shows and was an imitation of an imitation: a dance enslaved people invented that poked fun at plantation owners’ mannerisms, who then appropriated it for themselves without understanding its meaning.

“Mandy” became a hit a year later as part of a 10-minute minstrel segment in Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, a revue packed with vaudeville stars. Eddie Cantor and Bert Williams, both in blackface, opened the segment. The popular comedy duo of Gus Van and Joe Schenck (also in blackface) sang “Mandy” as part of the first act finale—known as “The Follies Minstrel”—alongside 45 shimmying choristers known as “The Follies Pickaninnies.”

The song resurfaced 15 years later in the 1934 Eddie Cantor film Kid Millions. The biggest differences between the “Mandy” number in Kid Millions and its previous uses was the sheer quantity of blackface and its place in the plot. Unlike the minstrel segment of Ziegfield Follies, only one performer—Cantor—was depicted in blackface as he performed in a recreated minstrel show that is only tenuously connected to the overarching story.

Eddie Cantor performs “Mandy” in blackface in Kid Millions. Courtesy of author.

By the time Kid Millions debuted, Hollywood was facing public backlash from the country’s cultural and legislative leadership for the content of its films, namely provocative imagery but also racism. The industry adopted the Production Code, popularly known as the Hays Code after its creator William H. Hays, to regulate the “purity” of motion pictures, pushing everything from nudity and profanity to interracial relationships off the screen. But as Kid Millions demonstrates, the policy mostly censored matters that directly concerned the Catholic church, which is why instances of blackface and other forms of racial caricature occasionally managed to slip past the censors. Eddie Cantor is a perfect example of this subjective censorship: because blackface minstrelsy had become indelibly tied to his stage and screen persona, his use of such racial caricature almost always made it into the picture.

“Mandy” returned in a 1943 World War II film, This is the Army. The staging modeled that of Yaphank and Millions, but the use of blackface was more subtle—a reference to something nostalgic from the past. This whole performance is bracketed as an homage to Berlin’s original use of blackface in Yip Yip Yaphank. Just as Cantor’s stage performance of “Mandy” in Ziegfield Follies gave him “cover” to use blackface in Kid Millions, Yaphank’s use of blackface within an army-themed musical lessened the backlash the “Mandy” scene received from film censors in This is the Army. Furthermore, most of this 1943 production removed prototypical, derogatory minstrel show elements and instead packaged the whole number in patriotism. Jim Crow stereotypes were replaced by over a hundred white men dressed in uniform, ready to fight for America.

The New York Times called the film “the freshest, most endearing, the most rousing musical tribute to the American fighting man that has come out of World War II,” and a “warmly reassuring document on the state of the nation.” Almost 80 years after the passing of the 13th Amendment, This is the Army shows how the white press was still giving the minstrel show a standing ovation.

“Mandy” made its final appearance in 1954’s White Christmas as the film’s big holiday spectacular: a minstrel show that dressed the old racist classic up in ebullient costumes, familiar voices, and lots of bare, white skin. Twelve scandalously dressed women outfitted like Christmas gifts replaced the traditional ensemble of white men in blackface. Clooney played the role of interlocutor, and Crosby and Kaye adopted the traditional minstrel tropes Mr. Tambo, who played tambourine, and Mr. Bones, who rattled bones as clappers, respectively. Vera-Ellen’s theatrical jazz dancing replaced the minstrel show’s conventional use of tap dance, offering a more mid-century take on appropriation.

By the time Americans saw White Christmas, the blackface mask had become a superfluous part of the minstrel show. “Mandy” has always been connected to the minstrel stage, its notes deeply embedded in a complicated nostalgia for white theatergoers. The long-entrenched pairing of “Mandy” with minstrelsy had laid the groundwork for perceiving racial caricature even in the absence of grotesque costume and speech. Race performance, and specifically blackface minstrelsy, need not be visible to be effective. And even as the civil rights movement began to pick up steam, these references to the minstrel show still had the ability to remind white theatergoers of a time when a good laugh and putting down “the other” shaped collective identity without fear of consequence.

Today, it’s still easy to get swept up in the nostalgia White Christmas is selling: lovers at a cozy Vermont cabin for the holidays, set against a backdrop of World War II service. But when romance and patriotism get tied up in the Christmas spirit, questioning even one part of the equation can feel downright sacrilegious. Rather than taking a jingoistic attitude toward what we feel the most nostalgic toward, let’s accept that American history is complicated, and that the American songbook can be rather unsettling—even, and maybe especially, at Christmastime.

The post The Blackface of <i>White Christmas</i> appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Like any great aphorism, the dramatist Anton Chekhov’s advice can be taken many ways. In our 21st century moment of constant and obsessive self-reflection, only exacerbated by the pandemic, the maxim rings truer than ever: Art and Life are not just connected—they reflect, permeate, and imitate one another.

This is great playwriting advice, but you don’t have to be a playwright to get the point. Life demands work if you want it to mean something, just as art demands work if you want it to truly play: that is, to happen in front of us, to engage and connect and challenge and jolt us into receptiveness.

I recently played hooky from work as a live artist to see Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 film Drive My Car. Based on Haruki Murakami’s eponymous short story, Drive My Car won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and has been nominated for four Academy Awards this year, including Best Picture. Like 2020’s Best Picture winner, Parasite, it has the chance to run the table.

But unlike Bong Joon-ho’s masterful cinematic provocation, this film plays on an entirely different strategy, burrowing down to the intertwined roots of its characters’ life and art.

Yūsuke Kafuku, the film’s main character, is an actor/director of international prominence who has a highly particular, even odd, method of staging plays—in this case, Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Not only does he seek a multinational company of actors, but he wants them to speak in their own languages. The actors come from all over the Far East. Although English is the default language in rehearsal, individual cast members speak the lines of the play in Mandarin, Korean, Tagalog, and Japanese. The effect is at first blush a headscratcher: How is this going to work for an audience? How are the players supposed to understand one another?

It is not quite as eccentric or exotic as it may seem. Since the middle of the 20th century, multinational companies of actors, dancers, musicians, and others have formed and traveled widely through the Middle East and Africa, Europe and the Americas doing plays that treat audiences as partners in a style that is sometimes called “a walking theater.” Among an array of legendary theater directors working in this style—Grotowski, Serban, Mnouchshkine, LePage— the preeminent practitioner is Peter Brook, known for his work at the International Centre for Theatre Research (CIRT).

Brook—like the film’s main character, named Yūsuke Kafuku—works with great texts, including those by Chekhov. And they both use non-directional directing, wherein an actor discovers on their own, without the director telling them, who or what they are. Rather, the director’s job is to attempt to call forth existing emotions and connections within the actor. As Brook has said repeatedly in discussing his acting and training techniques, “Human connection is the essence of good theater.”

In this style, the theater is not the art of imitation, but the art of suggestion. “A move from one creates a tremor from another; an impulse from a third, an immediate chain reaction,” Brook has said. What is interesting and ultimately of great importance is the relation between one thing and another. For Brook, truth in the theater is always on the move, and people from very different backgrounds can partake, understanding each other and coming together without losing their essential nature. We come to see not only the player but the audience member truly as an individual. The invisible is made visible, and we realize our fundamental humanity beyond surface differences.

Easier said than done. But the exercise of investigating classic texts in this manner has made for some of the great art of the late 20th century, climaxed by Brook’s productions of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Vyasa’s The Mahabharata at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

These were emotional experiences as much as productions. For one thing, they were long; The Mahabharata ran well over five hours. With Chekhov, Brook cleared not only the stage but the entire theater space, leaving only the bare audience seats, thus creating a shell without artifice shared by the actors and the audience. In its 1988 review, the New York Times said: “By banishing all forms of theatrical realism except the only one that really matters—emotional truth—Mr. Brook has found the pulse of a play that its author called ‘not a drama but a comedy, in places almost a farce.’”

In this kind of work, categories fall away.

In the decades since those Brook productions, art has gone in different directions (as it should), and the experience of non-directional theater may well feel foreign for many people. Yet this kind of work creates powerful resonances in 2022, in the midst of our own present moment of polarity, around the world and in our own communities and families. It is harder than ever for us to simply sit together, breathe the same air, and enjoy our interconnectedness.

Our technology sorts us by category, separates our likes and dislikes, anticipates our choice-making based on past purchases and searches, and stresses our peculiar tastes, hermetically sealing us from new or different tastes. Our politics are tribal. Our economy is unbalanced. And nowhere is the wicket stickier than with the question of race.

The stress keeps separating us, striating our heart muscles. And that separation keeps us dependent on surface opinions and judgements of who is with us or against us, and of what is worthy of connection. All the resulting noise of our era leads us to facile conclusions and pat expectations. And so we find it more difficult to receive, harder to breathe, and nearly impossible to reconnect to our intertwining underground roots.

Perhaps that is why Drive My Car feels like an exercise in non-direction. In an age of movies running and trumping one another, this is very much a walking film, full of suggestion, breathing at its own pace, making the invisible visible, and stripping away artificial separations and categorizations. It may tonally be a drama, but it has elements of comedy and farce. It doesn’t tell you how to feel, but it does ask you to walk alongside—or, in this case, ride along in the car.

There is no real reason to do the kind of work Yūsuke Kafuku does, unless you want to learn something new—about yourself and the person sitting next to you, whether you know them or not—and unless you’re willing to let go of the wheel.

Letting go is precisely what happens through much of the film, particularly in the Uncle Vanya rehearsals. The work between the actors has gotten so minimal as to be telepathic. No one is telling them, or us, how the world works or how to feel about it. We are not being talked at. But we are being included directly in the investigation. We have been given license to enter the discussion.

“Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” is a Zulu phrase made popular worldwide by the likes of the late Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela in the 1980s and 1990s, as they broke down apartheid in South Africa and strove to forgive the sins of their former oppressors. Although it can be translated many ways, the phrase basically means that a person is a person through other persons: “I am because you are—and since you are, definitely I am.”

Shared aims, shared needs, shared loves, and shared losses. A certain light appears, and something special begins to happen, something we would never have thought of alone, on our own. We live it together.

Putting on a play, writing a short story, making a film, or forgiving the guilty, takes work—lots of it. But when we experience that work as play, then it doesn’t feel like work anymore.

The post Can <em>Uncle Vanya</em> Work in Four Different Languages? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The year is 1933. The studio is RKO. And the movie is King Kong.

Then as now, audiences made anxious by global upheaval hungered for escapism; and in March 1933, Kong delivered the financial rescue its makers prayed for. But the movie might have failed, depriving us of later RKO classics like Citizen Kane, if not for the ninth-inning involvement of one man: RKO’s 44-year-old music director, Max Steiner.

You may not know the name, but you do know his music. More than any other composer, the Vienna-born Steiner established the ground rules of writing movie music that are still in use today.

Pre-Steiner, orchestral underscore was rare in talking pictures, which replaced silent films in 1929. As King Kong neared completion, nervous RKO brass told Steiner not to waste additional dollars writing music for the film, after finding the ape’s stop-motion movement underwhelming.

But Kong’s visionary producer, Merian C. Cooper, knew better. As Steiner recalled, “Cooper said to me, ‘Maxie, go ahead and score the picture to the best of your ability. And don’t worry about the cost because I will pay for the orchestra.’”

Steiner’s epic score—a thrilling synthesis of Wagnerian opera, Stravinskian dissonance and Viennese romanticism—convinced audiences that Kong was both terrifying and ultimately tragic. Its DNA is still found in the sweeping scores of John Williams and countless others. (Star Wars’s original “temp track” of music, used during editing before its score was written, included music by Steiner.)

Max Steiner, circa 1936. Courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University Library, Provo, Utah.

By the mid-1930s, Max’s trademarks were widely imitated if rarely equaled: separate, distinctive musical themes for characters, which he developed throughout a score to illuminate those characters’ thoughts and emotions; ingenious use of orchestral color to create atmosphere; and a gift for soaring lyricism that lifted dramas like Gone with the Wind and Now, Voyager into the realm of myth.

Best known for his work at Warner Bros. from 1936 to 1965, Steiner’s 300-plus credits include Casablanca, The Searchers, Mildred Pierce, The Big Sleep, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He was nominated for 24 Academy Awards and won three.

While retracing Max’s steps to write his biography, I realized why Steiner—a diminutive, wisecracking, but deeply romantic figure—related so strongly to the characters in his best-known films. Scarlett O’Hara’s fight to rebuild a family dynasty … Rick Blaine’s cynical wit that covers a broken heart … Kong’s vulnerability to beauty. All of these were part of Steiner’s story.

His life had the jolting plot twists typical of the Warner Bros. biopics he scored. During a pampered youth in late 19th century Vienna, Max was the presumed inheritor of a theatrical empire. His grandfather Maximilian launched the craze for Viennese operetta in the 1870s, after convincing waltz king Johann Strauss, Jr., composer of “The Blue Danube,” to write for the theater. Die Fledermaus, the world’s most performed operetta, was one result.

Max’s father Gabor was also a showman, fascinated by new technology; his productions ranged from symphony concerts to DeMille-like stage spectacles. Family friends included Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. Even Austria’s emperor was a fan, decorating Gabor with the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Franz Joseph.

Papa Steiner’s most ambitious creation was the amusement park “Venice in Vienna.” Sixty years before Disneyland, the multi-acre venue offered a re-creation of the Italian city, complete with canals and gondolas. Patrons could ride rollercoasters, listen to gramophone records (then a novelty), and watch silent movies just months after cinema’s invention. Most popular was the Riesenrad, a Ferris wheel that remains one of Vienna’s most iconic attractions. Max reveled in “Venice”’s potpourri of symphonies, jugglers, waltz concerts and water slides. That pop culture mix proved ideal training for Steiner, who spent his life writing sophisticated, yet accessible, music for the masses.

He did not arrive in Hollywood until the age of 41. Until then, his life mirrored the rise and fall of Gabor’s Ferris wheel: early success thwarted by family bankruptcy; itinerant music-making in Paris, Cairo, Johannesburg, and beyond; and, in 1914, a panicked escape from London to New York, after the outbreak of World War I changed Max’s status in Britain from successful conductor to enemy alien.

Europe’s loss was America’s gain. During the 1920s, Steiner thrived as a Broadway conductor. He oversaw shows by Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, and George and Ira Gershwin—most notably the Gershwins’ trailblazing Lady, Be Good! starring Fred Astaire. Conducting theater orchestras during a time before microphones, Steiner learned how to make sure music didn’t overwhelm a performer’s speech.

An invite from RKO to join its fledgling music staff brought him west in 1929. Within months he was made the studio’s musical director. Max’s early attempts to blend underscoring and onscreen dialogue were usually thwarted, by literal-minded producers who asked: where was the music coming from? But with scores like 1932’s Symphony of Six Million and 1933’s King Kong, Steiner proved that audiences accepted the unreality of an unseen orchestra accompanying the drama.

An Oscar win in 1936, for John Ford’s The Informer, cemented his reputation as leader in his field.

Whether overseeing the silky arrangements of Irving Berlin’s songs for Top Hat (1935), or writing snarling musical noir for James Cagney in White Heat (1949), Steiner set speed records for composing that were nearly superhuman. He thrived under pressure, writing scores in as little as a week if required.

Max Steiner conducts his score for King Kong (1933). Courtesy of L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University Library, Provo, Utah.

His score pages are filled with handwritten quotes of the movie dialogue being spoken at that moment (“Here’s looking at you, kid.” “It was beauty killed the beast!”). And somehow he found time to scribble notes in the margins sharing studio gossip, lamentations about his love life (he married four times), and sardonic, sometimes lewd commentary on screen action. His audience for these remarks was a private one: the orchestrators, who, like Max, slogged through days with little sleep to convert score pages into separate instrumental parts.

His jokes usually served a serious purpose: to keep his cohort alert, and to communicate dramatic intention. “Heaven music!” he wrote on the final pages of his score for Dark Victory, as Bette Davis bravely succumbs to a brain tumor. “Make this such a beautiful Heaven that no [studio] supervisor can ever get there!” On a 1952 religious drama: “Harps and Pianos are going ‘mad’ on account of the picture being just so-so.” And often, a comparison to the style of a beloved concert work: “A la Ravel’s Bolero—only better!” To keep his music from competing with dialogue, Steiner wrote above or below the pitch of an actor’s voice, after determining where that voice would be on a musical scale. In his score for the Bette Davis Oscar-winner Jezebel, he jots down that in her Southern belle accent, Davis “says ‘Am ah?’ … between [the notes] E and F.”

Steiner shaped not only how composers write film music, but how much they are paid. It was Max who launched a 27-year battle for film composers to receive royalties. (Until his efforts, studios paid a flat fee, and the royalty collection organization ASCAP ignored film music.) Today’s composers—some of whom make millions as their work plays on TV, home video, and streaming—have Steiner partly to thank.

Unfortunately, Max was both an innovator and a spendthrift. He earned millions, but spent even more on gambling, alimonies, alcohol, cigars, and generous handouts to friends in need.

A workaholic with manic tendencies, he was happiest when composing. Guilt led him to lavish his wives and his only son with everything except what they wanted most: his time. And although at age 71 he hit a financial jackpot—1959’s “Theme from A Summer Place” became the best-selling instrumental of the rock era—his failure as a parent would end in a tragedy from which he never fully recovered.

Fortunately, the music that was his addiction, and his escape from pain, still surrounds us. Every day, somewhere, a viewer’s heartbeat quickens as Steiner intensifies a classic moment of cinema: White Heat gangster Cody Jarrett’s defiant “Made it, Ma—top of the world!” The Searchers’s Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne, cradling his long-lost niece in his arms. Scarlett O’Hara’s “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” Or Rick and Ilsa’s farewell in a fog-shrouded airport in Casablanca.

It should be noted that Steiner did not write “As Time Goes By.” In fact, he hated the song, which was written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931, and had been largely forgotten. Entranced by Ingrid Bergman’s performance and her beauty, Max was eager to write an original love theme. But when ordered to weave Hupfeld’s tune into his score, Steiner created such heartbreaking variations that it’s hard to believe he didn’t love “As Time Goes By”— and compose it.

Typically, Max concluded his handwritten score for Casablanca with a joke to his orchestrator. “Dear Hugo: Thanks for everything! Yours, Herman Hupfeld.” It took him years to accept how effective that shotgun musical marriage had been. Without Steiner’s exquisite interpretations of Hupfeld’s melody—reimagined in the score as everything from a swooning waltz to a Puccini-esque lovers’ farewell—the song may not have attained its status as a pop standard.

Casablanca also demonstrates Steiner’s greatest strength as a composer: his gift for translating human emotion—grief, hope, romantic ecstasy—into music that still works its magic on 21st century viewers.

Just ask Steven Spielberg. In 2008, the filmmaker said of Casablanca’s score, “It just gets your heart. When you’re about ready to cry, Max Steiner comes in [and] those tears start to flow.”

Spielberg’s respect is also reflected in the nickname he uses for his favorite musical collaborator, John Williams. It’s also the name of Spielberg’s first son.

Max.

Listen to some of Max Steiner’s greatest scores:

The post The Composer Who Saved <i>King Kong</i>—and Transformed Movie Music appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After the success of the 1968 Steve McQueen film Bullitt, which was set in San Francisco, dozens of feature films, TV movies, and television series were shot on location there. Mayor Joseph Alioto, a former attorney to movie moguls Samuel Goldwyn and Walt Disney, wooed Hollywood producers and trumpeted over $10 million in annual revenue from location shooting.

But he soon faced staunch opposition from famed San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, the loudest voice among residents who bristled at the invasion of movie crews from rival Los Angeles. At stake were not only traffic and parking problems, but also San Francisco’s cherished image.

In Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films and the popular TV series The Streets of San Francisco, Hollywood frequently depicted the city as a dangerous cesspool. Alioto sold Hollywood production as a form of tourist promotion for the city, but San Franciscans soon rallied against producers who took advantage of their hospitality only to slander the city on-screen.

As the Downtown Association of San Francisco put it, “If moviemakers persist in giving the impression that San Francisco is a crime-ridden city where police chases are an everyday occurrence, let them make their movies somewhere else.”

Despite its proximity to Los Angeles, San Francisco had only sporadically served as a location for Hollywood filmmakers in the 1950s and early 1960s. This changed late in the decade when location shooting became the dominant production method, as films like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider took off while massive back lot productions like Camelot and Hello, Dolly! flopped.

Hollywood’s shift to youth-oriented films shot on location also corresponded with San Francisco’s Summer of Love. Which produced its own wave of media attention for producers to chase. Bullitt and another film, Petulia, both released in 1968, were the first commercial features shot entirely in San Francisco since the silent era, and their productions became the talk of the town as prominent socialites scored roles as extras. Bullitt soared at the box office, while reinventing the police genre and the car chase.

The first sign of disenchantment with Hollywood filmmaking stemmed from one of the most innocuous films of the era, What’s Up, Doc?, a throwback to screwball comedies of the 1930s. While shooting a car-chase finale in November 1971, filmmakers took few precautions and chipped the steps at Alta Plaza Park. This was no laughing matter for residents of the tony Pacific Heights neighborhood, as conveyed by the local headline, “Outrage at Alta Plaza.” The incident prompted the board of supervisors to consider greater scrutiny of the growing number of film productions in town.

Caen railed against “the chutzpah of these Hollywood invaders,” framing location shooting not as a local practice but as an encroachment of Los Angeles industry on San Francisco. Then he went a step further, directly tying the carelessness of filmmakers on location to their disregard in representing the city, particularly with the police genre. Figures like McMillan, Rock Hudson’s police commissioner in the television series, McMillan and Wife, were largely incompetent, but Dirty Harry was “a brute of a cop,” and other detective films like The Organization didn’t help the city’s image either.

Alioto worked to contain this early bout of negative publicity, which extended to the pages of Variety. He took the stage at the San Francisco premiere of Dirty Harry in December to assure filmmakers that, “We’ll continue to make pictures in San Francisco, and we’re not going to worry about a couple of chipped steps in Alta Plaza.” He soon put together a film committee, led by a local casting director, which conferred with local Screen Actors Guild and International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees groups working to better organize and streamline production in the city.

But Alioto stood firmly on the side of Hollywood and remained personally invested in filmmaking. He courted producers in Los Angeles, and often met with visiting filmmakers in person. Deputy Mayor John DeLuca helped secure locations for major productions. This embrace of Hollywood made him vulnerable to more direct attacks by Caen.

The San Francisco shooting boom intensified in 1972 when The Streets of San Francisco became the first weekly network series filmed extensively in the city since The Lineup in the 1950s. In 1973, three of the six features shooting in town were police films, and a fourth was a mafia picture. Violence dominated the city’s screen presence, ranging from a machine-gun massacre on a bus in The Laughing Policeman to “a sniper spraying bullets around campus” for an episode of Streets.

Publicity photo picturing David Wayne and Karl Malden from The Streets of San Francisco. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

But, once again, it was a comedy, albeit a police comedy, that drew public outcry. Freebie and the Bean featured a pair of cops, who “were hopelessly inept or corrupt,” according to Police Sergeant Bill McCarthy, who oversaw filmmaking in the city. The police department, which was responsible for safety and security during location shoots, refused to endorse the San Francisco setting. They withheld official badges and decals for the movie detectives, and all references to the city had to be struck from the script. (Of course, any viewer with a basic knowledge of San Francisco could identify the city in the background.)

Fatefully, the script also called for a spectacular car chase (a staple of police films following Bullitt and The French Connection) in which a car would fall from the lower deck of the Embarcadero Freeway. Working on a tight schedule and further delayed by November rains, filmmakers convinced the Department of Public Works to make an ill-advised decision, closing off the Stockton Street Tunnel during morning rush hour.

Caen pulled no punches, opening his column by noting the “honest taxpayers” who were forced to be late for work. He mentioned another incident where ten wrecked cars parked at one location blocked residents from pulling out of their parking spaces. He added the following exchange:

   Fumed one irate woman, “who needs these people, anyway?”

   Cop: “Alioto”

In a short, pithy column, Caen bluntly suggested that the regular citizens of San Francisco were the ones paying for Alioto’s movie aspirations. Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, the future mayor and U.S. senator, joined the fray, suggesting new legislation to set rules on location filmmaking. Supervisor Dorothy von Beroldingen threatened to hold public hearings on location shooting. The film committee and labor leaders managed to convince the board not to proceed any further, but the days of easy cooperation were over.

San Francisco’s appeal for filmmakers had largely rested on that cooperation, in combination with its unique, scenic cityscape. By 1975, a glut of police films had all but exhausted its novelty as a location. Meanwhile, public enthusiasm waned and logistical problems multiplied as a small, densely populated city struggled to accommodate so many production crews. Following the blockbuster The Towering Inferno and Francis Ford Coppola’s critically acclaimed The Conversation, filmmaking in the city declined through the second half of the 1970s. As generous incentives flooded in from other regions eager to attract filmmakers, San Francisco no longer had to worry about Hollywood invaders.

In the end, the most powerful handgun in the world failed to put a dent in San Francisco’s reputation. The postcard image survived the harrowing depictions of Dirty Harry, its sequels, and its many imitators. The city moved on, and so did the movies.

San Francisco’s production boom preceded the aggressive, international competition for location production that has defined Hollywood filmmaking ever since. Places that succeed, like Canada or Louisiana, still weigh the cost versus the benefit, although largely in financial terms.

San Francisco raised a rather different question about Hollywood production: What is at stake in the way that movies portray a given place, and are filmmakers accountable for that depiction?

The post When San Francisco Kicked Hollywood to the Curb appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.