Mark Duplass talks about the new HBO series he created with his brother, Jay; what's the market for the new high-end audio players from Sony and Neil Young?; a landmark mural of Anthony Quinn is being restored in downtown L.A.
Mark Duplass gets naked and gets real about the film business in 'Togetherness'
Filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass are a couple of busy brothers. After conquering the micro-budget, indie film world ("The Puffy Chair," "Jeff Who Lives at Home"), making a small budget studio movie ("Cyrus"), and appearing on niche hit television shows (Mark in FX's "The League," Jay in Amazon's "Transparent"), the Duplass brothers have made a TV series.
Together with their high school buddy, actor Steve Zissis, Mark and Jay created the new HBO comedy "Togetherness." It debuts Jan. 11 after the season 3 premiere of "Girls." It's a great spot on the schedule for a show with a naturalistic, character driven style that — like "Girls" — is not afraid to show nudity, both male and female.
When Mark recently came by The Frame, host John Horn asked him about getting naked in front of the camera, why the show is set in Eagle Rock, and the depressing realities of working in show business.
Interview Highlights:
What's your relationship with Steve Zissis? How did all three of you come together to create the show?
Jay, Steve and myself all went to the same high school in New Orleans. Steve was a golden god. He was the guy who hit puberty at 11, he was the president of the student council at 15 ...
This is all in the show, and he's not joking?
This is real. He is the most autobiographical character we've ever written, and he knows this. We honestly built the show for Steve, because we wanted the world to see how talented he was. Literally, we all thought Steve was going to be the President, or [the next] Tom Hanks, or both. And that didn't happen for him. It kills us, and it killed him, and so we just said, "All right, we'll just make the show that shows it happening."
Steve plays a struggling actor in the show, and he is, I guess you're saying, a struggling actor in real life.
He is, in fact, a chubby, balding, struggling actor in real life, which we hope will change a little bit once we serve him up to the fans of HBO, because we've loved him to death for years and think he's amazing. We really wanted to get him out there.
In the show, you play a sound engineer, Steve plays an actor, and there's also a producer in the show. How important was it that this be set in the world of show business? Was that something you were trying to work toward or away from?
I think we honestly tried to work away from that. We wanted the show to be in Los Angeles, mostly because we really like the idea of these people who are living on the fringes of L.A., who live on the east side, which we haven't seen represented as much.
The show is basically set in Eagle Rock, correct?
It's set in Eagle Rock, exactly. People who have one foot in and one foot out of the industry, which is very much how Jay and I live. But we didn't want this to be an industry show. It's not a show about actors, it's not a show about directors or sound designers. At its core, it's really a relationship show, and a show about what it means to be approaching 40 and figuring out that your life isn't all you hoped it would be, and how you reconcile that.
In particular, these aren't characters who have that "Lost Generation" malaise or that Woody Allen-sniffling-complaining [personality]; they are actively banging their heads against their destinies, trying to make happiness happen. That's why I sort of love them.
What sort of things do you want to say or reflect upon about the realities of working in the business? These people are clearly talented, they want to do well, and yet they're not making that kind of breakthrough. Is that specific to this business, or is it more general than that?
I know two businesses well: the music industry and the film industry. I can only speak to those, but what I can say is that they are industries where being talented, being good in a room, and being friendly and making people want to work with you don't guarantee that you're going to get work. And that's really frightening and depressing, that you could be amazing at your job, easy to be around, good in a room, and go broke. That's a difficult thing to navigate.
I was talking to an actress friend not long ago, and she was talking about nudity in the industry. She said that there's a joke among actors: "It's not nudity, it's HBO."
This is a joke, and it's also funny because it's true.
What does that mean to this show?
Well, everybody gets raked [over] the coals [laughs]. This is really what happens. I would say, without giving away too much in the show, that we developed a term on the set, called "wife sexy" and "husband sexy." We were not going to glorify anything here, but at the same time we're not looking to be incendiary with our nudity and shocking in any shape or form. We just wanted to show these people as they are, and if we're having a sex scene, we didn't want to shy away from it and pull up the covers or have someone wearing a bra.
We're aiming for a certain amount of naturalism, so I'll say that you will see things on this show and they might not be as good-looking as you hoped they might be, but they'll definitely be reflective of what most people see in the bedroom.
And it's not just limited to the women, we should say.
Absolutely not. I didn't do a week's worth of kale smoothies before I had my nude scene, and there's a reason behind that.
Do you wish you had?
You know, in [post-production], when I saw it, I had some second thoughts, but I'll stand behind my decision from an ideological perspective [laughs].
"Togetherness" premieres Sunday, Jan. 11, on HBO
Can Neil Young's high-quality Pono music player attract a wide audience?
One of the buzziest debuts at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is Neil Young's high-resolution music player, called Pono.
The pocket-sized device promises to deliver higher quality audio, and the makers say it is designed to be the next best thing to live music. It’s just one of a handful of new devices that hope to corner a market of music lovers who aren’t satisfied with lower-quality MP3 files.
But the device itself costs $400, and each album runs between $17-$25. Will consumers be willing to pay top-dollar per album for better quality sound?
Steve Guttenberg, who writes the Audiophiliac blog for C-NET, joined The Frame to talk about the past, present and future of hi-res audio players.
Interview Highlights:
There seems to be a growing interest in super high quality sound devices. What do you think is driving that trend?
That old guy, Neil Young, has somehow made everybody suddenly aware of hi-res music. The curious thing is that it's not new. Hi-res music has been around actually since just before the turn of the century, but starting about six years ago, a couple of companies like HiFiMAN and Fiio started making high-resolution music players, and various websites started selling high-resolution files — there's one based in New York called HDTracks, for example. So Neil Young's a little late to this party, which has been going on for a while.
So what is Neil Young proposing? What is his technology and what is it supposed to do?
He's proposing that now you can finally hear what the musicians heard when they made the record in the first place.
And is this something that purportedly has been lost by converting audio files to MP3s? In layman's terms, what's the issue, technologically?
Ideally, what we're talking about with high-resolution music is to give a clearer picture of the recording. To think of it in photographic terms, it's a sharper, clearer picture. More pixels, more resolution, more detail, more depth.
One of the things that high-resolution promises, but doesn't always deliver, is greater low-level, quieter details, like the breath of the singer or the singer strumming an acoustic guitar. You just hear subtle things, not the loud stuff. You always hear the loud stuff, but it's the quieter parts that come through much more clearly.
Sony recently announced its $1,200 Walkman, the NWZX2. Is that a similar technology, or is it kind of the same idea that Neil Young is pursuing with Pono?
Yeah, same idea. That one's going to come out later this year. But they do have a player that I reviewed a few months ago called the NWZA17, which is a $300 high-resolution music player, and for $300 it's pretty damn good.
Where does this go next, and what do you think the future looks like?
This is the tricky part, because one of the things that's happening, parallel to hi-res music, is the resurgence in vinyl. And the funny thing is that vinyl never went away; they were always making vinyl records and they never stopped making turntables, but over the last year or two, vinyl has really kicked it up.
It's definitely a much bigger thing now, and one of the things that's interesting about vinyl compared to hi-res is that you have to be home to listen to an LP. It's hard to listen to them on the bus. So when you're home, it's a much more conducive environment, and presumably quieter than the bus, the car or the train. So you can hear those quieter details more clearly and you're way more likely to be engaged. There's less multi-tasking going on when you're playing a vinyl record than when you're listening to a file.
I guess the hope is that these kinds of players or hi-res files become the standard, like DSL Internet versus dial-up. It will become the new basis against which everything else is measured.
I wish that were true. The thing is, we live in this world where most people get their music for free. You could always get music for free, you could always listen to it on the radio, but now you can listen to what you want, when you want to hear it, on YouTube, Pandora or Spotify, and pay absolutely nothing.
So we have that at one end, which is what most people are using. And I think the idea of getting those people, who are used to getting their music for free, to instead spend $25 for 10-to-12 songs sounds really hard. I don't think that's going to happen so fast.
But I guess the next step might be for Spotify or other streaming services to actually improve the resolution audio quality of their files, correct?
That would be a midpoint, and there's a new company starting up that's called Tidal that's the first lossless — not quite high-resolution, but CD quality — streaming service. Because it's higher quality, or maybe for other reasons, it's not free; it's $20 a month. And right now in the real world that's sort of a midpoint between free and $25 hi-res downloads on the other end.
Iconic mural of Anthony Quinn gets a facelift
At Broadway and 3rd Street in downtown Los Angeles, a five-story mural fills an entire side of the Victor Clothing Company building. It portrays a man in mid-dance with his arms spanning the building’s width — seemingly embracing the city. He looks too in-the-moment to pay attention to us pedestrians.
The subject of the mural? The late actor Anthony Quinn. The Victor Clothing Company commissioned muralist Eloy Torrez to paint the “Pope of Broadway” back in 1985 as an homage to its Latino clientele.
Nearly 30 years later, Torrez will be scaling those walls once again. Last October, the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles and City Councilman Jose Huizar announced the restoration of the mural, which will begin this month. It’s part of the Bringing Back Broadway Initiative, which aims to revive downtown Los Angeles.
L.A. City Councilman José Huizar, whose district includes downtown, says the goal is to make the area pedestrian-friendly, hip and attractive to all types of people. It will draw fans of Anthony Quinn to the neighborhood such as Conservancy executive director Isabel Rojas Williams, who describes him as “one of the most glittering actors in Hollywood and the world.”
Quinn was an iconic Latino actor. He was born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1915 and soon after emigrated to the U.S. He grew up in L.A.’s historic Latino neighborhoods, Echo Park and Boyle Heights. Quinn was famous for inhabiting characters from all kinds of backgrounds: Mexicans ("Viva Zapata"), Italians ("La Strada"), Middle-Easterners ("Lawrence of Arabia"), and — perhaps most famously — the title character in "Zorba the Greek." He won two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor, becoming the first Mexican-American to do so, and starred opposite greats such as Marlon Brando and Peter O’Toole.
Quinn died in 2001, but we still have his films, and Angelenos have their mural. Eloy Torres says the mural has taken on a life of its own to represent the Latino populatio0n of Los Angeles.
Which brings up an interesting question. Who's the icon, the man or the mural? When does a piece of art take a life of its own to become its own entity, separate from the original icon?
Mark Duplass gets naked and gets real about the film business in 'Togetherness'
Filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass are a couple of busy brothers. After conquering the micro-budget, indie film world ("The Puffy Chair," "Jeff Who Lives at Home"), making a small budget studio movie ("Cyrus"), and appearing on niche hit television shows (Mark in FX's "The League," Jay in Amazon's "Transparent"), the Duplass brothers have made a TV series.
Together with their high school buddy, actor Steve Zissis, Mark and Jay created the new HBO comedy "Togetherness." It debuts Jan. 11 after the season 3 premiere of "Girls." It's a great spot on the schedule for a show with a naturalistic, character driven style that — like "Girls" — is not afraid to show nudity, both male and female.
When Mark recently came by The Frame, host John Horn asked him about getting naked in front of the camera, why the show is set in Eagle Rock, and the depressing realities of working in show business.
Interview Highlights:
What's your relationship with Steve Zissis? How did all three of you come together to create the show?
Jay, Steve and myself all went to the same high school in New Orleans. Steve was a golden god. He was the guy who hit puberty at 11, he was the president of the student council at 15 ...
This is all in the show, and he's not joking?
This is real. He is the most autobiographical character we've ever written, and he knows this. We honestly built the show for Steve, because we wanted the world to see how talented he was. Literally, we all thought Steve was going to be the President, or [the next] Tom Hanks, or both. And that didn't happen for him. It kills us, and it killed him, and so we just said, "All right, we'll just make the show that shows it happening."
Steve plays a struggling actor in the show, and he is, I guess you're saying, a struggling actor in real life.
He is, in fact, a chubby, balding, struggling actor in real life, which we hope will change a little bit once we serve him up to the fans of HBO, because we've loved him to death for years and think he's amazing. We really wanted to get him out there.
In the show, you play a sound engineer, Steve plays an actor, and there's also a producer in the show. How important was it that this be set in the world of show business? Was that something you were trying to work toward or away from?
I think we honestly tried to work away from that. We wanted the show to be in Los Angeles, mostly because we really like the idea of these people who are living on the fringes of L.A., who live on the east side, which we haven't seen represented as much.
The show is basically set in Eagle Rock, correct?
It's set in Eagle Rock, exactly. People who have one foot in and one foot out of the industry, which is very much how Jay and I live. But we didn't want this to be an industry show. It's not a show about actors, it's not a show about directors or sound designers. At its core, it's really a relationship show, and a show about what it means to be approaching 40 and figuring out that your life isn't all you hoped it would be, and how you reconcile that.
In particular, these aren't characters who have that "Lost Generation" malaise or that Woody Allen-sniffling-complaining [personality]; they are actively banging their heads against their destinies, trying to make happiness happen. That's why I sort of love them.
What sort of things do you want to say or reflect upon about the realities of working in the business? These people are clearly talented, they want to do well, and yet they're not making that kind of breakthrough. Is that specific to this business, or is it more general than that?
I know two businesses well: the music industry and the film industry. I can only speak to those, but what I can say is that they are industries where being talented, being good in a room, and being friendly and making people want to work with you don't guarantee that you're going to get work. And that's really frightening and depressing, that you could be amazing at your job, easy to be around, good in a room, and go broke. That's a difficult thing to navigate.
I was talking to an actress friend not long ago, and she was talking about nudity in the industry. She said that there's a joke among actors: "It's not nudity, it's HBO."
This is a joke, and it's also funny because it's true.
What does that mean to this show?
Well, everybody gets raked [over] the coals [laughs]. This is really what happens. I would say, without giving away too much in the show, that we developed a term on the set, called "wife sexy" and "husband sexy." We were not going to glorify anything here, but at the same time we're not looking to be incendiary with our nudity and shocking in any shape or form. We just wanted to show these people as they are, and if we're having a sex scene, we didn't want to shy away from it and pull up the covers or have someone wearing a bra.
We're aiming for a certain amount of naturalism, so I'll say that you will see things on this show and they might not be as good-looking as you hoped they might be, but they'll definitely be reflective of what most people see in the bedroom.
And it's not just limited to the women, we should say.
Absolutely not. I didn't do a week's worth of kale smoothies before I had my nude scene, and there's a reason behind that.
Do you wish you had?
You know, in [post-production], when I saw it, I had some second thoughts, but I'll stand behind my decision from an ideological perspective [laughs].
"Togetherness" premieres Sunday, Jan. 11, on HBO
Can Neil Young's high-quality Pono music player attract a wide audience?
One of the buzziest debuts at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is Neil Young's high-resolution music player, called Pono.
The pocket-sized device promises to deliver higher quality audio, and the makers say it is designed to be the next best thing to live music. It’s just one of a handful of new devices that hope to corner a market of music lovers who aren’t satisfied with lower-quality MP3 files.
But the device itself costs $400, and each album runs between $17-$25. Will consumers be willing to pay top-dollar per album for better quality sound?
Steve Guttenberg, who writes the Audiophiliac blog for C-NET, joined The Frame to talk about the past, present and future of hi-res audio players.
Interview Highlights:
There seems to be a growing interest in super high quality sound devices. What do you think is driving that trend?
That old guy, Neil Young, has somehow made everybody suddenly aware of hi-res music. The curious thing is that it's not new. Hi-res music has been around actually since just before the turn of the century, but starting about six years ago, a couple of companies like HiFiMAN and Fiio started making high-resolution music players, and various websites started selling high-resolution files — there's one based in New York called HDTracks, for example. So Neil Young's a little late to this party, which has been going on for a while.
So what is Neil Young proposing? What is his technology and what is it supposed to do?
He's proposing that now you can finally hear what the musicians heard when they made the record in the first place.
And is this something that purportedly has been lost by converting audio files to MP3s? In layman's terms, what's the issue, technologically?
Ideally, what we're talking about with high-resolution music is to give a clearer picture of the recording. To think of it in photographic terms, it's a sharper, clearer picture. More pixels, more resolution, more detail, more depth.
One of the things that high-resolution promises, but doesn't always deliver, is greater low-level, quieter details, like the breath of the singer or the singer strumming an acoustic guitar. You just hear subtle things, not the loud stuff. You always hear the loud stuff, but it's the quieter parts that come through much more clearly.
Sony recently announced its $1,200 Walkman, the NWZX2. Is that a similar technology, or is it kind of the same idea that Neil Young is pursuing with Pono?
Yeah, same idea. That one's going to come out later this year. But they do have a player that I reviewed a few months ago called the NWZA17, which is a $300 high-resolution music player, and for $300 it's pretty damn good.
Where does this go next, and what do you think the future looks like?
This is the tricky part, because one of the things that's happening, parallel to hi-res music, is the resurgence in vinyl. And the funny thing is that vinyl never went away; they were always making vinyl records and they never stopped making turntables, but over the last year or two, vinyl has really kicked it up.
It's definitely a much bigger thing now, and one of the things that's interesting about vinyl compared to hi-res is that you have to be home to listen to an LP. It's hard to listen to them on the bus. So when you're home, it's a much more conducive environment, and presumably quieter than the bus, the car or the train. So you can hear those quieter details more clearly and you're way more likely to be engaged. There's less multi-tasking going on when you're playing a vinyl record than when you're listening to a file.
I guess the hope is that these kinds of players or hi-res files become the standard, like DSL Internet versus dial-up. It will become the new basis against which everything else is measured.
I wish that were true. The thing is, we live in this world where most people get their music for free. You could always get music for free, you could always listen to it on the radio, but now you can listen to what you want, when you want to hear it, on YouTube, Pandora or Spotify, and pay absolutely nothing.
So we have that at one end, which is what most people are using. And I think the idea of getting those people, who are used to getting their music for free, to instead spend $25 for 10-to-12 songs sounds really hard. I don't think that's going to happen so fast.
But I guess the next step might be for Spotify or other streaming services to actually improve the resolution audio quality of their files, correct?
That would be a midpoint, and there's a new company starting up that's called Tidal that's the first lossless — not quite high-resolution, but CD quality — streaming service. Because it's higher quality, or maybe for other reasons, it's not free; it's $20 a month. And right now in the real world that's sort of a midpoint between free and $25 hi-res downloads on the other end.
Iconic mural of Anthony Quinn gets a facelift
At Broadway and 3rd Street in downtown Los Angeles, a five-story mural fills an entire side of the Victor Clothing Company building. It portrays a man in mid-dance with his arms spanning the building’s width — seemingly embracing the city. He looks too in-the-moment to pay attention to us pedestrians.
The subject of the mural? The late actor Anthony Quinn. The Victor Clothing Company commissioned muralist Eloy Torrez to paint the “Pope of Broadway” back in 1985 as an homage to its Latino clientele.
Nearly 30 years later, Torrez will be scaling those walls once again. Last October, the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles and City Councilman Jose Huizar announced the restoration of the mural, which will begin this month. It’s part of the Bringing Back Broadway Initiative, which aims to revive downtown Los Angeles.
L.A. City Councilman José Huizar, whose district includes downtown, says the goal is to make the area pedestrian-friendly, hip and attractive to all types of people. It will draw fans of Anthony Quinn to the neighborhood such as Conservancy executive director Isabel Rojas Williams, who describes him as “one of the most glittering actors in Hollywood and the world.”
Quinn was an iconic Latino actor. He was born in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1915 and soon after emigrated to the U.S. He grew up in L.A.’s historic Latino neighborhoods, Echo Park and Boyle Heights. Quinn was famous for inhabiting characters from all kinds of backgrounds: Mexicans ("Viva Zapata"), Italians ("La Strada"), Middle-Easterners ("Lawrence of Arabia"), and — perhaps most famously — the title character in "Zorba the Greek." He won two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor, becoming the first Mexican-American to do so, and starred opposite greats such as Marlon Brando and Peter O’Toole.
Quinn died in 2001, but we still have his films, and Angelenos have their mural. Eloy Torres says the mural has taken on a life of its own to represent the Latino populatio0n of Los Angeles.
Which brings up an interesting question. Who's the icon, the man or the mural? When does a piece of art take a life of its own to become its own entity, separate from the original icon?