Rob Verdi's rare and unusual saxophones, LA's first film and John Ridley's latest, Tiberius - not so bad, and the lasting influence of The Twilight Zone TV series.
Getty Villa exhibit invites visitors to rediscover troubled Roman Emperor Tiberius
Overshadowed by his predecessor, Augustus, Tiberius has long been thought of as an isolated and rather unpleasant character. He was often uncomfortable in the role of ruler, and famously fled from Rome to the island of Capri where his cruelty and sexual excesses reportedly reached their peak. -- "Tiberius: Portrait of an Emperor," Getty Villa, on view until March 3, 2014.
Tiberius was a famous Roman general who ruled as Rome's second emperor from 14-37 AD. He did okay for a while, according to Tacitus, then "erupted into an orgy of crime and ignominy alike, when, with all shame and fear removed, he simply followed his own inclinations.”
A new exhibit at the Getty Villa tries to show a more nuanced view of Tiberius. I spoke with Erik Risser, assistant conservator of antiquities, and David Saunders, assistant curator in the Department of Antiquities, both stationed at the Villa. I learned that Tiberius probably got somewhat of a bum rap.
As Saunders writes in a blog post:
"The tales of Tiberius’s outrageous and criminal behavior (are) ancient tittle-tattle, gossip, besmirching Tiberius’s reputation. One can see how they arose, however. The emperor famously retreated from Rome to the island of Capri midway through his reign ... which no doubt set the Roman rumor-mills in motion ... And yet, when he died, Rome was secure and solvent, no small achievement ... There’s more to him than the monstrous figure that emerges from Tacitus and Suetonius."
The 8-foot statue at the center of the exhibit gets more interesting the more you know about it. First of all, it's made of a thousand pounds of bronze.
"This was ubiquitous material in antiquity," Risser says, which "has a tendency to corrode, but more importantly, as today, recycling was a big part of what happened to metals throughout history. So almost all of the bronzes that come down to us today come from extreme circumstances."
Many survivors were underwater, but others were buried by volcanic eruptions. This statue suffered when Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD and wasn't uncovered for about 1,650 years. But it was, Risser says, 80 percent intact, which is remarkable. You can read all about the restoration work here.
(Statue of Tiberius, Roman, A.D. 37, showing areas restored in the 1700s. Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei – Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Laboratorio di Conservazione e Restauro)
'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."
Orange County saxophone collector pays tribute to inventor in 'Saxophobia'
Most days you can catch Rob Verdi in a pink suit, walking the streets of New Orleans Square in Disneyland. He’s been a professional musician, and he’s worked at the Happiest Place on Earth for almost 30 years.
But when he’s off the clock, Verdi visits shops all over the country in search of one thing: rare and unusual saxophones. He now has more than 75 in his collection. Some of the instruments don’t sound much like saxophones at all.
Rob Verdi is playing a “Slide Sax.” His fingers move up and down a saxophone with no keys. Instead, he guides a zipper device with a roller to make his sax sing.
“To me it almost sounds like one of those saws – you know, wood saws, bending the wood saw or some type of Hawaiian instrument," he said.
Learning that instruments like the slide sax even existed is what Verdi says inspired him to research the history of the saxophone. It was 1990. Verdi had just finished a concert in Yuma, Arizona. Afterwards, a man came up to talk to him about his slide sax.
“I basically called him a liar," he said. "I had never heard of a saxophone with a slide on it like a trombone. So he sent me photos, we corresponded for a while, and he finally sold it to me.”
Ever since, Verdi said he has discovered dozens of variations of the original.
Take the basic shape of a saxophone — and blow it up to six and a half feet tall. That’s the Contrabass.
"I joke that it kinda sounds like the Queen Mary leaving port," Verdi said.
“The gentleman I got it from – he was in the war and he took this over to Korea to entertain the troops, and he said he was shot at a number of times and one time laid down next to it to protect himself from the bullets.
Verdi said it didn't get hit. He secures the big Contrabass back into a wood display cabinet. Then he pulls out another, much smaller saxophone.
The sopranino is one of the smallest saxophones in existence. It spans about 10 inches from top to bottom. Verdi said he got his at a music store in Portland, Ore.
“It was owned by a street performer in Paris who dressed up in a clown outfit and rode a unicycle," he said. "I feel like I saved its life. How long would it have lasted being played by a guy on a unicycle?”
Verdi’s devotion to the saxophone has also made him an expert on its history.
Invented by the Belgian Adolphe Sax in the 19th century, Sax took after his father – also an instrument maker. Originally intended as an instrument for military bands, the saxophone was an international hit.
“There’s a sad turn to this," Verdi said. "[Sax] won awards for his invention and his design, and he was becoming very successful, and then some of the other instrument manufacturers, they started attacking him, and they stole his patents, and they sued him, and he ended up going bankrupt and dying penniless. Never knowing just how popular his instrument would become.”
Verdi said one of the reasons the saxophone is still popular today is its versatility. You hear it in jazz, pop, rock and roll and classical music. The saxophone resonates with people.
”I think it’s the timbre. It’s the sound," he said. "I think the range of it and the sound of it is similar to the human speaking voice. It’s just sort of right in the middle. I mean, a piccolo is really high pitched, and a tuba is so low. And I just think it’s the mood that you can create with the saxophone.”
Maybe the mood is sexy. Maybe lonely.
“You think of this guy on a street corner standing up against a light post. Maybe he’s dressed nice – maybe he’s not. Maybe he’s just kind of playing the blues, and there’s the moon behind him. It’s that whole image," he said.
Verdi said instrument makers capitalized on the sax’s popularity in the 1920s. That’s when unique variations of the original sax debuted. For example, the Slide Sax, the F Mezzo-Soprano and the Tipped Bell Soprano.
“That was the onset of the Depression, so sales really plummeted, so a lot of the manufacturers were all scratching their heads to trying to conjure up some creative new ways to stimulate sales of the instrument," Verdi said.
The Conn-O Sax is a saxophone pitched in the F key so it can play English horn parts. Verdi holds his fingers in the same place as he would on a regular curved saxophone, but the body of this Conn-O Sax goes straight down, and it has a big bubble at the bottom.
“Although this doesn’t sound exactly like an English horn, it was close enough to where Conn thought they had a really exciting idea here," Verdi said.
Conn started making the Conn-O Sax in 1928. But Verdi said production stopped in 1929.
“I think some composers were reluctant to write Conn-O Sax parts, so if there were no parts, band directors had no need to order them," he said.
A couple decades pass, and the Grafton Co. releases a saxophone made out of plastic. Verdi has a white one. It almost looks like a children’s toy. Verdi said the materials to make the plastic saxophone were cheaper than metal, so manufacturers thought they had a good thing going, but that thought didn't last long.
“This is a very delicate, very fragile material, and most of these Graftons are not around anymore," Verdi said. "They developed cracks, they were sensitive to temperatures.”
Verdi said the saxophone that has best stood the test of time – and weather – is still the basic design Adolphe Sax invented in the 1840s. The alto is still one of the most commonly played saxes today.
Verdi said he takes breaks from his day job at Disneyland to take his saxes on the road. He travels the country to play a tribute show to Adolphe Sax called “Saxophobia.” It’s aimed at teaching kids about the history of the instrument. Verdi said he hopes to one day build a museum where others can enjoy his collection.
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.