A vacant lot is one of downtown LA's most historic spots ... A local morning radio personality tells how her father chose to commit suicide rather than die of bladder cancer ... We’ll go to the neighborhood that inspired Dexter Story latest jazz album ... Brains On explains how you get an allergic reaction to pollen ... The director of “A Million Dollar Duck,” a new doc about the Federal Duck Stamp contest ... And Tim Cogshell puts together a DIY film festival of continuity errors.
We found 5 movies with delicious continuity errors; tell us your favorites
Tim Cogshell is film critic for KPCC's Off-Ramp and Filmweek, and for Alt Film Guide. He blogs at CinemaInMind.
Continuity errors in cinema are legend. There are a some classic doozies, like the croissant Julia Roberts is chomping in "Pretty Woman" that becomes a pancake.
The errors come in a number of categories, from crew and equipment earnestly working to get the shot they are in, to props magically appearing and disappearing between cuts, to material or narrative anachronisms.
Sometimes they matter, sometimes they don’t -- who cares if Rick's trench coat is wet when he boards the train in Paris?! -- and sometimes they make the movie. Here’s a quick DIY Film Festival of films you might want to see for their dubious continuity - and you can judge for yourself if they break or make the movie.
1. "Almost Famous" (2000)
Deep Purple’s "Burn" figures prominently in the background of a scene from writer-director Cameron Crowe’s "Almost Famous," set in 1973.
A precocious teen, Crowe was a writer for "Rolling Stone" in 1975. He spent time on the road with The Eagles, the band on which he based the fake iconic rock band, Stillwater, in "Almost Famous." And he wrote the definitive cover story on The Eagles. But he got a lot of the music wrong in the movie. That Deep Purple album was released 1974. There are a few of those in "Almost Famous" - along with some T-shirts for tours that wouldn’t happen for another decade. To fans of classic rock these errors ruin the movie, but most people don’t even notice them.
2. "Posse" (1993)
Director Mario Van Peebles 1993 film "Posse" is set in 1898, but a crowd shouting "No justice, no peace" is straight out of 1992, along with the late great Nipsey Russell asking, "Can't we all just get along?!"
These anachronisms were controversial at the time. Some critics and audiences - out for a rooting-tooting cowboy movie - called it blunt political commentary that the broke suspension of disbelief ... As if casting Big Daddy Kane and Tone Loc didn’t already do that.
3. "Born on the 4th of July" (1989)
Don McLean’s "American Pie" is forever associated with Oliver Stone’s "Born of the 4th of July." The song is played and heard by characters in the film several times ... in scenes set 1969. The problem? The album was released in 1971. Still - would any other song do? The of loss of an American ideal represented in Don McLean’s ode to Buddy Holly is a perfect metaphor for the American ideal lost by Ron Kovic. This movie and that song go together, continuity be damned.
4. "The Hurt Locker" (2008)
At one point in "The Hurt Locker," specialist Owen Eldridge, played by Brian Geraghty, says “.... they’re going to put me on YouTube.” Nope. "Hurt Locker" is set in 2004 and YouTube did not launch until 2005, which the producers of this film, which came out in 2008, should have thought about in 2007. Or maybe not, because it won a bunch of Academy Awards in 2009.
5. "TNT Jackson" (1974)
But my favorite continuity mistake of all time is in an early 70s Blaxploitation classic called "TNT Jackson." It stars stars Jeannie Bell as a young black karate expert out to avenge her brother’s death on the mean streets of Hong Kong.
There are a number of badly staged karate fight sequences in the movie, and Jeanne kicks much fake karate ass in all of them. But this was an exploitation film after all, so one of those fight scenes takes place when the exciting TNT Jackson is wearing nothing but a pair of panties and a wicked afro. During this perfectly fabulous scene, TNT kills the lights to even her odds against her multiple attackers.
When the lights come back on, the intrepid Ms. Jackson is wearing different panties. They were brown. Now they're white. The lights go out and come back on again. And the panties change again. You can’t help but notice ... because she’s only wearing the panties and the wicked afro. This is a perfectly crazy continuity mistake. And I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world.
A daughter's story: 'Flipping the switch' before physican assisted suicide
The light from a laptop splashed on Tiffany Angelo’s face and lit up a part of the living room that afternoon. She typed quietly while her father slept the pain away on the couch. He had been spending most of his time in that room lately, and not by choice. Ten months before, Carl Angelo, 67, was told he had stage four bladder cancer.
Every three weeks, Tiffany Angelo would fly from her home in Redlands to Warren, Ohio, to spend the weekends with her father. The year was 2010.
Carl Angelo was a proud Italian man with an extended Catholic family. He was kind. He wanted people to like him and if that meant putting himself in uncomfortable situations, he was okay with that. But everyone has their breaking point.
“When your health is going downhill and you have cancer, you agree to one thing, after another, after another because each thing in and of itself is not so bad,” said Tiffany Angelo. One urostomy bag sucked. Two bags became dreadful. The pain was the worst, and one day it became impossible.
With her back toward the couch, Tiffany Angelo heard her father wake up from his medically-induced nap. He began to pace, and then he walked up to the desk she was working at.
“I hear his voice behind me and he says, ‘Honey, I want to die,’” she remembers. “I know Dad,” Tiffany told him while still typing on the laptop. She knew he was in pain. They talked about it all the time but her fingers started to move slower on the keyboard as Carl Angelo continued.
“No, what I mean is if I could flip a switch and have all this be over, I would,” he said.
“I don’t blame you, Dad. I don’t blame you,” Tiffany replied, still not turning around.
He kept hammering: “But really, if I could …”
Tiffany Angleo stopped and turned around. “I had to look him in the eye,” she remembers. He was looking for consent.
Carl Angelo had finally accumulated the arsenal of pain medications he needed to live with cancer. Oxycodone, Fentanyl patches … there were enough drugs in that apartment to kill a horse, Tiffany Angelo says, but it wasn’t enough of a sure thing for him to die by those drugs -- his biggest fear was suffocating to death.
“I didn’t know he had a gun,” she said.
After that eerie conversation with her father, Tiffany Angelo left to visit her mother about 10 minutes away, as Carl Angelo asked her to. Come back at 6 p.m., he said.
"I was pretty cool that day,” Tiffany Angelo remembers. “And by cool – not just calm and collected – but I was pretty badass and I don’t know where that person came from.”
She spent the late afternoon at her mother’s retelling the conversation she had with her father hours before. She talked about how Carl Angelo worried about legal consequences she and her brother could face if they knew he was going to kill himself. Physician assisted suicide wasn’t an option in Ohio in 2010. It still isn’t. And at that time, California lawmakers were just starting to talk about legalizing it. It would be another six years before California doctors and terminally ill patients would be allowed to choose end-of-life options.
Tiffany Angelo doesn’t have many regrets about her father’s suicide but one of them is that she wished they would have been able to communicate more openly about it. She wished he didn’t have trepidation about the laws, about how it would feel, about what his family would think. “He shouldn’t have had to worry about that,” Tiffany said. “He should have been able to be honest with people and say, ‘Look, this is where my cutoff point is. I can’t do that.”
“The extent that he had to go to protect me, in particular, was stupid,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to use a self-defense weapon to blow an organ up to die in 2010.”
When six o’clock arrived, Tiffany Angelo drove back to her father’s two-bedroom duplex in Northeast Ohio. The trees had just turned red; it was three days before Halloween. Carl Angelo lived in the type of neighborhood where you didn’t lock the front door when you were home, but this time Tiffany Angelo had to use her key to get in.
“There is a weird silence to a house with death in it,” she remembers. “Maybe you just don’t realize how much noise a living thing makes until it’s not making it anymore.”
After fighting bladder cancer for ten months, there were only two places Carl Angelo spent his days: on the couch or in the bathroom but Tiffany didn’t find him in either of those rooms. Then, she spotted the TV screen in the reflection of the bathroom mirror. The set had been twisted to face the spare bedroom. The sound was turned up; sports was on. Carl Angelo was a big Ohio State college football fan.
“I thought, ‘Alright, you got to walk into that room,’” Tiffany said.
No one ever entered the spare bedroom. It was more of a medical storage room. There was an air mattress in there for when Tiffany would visit, but these days, because Carl Angelo had preferred the couch, she was staying in her father’s bedroom.
But before she walked in, Tiffany Angelo knew. She just knew. “He went in there because he didn’t want to mess up the other rooms,” she said.
Everything from that moment, on that day, happened in snapshots for Tiffany. Her eyes took single, zoomed in photos.
His eyes were empty, fixated on the ceiling.
His mouth hung open.
His chest had two tiny drops of blood.
His body lied on the mattress.
And next to it on the floor was a 9mm semi-automatic silver pistol.
“I didn’t want the whole picture,” Tiffany Angelo says. “I have a billion, literally a billion, flash photos in my brain of my dad and I didn’t want that photo. And once you take that picture, it’s in the permanent archives and I didn’t … I didn’t want it.”
Carl Angelo served as a medic during the Vietnam War. He knew where the heart was. A gunshot to the chest was his way of flipping the switch.
Detectives from the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office came after Tiffany Angelo called 911 to report her father’s death. They were kind, she remembers, but they were thorough. After all, there was a dead body in the house and a gun, and she was the only person there.
After about two hours of questioning, the coroner arrived and took Carl Angelo’s body away. They asked Tiffany if she wanted to see her father one last time. She tried but the good parts of her dad were gone. All that was left was the icky parts, she said. And that was okay for her.
“He was an adult who made a choice that a lot of us would have made,” Tiffany Angelo said.
She and her brother hung out at the apartment that night. They got drunk and watched old Ohio State football games in their father’s honor. They told the best stories about him and purged the place of every cancer-related thing he had. “Everything that proceeded this was the horror show,” she said. “Cancer was the disaster. This was the end of the disaster.”
Of course, she and her family would have liked one more month, Tiffany says, but goodbye was coming no matter what. Carl Angelo was in so much pain. He stopped eating. He got pleasure out of nothing. There was no unfinished business. They hugged; they kissed; they said I love you all the time. Their fears for what cancer had next for him was horrific, she said. “Still, it took courage because I knew he was afraid of suffering … He was afraid,” she said. “We were proud of him.”
But Tiffany Angelo wishes her dad knew that.
On October 28, 2010, Carl Angelo left a suicide note on the computer, apologizing:
“I’m so, so, sorry,” it read. “I love you all. Please know you have done everything you can and so have I. I just can’t take the fear and pain anymore.”
Feel the Tizita. LA's Dexter Story finds inspiration in Little Ethiopia
Off-Ramp recommends you go see world music royalty next weekend, when Nigeria's King Sunny Ade plays the Regent Theatre in downtown Los Angeles. And make sure to come early for the opening act: Dexter Story & Wondem. Dublab's Mark McNeill spoke with Story at a restaurant in Little Ethiopia.
Little Ethiopia is the long block of Fairfax between Olympic and Whitworth in LA's Mid-Wilshire district. It's a compact stretch of shops and restaurants bursting with flavor and inspiration.
This tiny neighborhood inspired the LA composer and multi-instrumentalist Dexter Story to make his latest album "Wondem," which means "brother" in Amharic, a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia.
"It's always fun to walk the street here and see people of the culture, Ethiopians on the street," Story says. "To smell the injera (Ethiopian spongy flatbread) and doro wat (Ethiopian chicken stew). And then the music. It's so expansive, so vast and romantic. I'm feeling tizita, which is the national sentiment of nostalgia."
Story had never been to Ethiopia until last year, but says he's frequently mistaken for an Ethiopian, and takes it as a compliment. "My hope with someone that comes across 'Wondem,'" he says, "is they hear the love in it, they hear my heart, they hear my passion, that their spirit is uplifted.
Listen to Dexter Story's "Wondem" on Spotify
August 14, 8pm: King Sunny Adé Live, with opening act Dexter Story & Wondem. The Regent Theatre, 448 S Main St, Los Angeles, CA 90013. 18+. Tickets are $24.50 - $32.50.
See the 1971 Land Rover painted by Keith Haring at the Petersen Automotive Museum now
At the Petersen Automotive Museum in Mid-Wilshire, you can see a newly unveiled work by the late artist Keith Haring.
It's a 1971 Series 3 Land Rover, painted army green and covered front to back by Haring's signature cookie-cutter people, crawling babies and animals.
"We were so lucky — the owner of the car actually approached us," says Leslie Kendall, chief curator at the Petersen. "And it was absolutely a no-brainer to say 'Yes, we'd love it.'"
Haring is the rare contemporary artist whose reputation precedes him — his work first gained attention when it appeared on walls in New York subway platforms and trains before taking over galleries and museums in Manhattan and beyond.
Kendall says the museum isn't sure about the Land Rover's backstory, or how Haring ended up painting it — Haring did write "Montreux Jazz Festival '83" on the side — but that the car stands on its own as a work of fine art.
"What caught my eye about this particular piece is how nicely it's done," says Kendall. "A lot of artists are very tempted to overdo it — if they're going to paint a car, man, they paint the car! Every inch of it. But what Keith Haring's done, is he's adapted his own style to fit the car, to make it make sense for the car."
Kendall went on:
"I think what's interesting is an artist based in New York choosing a means of transportation to express himself. He did start out doing his work on subways on the East Coast, and now he picks a fairly iconic means of transport in Los Angeles, too," says Kendall. "It's a little unexpected, but that makes it all the more interesting."
The car was unveiled last month. Kendall says it will be on display until the end of the year, at least.
Correction: An earlier version of this story was mistaken about the year of the Land Rover. KPCC regrets the error.
Song of the week: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - "When I try, I'm full"
This week's Off-Ramp song of the week is from a local electronic composer: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. She raised in the Pacific Northwest but writes and records from her studio in Glendale, California. of
Smith works with massive, vintage keyboards to create huge soundscapes and hypnotic rhythms. She said that on her latest album, “Ears,” she wanted to “create a sonic motion ride through a futuristic jungle.”
How does she do? You be the judge.
If you're a gear head, the synths Smith works with are really cool, by the way. Here's a video of Smith touring her studio:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95UvPlhjbE4
Filmmaker highlights obsessive, weird world of duck stamp artists
Have you heard of the Federal Duck Stamp? It’s a $25 stamp sold by the United States Department of the Interior to duck hunters and collectors all over the country.
Each year, there’s a different illustration on the stamp, usually a duck. The artwork is selected in a nationwide contest that anyone can enter, but only one can win. In the wildlife art community, there’s no higher honor.
The stamp is the subject of a new documentary, "The Million Dollar Duck," directed by Angeleno Brian Golden Davis. Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson talked with Davis about the new movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul6NQ23x_Q8
Interview Highlights:
The Million Dollar Duck brings out a lot of people who are experts in their field, people who are completely obsessed with this field, too. And they make it their entire lives. Which makes sense, I guess, but I would never have thought of that.
And that's one of the things that really got me interested in the film. A cartoonist named Ding Darling in 1934 had this idea to make a revenue stamp that would generate money to create the national wildlife refuges. Then somewhere along the way, it's like, "Hey why don't we have an open contest just to get the design of a duck on the stamp each year?"
That just sort of snowballed into this weird subculture where people dedicate their whole lives painting every year for 30 years, 40 years, 50 years... just to win and just to get their duck on that stamp.
You live in the L.A. area. You went to USC film school. All of this stuff happens in the Midwest. And a lot of the main characters in your documentary are from the Midwest. How did you find out about these people?
I grew up in Virginia. It's an odd place for ducks because it's by the Blue Ridge Mountains — there's not a lot of ducks there. My friend's stepdad was a wildlife artist. And one day I was asking him about that and it was like, "Actually, he painted a duck. It got on a stamp. And now our family is set for life!"
I just remembered it so clearly — that there is this mythical duck stamp out there, and that if an artist won the contest, it would change your life overnight.
And I actually heard about it on the radio — on KPCC I believe — we heard an interview with an author talking about a nonfiction book that you read about the contest. I read that book and it just triggered that memory and I was off to the races with the film.
The only other point of reference people might have for the Federal Duck Stamp contest is the series of scenes in Fargo with Frances McDormand's husband, Norm Gunderson:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj1CqBBMT54
Yeah, I think most people's reference for this, when you mention the Federal Duck Stamp, most of the time people mention "Fargo." But what's funny about that film is that, they actually mentioned the Hautman brothers. They say like, "Oh, the Hautman brothers are entering this year, I'm not going to have a chance."
The Hautman brothers are actually these three brothers from Minnesota.
Yeah, they're just like the Yankees of the Federal Duck Stamp.
They actually grew up right beside the Coen brothers. So the Coen brothers' mom would be like "Oh, my boys just won an Oscar," and then the Hautman brothers' mom would be like, "Oh, well my boys just won another duck stamp!"
They actually used the Hautman brothers' painting supplies and easels and stuff like that in the film.
Any favorite characters?
It's kind of weird, because when I first started I was, like, just mentally asking myself: "Am I really going to invest like a couple of years of my life to doing a story about people who paint ducks competitively?"
But the other thing was Rob McBroom. For those who don't know about the contest, it's really been dominated by realism. The ducks are very anatomically accurate.
And then Rob McBroom is this guy who paints abstract ducks. He uses, like, a Chevy logo as the duck's bill. You have to kind of see his work, but it's completely in the opposite direction of realism.
He's kind of a great antagonist to that crowd.
Yeah, and that was one of the funny things, because I knew that a lot of the people that take that kind of stuff really seriously are spending two to three months of work and they're painting each year to get that perfectly detailed feather and stuff. And when they see this abstract painting, it just — for lack of a better word — riles their feathers up.
It's also a story of a federal program that not a lot of people are aware of that puts a lot of work into conservation.
You don't really see a lot of good stories about the government these days. The Federal Duck Stamp program is so small, it's really run by two or three people. And it generates a massive amount of funding for national wildlife refuges. You kind of get this thing where the Republicans like it, the Democrats like it, the Libertarians like it — it's just like this thing that they sort of, everyone gets behind. So it's kind of cool to see.
"The Million Dollar Duck" comes out August 9 — it'll be available on Amazon, iTunes, and through local cable providers.
From radical unionists to feral cats: One of downtown LA's most historic sites is an empty lot
That vacant lot across from the L.A. Times building — on First between Broadway and Spring in downtown Los Angeles — is no ordinary vacant lot. As Robert Petersen, host and producer of The Hidden History of Los Angeles, tells us, it's the site of at least two bombings and two famous tent cities, and was the site of a huge colony of feral cats.
We talked with our backs to the chain link fence that surrounds the site now. “If you go back 100 years, Los Angeles was in a much different political situation,” Petersen says. “Terrorism was actually on the minds of a lot of people … but back then you would think about anarchists or labor activists. At the time there was a big struggle between big business and organized labor. At the heart of that struggle was Harrison Gray Otis, the publisher of the L.A. Times, who was notoriously anti-union.”
And the vacant lot was the home of the former L.A. Times building. The current L.A. Times building we know today is actually its third building, which opened in 1935.
On Oct. 1, 1910, two brothers decided to plant a bomb at this former building site on the northeast corner of Broadway Avenue and First Street. Their suitcase bomb held about 17 sticks of dynamite. The bomb was set off shortly after 1 a.m. — with a little over 100 people still in the building.
“What the bombers didn’t know is that there were gas lines underneath the building,” Petersen says. “A huge fire engulfed the building and 20 people died, most of them burned alive.”
The L.A. Times immediately blamed the bombing on the unions, but brothers John and James McNamara were not arrested until April 14, 1911 in the Oxford Hotel in Detroit. It wasn’t until then that it was discovered that one of the men involved in the bombing did in fact have connections to the labor union known as the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers.
The lot became home of the State Building in 1932 — the same year as the first L.A. Olympics. The opening ceremony for the building featured guest speaker Amelia Earhart. In 1974, the Weather Underground bombed the building, but it stood until 1976 when earthquake damage caused it to be closed and demolished. But they didn't get rid of the foundation or underground parking lot for 39 years.
The area then took on a different life. In 1984, homeless activist decided to create a tent city, which created a space for hundreds of homeless people to camp out. In 1986 they did it again, but this time they got a 5,000-square-foot circus tent, and it covered 200 homeless people.
More recently, the parking structure underneath the old state building became home to a colony of feral cats. Last year, when the parking structure was demolished, workers had to remove all of the cats before work could continue.
If you have one of those cats, or know someone who does, we'd love to hear from you.