RH Greene sits down with Chaz Ebert at the Palm Springs Film Festival; we remember poet Michele Serros; Patt Morrison looks back and forward at Jerry Brown; and Marc Haefele takes us to the Fowler museum for an exhibit that almost didn’t happen.
Charlie Hebdo: French people — and their leaders — have long taken their satire seriously
Long before the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks, Paris was a place where satire — especially satirical cartoons — has been taken very seriously, both by its people and their leaders.
In 1726, Voltaire, the author of the satirical novella "Candide," who had already been sent to the Bastille and exiled from Paris three times for his writings, was beaten by thugs hired by Chevalier de Rohan, a nobleman he’d mocked. The great writer had changed his name from Arouet to Voltaire, prompting Rohan to ask him, "Monsieur de Voltaire, Monsieur Arouet, exactly what is your name?" To which he’d replied, "I myself do not bear a great name, but I know how to honor the one I carry."
(Caption: Voltaire, at 70)
In some versions of the story, Rohan tells his toughs not to strike Voltaire’s head, “as something good may yet come out of it,” but Rohan wasn’t that clever.
In 1832, Honoré Daumier, “the Michelangelo of caricature,” was fined and jailed for a caricature of King Louis Philippe. As a young man, Daumier began working at La Caricature, a satirical magazine run by Charles Philipon and his brother-in-law Gabriel Aubert.
Daumier quickly developed a powerful, personal drawing style, which he used to ridicule the follies of the bourgeoisie and the corruption and ineptitude of the restored Bourbon monarchy.
At the time, King Louis Philippe received more than 18 million francs a year, paid with taxes levied on the citizens of France. Daumier drew the indolent “Citizen King” as Gargantua, a giant being fed great sacks of money that the tattered poor of Paris are compelled to fill.
As part of their escalating campaign against the press, the Paris police seized all the copies they could find of “Gargantua” and the original lithograph stone. When Philipon published an article in the La Caricature ridiculing the decision to censor Daumier’s picture, he, Aubert, and Daumier were tried, convicted, fined 500 francs — plus legal fees — and sentenced to six months in prison. That didn’t stop the satirists. It didn’t even slow them up: by 1834, the offices of La Caricature had been raided 27 times.
Two years later, Daumier produced the lithograph, “Rue Transnonain, 15 April 1834,” depicting the butchered victims of a massacre in that street during the riots of 1834.
“Rue Transnonain" was drawn for a special publication created to promote freedom of the press. Once again, the police seized all the copies they could find and the litho stones.
But it was pointless, as are all attacks on cartoonists, satirists, and other creators. While artists are flesh and blood and can be beaten, imprisoned and even murdered, their work cannot. So, centuries later, Rohan is largely forgotten; Louis Philippe is a minor figure in French history courses. But Voltaire and Daumier are remembered and honored. And “Garganuta” and “Rue Transnonain” are proudly displayed in the collections of major museums.
Remembering Taylor Negron and Lucille Ball
UPDATE 1/12/15: Performer Taylor Negron died Saturday of cancer at the age of 57. In 2007, he recorded this story, about Lucille Ball giving acting and life lessons, for Off-Ramp.
Palm Springs Film Fest: Chaz Ebert on Life with Roger and Ebertfest
The late film critic Roger Ebert loved film festivals so much he created one of his own--the Ebertfest, which is still held each April at the Virginia Theatre in Champaign IL. Off-Ramp contributor R. H. Greene saw this side of Ebert's personality up close when he worked with Ebert at the Sundance Film Festival in both 2000 and 2001. This week, as he covers the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Greene has been thinking about Ebert a lot.
"The thing that to me is going to stand the test of time is what Roger said about movies being a machine that generates empathy. It allows us to put ourselves in someone else's shoes for two hours. That is his legacy to me, not so much his writing about movies, but the underlying reason for his love of movies is that they helped you develop compassion for other people."
-- Chaz Ebert on her late husband, the film critic and fan, Roger Ebert
The Palm Springs International Film Festival is a bustling place, full of stars and premieres, Oscar hopefuls and first-time filmmakers. A good time, even when you're haunted by a ghost. I never go to a film festival without thinking of Roger Ebert. I worked Sundance with Roger twice--once as a web producer, and a second time as his TV cameraman. He was memorable and intellectually stimulating company.
Roger was ubiquitous at places like Sundance -- walking the streets, greeting his fans, posing for selfies long before they had a name. Festivals seemed to activate the newspaperman in Roger, and he loved the action. He filed copy, broke stories, took his own photos. You saw him everywhere.
Roger's gone now, but the robust health of the festival circuit -- it's importance as a pathway for difficult and visionary movie product -- is a big part of his legacy. Roger's widow Chaz continues to carry that torch. She was at Palm Springs this year ... as a participant not an onlooker. It's almost the end of her year-long promotional run for "Life Itself," director Steve James' moving chronicle of Roger's life and death.
Official trailer for "Life Itself"
For those who know Roger as a public intellectual, the film's intimate glimpse of his life with Chaz is a revelation. It was clearly a great romance, the kind everybody hopes for and few achieve. It's tempting to call theirs a kind of movie love. But "Life Itself" unflinchingly shows it was realer than that. Real as cancer. As real as the grave. "Life Itself" is on the shortlist for this year's documentary Oscar. Chaz admits she thinks about the prospect of a nomination.
The Eberts loved film festivals so much they created one of their own. It used to be the Overlooked Film Festival. It's Ebertfest now. And it's in its 17th year. As Chaz describes it, it was a place where Roger was very much alive.
"At Ebertfest, Roger used to introduce every single film, and after it was over, he'd go onstage, conduct the Q & A, and after watching the films all day with the filmmakers, he would take them out to Steak and Shake at the end of the evening, and we'd be out til 2 in the morning," said Chaz. "He was an only child, and he loved being surrounded by family."
Ebertfest endures. And Roger -- for now at least -- is still here too, working the circuit, if from the other side of the movie screen.
Mystery Pier Books is West Hollywood's bookseller to the stars
Mystery Pier is a book lover's dream. There's an 1876 copy of "Leaves of Grass" signed by Walt Whitman, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Princeton yearbook, and a copy of "Hell House" autographed by "Twilight Zone" writer -- and former customer -- Richard Matheson.
Owner Harvey Jason, who's been running Mystery Pier in West Hollywood for 16 years, says books can be big business:
Books, which a lot of people don't realize, books escalate at a much more rapid rate than art. Books escalate quicker than paintings do... These things escalate like crazy. 'Catcher in the Rye,' you could've gotten a good 'Catcher' ten years ago for $3,000. We just sold a perfect copy for $20,000.
Harvey's business partner is his son Louis, who says their business isn't as simple as just selling old books: "The only value is in first edition, first printing, and that's crucial."
Harvey says the value of a book doesn't always lie in its age. Sometimes, they turn big profits on freshly printed books, like the time they unknowingly came across a signed Robert Galbraith (a.k.a. J.K. Rowling) while they were in London.
Harvey was an actor who worked steadily from the original "Batman" TV series to "Jurassic Park" to "Star Trek." But then something snapped:
It was always a pipe dream. I remember walking down the street on the backlot of Universal with the director of this picture. And I said to the director, 'Steve' -- it was Steven Spielberg -- and I said 'Steven, you know what, when we wrap this picture, it's four months, and I'm in the book business.' He laughed and said, 'You can't do that, you're one of the stars of this movie.' And I said I've had it. I've had it with the egos, I've had it with the whole business. I never want to do this again, I really don't. Not long thereafter we opened the shop.
Even though Harvey isn't in the movie business anymore, his store feels like the set for a magical bookshop, with priceless books bursting out of glass cases, teetering on the edges of wooden tables or even stacked on the floor. Set off the Sunset Strip by way of a narrow passageway, Mystery Pier's location in an unassuming bungalow makes it a favorite spot for paparazzi-wary celebrities with a taste for the finest in antiquarian books and literature-related collectibles.
Harvey says he's sold books and collectibles to Natalie Portman, Flea, Guillermo del Toro, Patti Smith, and many other celebrities. But it's still the books that steal the show at Mystery Pier. Harvey says they keep getting approached to make a Mystery Pier reality TV show. But that's not really their style.
"We're just quite happy being the humble booksellers and that's fine, that's great," Harvey says.
Cameroon's Pascale Tayou 'coaxes poetry' out of mundane objects at Fowler Museum exhibit
I went to an art exhibit at UCLA’s Fowler Museum the other day, and the first piece that really grabbed me was a wall of over 500 prefab, blue-gray birdhouses, separated by wads of straw. Sometimes they tweet recorded bird calls, sometimes they play the sounds of the human voices in the world’s favelas.
The exhibit is called World Share, and it’s the nation-state of artist Pascale Marthine Tayou. The piece with the birdhouses is called “Favelas,” a crowded habitat randomly stacked much like Moishe Safti’s 1967 Montreal Worlds Fair apartments, only for birds.
We are all in this world together, he’s saying: birds and people, audible, invisible. Both free and tied to the earth. It’s a willful, wistful and marvelously artistic accumulation of the world’s discards, animated by an African creator spirit.
Fowler Curator Gemma Rodrigues told me how the show happened: A few days before the opening, the cargo container containing the exhibit had not yet arrived in LA. So Tayou, with the help of the Fowler staff, decided to create a new show of art made from scratch, based on humble and locally available materials you might find at a hardware store, trash bin or recycling center. Tayou being a great improviser and inspirer, the project went quickly, and some of the show’s most remarkable and sizeable installations were thus made in LA. But then the container arrived just before the opening. So half the show is old Tayou, and half brand new works, locally sourced, never seen before.
Tayou considers himself a world artist, a cosmopolitan nomad, with so many influences that it’s hard to count them. But first, there is his native central African nation of Cameroon, one of ultra-diverse Africa’s most diverse countries.
(Pascale Marthine Tayou/UCLA Fowler Museum)
You see this influence most strongly in his tumescent blown glass sculptures that resemble strongly Cameroonian folk statuary, but they’re also festooned with all sorts of things: feathers, plastic toy snakes, wires, even flattened beer cans. Then there are the animals, particularly the birds that recur in his work. “A powerful metaphor for freedom,” Rodrigues says.
And then there is the art from all the waste materials that get tossed out by our transnational world, then fall from the rich nations into the poor ones ... everything from old razor blades and pizza boxes to the white plastic pipe that circles the gallery in a convoluted time line, indicating man’s abuse of the world’s resources.
Rodrigues says Tayou takes the most mundane humble objects and puts them together in utterly unexpected ways. “He coaxes the poetry out of them,’’ she says.
Or the sorry truth. I was struck by the common bicycles, stacked with almost two stories of tethered cardboard boxes. That’s the way things get moved around in Cameroon. But the overburdened cycle sculptures also show the way developed nations lay huge burdens on the peoples of Earth’s developing lands.
It’s a theme that emerges in Tayou’s poetry:
Yesterday,
After a long and difficult routine battle,
The strongest prevailed over the weakest,
The same places were still in hell and the keys to paradise have not changed pockets.
World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou, is at the Fowler Museum through Mar. 1, 2015.
The future of the LA Times under Austin Beutner
When 2010 dawned, almost no one in Los Angeles had heard of Austin Beutner. Five years later, the new publisher of the L.A. Times is one of the most powerful and respected people on the civic landscape.
To understand Beutner’s status, consider his appearance at a Town Hall-Los Angeles luncheon. Tickets started at $50, and they sold out. When’s the last time a publisher of the Times sold out any appearance larger than a kitchen table? Heck, who can even name a publisher of the Times since Otis Chandler?
The paper’s spent the better part of a decade hemorrhaging reporters, and Sam Zell’s ownership and the Tribune Co.’s bankruptcy created the consensus that its best days are gone, so some are looking at Beutner like he’s Neo in "The Matrix," the only hope to save LA’s most enduring news organization.
What’s on the table for the future of the 133-year-old newspaper and its much younger website? Just about everything. After the Town Hall luncheon, Beutner told me, “I made it pretty clear to people that if we’re going to repeat the same habits, we’re not going to get a different outcome.”
Beutner struck quickly, and within two months he euthanized the paper’s LatExtra section, which sounded more like a skin cream than a local section and exemplified all that had gone wrong at the paper. Beutner says it worked for the printing press operators but made little sense to readers. In killing LatExtra and reviving the California section, Beutner gave the impression that the Times might care about local readers.
Beutner told the crowd, “We have to find different ways to tell stories,” and “different” is the operative word. Beutner said the Times’ web data, prepared by gnomes that live in the Buffy Chandler Powder Room at Times HQ, shows that readers most engage with short stories of 100-200 words, and longer explanatory pieces of 1,000 words or more, but don’t like 500- to 700-word stories, which are far more common.
He also said the Times will partner heavily with high schools (the “HS Insider” launched eight days later), and that many sports reporters will have to file more stories.
Anyone familiar with Beutner isn’t surprised by the ambitious agenda. The cutthroat New York financial firm Blackstone made him partner at 29, and President Clinton sent him to Russia to help install a market economy. He co-founded the venture capital firm Evercore, and made more money than most rappers. But after breaking his neck in 2007, he reassessed his life, and went civic, becoming Mayor Villaraigosa’s first Deputy Mayor and giving focus to the wandering administration.
He ran for mayor in 2011, backed out, then partnered with power lawyer Mickey Kantor to helm the 2020 Commission, which last year released two sharply worded reports about LA’s problems.
Beutner is very smart, and sometimes wields his influence in unexpected ways. In 2012 he learned that thousands of local schoolkids with bad grades needed glasses. So he bought a bus, hired eye doctors, and had them travel to schools and give free glasses to kids who needed them. It was the type of problem that could have been analyzed to death, with reams of reports and rounds of bidding. Instead, Beutner acted.
The LA Times, with 500 journalists, a $75m newsroom budget and challenges from every corner of the Internet, is a much more complicated problem. The glasses-for-schoolkids move was impressive, but preparing the LA Times for the future will take a much different kind of vision.
Jon Regardie is executive editor of the Los Angeles Downtown News, where this commentary first appeared in different form.
Remembering - and listening to - the distinct voice of Michele Serros
Southern California poet, novelist, and performer Michele Serros died last weekend of cancer. She was just 48, but in her too short life she made a difference by telling different stories of Mexican-American women in a very different voice.
KPCC's Adolfo Guzman-Lopez - a member of the Taco Shop Poets - knew Serros from the 1990s LA poetry scene and wrote the KPCC remembrance of Serros. He joined me in the Off-Ramp studio to listen to some of Serros' performances on the album "Chicana Falsa," and to tell me more about Serros' place as a public intellectual and how she gave voice to Chicanas with one foot in each culture.
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.
'Hungry' filmmakers talk about the strange world of competitive eating
“Hungry” is a documentary about the strange — and sometimes nauseating — world of competitive eating. With no shortage of trash talking and contract disputes, competitive eating is starting to look like the professional sport that serious competitive eaters consider it to be.
"We’re both comedians and we met in New York City, and we were always talking about the idea of doing a film about competitive eating... We always spoke about maybe writing a script about it because we thought it was funny," says filmmaker Barry Rothbart. "It was going to be a comedy piece, but then it turned into more of this look into this strange, niche world."
The film spends the most time on Takeru Kobayashi — who took competitive eating by storm in 2001 when he doubled the Nathan's Coney Island hot dog eating record as a newcomer — and his legal battle with the organizers of the famous eating contest, Major League Eating, or MLE. Kobayashi won the Nathan's competition for six years in a row, until being defeated by the current champion, Joey Chestnut.
"Hungry" also follows two other competitive eaters: Brad “The Lunatic” Sciullo and Dave Goldstein, who goes by the nickname “U.S. Male.”
"They’re very different. Kobayashi’s a celebrity and he’s very famous. And Brad’s this... kind of a young crazy guy. And then 'U.S. Male' is just a family guy who’s in his early fifties who just enjoys doing it," says filmmaker Jeff Cerulli. "So you get the three different characters who are all at different stages of their career in competitive eating."
Some scenes in “Hungry” are a little hard to watch because competitive eating can be...hard to watch. Part of Brad Sciullo’s training regimen involves chugging gallons of water to stretch his stomach. Other eaters will consume huge amounts of low calorie foods like lettuce in preparation for a contest.
The filmmakers also confessed that throwing up seems like the only logical thing to do after an eating competition, but the competitive eaters featured in "Hungry" weren't so open when it came to this subject.
"They don’t talk about it," says Barry. "We really wanted to find that out. It’s a pride thing. It’s very strange how they don’t want to talk about it, but they have to."
"There’s a lot of sports that are more dangerous than this, but I think the reason people have such a visceral reaction is because everyone knows what it’s like to overeat. No one knows what it’s like to be punched in the face by a boxer or to fall off a surfboard or to be in an MMA fight, but people know what it’s like to overeat, so there’s more physical empathy," says Barry.
Barry and Jeff say they entered a handful of competitions themselves while making the documentary, and found out just how difficult competitive eating is.
"You’d be surprised how boring it is to watch two amateur... competitive eaters try to competitive eat. It’s basically watching someone eat a meal for ten minutes. There’s nothing more boring than that," says Barry. "So, I think we decided it didn’t work for the film, but we definitely learned how hard it is. It’s very hard."
Kobayashi is credited by many as being the first to treat competitive eating as a serious sport and many have followed his lead, but the outside world's view hasn't changed much. Competitive eaters say they struggle with a public that doesn’t take them seriously and doesn’t consider what they do to be a real sport.
"I think a lot of people talk about it like, this is gross, and this is something that’s wrong and that this is something that’s like freaks trying to get attention. So I think that that was what we assumed the majority of people thought about it, which was what we thought about it for a while," says Barry. "And then I think as we dug more into it, we realized that these are actual normal people that take this very seriously as their fifteen minutes of fame."
To learn more about the documentary and find out how you can rent it online, visit the film's website.