Piper Laurie on Paul Newman and Ronald Reagan; Pepe Aguilar's musical legacy; What is God?
First movie ever made of LA was of traffic ... with no traffic jams!
The first thing anybody ever filmed in Los Angeles was oncoming traffic.
On Feb. 24, 1898, Thomas Edison’s employee, James H. White, went to downtown Los Angeles and pointed his unwieldy camera up South Spring Street. Commissioned by the Southern Pacific Railroad, White immortalized everything that passed in front of him for almost thirty seconds.
Lucky for White it was only 1898. He apparently thought nothing of standing right there in the street and making everybody go around him.
As movies go, “South Spring Street, Los Angeles, Cal” won’t make anybody forget “Citizen Kane.”
The first thing we see is a bustling streetscape in blurry, jerky monochrome. The roadway is dirt. Pedestrians fill the sidewalks. The curb isn’t a barrier, more of a suggestion. The day is a sunny one. Blockish office buildings cast long, early-morning or late-afternoon shadows.
It’s rush hour on the one-way street. Two men in a horse-drawn carriage are driving toward the camera. The carriage veers off, followed by another behind it.
Now six white horses are pulling an open stagecoach in our direction. A stagecoach! A passenger in back lowers his large umbrella from upright to horizontal, as if he wants to slow the coach down.
Traffic lets up for a moment. One man crosses the street on foot from left to right, three more from right to left. The last man is looking down at something in his hand, oblivious to the hubbub around him. The posture is strikingly modern. It’s like he’s checking his email.
Now the traffic really picks up. More horses in harness gallop toward us, drawing an open public coach with seven or eight people jouncing along up top. A bicyclist pedals by, swerving briefly toward the camera as if to give us a scare.
And now the capper: a stylish streetcar glides by, electrified on overhead wires. On the front, you can barely make out most of the curved words “Los Angeles” and, below it, “Railway.” A man -- maybe the conductor, maybe just an exuberant passenger -- holds on with one hand and swings out into nothing. Then, as if he knows that the film is running out, he looks right at us, and waves.
Finally, in the distance, a burly policeman detaches himself from the sidewalk crowds and trundles into Spring Street. His greatcoat is belted, his helmet high. He has no inkling that his next proud step is his last.
And then? Nothing. The slow fadeout hasn’t been invented yet.
A few things jump out at you right away.
First of all, women are completely missing. We know that most of them were at home, doing laundry, baking pies, and talking about us. But all of them?
Second, all the men wear hats. All of them, as if there’s a law. Where did all those hats go? Did the men trade them in for women?
And finally, it hits you. In the first images of Los Angeles ever recorded, you’ve been watching a vision of the city as it once was -- and as it’s occasionally starting to look again. Maybe half a dozen different kinds of locomotion on the same street. Cyclists, walkers, drivers, convertibles, streetcars, even animals. It actually looks a little like CicLAvia.
Oh, and one more thing: despite all the traffic, there are no traffic jams. If only for 30 seconds.
David Kipen runs Libros Schmibros, the Boyle Heights lending library, and contributes to KPCC’s Take Two and Off-Ramp.
Piper Laurie in-depth, or 'I'll have what she's having, hold the knives.'
(Piper Laurie speaks at The Bowers Museum Sunday, January 13, at 1:30.)
Today, at 80, actor Piper Laurie is grandmotherly. She made me coffee at her house before our interview, and fretted it was lousy. (It was fine.) So it's a little hard to picture her losing her virginity, as she claims in her memoir, to Ronald Reagan, who was playing her father in Louisa (1950); losing her composure in The Hustler (1961) while sitting across the table running lines with Paul Newman; and turning her death scene in Carrie (1976) into a protracted and creepily sexy orgasm.
As she explained to me, she pitched the idea to director Brian DePalma and he liked it.
Our conversation was long and wide ranging, encompassing a very sad few years when she and her sister were virtually exiled to a sanitorium in LA for her sister's health, an audition for Universal that should have led to better roles, three Oscar nominations, and the phenomenon that is Twin Peaks. She's still a little puzzled that it was canceled. She figures the network executives were as frustrated as many of the viewers about the number of loose ends David Lynch has leaving.
We also spoke about her sculpting, which she perfected in Woodstock during the long hiatus between The Hustler and Carrie. This is not the work of an actor/artist; both titles figure equally in her resume.
By the way, when she saw the photo of our Carrie re-enactment, Piper Laurie was appalled that there was schmutz on the blade. It's avocado, not flesh.
Mexican Ranchera singer and pop superstar Pepe Aguilar gets his due at The Grammy Museum
UPDATE: On May 20, 2014, Pepe Aguilar gets his due at The Grammy Museum at LA Live, with a new exhibit called "Pepe Aguilar…La Leyenda Contunúa." The exhibit includes the charro suit and saddle he used as a kid when he made his Madison Square Garden debut; family photos; and letters written by his late father, Don Antonio Aguilar. And on May 21, he'll be onstage for an interview in the Museum’s Clive Davis Theater.
For a fifth of our audience, he needs no introduction, but the rest of you have been missing out.
Pepe Aguilar sings Mexican ranchera music, and has sold more than 12-million records. He was born in San Antonio, Texas, 45 years ago, but he was brought up on tour.
BELOW: Listen to Pepe Aguilar's favorite tribute songs
His father was the late Antonio Aguilar, one of the greats of ranchera music, and his mother is Flor Silvestre, a singer and actor from Mexico's golden age of cinema. Last year, he got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Pepe Aguilar's new album — his 24th — is a tribute to yet another of the greats, his father's rival Vicente Fernández. It debuted on iTunes at #1, and is called "Lástima Que Sean Ajenas," a joking reference to the Vicente Fernández song, "Lástima Que Seas Ajena," which translates roughly as "it's too bad she doesn't belong to me." The album's title, switching out "they" for "she," could be read as "I wish those were my songs."
"If you have grown up in the last three decades and you are a ranchera singer like me, Vicente Fernández has to be one of your idols," said Aguilar. "It's the Last of the Mohicans, that guy. It's a different story. People listen to many genres, not only one or two. For me it was important to close that era with my tribute to the last of the Mohicans."
Many children of stars who follow their parents' footsteps are tormented because they can never measure up. You can hear in that quote that Pepe Aguilar doesn't seem to have that problem. If anyone is allowed to close a door, it's him.
Aguilar says music is all he ever wanted to do, whether or not he made money from it. And if changing times means he may never experience the cultural dominance his parents enjoyed, 12-million records and a #1 debut on iTunes — coming in his 13th year as an independent artist — is nothing to sneeze at. And, in my opinion, where his father's voice had character, Aguilar's is fuller, more soaring and beautiful.
Aguilar says he strives to make music that has no boundaries, and there's no good reason more Anglos shouldn't buy his albums, even though they're sung in Spanish. The voice, the arrangements, the production values, the pure romance — they're all irresistible.
Frankly, isn't it better to not speak the language when you put a make-out album on the turntable? (Barry White's lyrics are distracting.)
Pepe Aguilar puts on a hell of a show, in charro costume, with a full band, and he has two concerts coming up. Thursday, Nov 21, at San Manuel Casino in Highland and Friday, Nov 22, at Valley View Casino Center in San Diego.
Aguilar shared his favorite tribute songs with KPCC. Listen to his Spotify playlist and tell us who else deserves a tribute album on Twitter using #PepeAguilarKPCC — or in the comments below.
Why more than 50 years later, we're all still in 'The Twilight Zone'
TV shows come and go. Most can't stay relevant once they've gone off the air, after time has numbed their ability to connect with viewers.
But "Twilight Zone" is different. The show examined race issues, criticized our dependence on technology and, five decades later, millions of people young and old still find the show's timeless themes as fresh as the day they aired.
And it's all thanks to Rod Serling.
Marc Zicree, producer, screenwriter for shows like Star Trek and author of "The Twilight Zone Companion," says it's no accident that the messages in "Twilight Zone" stayed relevant all these years. Rod Serling was trying to do more than just scare you.
"At one point he [Serling] said, if I made this science fiction and populated the congress with robots and put it in the 21st century, I could have gotten my point across," Zicree says. "It wasn't just escapism, it wasn't empty, you can watch an episode and know what the ending is and still get as much value from it as the first time you saw it."
In the 1961 "Twilight Zone" episode "A Quality of Mercy" Serling tackles the futility of war. 1963's "The Old Man in the Cave" imagines the mob politics of a post-apocalyptic world.
"Rod was a very committed human being and he had a great empathy for people who were suffering and that really comes across," says Zicree.
In a 1959 interview with journalist Mike Wallace, Serling expressed how he felt about the current methods of sponsor-run television:
"I think it's criminal that we're not permitted to make dramatic note of social evils as they exist... of controversial themes as they are inherent in our society."
But, in the end, what was "Twilight Zone" getting right the most? Sure, the show featured great acting talent, from William Shatner to Martin Landau, but what was "Twilight Zone"'s real secret?
"It was definitely the writing," Zicree says, "because, prior to Rod Serling, producers ran network drama and the writers were subordinate to them. Rod was basically the first modern showrunner. Nowadays, writers run television. You know, Vince Gilligan on 'Breaking Bad' or Damon Lindelof on 'Lost,' Matt Weiner on 'Mad Men.' All of them basically wanted to grow up to be Rod Serling."
And Serling recruited the best writers to help him with "Twilight Zone," too. Greats like Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and Earl Hamner, Jr.
Rod Serling gave Hamner him his first job writing film.
"A friend, it was actually Ray Bradbury, said why don't you call Rod, who was looking for writers, and see what he's got up his sleeve," Hamner says.
Although Hamner was hesitant at first -- he had never written for film before -- the "Twilight Zone" episodes he wrote became classic examples of television drama. Episodes like "Stopover in a Quiet Town" imagine an alien abduction experience decades before "The X-Files."
"I just thought it was a miracle that I could write that kind of fanciful material," Hamner says. "But it really opened up a whole are for me. When "Twilight Zone" finally went off the air, I was left with a whole stockpile of really good stories... It gave you an opportunity to make an observation about human nature without making it seem preachy."
And that's what stands out to TV writers down to today. Serling wasn't just writing short TV dramas, he was writing allegories, stories that don't always have happy endings. J.J. Abrams created the TV show "Lost," directed the new Star Trek reboot and is signed on to direct Disney's new "Star Wars" movies. In interviews he's called "Twilight Zone" "mindbending." He's even developing an unproduced Serling screenplay.
"He cast an incredibly large shadow," Zicree says. "All of us look up to him, whether it's Steven Spielberg, or J.J. Abrams... The implicit message in what Rod was doing with 'Twilight Zone' was you can aim high, you can write something that doesn't talk down to the audience, you can write something that's the totality of who you are as a human being -- you can take what you feel about most deeply and most profoundly -- and you can communicate it and the audience will understand that."
So, if you love to get lost in the grainy, black and white world of a New Year's Eve "Twilight Zone" marathon, you're in good company. And, if you're happy about the way TV is going these days -- a little more subtext and a little less melodrama -- then you probably have Rod Serling to thank.
If you'd like to learn more, head over to Ithaca College's Rod Serling Conference next weekend (Nov. 8 & 9) at The Hilton in Universal City. More on the the conference and registration information at the Rod Serling Conference website.
First movie ever made of LA was of traffic ... with no traffic jams!
The first thing anybody ever filmed in Los Angeles was oncoming traffic.
On Feb. 24, 1898, Thomas Edison’s employee, James H. White, went to downtown Los Angeles and pointed his unwieldy camera up South Spring Street. Commissioned by the Southern Pacific Railroad, White immortalized everything that passed in front of him for almost thirty seconds.
Lucky for White it was only 1898. He apparently thought nothing of standing right there in the street and making everybody go around him.
As movies go, “South Spring Street, Los Angeles, Cal” won’t make anybody forget “Citizen Kane.”
The first thing we see is a bustling streetscape in blurry, jerky monochrome. The roadway is dirt. Pedestrians fill the sidewalks. The curb isn’t a barrier, more of a suggestion. The day is a sunny one. Blockish office buildings cast long, early-morning or late-afternoon shadows.
It’s rush hour on the one-way street. Two men in a horse-drawn carriage are driving toward the camera. The carriage veers off, followed by another behind it.
Now six white horses are pulling an open stagecoach in our direction. A stagecoach! A passenger in back lowers his large umbrella from upright to horizontal, as if he wants to slow the coach down.
Traffic lets up for a moment. One man crosses the street on foot from left to right, three more from right to left. The last man is looking down at something in his hand, oblivious to the hubbub around him. The posture is strikingly modern. It’s like he’s checking his email.
Now the traffic really picks up. More horses in harness gallop toward us, drawing an open public coach with seven or eight people jouncing along up top. A bicyclist pedals by, swerving briefly toward the camera as if to give us a scare.
And now the capper: a stylish streetcar glides by, electrified on overhead wires. On the front, you can barely make out most of the curved words “Los Angeles” and, below it, “Railway.” A man -- maybe the conductor, maybe just an exuberant passenger -- holds on with one hand and swings out into nothing. Then, as if he knows that the film is running out, he looks right at us, and waves.
Finally, in the distance, a burly policeman detaches himself from the sidewalk crowds and trundles into Spring Street. His greatcoat is belted, his helmet high. He has no inkling that his next proud step is his last.
And then? Nothing. The slow fadeout hasn’t been invented yet.
A few things jump out at you right away.
First of all, women are completely missing. We know that most of them were at home, doing laundry, baking pies, and talking about us. But all of them?
Second, all the men wear hats. All of them, as if there’s a law. Where did all those hats go? Did the men trade them in for women?
And finally, it hits you. In the first images of Los Angeles ever recorded, you’ve been watching a vision of the city as it once was -- and as it’s occasionally starting to look again. Maybe half a dozen different kinds of locomotion on the same street. Cyclists, walkers, drivers, convertibles, streetcars, even animals. It actually looks a little like CicLAvia.
Oh, and one more thing: despite all the traffic, there are no traffic jams. If only for 30 seconds.
David Kipen runs Libros Schmibros, the Boyle Heights lending library, and contributes to KPCC’s Take Two and Off-Ramp.
Piper Laurie in-depth, or 'I'll have what she's having, hold the knives.'
(Piper Laurie speaks at The Bowers Museum Sunday, January 13, at 1:30.)
Today, at 80, actor Piper Laurie is grandmotherly. She made me coffee at her house before our interview, and fretted it was lousy. (It was fine.) So it's a little hard to picture her losing her virginity, as she claims in her memoir, to Ronald Reagan, who was playing her father in Louisa (1950); losing her composure in The Hustler (1961) while sitting across the table running lines with Paul Newman; and turning her death scene in Carrie (1976) into a protracted and creepily sexy orgasm.
As she explained to me, she pitched the idea to director Brian DePalma and he liked it.
Our conversation was long and wide ranging, encompassing a very sad few years when she and her sister were virtually exiled to a sanitorium in LA for her sister's health, an audition for Universal that should have led to better roles, three Oscar nominations, and the phenomenon that is Twin Peaks. She's still a little puzzled that it was canceled. She figures the network executives were as frustrated as many of the viewers about the number of loose ends David Lynch has leaving.
We also spoke about her sculpting, which she perfected in Woodstock during the long hiatus between The Hustler and Carrie. This is not the work of an actor/artist; both titles figure equally in her resume.
By the way, when she saw the photo of our Carrie re-enactment, Piper Laurie was appalled that there was schmutz on the blade. It's avocado, not flesh.
Mexican Ranchera singer and pop superstar Pepe Aguilar gets his due at The Grammy Museum
UPDATE: On May 20, 2014, Pepe Aguilar gets his due at The Grammy Museum at LA Live, with a new exhibit called "Pepe Aguilar…La Leyenda Contunúa." The exhibit includes the charro suit and saddle he used as a kid when he made his Madison Square Garden debut; family photos; and letters written by his late father, Don Antonio Aguilar. And on May 21, he'll be onstage for an interview in the Museum’s Clive Davis Theater.
For a fifth of our audience, he needs no introduction, but the rest of you have been missing out.
Pepe Aguilar sings Mexican ranchera music, and has sold more than 12-million records. He was born in San Antonio, Texas, 45 years ago, but he was brought up on tour.
BELOW: Listen to Pepe Aguilar's favorite tribute songs
His father was the late Antonio Aguilar, one of the greats of ranchera music, and his mother is Flor Silvestre, a singer and actor from Mexico's golden age of cinema. Last year, he got his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Pepe Aguilar's new album — his 24th — is a tribute to yet another of the greats, his father's rival Vicente Fernández. It debuted on iTunes at #1, and is called "Lástima Que Sean Ajenas," a joking reference to the Vicente Fernández song, "Lástima Que Seas Ajena," which translates roughly as "it's too bad she doesn't belong to me." The album's title, switching out "they" for "she," could be read as "I wish those were my songs."
"If you have grown up in the last three decades and you are a ranchera singer like me, Vicente Fernández has to be one of your idols," said Aguilar. "It's the Last of the Mohicans, that guy. It's a different story. People listen to many genres, not only one or two. For me it was important to close that era with my tribute to the last of the Mohicans."
Many children of stars who follow their parents' footsteps are tormented because they can never measure up. You can hear in that quote that Pepe Aguilar doesn't seem to have that problem. If anyone is allowed to close a door, it's him.
Aguilar says music is all he ever wanted to do, whether or not he made money from it. And if changing times means he may never experience the cultural dominance his parents enjoyed, 12-million records and a #1 debut on iTunes — coming in his 13th year as an independent artist — is nothing to sneeze at. And, in my opinion, where his father's voice had character, Aguilar's is fuller, more soaring and beautiful.
Aguilar says he strives to make music that has no boundaries, and there's no good reason more Anglos shouldn't buy his albums, even though they're sung in Spanish. The voice, the arrangements, the production values, the pure romance — they're all irresistible.
Frankly, isn't it better to not speak the language when you put a make-out album on the turntable? (Barry White's lyrics are distracting.)
Pepe Aguilar puts on a hell of a show, in charro costume, with a full band, and he has two concerts coming up. Thursday, Nov 21, at San Manuel Casino in Highland and Friday, Nov 22, at Valley View Casino Center in San Diego.
Aguilar shared his favorite tribute songs with KPCC. Listen to his Spotify playlist and tell us who else deserves a tribute album on Twitter using #PepeAguilarKPCC — or in the comments below.
Why more than 50 years later, we're all still in 'The Twilight Zone'
TV shows come and go. Most can't stay relevant once they've gone off the air, after time has numbed their ability to connect with viewers.
But "Twilight Zone" is different. The show examined race issues, criticized our dependence on technology and, five decades later, millions of people young and old still find the show's timeless themes as fresh as the day they aired.
And it's all thanks to Rod Serling.
Marc Zicree, producer, screenwriter for shows like Star Trek and author of "The Twilight Zone Companion," says it's no accident that the messages in "Twilight Zone" stayed relevant all these years. Rod Serling was trying to do more than just scare you.
"At one point he [Serling] said, if I made this science fiction and populated the congress with robots and put it in the 21st century, I could have gotten my point across," Zicree says. "It wasn't just escapism, it wasn't empty, you can watch an episode and know what the ending is and still get as much value from it as the first time you saw it."
In the 1961 "Twilight Zone" episode "A Quality of Mercy" Serling tackles the futility of war. 1963's "The Old Man in the Cave" imagines the mob politics of a post-apocalyptic world.
"Rod was a very committed human being and he had a great empathy for people who were suffering and that really comes across," says Zicree.
In a 1959 interview with journalist Mike Wallace, Serling expressed how he felt about the current methods of sponsor-run television:
"I think it's criminal that we're not permitted to make dramatic note of social evils as they exist... of controversial themes as they are inherent in our society."
But, in the end, what was "Twilight Zone" getting right the most? Sure, the show featured great acting talent, from William Shatner to Martin Landau, but what was "Twilight Zone"'s real secret?
"It was definitely the writing," Zicree says, "because, prior to Rod Serling, producers ran network drama and the writers were subordinate to them. Rod was basically the first modern showrunner. Nowadays, writers run television. You know, Vince Gilligan on 'Breaking Bad' or Damon Lindelof on 'Lost,' Matt Weiner on 'Mad Men.' All of them basically wanted to grow up to be Rod Serling."
And Serling recruited the best writers to help him with "Twilight Zone," too. Greats like Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and Earl Hamner, Jr.
Rod Serling gave Hamner him his first job writing film.
"A friend, it was actually Ray Bradbury, said why don't you call Rod, who was looking for writers, and see what he's got up his sleeve," Hamner says.
Although Hamner was hesitant at first -- he had never written for film before -- the "Twilight Zone" episodes he wrote became classic examples of television drama. Episodes like "Stopover in a Quiet Town" imagine an alien abduction experience decades before "The X-Files."
"I just thought it was a miracle that I could write that kind of fanciful material," Hamner says. "But it really opened up a whole are for me. When "Twilight Zone" finally went off the air, I was left with a whole stockpile of really good stories... It gave you an opportunity to make an observation about human nature without making it seem preachy."
And that's what stands out to TV writers down to today. Serling wasn't just writing short TV dramas, he was writing allegories, stories that don't always have happy endings. J.J. Abrams created the TV show "Lost," directed the new Star Trek reboot and is signed on to direct Disney's new "Star Wars" movies. In interviews he's called "Twilight Zone" "mindbending." He's even developing an unproduced Serling screenplay.
"He cast an incredibly large shadow," Zicree says. "All of us look up to him, whether it's Steven Spielberg, or J.J. Abrams... The implicit message in what Rod was doing with 'Twilight Zone' was you can aim high, you can write something that doesn't talk down to the audience, you can write something that's the totality of who you are as a human being -- you can take what you feel about most deeply and most profoundly -- and you can communicate it and the audience will understand that."
So, if you love to get lost in the grainy, black and white world of a New Year's Eve "Twilight Zone" marathon, you're in good company. And, if you're happy about the way TV is going these days -- a little more subtext and a little less melodrama -- then you probably have Rod Serling to thank.
If you'd like to learn more, head over to Ithaca College's Rod Serling Conference next weekend (Nov. 8 & 9) at The Hilton in Universal City. More on the the conference and registration information at the Rod Serling Conference website.