"The Daily Show" host talks about his film directing debut, "Rosewater"; how is the LGBT community faring in depictions on television?; Jake Gyllenhaal tells us about the first time he realized he wanted to act; and singer Perla Batalla recalls her family-run record store that is gone, but not forgotten.
Gone, not forgotten: Perla Batalla's family's record store
Los Angeles is famous — maybe infamous — for not preserving its past. On The Frame, we’ll occasionally visit cultural landmarks that are no longer around in a series called “Gone, Not Forgotten.” In this first installment, singer Perla Batalla takes us to the site of a record store that was once owned by her parents.
We're standing in Santa Monica, at Pier and Lincoln, which was the location of my parents' record shop when I was growing up, Discoteca Batalla. It's kind of a big deal [because] I haven't been here for over 20 years. Discoteca Batalla was not just a record store, it was a hub for the Latino community.
Truly a family affair
They opened in the late '60s. Of course, on a regular basis my mother would have been there. And also I worked there all the time as a little girl. My mother trusted me completely. By the time I was 10 years old, I could run the store by myself. You walked in and there were records everywhere. My father built the furniture that the LPs were in.
A place for community
Sometimes on the weekends ... out front there would be a full mariachi in their costumes...and hundreds of people would gather down the street. My mother would make food for strangers to just come in off the street and listen to great music. And because my father was a DJ, he could get some pretty famous groups here to play for nothing. It was pretty amazing.
Filling the customers' needs
People really struggled, they struggled with loneliness, being away from home. They struggled with money. They obviously wanted to support their family. The economy was very bad in Mexico. And Discoteca Batalla made them feel like they could be home for a second. Farmworkers, people who worked in people's houses would come. Restaurant workers. But famous people came too. Bobby Vinton, who was a famous singer then, would come and ask my mother, "What songs should I be listening to, because I need to record in Spanish." Because Eydie Gorme's record with Trio Los Panchos had been so famous that now a lot of other people were looking for this music.
The matriarch of the store
My mom, Barbara Batalla, she ran the store. She was from Buenos Aires, she was Argentine. She met my father here, who was a Mexican. He came to the States and joined the Army and got his citizenship that way. But she ran the store. She was blonde-haired, blue eyes, and they called her Güera [light-skinned]. Mom was sort of the town gossip and also the town therapist. The Mexican families who were here, away from the other parts of their families in Mexico, just making money and sending it home. Mom was always talking with them, she would help them mail things home. She was very funny. I think she brightened everyone's day.
On the changes that led to the end of Discoteca Batalla
The huge stores had opened that carried enormous amounts of records and they had all of the Spanish-language music that people were buying. And my mother just couldn't keep up anymore. When I was growing up, there was a huge Mexican community here and it seems to have been pushed out by Hollywood and the wealthy. So that makes me sad. But on the other hand, things do have to progress and change. And I'm OK with that. But I'm really glad to see that the building hasn't been torn down. It's still there. It brings back a lot of wonderful memories.
Perla Batalla named one of her albums after her parents’ record store. Her recordings are available through iTunes.
The Frame 'First': How Jake Gyllenhaal was inspired by Denzel Washington to become an actor
During our recent interview with Jake Gyllenhaal around the opening of his current film, "Nightcrawler," he told us how watching a particularly emotional performance inspired him to become an actor:
The first time that I knew that I wanted to be an actor, and I saw a piece of acting that made me feel that way was seeing "Glory" when I was a young boy. And watching Denzel Washington in the scene where he looks in the camera while he's being whipped. I remember ... the way he looks in the camera and the performance in that moment ... with great vulnerability and great strength in the same moment. And I realized that was something I wanted to strive for. Not only as an actor, but also as a person. To try and be open and vulnerable and, at the same time, be strong.
Washington won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1990 for his role in "Glory":
Jon Stewart: ‘Rosewater’ production lacked ‘baby's-butt smoothness’ of ‘The Daily Show’
Jon Stewart is no stranger to showbiz — from standup routines in dingy bars to the bright lights of "The Daily Show," he's been through a lot in his career.
He hosted a show on MTV that was cancelled within two years, he played Adam Sandler's roommate in 1999's "Big Daddy," and his appearance on Crossfire in 2004 has become legendary. But there's one thing that Stewart hadn't done until recently: direct a movie.
Well, there's another thing to check off the bucket list, as Stewart's directorial debut, "Rosewater," opens on Nov. 14.
We caught up with Stewart at this year's Telluride Film Festival to talk about the soul-sucking process of getting a movie written, the things he learned from working on "The Daily Show," and how important it is to sometimes admit when you have no idea what you're doing.
Interview Highlights:
On getting "Rosewater" made:
We went through what I guess what you would consider a more typical process, where we talked to [Maziar Bahari's] book agent and I spoke with some agents that I knew, and I said, "Help us compile a list of authors and screenwriters that you think could handle this material." And so we got these lists of these incredible writers who, yes, could have done this beautifully, but it turns out a lot of other people think they're great writers, and they've been hired to do other great stories at this very moment.
And I just got to a point [where] I felt like this was the kind of movie whose relevance was urgent, and I wanted a chance to be able to tell the story sooner rather than later, and so it was born of impatience with the process more than anything else.
On the elements of The Daily Show that made directing easier:
One of the things about the show that I thought ended up being really helpful in the filmmaking process is, the show is very collaborative, and it is very difficult to have any preciousness over any of your material, because of the speed with which we have to accomplish it. So you learn to recognize discordant moments very quickly, and discard them with no preciousness, with no sense of, But I wrote that joke! That joke was born of me! It's a diamond! Recognize it! It's more like, Yeah, f**k that, we can't do that. Can we get a graphic for that? Oh, we can't. Okay, let's do something else. So you learn a sense of necessary improvisation. Bringing that to this process was really important, given the limitations financially, time-wise, and where we were.
On the difficulties involved in directing a movie:
In general, I think it's the vagaries of new locations, and the vagaries of systems that are not well-worn. [laughs] As sad as it sounds, people might say, "Man, working at 'The Daily Show,' that's gotta be a blast. You just sit around and laugh all day." And you're like, "No, we have a meeting at 9, and the 9 meeting has to be over by 9:30, and the scripts have to be in by 11, because if they're not then we miss this deadline." And we have honed that process to baby's-butt smoothness, because we're there every day, we're in the same location with the same people, and we learn to trust each other and to make those adjustments. And so it is a process that is incredibly infrastructure-heavy and honed.
Out in the field it's just two guys that really don't speak English putting two wires into an outlet directly, and that's today's location. Really, the generator blew up? I think it had something to do with that. One day you're in a working Jordanian prison during Ramadan, which has a great deal of cultural sensitivities and parameters of time and place. We were in a refugee camp trying to shoot a street scene when things got a little out of hand ... It's a lot of that.
On admitting when you don't know what you're doing:
That was the first conversation that I had with my [director of photography], Bobby Bukowski, and Jerry Sullivan: "'I need you to be the voice in this that understands when I don't know something, because I don't know what I don't know. So here's what I need you to do: you need to be a lifeguard to some extent, as well as doing your job."
It was a complication that I had to add to their job. Where I work, I know exactly how long it takes for changes that we are making to be executed, so I know when I'm putting somebody in an uncomfortable or even impossible place to get something prepared to the level or sophistication that we need it to be by the time of the taping. In film, I do not, and did not. And so when we were out on the street and I would say, "Oh, you know what would be f**king ballsy? If the motorcycle came down these stairs!" I had to make sure that everybody knew that they could say, in that moment, "There is no f**king way that we are going to be able to do that." And so that process had to start from the very beginning. So, within that regard, I was never shy about that. To me, confidence without ability is insecurity, and I'm not particularly insecure. I've failed at the highest levels of show business.
"Rosewater" opens in theaters on November 14.
GLAAD media study: 'We've made incredible gains over the past decade'
This fall’s new batch of TV shows saw an increase in recurring or regular characters who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. But as the quantity of these characters increased, has the quality of how they are depicted improved as well?
GLAAD -- formerly known as Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation — has looked at how the LGBT community is represented and illustrated in this year’s Fall TV line-up in a new study titled "Where We Are On TV."
GLAAD has been conducting these studies for 19 years. For the 2014-2015 season, the report states that 3.9 percent of primetime broadcast scripted series regulars will be lesbian, gay or bisexual characters — up from 3.3 percent last year.
Matt Kane, the Director of Entertainment Media at GLAAD, oversaw the study and gives his take on what these numbers mean for the LGBT community.
Interview Highlights:
On which networks or shows are doing positive things with LGBT characters:
We have a couple of shows that we were very excited about this season, including two on Fox: the new show "Empire," which will be premiering later on this winter and features a young gay black man who's also an aspiring musician and the son of the lead character; and we were also very excited to see Renee Montoya [a lesbian detective character] from DC Comics making an appearance on the show "Gotham."
On the importance of the GLAAD Media study results:
I think these numbers are really important to look at, especially compared to where they were five [or] 10 years ago. This gradual increase we've seen is really indicative of the general public's greater acceptance and increased understanding of the LGBT community. And we're getting to a point now where the numbers are actually becoming less important than the depictions themselves; we want to see more diverse and more multifaceted depictions that more closely resemble real LGBT people.
Which TV characters are pushing past stereotypes and cliches:
The character of Maura on "Transparent" is a really important new character, because she's telling a very specific story about a specific trans experience that hasn't really been depicted in very great detail on a television show before. But also characters on shows like "Orphan Black" and "Penny Dreadful," which are both very genre-driven shows. They may not be the places where you would expect to see LGBT characters, but I think that element — of taking characters that we've often seen in dramas and comedies and putting them inside these very extreme situations — really offers up new opportunities for telling stories about LGBT characters that people might not have expected otherwise.
Which networks need to improve:
Ah, well. [laughs] The ones that we've looked at that I'd say really could do better include The History Channel ... [which] has more hours of original programming than most other networks on cable — or even broadcast for that matter — and it does not regularly have any kinds of appearances by LGBT people. Although it does have a lot of opportunities where they could be telling stories about LGBT people living in the parts of America that very often aren't given much attention by the media.
On whether the study results are positive or frustrating:
There's always going to be an area here or there that — when you look at the data this closely — you'll find some frustration. But if you take the wider picture from where we were a decade ago, and specifically where I thought we might be a decade ago, it's really incredible. The gains that we've made just in terms of getting to see ourselves reflected more fairly and accurately on television are really incredible and really beneficial to the LGBT community on the whole.