In 1968, KPCC editor Paul Glickman's mom wrote to Charles Schulz, asking him to integrate Peanuts. Franklin was born. Plus: a tribute to Chandler, Pierce College Farm Center, and the harpsichord.
Don Bachardy's 'Hollywood': Celebrity portraits and time machines
As it should, the cover of "Hollywood," artist Don Bachardy's huge new collection of portraits of the industry's famous and not-so-famous, tells the whole story:
The book includes 50 years of Bachardy's unflinching "psychological portraits" of people we're used to seeing in airbrushed headshots. There's Bachardy, looking like what he is: an 80-year-old man — not the talented twink who captured writer Christopher Isherwood's heart in 1953. It's Bachardy's self-portrait of "the artist as an old man," if you will.
"If I came out looking 21 and lovely, they'd say 'Hey! That's not fair!' Age is fascinating, but at the same time I hate turning into a gorgon in my own mirror."
(Don Bachardy and Christopher Isherwood, soon after they met.)
So there's Jack Lemmon in 1992, looking a lot older than his 67 actual years, a man who's seen a lot:
(Jack Lemmon, 1992, by Don Bachardy. Glitterati Incorporated)
Bachardy paints a lot of nudes, but very few show up in "Hollywood." Teri Garr is one of the few, but since we don't want to break the Internet, here's a standard portrait:
(Teri Garr, 1979, by Don Bachardy. Glitterati Incorporated)
And it looks like success might have spoiled Tab Hunter.
(Tab Hunter, 2006, by Don Bachardy. Glitterati Incorporated)
In a long interview at his home in Santa Monica, Bachardy said he began drawing faces when he was a boy — mostly of movie stars. Seeing them on the screen helped them to come alive for him, he said.
At 18, when he started his 33-year relationship with novelist and screenwriter Christopher Isherwood, Bachardy suddenly had access to many of the people he'd been drawing. "And to have them sitting in front of me in the flesh!?" It was "scary, but the best kind of scary: exciting scary."
Bachardy began doing his portraits in pencil or ink, then switched to acrylic and color as he gained confidence. Color lets him express much more of the emotion he picks up on in sittings that can last 3 or 4 hours. (Some sitters couldn't take it, like Gov. Jerry Brown.)
Among the 300 images are a number of repeat sitters. Their portraits offer a different sort of time machine. Screenwriter and director Mary Agnes Donoghue, for instance, ages before our eyes in 1971, 1989, and 1998 portraits. These are people he might see socially over the years, but after doing the portraits, "I'm sometimes quite stunned! Oh my gosh! He or she has changed so much since the last time we worked together. But I can't do anything about that. I must record what I see while I'm looking at it. So, sometimes my sitters are quite shocked when they see what I've done."
A friend who's sat for Bachardy says there's a rule. You hate your portrait, but your friends all say it captures you perfectly.
Make sure to listen to our interview above to hear much more from Don Bachardy, including what happened when Angelina Jolie came in for her first sitting.
Superman creator Jerry Siegel's typewriter hits the Paley Center
Every machine in Steve Soboroff's typewriter collection tells a different story, and one of them comes from a planet called Krypton.
The keys of Julie Andrews' IBM Selectric match her electric blue eyes; the Unabomber's is missing some parts, which he used to make bombs; and Jerry Siegel's black Royal, his daughter says, holds his spirit, which gave itself to Superman, articles in Stars & Stripes and many other projects.
These and 25 other famous typewriters — profiled in 2012 on "Off-Ramp" — are now on display at the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills. Laura Siegel Larson and her son Michael Larson were at the opening celebration, and I caught up with them at a Royal Portable Quiet Deluxe that was, Laura says, Siegel's "pride and joy. He loved this portable typewriter, and he took it all over with him." (Siegel wrote Superman, while Joe Shuster illustrated it.)
Typewriters, Laura says, are fundamentally different from word processors. "It's just you and this machine that becomes a friend of yours. And it's your collaborator, cohort, as you're doing things. Computers, because they're electronic, have a life of their own, so you can't kind of blend your personality with them as easily as on a typewriter."
Laura, now an advocate for creators' rights after years fighting for her father's intellectual property rights with Superman, says she let the Royal become part of the Soboroff collection because Soboroff uses the machines for auctions that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for journalism scholarships, and because it was time.
"I had to process the passing of my dad and mom, and this is something that will inspire people. I believe that the vibration of the person that has typed on a typewriter, sort of never leaves it, and there's something special about each one. And so I wanted people to make contact with my dad and their own creativity."
Make sure to listen to the audio (click the button on the left) for the full interview, which includes Laura's son Michael, a writer who feels a similar kinship with his laptop.
The Soboroff Collection is at the Paley Center for Media, 465 North Beverly Drive
Beverly Hills CA, through Jan. 4.
Fire ravages builder Geoff Palmer's newest downtown Italian-aint apartment house
There's no question, says Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele, that developer Geoff Palmer hit the sweet spot with his apartment blocks. Long before downtown LA became hip, he started building the Italian-looking apartment buildings with the Italian-sounding names: the Orsini, the Piero, the Visconti, and the Medici. And he did it on land that wasn't considered developable.
Monday, fire did $10m damage to part of the DaVinci complex, just a few days after Marc filed a long report for Los Angeles Magazine on the storied developer:
For Palmer ... the Italianate buildings also honor the city’s founders. “The Italians actually settled L.A. before the Spanish and Chinese,” he says. That may be a rather unusual reading of the area’s history, which typically maintains that Spanish settlers founded L.A. in 1781, but Palmer has long demonstrated a tendency to go his own way.
-- Marc Haefele in December's Los Angeles Magazine
Marc says Palmer successfully fought laws requiring builders like him to include affordable housing in their developments, and proved the point in court. "So basically, he eliminated those laws as far as the city of Los Angeles is concerned, they no longer exist. Housing advocates say there's no political will now to build affordable housing downtown. This isn't all Palmer's fault, but the he's the guy who actually legalized the elimination of the affordable housing element."
MORE on Palmer from Ben Bergman in the KPCC blog, The Breakdown
Click on the audio at left to hear both my conversation with Marc this week, and our report from the site of the 1887 Geise House, which Palmer's workers destroyed in 2003.
The 2 friends who helped integrate Charlie Brown and the 'Peanuts' gang in 1968
UPDATE 3/12/2015: Harriet Glickman and Ken Kelly have been the toast of Little Rock, Arkansas this week, after an invitation from the Clinton Presidential Center to come talk about their work to integrate "Peanuts."
(Harriet Glickman being interviewed by a Little Rock TV station at the Clinton Presidential Center. Image: Katherine Moore)
On the one hand, there's Rosa Parks and Ruby Bridges. On the other, there's Harriet Glickman and Ken Kelly. All took part in the Civil Rights struggle. Glickman and Kelly's role was smaller — in an era before the controversy of Ferguson, they helped bring on the creation of a boy named Franklin.
In a conversation over chocolate chip cookies and coffee in the dining room of the house she's lived in for half a century, Glickman, an 88-year old retired schoolteacher, and Kelly, an 86-year-old retired JPL microwave communications engineer from Sherman Oaks, told how they convinced "Peanuts" creator Charles Schulz to integrate his strip. Through their polite and candid exchange of letters and ideas, Franklin, a black kid with a father serving in Vietnam, was born.
Franklin was unspectacular as a character, but he made a huge splash. "It was 1968," Glickman said. "I was living here in Sherman Oaks with three children (including KPCC Senior Editor Paul Glickman), and the idea came to me to write the letter to Charles Schulz, asking if he would put a then-Negro [the common usage] child into his strip."
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Her longtime friend Ken Kelly, an African-American who later fought to integrate local housing developments, picks up the story. "It was so common in the total media picture — movies, newspapers — the absence of Negro people was extreme, but worse, negative situations always got covered." But he liked Peanuts on the whole. "The characters and situations were beautiful."
Glickman made the first move, asking Schulz to add a black character. Schulz responded in a letter, saying of he and fellow artists, "We all would like very much to be able to do this, but each of us is afraid that it would look like we were patronizing our Negro friends. I don't know what the solution is."
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But Glickman knew. She shared Schulz's letter with Kelly and another black parent, and asked them to write Schulz with their ideas. Kelly suggested Schulz create a black character as a "supernumerary" — not a hero, just a regular kid. And that's what Schulz did.
"He did it so smoothly," Kelly says. "He wasn't rocking anyone's boat, except there are those they felt the boat was being rocked."
There was a letter of protest from a newspaper editor in the Deep South, upset about the depiction of an integrated school. But there was also the letter of thanks from then-City Councilman Tom Bradley.
Of her role, Glickman says, "When I was at the museum, somebody said, 'It took courage.' No it didn't. It didn't take courage to sit in Sherman Oaks, in my comfortable home, and type a letter. Courage was little Ruby Bridges," a black girl who integrated an all-white elementary school in New Orleans. "That was courage."
(A study in courage: Ruby Bridges being escorted to school. Credit: U.S. Department of Justice)
And, Harriet Glickman says, "What we're seeing today, some of the hatred, some of the anger, the racism that still exists, it's not going to be fixed by putting a little character in a 'Peanuts' strip."
The 46-year old letters between Schulz and his gently prodding fans in L.A. are now part of the collection at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, and you can read more of them in this Mashable article.
'It's a Wonderful Life' — unless you're Cosby, Ghomeshi, or Sterling
It's the film almost everybody loves, except for that one minor detail. As the popularity of "It's a Wonderful Life" grew over the years, filmmaker Frank Capra's fan mail changed. Nearly every letter started to ask, "Mr. Capra, why did you let Mr. Potter keep the money?"
In the film's climax, Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter, the bitter, wheelchair-bound miser, whose predatory lending practices nearly destroy Bedford Falls, accidentally comes to possess the $8,000 Jimmy Stewart’s Bailey Building and Loan needs to avoid bankruptcy. It isn't Potter's money, but he keeps it anyhow, setting in motion the crisis that defines a dark film's harrowing but redemptive finale.
WHOAH! In a nasty part of downtown LA, there's a harpsichord factory!
George is saved by the many people he's helped down the years. In his hour of need, they shower him with quarters, dimes, and paper money, in an orgy of communal generosity that saves the day. But as the film fades to black, Potter is still out there, his larceny undetected. It's a storytelling choice so notorious, it spawned a classic "Saturday Night Live" sketch about a "lost ending," where Mr. Potter gets beaten to a pulp:
To audiences used to seeing the guilty punished, letting Potter get away with it feels like bad filmmaking. To me, it's always been a sign of Capra's greatness. Because to view "It's a Wonderful Life's" ending as a happy one, you have to embrace its value system, which is that money and power are booby prizes. Friendship, love and altruism are the values that make life worth living. And I've been struck by the wisdom of "It's a Wonderful Life's" vision again and again in 2014, a year filled with real life Potters, who often got to keep their worldly trappings , but who were dis-invited from the communal banquet of everyday life.
I can remember sitting in my car last April, unable to turn off the radio, as the NBA announced the banishment of Clipper's owner Donald Sterling for his racist comments. In the end, a show of solidarity, encompassing ballplayers, owners, coaches and NBA brass — the pro-basketball equivalent of Bedford Falls, rallied to save some vision of a better self.
The Year of the Big Shun was born.
(Former CBC Radio hostJian Ghomeshi. Image: CBC)
Then, we have Jian Ghomeshi, the hipster with the clenched fists, whose syndicated Canadian chat show shared KPCC's airwaves. Ghomeshi made himself into a spokesmodel for public radio values: Inclusiveness. Intellectual curiosity. Tolerance. Then, in one remarkable news cycle , Ghomeshi's musical protégé, his former bandmates, and his agent all joined with his former employers at the CBC and much of his fan base in denouncing him. Even his PR firm abandoned him, and now he's been arrested and charged with assault.
And all of this was just a prologue to the sad spectacle of watching Bill Cosby's legendary career come crashing to the ground over the past few weeks.
LISTEN to the deafening silence from Bill Cosby on NPR's "Weekend Edition"
We shunned them. Like Capra's Mr. Potter, when the circle was drawn, they stood outside.
(Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks at the Diner.")
This holiday season, I've been daydreaming. I see Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby sitting at separate tables in some imaginary diner in this, the year of the Big Shun. In a corner booth, Mel Gibson, a regular, murmurs epithets and punches air. Donald Sterling is tracing out legal stratagems on a cocktail napkin with a cramped and trembling hand.
There's a TV on, the way there always is in any sad cafe. On the black and white screen, a smiling young hero has just come home from a good war. He raises his glass to make a toast: "To my brother George! The richest man in town!"
The Big Shun. It's powerful stuff. Let's use it sparingly, and only as necessary. And see you at the party.
The story behind Jerry Brown's gubernatorial portrait
Thirty years ago, California Gov. Jerry Brown unveiled his official gubernatorial portrait. The work, created by Santa Monica portrait artist Don Bachardy, was a far cry from the traditional portraits. Instead of a photorealistic snapshot of a heroic politician, it showed the governor surrounded by gray, his angular face and falcon-like glare staring directly at the viewer.
It didn't go over well at the California State Capitol. New York Magazine wrote that one state legislator said it looked like Bachardy painted it with "spilled ketchup and soy sauce." The portrait was tucked away on the Capitol's third floor, far from the other gubernatorial portraits.
But what was painting the famous portrait like? Don Bachardy, who has a new book of portraiture out now called "Hollywood," explained the process.
Bachardy estimates he did at least 15 different portraits while on the search for the perfect one. The governor attended five sittings in all, but it wasn't easy getting through them.
"He couldn't understand why I'd want him for five sittings," Bachardy told Off-Ramp host John Rabe. "He found sitting still very difficult. He felt vulnerable. He's not used to being passive, or he felt it was a case of my dominating him."
Although the portrait got a chilly reception at first, many grew to embrace the work. When Brown was re-elected governor in 2010, he said the unfinished nature of the portrait reflects his "unfinished work while in office."
Near downtown LA's Skid Row, a haven for harpsichords
If the harpsichord is truly the "enfant terrible" of the music world, as Manuel Rosales told us on Off-Ramp the other day, Curtis Berak will need two double strollers for upcoming concerts featuring four of his babies on stage.
On Thursday, Dec. 11, at Zipper Hall, and Saturday, Dec 13, at Valley Performing Arts Center, Northridge, the L.A. Chamber Orchestra will start its Baroque Conversations Series with a rare performance of Bach's Concerto for Four Harpsichords. And that means four times as much work for Curtis Berak, the region's classical harpsichord go-to man.
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Since 1976, in the basement of a a run-down building in the southern part of downtown L.A., Curtis Berak has been building and fixing harpsichords. "I was coming from San Diego as an artist. I did abstract painting and I had the idea that I needed to be in a big city to have an art career. When you're a painter, you have a lot of time to listen to music."
And that's where harpsichords come in. Berak listened to baroque music, which often features the harpsichord, and liked it. Then he learned that you can make a harpsichord at home from a kit, "and that's what got me started," he said.
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As you can hear in the audio (make sure to click and listen), we sampled a number of Berak-built harpsichords — from a small Italian; to a double-manual French; to one modeled on harpsichords made by the Stradivarius of antique harpsichords, Ruckers, in the Flemish style.
As important as their sound is the look, and Berak painstakingly decorates his instruments to appear as if they were hundreds of years old, with authentic woodwork and delicate brushwork, so make sure to look through the photos above!
LA Music Center 50th Anniversary: Who was Dorothy Chandler?
On December 6, 1964 — 50 years ago this week — the Music Center opened. Home now to the Mark Taper Forum, the Ahmanson Theater and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Music Center originally consisted of just one building: the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which still hosts music today.
Dorothy Chandler — born Dorothy Mae Buffum — was the wife of Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler. For almost 10 years she made the building of a concert hall in Downtown Los Angeles her driving cause: she lobbied politicians, spoke before the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, and solicited donations from her wealthy friends.
Chandler died in 1997, but among her many descendants is Harry Chandler, her grandson. Harry was there on opening day, and shared his memories of his grandmother with KPCC's Patt Morrison.
On Opening Day at the Music Center
As an 11 year old boy, I wasn't exactly thrilled by classical music, or long ceremonies. So, while I was very proud of Mama Buff — as we called her — it wasn't my finest and most fulfilling afternoon in my life. There were a lot of speeches. A lot of people I didn't know. I was seated front row on the aisle, so I couldn't — I had to behave.
Finally, the concert started. After about 20 minutes, I was kind of bored. And I had secreted in my coat pocket a little AM/FM radio. And so I discreetly put the little earphone on and tried to tune in to KRLA, which was the Pasadena rock station of the era. Unfortunately, the Pavilion was so well built that I could get no signal.
On being Dorothy Chandler's grandson
I remember a lot about her personality. And then in later years, after her husband Norman passed away, I was her main escort [to the music center].
She was very regal. And that was her mannerisms. Even as a grandmother, she was not a grandma that put me on the knee and bounced me when I was a kid. Often, the only times we would see her during the year would be at the holidays.
And my two great memories of that are: we had finger bowls, which is the only place I've ever had finger bowls. So you had to wash your fingers before your meal. And then, she required all her grandkids, after the meal, to stand up one by one and make a toast!
On the Music Center's legacy, as Downtown LA expands its artistic reach
Look at Paris: what's the core of arts in Paris? The Louvre has been there for generations, but they have so many great new things. So I don't think it matters whether it's the core. Certainly, if you want to hear symphony, you come here. If you want to hear opera, if you want to watch great theater. To me it just kind of helped create the momentum by putting this building and this music center together.
On attending Music Center concerts with Dorothy Chandler
One of my special memories was with my grandmother, we went first to dinner. And at our table was Zubin [Mehta, the conductor and music director for the Los Angeles Philharmonic]. I had met him in passing, but never really had him for dinner. And he was conducting that night. So what was really great was to spend the whole evening dinner with him and then watch him go out on the stage. And of course we had those wonderful seats that Dorothy had. Somewhere, in that moment of bowing to the audience he tipped his head and looked up at us. He gave a little expression — that felt pretty great.
It was great. Zubin is a very interesting man, he's very cultured. But he was also very deferential to Mrs. C, as he called her. My wife was at that dinner, and during the course of the evening Mama Buff said something about women as a gender. It was kind of horribly outdated, what she said. I took it upon myself to say, "Well, I'm not sure modern women might agree with that statement."
Suddenly, she went cold. Dead cold. And she looked at me. I don't think someone had interrupted — not interrupted — someone had taken issue with her statement in quite a while. So during the whole performance, as much fun as it was watching Zubin conduct, she never looked at me. She never was warm. She was upset. And this continued all the way down to the parking garage. I drove her home — not a word, not even a look.
My wife was smart enough to stay in the car while I walked her up to her front door. We rang the front door, and she had her back to me. I didn't know what to expect. And suddenly she turned around, and she was in tears. And she said: "Thank you. Only my grandson would have told me when I was wrong, and I appreciate that."
The Music Center celebrates its 50th anniversary with a handful of events. Check the Music Center's website for details and info.
How Pierce College Farm Center saved Taylor Orci from being a city kid
I'm trying to figure out how to make farms sound sexy, but instead I keep thinking back to a cartoon. A little girl from the city is trying to solve a mystery. She picks up a clue, which is a milk bottle, and she asks herself, "Where did this come from?" Then, after some thinking, she lights up: "I know! The cow factory!"
I was that city kid. If you asked me where stuff came from, I'd have probably told you scientists plunk chunks of stuff into a funnel and then it comes out transformed and shiny on a conveyor belt and then people with hairnets inspect the line for imperfections and maybe the occasional old boot. That's it. That's how everything is made.
And I thought that was great, because as a city kid, I knew that nature was gross.
LISTEN: We rediscover a forgotten man, Jim Tully, "Hollywood's most-hated man"
When I was growing up in L.A., the ocean was a place where you got rashes if you swam in it, the sky was where they came from when they were spraying for the medfly. There was the Northridge earthquake, floods where we had to sandbag the front door to our apartment and fires that made ashes that fell down our faces at recess like snow. Then we tried to eat it like snow and that was gross. Nature wasn't beautiful, it was a disaster.
I think I went to a farm once on a Girl Scout trip. Or maybe it was just a cow. I went to one cow.
(A cow. LAPL/Security Pacific National Bank Collection)
I didn't remember much except we all stood in line to touch a live cow's udder. I remember staring at this warm mass of teats on this suspiciously indifferent cow and thinking, "This is just weird." Milk came from a carton, from the store, from a place like the cow factory. And that was clean and not gross at all and no one had to think about where things came from because they were always there.
As an adult I've tried to be more aware of where stuff comes from, especially if I eat it. Food comes from farms. Even writing that I'm thinking, "Does it?" Just like when I heard a Subway commercial say, "Tomatoes that taste like they're picked off the vine," and my brain went, "That's all tomatoes!" But then I thought, "Is it? Are they?"
City kids need to know where food comes from because otherwise they become me. So two years ago, when pumpkin carving time came around, my boyfriend took me to a place called the Pierce College Farm Center, near Woodland Hills, and I went nuts.
They didn't just have cows, they had horses and goats on an obstacle course and they grew their own pumpkins and, my favorite thing: the corn maze. I had never been in a corn maze! They gave you a map and peppered in trivia about geese migration which was meh, but wow, did I love that corn maze.
I loved the Farm Center! I loved that there was a place in the city where kids could go and see a growing pumpkin patch or pet a goat or buy food grown on the farm at the country store. As a kid, this is all I ever wanted, and here it was.
I couldn't wait to go back. All year I told my friends, "Have you heard about the Pierce College Farm Center? It's got all this stuff!" And this year when I went back, I made my friends go with me to the corn maze, but the facts weren't about geese migration, they were about how the Farm Center was closing.
I got this weird feeling I've had before like I'm one of the kids on the book jacket of "Where the Sidewalk Ends." There's nothing more for you here, this is your last time in this corn maze. Buying my pumpkin at the register, I asked the clerk if the Farm Center really was closing. She handed me a flyer to sign a petition online.
I read the language for why the Farm Center was closing and it just made me sad. Sad because of how complicated something like an educational farm can be. The administration says the Farm Center costs too much; the other side says it's self-sufficient. What I wouldn't give to have a dorky maze about geese facts be the focal point of my Farm Center experience right about now.
A quaint farm center closing the day after Christmas seems like a great premise for a Hallmark movie where the whole town gets together to save a meaningful thing. And in the last minutes, the narrator would say, "And the children of Woodland Hills learned that food does come from farms after all, and not from factories like Taylor thought back in the '80s."
It would be a Christmas miracle.
Jim Tully, father of hardboiled fiction, was the 'most hated man in Hollywood'
In the '20s and '30s, Jim Tully was a national celebrity, known as a pioneering novelist, Charlie Chaplin's wingman and publicist — and for punching a major movie star in the face at the Brown Derby. Tully was a top contributor to "Vanity Fair" and H.L. Mencken's "American Mercury," but by the late 1940s, he was forgotten.
"I lived in many a brothel where the dregs of life found shelter. I fraternized with human wrecks whose hands shook as if with palsy, ... with degenerates and perverts, greasy and lousy, with dope fiends who would shoot needles of water into their arms to relieve the wild aching."
— Jim Tully
In 1992 in Kent, Ohio, a man walked into bookseller Paul Bauer's shop and asked for a book by Jim Tully, "the father of hardboiled fiction." Bauer was abashed. He'd never heard of Tully, and so he called his friend Mark Dawidziak, then a columnist at the Akron Beacon Journal.
Dawidziak found Tully's book "Shanty Irish" in another store for $2.50, then searched out all 12 of Tully's novels and scoured libraries for any mention of Tully. In his own newspaper's archives, Dawidziak discovered that Tully had been a reporter for the paper. It was a sign, and the two men decided to write Tully's biography.
A librarian informed them that Tully's personal papers were at the UCLA library.
(Credit: UCLA Jim Tully archive)
They flew out to Los Angeles and found 117 boxes of letters, articles and newspaper clippings. "That really was the treasure trove," they say, that let them piece together Tully's incredible life.
(St. Mary's, Ohio, in the late 1880s. Credit: ridertown.com)
Tully was born in 1886 in St. Mary's, Ohio. His father was a ditch digger, and his mother died when he was 6. Tully's childhood was spent in an orphanage — then, at 12, his father gave him to an abusive farmer as a farmhand.
At 13, Tully escaped back to St. Mary's, where he heard road stories from hobos. At 14, Tully joined them, becoming a "road kid," or "junior hobo," says Dawidziak. The rest of his adolescence was spent jumping trains and in the company of hobos, prostitutes and carnies.
UCLA archivist Alisa Monheim says, "One of the few things that you can do in that situation, places you can go to get out of the heat or out of the cold, is go to libraries." That's where Tully apparently taught himself to read and write.
In 1906, at 20 years old, Tully took up boxing as an occupation.
"I staggered from an overhand right and rattled the teeth in Tierney's jaw in return. I tried to get under the eaves. Tierney was wise. His rigid arm met my attack. Our gloves were now blood-and-water soaked. My kidneys ached with pain."
— Jim Tully on his bout with Chicago Jack Tierney.
"He was an untrained boxer, to be sure, but he was fearless," Bauer says. "He was willing to take punches, to take punishment, all to get inside and score hits." Despite having some success, "He had seen men die in the ring. He had seen 'em blinded in the ring. And I think he realized that this was not a career he was going to carry into middle age."
Tully married his first wife in 1911. They had two children, Alton and Trilby, and moved to Los Angeles.
(Tully and family in L.A.)
He spent 10 years traveling as a tree trimmer and working on his first novel, "Emmett Lawler." He also submitted poetry to newspapers and articles on hoboing and boxing to various magazines.
Recognition for Tully's work grew among writers and editors he sought out for advice: Jack
London, Upton Sinclair and H.L. Mencken. When Tully came to L.A., he made notable friends, including Lon Chaney and Erich von Stroheim.
One of Tully's best friends was Paul Bern, a producer at MGM, who invited Tully to a party, knowing Charlie Chaplin would be there, and that they'd hit it off. In 1923, Charlie Chaplin made Jim Tully his all-purpose PR writer.
During this time, Tully started his second novel, "Beggars of Life."
"Beggars" was published in 1924 to great success, giving Tully the means to leave Chaplin and write more articles, novels and a series of movie star profiles.
"He was known as 'the man Hollywood most loved to hate,' because he was one of the first reporters to ever cover Hollywood as a beat," says UCLA's Monheim. "He really didn't care who he pissed off in the slightest."
Bauer says Tully's profile of former silent film icon John Gilbert was "so harsh that, reportedly, when Gilbert read it, he threw up." In 1930, Gilbert called Tully out at the Brown Derby.
Dawidziak breaks down the scuffle: "Tully is up, and he is in a boxer's stance. Gilbert comes at him, and he throws two wild punches. Misses with both. Tully, a trained boxer, steps into the gap and snaps a right uppercut. Knocks him cold with one punch."
(Gilbert v. Tully at the Brown Derby. Courtesy Mark Dawidziak)
Tully's career was declining by the mid-to-late '30s. He attempted comebacks with "The Bruiser" (1936) and "Biddy Brogan's Boy" (1942), but neither were successful in his lifetime.
On June 22, 1947, Tully's heart failed. He was 61 years old. He's buried at Glendale's Forest Lawn, on the same hill as John Gilbert. A last ignominy for Jim Tully, whom Dawidziak calls "the missing link between Jack London and Jack Kerouac": His grave marker gets his birth year wrong.
Chris Greenspon thanks: Voice actors Jennifer Miller and Christopher Murray, documentary filmmaker Mark Wade Stone for clips from "Way for a Sailor," and WKSU's Joe Gunderman.
The art of World War I comes to life at the Getty Research Institute
You probably heard it a dozen times in high school: World War I was the first industrial war. Armies used planes, tanks, mines, and chemical weapons in unprecedented numbers. The casualties were catastrophic.
But World War I was also one of the first that modern art had to reckon with. This week, the Getty Research Institute debuted World War 1: War of Images, Images of War. The exhibit takes original propaganda posters and journal articles from the war and shows them alongside how artists from the age interpreted it — the result is fascinating, strange and sometimes chilling.
Off-Ramp Producer Kevin Ferguson went to the Getty Research Institute and talked with the Getty's Nancy Perloff and Philipp Blom.
The exhibit features art used for state-sponsored propaganda, but also art produced as a reaction to World War 1. With propaganda, the objective was clear: news journals in places like France and Germany would draw covers with caricatures of their enemy's culture: drawings of Kaiser Wilhelm II executing children, or the French Gallic Rooster looking sick, weak and forlorn.
When artists looked at the war, the perspective was very different. Philipp Blom, a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, points to the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, an artist who served briefly in the German military before suffering a nervous breakdown and being committed. "He drew pictures of the apocalypse," said Blom. "And he drew them on the back of cigarette packs, because he had no other paper available. So they're very small, and there's this cycle of drawings that shows you different stages of the apocalypse."
Nancy Perloff — a curator with the Institute — said she hopes visitors will walk away from the exhibit with a sense of the power of images to wage war. "Look at how differently each country responded," she said. "France, the object of its propaganda was largely Germany. Germany, not entirely, but largely against the United Kingdom. And you'll see that through and through."
Philip Blom said he agreed, and added that the exhibit also shows visitors the disparity between how nations depict war through art versus independent artists. "You hardly see any specific uniforms," said Blom. "You hardly see any national attributes. You see people suffering. So the propaganda shows you all the nationalist attributions, all the negative stereotyping. And when it them comes to the real experience, you see pure and naked human suffering."
World War I: War of Images, Images of War is on display at the Getty Research Institute now through April 19. Head to the Getty's websitefor visiting information.
Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film: 'Big Hero 6'
UPDATE 1/15/2015: Disney's "Big Hero 6" is nominated for Best Animated Film Oscar. Here's our Off-Ramp interview with two of the people who helped make it a hit.
Off-Ramp animation expert Charles Solomon goes to Disney to talk about the look of the Disney animated blockbuster "Big Hero 6" with production designer Paul Felix and Scott Watanabe, art director, environments.
"John (Lasseter) believes your story's going to change over the course of the years it takes to do these movies. But your world is something you're going to live with the whole time." — Director Don Hall, LA Times
Virtually every review of Disney’s animated hit "Big Hero 6" — which has brought in $112 million domestic and $148 million worldwide through this weekend — praises the imaginary city where the story unfolds: San Fransokyo, which blends famous San Francisco landmarks with elements of Tokyo's iconic skyline into a metropolis that feels both familiar and alien:
(Image: Disney)
Two of the artists most responsible for that look are production designer Paul Felix and Scott Watanabe, art director, environments. Felix was production designer on "Lilo & Stitch" and "The Emperor's New Groove," but his credits go back to the 1980s, when he did storyboard cleanup on "ALF." "Big Hero 6" is Watanabe's first film as art director.
RELATED: Meet Disney and "Fat Albert" animator Floyd Norman
First, why combine Tokyo and San Francisco?
"Initially," Watanabe says, " we wanted to have the freedom to create a new environment (not) tied down to reality, plus I think everybody just thinks it's cool."
"I think, too," Felix says, "Marvel (which originated the characters) wanted to make sure that this film was distinct from the Marvel Universe, so you wouldn't expect Iron Man to drop in, so it had to become our own story."
The team blended two very different cities. Says Solomon, "I wouldn't say Tokyo is oppressive, but it's kind of omnipresent, whereas in San Francisco you can look up at the sky." Felix says they had a graphic designer working for two years just to capture the signage needed. To get the quality of light right, Felix says they photographed from atop a skyscraper from dawn to dusk. And Watanabe recounts how, during the production, he'd joke "put a roof on it," when they tried to make a San Francisco icon look more Japanese, referring to iconic Japanese-style roofs.
(Image: Disney)
For the interiors, the two say it was essential to get the clutter right. It was a real challenge," says Felix, "to try to populate those sets with enough detail to conform with some of the research we saw." They took trips to robotics labs at Carnegie-Mellon and MIT, "and that clutter is there." Watanabe says he took inspiration from his Disney colleagues, many of whom have accumulated layers of mementos in their work spaces, and from home: "Just visiting my Japanese grandparents' homes, and they have clutter everywhere!"
Watanabe says one of the concepts animators developed was to let the clutter grow throughout the film, like plants, "Which worked out well for some things," Felix interjects, but in some scenes, "it started looking very much like cat or rat poop, so we had to dial back on where you actually see it."
Felix says their job is to create environments that give context to the characters, to make the experience richer and more immersive. "You're world-building from scratch," says Watanabe, "and that could come off as really cheap if you don't a true-to-life job."
Easter Egg for KPCC junkies: Did Rabe find a Lasseter/Miyazaki Easter egg in some early "Big Hero 6" art? Check out our photo slideshow.
Hit @LosFelizDayCare Twitter feed shoots down helicopter parents
If you live in or around Los Feliz and send your little person to daycare with a sack of organic carrots and a yoga mat, you might want to skip this segment. You're going to be disappointed in public radio.
If not, welcome to
, a hit Twitter feed run by comedy writer Jason Shapiro. It has 16,600 followers as of Thursday, and here's why:
Emmet was sent off on a meditation opportunity after telling Saha where the hidden cuts in Birdman are. It's all one take if you believe!
— Los Feliz Day Care (@LosFelizDayCare)
SILENT DROP OFF/PICK UP TODAY. New episode of
was released and silence is the only way to ensure that everyone feels spoiler safe.
— Los Feliz Day Care (@LosFelizDayCare)
SILENT DROP OFF/PICK UP TODAY. New episode of @serial was released and silence is the only way to ensure that everyone feels spoiler safe.
— Los Feliz Daycare (@LosFelizDaycare) October 23, 2014
Los Feliz Day Care (humanely) captures the neighborhood's helicopter parent zeitgeist, then skewers and roasts it like a tofu shish kebab — and in a way, the feed has a kind of echo of "Welcome to Nightvale."
Someone left the shed open and now we have skunks living in our cider press. Please explain that we can't name them. That's not for us to do
— Los Feliz Day Care (@LosFelizDayCare)
The kids' names are one of the best parts of the feed: Beckett, Tallulah, Ranger — but you'll have to listen to our interview to discover if little Kai is named for the handsomest man in public radio.