A KISS arena football team is coming to SoCal. What was Cecil B. DeMille thinking when he made "Madam Satan?" Kristen Bell on the Ira Glass/"Veronica Mars" cameo.
Pop-art icon Wayne Thiebaud, 'the old pie man,' tells his story in 2 SoCal exhibits
Wayne Thiebaud is one of the rare artists who changed the way we see. Decades ago, gallery after gallery laughed at him and his paintings of cakes and pies. The one that accepted him had an overnight success — and a new art star — on its hands. His works are showing at two Southern California museums.
At the Laguna Art Museum it's a show called "American Memories," pieces that date back to 1959 that Thiebaud (say it "TEE-boh") chose himself. At the Weisman at Pepperdine it's an exhibit of Thiebaud's works on paper from the 1950s to now, with etching, lithography, woodcut and other graphic media.
Off-Ramp interviewed Thiebaud from his studio in Sacramento about the Laguna show (we've posted the full audio on this page), and we asked Off-Ramp contributor Marc Haefele to write about the show at Pepperdine. Here's Marc's review:
Making your way slowly through the comprehensive exhibit at Pepperdine’s Weisman Museum, you just know that Wayne Thiebaud must be a pretty good cook. His images of pies, cakes, candy, ice cream and yes, even a perfect bacon and eggs breakfast haunt you after you leave — possibly hungry.
(Wayne Thiebaud, "Cakes," 1963. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C)
This is perfectly appropriate; Thiebaud, who is now nearing 94, was a food worker himself, early in his career, in a Long Beach fast-food joint. And much of his work, he says, is from memory. Which at least assures us that his studios don’t drip with melted ice cream.
But we, his viewers, also carry those images of common American classic dessert cuisine around in our heads, so that they meet his pictures head on with some delicious consonance with our animal desires for forbidden sweets. Which probably explains a great deal of his popularity — and it’s also why critics saw him as the primal pop artist, 52 years ago, having got there a bit before Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
But as the show at the Weisman demonstrates, he built this work phase on a foundation of solid, even brilliant artistic work experimenting with various modern forms of the fifties — wood cuts and then silkscreen prints. He even had a bout of abstract expressionism, but you feel he really found his footing with straight expressionism in his prints, as in his rose-pink picture of a movie theater marquee that somehow reaches mysteriously beyond the lobby, into the heart of the building itself.
("Three Machines" (1963), by Wayne Thiebaud. De Young Museum, San Francisco)
Maybe Thiebaud’s gum machines belong in that very lobby. He does have a singular fascination with them. He says it’s “a gadget for stimulating the greatest series of associations and responses.” Like life itself, you put something in and something comes out of it for you. A shape, a flavor, in one of Thiebaud's astonishing range of colors.
There is, though, in the continuity of food pictures through the 1960s and beyond, something increasingly sinister, like an implicit black-and-white sandwich, without any defining lines, a dark cake whose brownish-black hue seems somewhat threatening (is it chocolate, or is it perhaps plutonium?) or the black, semi-elliptical shadows his food objects throw on an invisible table. And everything is now more purely geometrical.
Meanwhile, Thiebaud was shaping a singular series of San Francisco streetscapes. Obsessed with the near verticality of some of that city’s avenues, Thiebaud used Asian painting techniques to reformulate the city itself into proud towers bound with impossible ascents.
(Wayne Thiebaud, "24th Street Intersection," 1977. Private collection/artchive.com)
Then, in a complete departure, there is a page of Thiebaud’s sketchbook, maybe by itself the single most fascinating thing in the show, with its spread of visual encounters—muffins and mandolins, books and bagels, cartoonish little figures reminding us that the artist once apprenticed at Disney. “I’ve drawn all my life,” Thiebaud says. That’s close to 90 years of drawing, and it shows in every aspect of his work.
At this point, we ought to add that Thiebaud is a living California treasure. He’s taught in state and community colleges all of his life, been generous with sharing his visions and encouragement, shining the light of his genius, in areas that rarely get the benefit of artistry of his caliber.
The show at Pepperdine, and its companion at the Laguna Art Museum, are suitable demonstrations of what he has given us — and still gives us.
Wayne Thiebaud on CBS Sunday Morning
The friendship behind 'Madam Satan,' Cecil B. DeMille's musical disaster
Dance writer Debra Levine, who runs the artsmeme blog, tells the untold story of "Madam Satan," director Cecil B. DeMille's only musical, and one of his only flops. She'll be introducing the film at 2 p.m. on March 15 at the Egyptian Theatre.
When you think Hollywood musicals, the name Cecil B. DeMille doesn’t leap to mind. But he made one at MGM, a fascinating disaster called “Madam Satan.” And the movie helps tell the unknown story of a 40-year friendship between this famous Hollywood director and a Russian ballet dancer.
Cecil B. DeMille made 70 feature films over a 56-year career, only a few of which lost money.
(DeMille while filming "Madam Satan," with screenwriter Elsie Janis and the movie's star, Kay Johnson. Image: MGM)
But in 1929, like many Americans, he was in a tough spot. Five years earlier, he’d been fired by Paramount, the studio he helped found in 1913. His next venture, Cecil B. DeMille Pictures, Inc., was a debacle.
By 1929, DeMille was scrambling to deliver on the second of a three-picture deal struck with Louis B. Mayer at MGM. DeMille’s daunting assignment from L.B. was a movie musical. DeMille — a minister’s son, though not lacking a sense of humor — was markedly unhip. His brand was domestic dramas. He would never admit it, but assembling a creative team to make a musical was out of his comfort zone.
DeMille feverishly worked his network, firing off telegrams to A-listers such as Robert Benchley, Cole Porter and Dorothy Parker. He wrangled for access to former leading lady Gloria Swanson, but was blocked by her gatekeeper Joseph P. Kennedy — JFK’s father. No one of this caliber signed on. Could the problem have been the title, “Madam Satan?”
Enter Theodore Kosloff.
(Theodore Kosloff, circa 1927. Image: Wikipedia Commons)
The Moscow-born son of a musical family, Kosloff started his career with the Bolshoi and Kirov Ballets, in the pre-Soviet era called the Imperial Russian Ballet. In 1909 he joined The Ballets Russes, Diaghilev’s infamous troupe. There he shared the stage with Ballets Russes superstars Nijinsky, Pavlova and Karsavina. A foil to the poetic Nijinsky, Kosloff was a technical dynamo whose claim to fame was milking 18 revolutions from a single pirouette. But he could also turn a buck.
An early arts entrepreneur, Kosloff first ventured to America around 1911. Vaudeville touring brought him to L.A. by 1916, where, practically on first sight, DeMille cast the mop-haired, muscular dancer in his upcoming photoplay “The Woman God Forgot.” Biceps bursting, he clutched a formidable spear in his movie debut.
Kosloff was equally dazzled by DeMille, calling him the “Napoleon of moving pictures.” Kosloff’s specialty was character roles: Continental lovers, exotic bad guys. In the Roaring ‘20s, DeMille had made a millionaire of Kosloff, who, for one movie, wisely accepted Paramount stock in lieu of a salary.
The two men became not just good colleagues over 30 silent pictures, but also close friends. Each owned a ranch in the San Fernando Valley’s far reaches of Tujunga-Sunland. At weekend getaways, they toasted each other with vodka as comrades. Tovarisch! But when sound came in, no one could understand Kosloff’s heavy Russian accent, and he was banished from Hollywood sound stages.
That’s why in 1929, when the call came for “Madam Satan,” Kosloff leapt on board. He’d be featured in an incredible six-minute dance sequence. The scene was an art deco masked ball inside a Zeppelin.
Kosloff lords over a huge throng of dancers, who in a special camera effect morph into heavy machinery. It’s astoundingly awful, kitsch and clumsy, but in its use of overhead shots foreshadows what Busby Berkeley would perfect a few short years later. That’s how quickly Hollywood figured out how to film dance in the movies.
Metro invested a million dollars in “Madam Satan,” a small fortune at the onset of the Depression. Studio brass blamed its box-office bombing in great part on Kosloff’s kooky “ballet mecanique.”
“Madam Satan” represents a crossroads in two creative careers. Kosloff would appear only once more in the movies, in a tiny cameo in “Stage Door.”
Kosloff speaks 14-seconds into this clip from "Stage Door," his final film appearance
But DeMille reconstituted after “Madam Satan.” He adapted and improved on filming techniques learned during its making. He never revisited the musical genre, and he never again released a movie so hopelessly out of touch with his audience.
But it wasn’t a crossroads for the tovarischi, Kosloff and DeMille. They had a friendship even “Madam Satan” could not destroy.
Rock band KISS bring arena football back to Southern California. Will it stick around?
LA's gone without an NFL team for almost 20 years. Several pro football teams have tried to fill the gap, but they all went out of business. But on March 15, the LA KISS, an arena football team owned and operated by the rock band KISS, play their first game.
After so many teams have tried and failed to set roots in the LA market, Off-Ramp producer Kevin Ferguson asks: Will this one succeed?
First, some clarifications. The LA KISS are not actually coming to LA. They’ll play home games in Anaheim, at the Honda Center, and yes, they're playing football. But it's arena football. Arena football is a 27-year-old sport played indoors on a smaller field. The action is quicker and the scoring is much, much higher:
Virgin Mobile ArenaBowl Highlights
Ask any player or fan and they'll admit it's a niche sport; the Arena Football League has much lower revenue and attendance than the NFL. But the LA KISS have something no NFL team has: KISS, the band. Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons co-own the team.
Why KISS? Why arena football?
"Why not?" said Paul Stanley on NPR’s Only a Game last year. "AFL is something that's unique even within football. It's interesting that some people seem to think of it as the second stringers, but let's be very clear: a diamond is a diamond."
The LA KISS are actually the fourth arena football team to set up here. The first team, the LA Cobras, lasted just one season in 1988, and the LA Avengers played at Staples Center from 2000 to 2009. In the mid-90s, entrepreneurs unleashed the Anaheim Piranhas on Southern California football fans, playing in the same stadium the KISS will play in now.
Dave McKibben reported on the Piranhas for the LA Times. He said there wasn't a ton of publicity at the time.
"I think, really, they were just hoping that Orange County would be a great market because there was no NFL team. The Rams, if you remember, the Rams had just left a few years before," said McKibben. "I think they assumed the thirst for football in Orange County at the time."
Not just the Rams, but the Raiders also left Los Angeles in 1994. Two years later, the Piranhas started playing in Anaheim. Roy Englebrecht co-owned the team.
"We just thought there was a perfect time to bring football back in some fashion to Southern California and to Orange County," he said.
But things didn't work out as planned. McKibben says the Piranhas made the playoffs during their debut season and sold reasonably well, but attendance dropped sharply the second season. Costs and expenses climbed; the prospect of filling the arena grew daunting and the stress was too much.
"I don't think it surprised a lot of people that they folded after two years," said McKibben.
Stories like the Piranhas' aren't uncommon in the Arena Football League. In the sport's history 43 teams have gone defunct, lasting just under five seasons on average.
Lately, pro football teams in Los Angeles haven't had a great track record, either:
The Arena Football League's undergone several reorganizations, it even declared bankruptcy in 2010. Part of it's an image problem: High school quarterbacks don't work day in and day out so they can play for the Iowa Barnstormers or the Pittsburgh Power.
Also, it's a tough market. While there isn't any pro football here, there's plenty of sports to watch. But the KISS want to be more than that:
"We are truly trying to fuse sport, entertainment, music and theater all into one two and a half hour event," said LA KISS co-owner Brett Bouchy. Bouchy is an arena football veteran and previously owned the Orlando Predators, one of arena football's longest running teams.
Bouchy said the LA KISS is aware of stories like the Piranhas and where these teams went wrong. He knows LA's a big market, too. But he said in the years since the league's bankruptcy, arena football teams are now much more stable and sustainable than before. The league is more centralized and has a new collective bargaining agreement with the players' union.
Also, it's the LA KISS, and that's a name that's worth something.
"Our players are not going to be coming in from the tunnels. They're going to be coming in from the ceiling," he said. "Kiss has built a brand for the last 40 years and they're concerts are a spectacle. We're gonna bring that to arena football, but more importantly, sport. So you're gonna see elements. You're gonna see dancers—they're not gonna be performing on the field. They're gonna be performing in cages 75 feet in the air. "
The LA KISS have also signed partnerships to broadcast their games on ESPN, KCAL 9, and they'll even have a reality show on AMC — it launches this summer. Whether or not the team succeeds, it won't be for lack of trying.
The LA Kiss play their first game March 15 in San Antonio Texas, and make their Honda Center debut on April 5th.
'12 Years a Slave' Oscar winner John Ridley
UPDATE 3/2/2014: John Ridley won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for "12 Years a Slace," which also won Best Picture this year.
For KPCC's new iPad app, Off-Ramp host John Rabe sat down with screenwriter and director John Ridley ("Undercover Brother," "Three Kings") to talk about his two new films - "12 Years a Slave" and "All Is by My Side."
Ridley on finding a way to tell a story about Jimi Hendrix that has not been told already:
"I wanted to tell the story about, not just Jimi Hendrix, but the people that were close to him, and the people who were influential to him. I think that with Jimi, his iconography as a person is so overpowering that a lot of times we don't think of him in terms of a person, we don't think about the relationship, we don't think abut his human nature."
Ridley on the pitfalls of making a movie about slavery:
"I think sometimes the dangers are trying to preach to an audience, proselytize. I mean, people go in, unfortunately, and think, 'I know about slavery, I've heard all there is to hear about slavery.' And the reality is that most of us don't really have a concept of that system, of the stories, of the individuals who lived through it."
'20 Feet from Stardom' wins documentary Oscar, was first film to sell at Sundance
UPDATE 3/2/2014: "20 Feet from Stardom" won the Documentary Feature Oscar tonite! Here's our piece from Sundance 2013, and congratulations to all involved.
They can really make or break a record, but throughout the history of recorded music, they've been -- mostly -- kept out of the spotlight. They're background singers.
Director Morgan Neville tells their story in the inspiring new documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, which became the first film to sell at Sundance 2013. The Weinstein Company snapped up the North American rights and it'll reportedly screen in theatres this summer.
Off-Ramp contributor and documentarian Ray Greene talked with Neville at Sundance soon after the director heard the good news. Neville told him, "It's the kind of thing you fantasize about for years when you're making films. My head's spinning. It's a huge relief. And it means I get to go see movies" at Sundance.
Neville told Greene former A&M Records president Gil Friesen approached him about making the film, and they started -- since they didn't really know anything about background singers -- by simply interviewing fifty of them. Then, the doc took shape.
Friesen, the film's producer, died last month. Neville says Friesen saw the final cut, and was in the hospital when he heard the news it was accepted at Sundance. "It's just added a whole other layer of emotion to beign here at Sundance with his wife, and his kids, and his friends, and knowing it was his dream, too."
Kristen Bell on 'Veronica Mars,' the 'pederazzi' and the Oscars
Yes, it was a #KPCClove-fest when "Veronica Mars" and "Frozen" star Kristen Bell visited the Mohn Broadcast Center today for her Off-Ramp interview.
Bell is not just a KPCC listener. Bell asked her husband, Dax Shepard, for a KPCC membership for Christmas. (SPOILER ALERT for the upcoming "Veronica Mars" movie, opening March 14.)
Bell also considers Ira Glass' brief appearance in the "Veronica Mars" movie its biggest cameo. "Light years" bigger than James Franco, she said.
A screencap from the trailer for "Veronica Mars."
And the whole staff of "This American Life" loves the late lamented "Veronica Mars" TV show so much that Glass, Bell says ... well, we'll be saving that for next week.
The public radio connection is important here because, when you think about it, the new "Veronica Mars" movie — with Bell reprising her TV role as the now adult former private detective who is called back to Neptune — was produced using the public radio model. Sort of. When the thing they loved was taken away, almost 100,000 people gave to the Kickstarter campaign to make the movie.
Bell told me that when it came to giving the Kickstarter campaign backers their rewards, "It's funny, I was initially a little hesitant and scared. I thought, 'I'm going to meet so many randoms.' It's nerve-wracking when you're tasked with meeting 700 people over the course of a month or so. But, I gotta say, I was so happy with the people that I met."
Lunch on the set with regular people was much more interesting, she says: It got her out of the Hollywood bubble. "I've had people stop me on the street and say, 'I'm a backer. I'm so excited!'"
You can hear much more about the movie in our first interview segment, including what Veronica's wardrobe says about her character: "She's wearing armor."
But speaking of people on the street, Bell is also leading a campaign against what she calls the pederazzi: members of the paparazzi who are, she says, increasingly targeting the children of celebrities. And not just photographing them from a discreet distance, but "running red lights around pre-schools, screaming at other children, pushing them."
She's asking media outlets to agree to not use photographs of celebrity children that weren't authorized by the parents. And many outlets have signed on, including People Magazine and NBC's "Today" show. The issue became a hot-button for her after the birth of her daughter, Lincoln, last March:
"I like being an actor, but I love being a mother. I'm supposed to be her protector. I don't know if she's going to be really shy, and if she is, it will kill me to have not protected her anonymity."
This weekend on Off-Ramp, we talk much more with Kristen Bell about the pederazzi issue, the "Veronica Mars" the movie ... and the Oscars.
What will she wear? "I'm not sure yet. It's such a big decision for a girl. Some clothes, I think, probably."
Next weekend, we'll talk with the actor about sloths, Ellen, working with David Mamet, and coughing into someone's mouth. And we'll also unveil a video we shot with Bell at KPCC modeled on the Ira Glass scene in "Veronica Mars," but with a couple cast upgrades.