Cable TV and the Niche-ing of America

TODAY I have a story in Salon looking at the golden age of cable TV post-Sopranos, and contrasting this with the economic/technological forces in the culture right now.

And I ask: If HBO, or AMC, can find a profitable quality niche -- and stay in business -- can a jazz club? A book publisher? Theater company? I also look at the world of indie rock labels.

I speak to the authors of two new books, Brett Martin, of television chronicle Difficult Men, and producer Lynda Obst, of Sleepless in Hollywood.

Tom Stoppard and "Parade's End"

THIS week on HBO, Americans can catch up with a literary adaptation that hit hard in the UK last year: Parade's End. Godlike playwright Tom Stoppard adapted this series of four short novels by the underrated Ford Madox Ford -- published in the '20s and set around World War I.

Yours truly had a story today on the miniseries and the process of adapting a very long and difficult text. It meant, among other things, that I got to sip coffee with Stoppard at the Chateau Marmont while the crew set up for the Vanity Fair party. (Overall, I'd rather have a serious conversation with a major writer, so I don't mind not being invited this year.)

I have more good cuttiny-room-floor material from this story than I usually do, including a long interview with Benedict Cumerbatch, who plays the lead role. I'll post some of it here once I clean a few things up.

And here is my original ending to the piece, which will make the most sense to those who've seen most of the miniseries:

Tietjens’ wife doesn’t have the same regard for him. Hall plays Sylvia as a lusty, restless redhead – Molly Ringwald’s evil twin. But she’s not, Hall says, simply evil: The actress was in awe of her character’s audacity as well as her contradictions. “I thought, if they don’t hate me by the end of the first episode, I’m not doing my job. And if they don’t like me by the end of the fourth episode, I’m not doing my job. I have to play those extremes.”

            The stubbornness of these three characters puts them on a collision course that resolves in the mini-series’ last scenes. Stoppard, in his initial meetings with the show’s producers, emphasized that this was not going to be a war film: The war serves, instead, as a metaphor for changing times in the same way that Crawley manor does.

            “It was the war that forced British society to go through this sea change,” he says. “In 1918 women got the vote – [though] not all of them. Social values, moral values. All the arts kind of went berserk in the face of the horrors that had been witnessed. And you can see how absurd it would have seemed for Tietjens to hold onto his prewar worldview. Or his view of himself for that matter.”

Photo credit: Nick Briggs/HBO

Ken Burns Goes to the Dust Bowl

LAST night the first half of Ken Burns' latest docs, The Dust Bowl, went up; it concludes this evening.

By now, we have a pretty good sense of what a Burns doc will be like. That said, parts of this are quite ravishing. And while it is not exactly a work of polemic, this look back at this man-made disaster, coming so soon after the ravages of the storm Sandy, show us how we're really throwing the planet out of wack.

Here is my interview with the bowl-cutted auteur.

Oliver Stone's History Lesson

ABOUT a week ago, I spent some time with Oliver Stone, and his co-writer, the historian Peter Kuznick, talking about their new "Untold History of the United States." The 10-part program, which goes up on Showtime starting tonight, is in a Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky line in looking at international and domestic issues, starting with World War II.

Perhaps the key theme of the series is the idea of American exceptionalism, which the two see as quite dangerous, and tied to a Manichean worldview that dates back to the Puritans.

Of course, people on both sides of the aisle have reasons to be wary of Stone's view of history, American and otherwise. Check out my story, here, and let me know if you are persuaded.

Ric Burns and the Civil War

IT'S not a pretty picture: The Civil War saw as many people killed as all American wars put together. In some places, the proportion of  young men killed was quite high: Parts of the South essentially lost a generation.

But the huge number of deaths, and the need to count the fallen, bury them, contact loved ones -- and to make moral/ spiritual sense of it all -- remade this country, says Ric Burns, whose documentary, Death and the Civil War, goes up next week on PBS's American Experience.

He's working from a book by historian Drew Gilpin Faust called This Republic of Suffering, which is a model of accessible but rigorous history.

Read about the doc is my LA Times story here.

I liked Ric a lot and found him quite passionate about his subject in an unforced way.

BBC's New "Copper"

COMING from BBC America this summer is a new series called Copper, created by Tom Fontana (Oz, Homicide, Borgia) and set in 1860s New York. Much of the show takes place in Five Points, the rough Irish neighborhood some of us know from Scorsese's Gangs of New York. The protagonist is a tormented, Irish born detective named Corcoran.

I've not yet seen much of the show, but it hits several of my personal obsessions, so I have high hopes for it.

Here is my curtain-raiser story from Sunday's LA Times.

Owen and Kidman as Hemingway and Gellhorn

SOMETIMES, in this business, you have to do things you don't want to do -- deal with unpleasant people, write about a production that bores you to tears. Other times, you get to talk to Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman about Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, the strong-willed war correspondent who would hate to be remembered at Papa's third wife.

Later this month, HBO will broadcast a film, Hemingway & Gellhorn, about the two writers and their ferocious love affair against the background of the churn of world politics. Here is my story, for which I interviewed the two actors as well as Philip Kaufman, director of The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

"There was this five-, six-year tussle with her," Kaufman told me. "It's a very mythical kind of relationship they had: She's a Hemingway heroine. The problem being: Is that what he really wanted in real life?"

I expected Kaufman and Owen (whose Children of Men is one of my favorite movies) to be intelligent and articulate. But Kidman really impressed me -- she had more depth, seriousness, and curiosity to her than I would have guessed. It's the business of an actor to be likable, unpretentious, etc -- but you can't fake smarts.

In any case, be curious what my readers make of the film, which uses a number of different film stocks to recreate the feel of several different eras.

The Wreck of the Titanic

THE hype around James Cameron's film, which came out while I was working as a film editor, was so deafening that a lot of us closed our ears when it came to this infamous ship and its demise. I know I did. There didn't seem to be much more to say about the whole mess.

But here we are, approaching the 100th anniversary of the Titanic's demise, and there are a ton of new television projects coming, some of them quite good. (The Cameron film, of course, has returned in 3-D.)

HERE is my story on the array of recent and upcoming programs on the doomed ocean liner. Most of them go up next weekend, the centenary of the disaster.

Dustin Hoffman Falls Into "Luck"

What's this celebrated screen actor doing on television? Dustin Hoffman isn't quite sure either. But he sat down to speak with me recently about what brought him to the David Milch/Michael Mann show Luck, and talked about his career and television in general. HERE is my story.

I was struck by how humble and openly neurotic Hoffman was; he spoke about his big break with The Graduate coming after what seemed like endless years of limbo. My favorite quote was about his difficulty in choosing suitable roles. Anyway, real soulful guy.

I'm curious to hear what my readers make of HBO's horse-track drama, by the way.

David Milch's "Luck"

WHAT do get when you cross the men behind Deadwood and Miami Vice with Dustin Hoffman? Bet you didn't think it would be a television series set at the Santa Anita racetrack and revolving around a quartet of degenerate gamblers, a crusty Kentuckian who talks to himself, some nasty white-collar criminals and a few noble, beautifully photographed horses?

Somehow, this is what fortune -- or at least, HBO -- has given us, and my curtain-raiser on the series Luck is here. I was lucky enough to sit down with David Milch, Michael Mann and Hoffman recently and speak with them about the show.

As rich as it is, this program seems like -- no pun intended -- a real gamble for the cable network. I'll be interested to see whether people watch it, in part because I have another story on Luck planned.

William Faulkner Headed to HBO

THE holidays have slowed me down -- happy new year, by the way -- so I'm a bit late on getting this up. Recently I had a story in the LA Times on David "Deadwood" Milch and his new deal to oversee adaptations of Faulkner's novels and stories to HBO.

When I began this piece, I thought the idea preposterous: I remember struggling with The Sound and the Fury as a high school student. But as I spoke to my sources -- two literary scholars and a television historian with experience in audience testing -- it started to seem feasible, if still difficult. If anyone can pull this off, it's David Milch.

Will be curious to see how this unspools.

"James Ellroy's LA: City of Demons"

CRIME novelist James Ellroy is hosting a new television show that goes up Wednesday night. He's both perfect for this -- who's written about crime in the Southland better than Ellroy? (All due respect to Ross Macdonald, Robert Crais, and a few others.) But his manic intensity also makes him a strange fit for television -- he can be a bit too much onscreen.

The show looks at both classic LA murders -- the Black Dahlia, Ellroy's mother's slaying -- as well as more recent stuff. Much of it it familiar to Angelenos. The busload of TV journalists I rode through town with on a chartered bus -- Ellroy ranted and raved up front -- were mostly spellbound by the mad dog. Here is my full story.

Some highlights from the tour:

"I am nothing if not a right-wing, LAPD apologist."

"The twin influences on my childhood were Confidential and the Lutheran church."

Finally, on the Ronnie Chasen murder:

"Somebody will rat somebody out for it... It will be an astonishingly prosaic revelation. It will be a head-scratcher until then.... And life will go on."

New View of General Lee

OKAY, get ready for a deluge of coverage of the Civil War, whose 150th anniversary begins in the new year. One of the first shots fired will be a new documentary on Gen. Robert E. Lee, who emerges as a complex, brilliant, at times tormented, and deeply human character. The doc, which goes up Monday on PBS, avoids the hero-worship of neo-Confederates and a debunking approach that might have been tempting.

HERE is my article on the film, which involves an interview with filmmaker Mark Zwonitzer (who has also written an acclaimed book on country music's Carter Family) and two eminent historians, Joan Waugh of UCLA and Joseph Glatthaar of UNC Chapel Hill.

We often hear that Americans are cut off from or uninterested in their own history. It's often true, but especially since the Ken Burns documentary in the early '90s, the Civil War has been a growth industry, and an obsession with the war has never gone away in the American South. And many historians see the war and its immediate aftermath as the period in which contemporary American culture was forged.

The film is quite explicit, by the way, about the cause of the war: For all the talk about "state's rights," it was quite solidly about slavery. Just look at the secession documents for each state: They were pretty unambiguous about what mattered to them.

And let me urge anyone interested in the Civil War to read historian C. Vann Woodward and his "Irony of Southern History."

Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets

THE home where the once-reviled Daniel Ellsberg has lived since the late '70s is hard to find: It's down a small redwood lined street and its address is out of order with its neighbors. When you review what Ellsberg went through in the '70s -- national manhunt, Nixon hiring thugs to break into his therapist's office, Kissinger denouncing him as "the most dangerous man in America" -- it's not hard to see why Ellberg, now nearing 80, would choose to live somewhere a bit removed. 

Nixon and Mao, 1972

A few weeks ago I met Ellsberg to discuss his leaking of the Pentagon Papers -- the record of our involvement in Indochina -- which helped destroy the Nixon presidency and, eventually, bring an end to the war. We talked about the events of those days, secrecy itself, and the very fine POV documentary that goes up tonight on PBS, The Most Dangerous Man in America.


HERE is my piece from today's LATimes. Sobering stuff.


There's some fascinating stuff in the doc, some of which comes from Ellsberg's memoir of the period, Secrets, including tapes in which Nixon urges Kissinger to use nuclear weapons in the conflict. "I just want you to think big." Nixon also told his secretary of state: You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care."

New TV Legal Drama

THE lawyer show has become almost as ubiquitous as the cop show, and there are several of each in the  new fall TV season.


I've reviewed a new legal drama, The Whole Truth, which goes up tonight at 10 on ABC. I'd say the show is decent, needs to fine tune some things, including an off-putting main character, but succeeds at drawing you into the law's chess game.


Here is my Hollywood Reporter review, which begins this way: 


Emotions run high on "The Whole Truth," a legal drama about dueling lawyers who struggle, in the pilot, over a murder and sexual-assault case with possible racist overtones. It's a lot of baggage and cultural hot buttons for a show to take on in its first episode, but for the most part, "Truth" works.


To the right, of course, is a statue of Justice.

Two New Cop Shows

THE new television season is starting, and there are a lot of new cop shows. So far the best I've seen is the mellow, low-key Terriers, which I reviewed for The Hollywood Reporter last week. Two new shows try a lot harder but achieve less. 


Here's my review of the Hawaii Five-0 reboot, which begins: 


By the time the shooting begins in earnest on "Hawaii Five-0," about halfway through the pilot, the action comes across well-directed, the camerawork crisp, the pace just right. But it took half an hour to get to this, and it just wasn't worth it.


And here's Chase, and its lead:


"Chase" begins with a fit blonde in tight jeans and a sharp leather jacket chasing a criminal through the streets of an unnamed city, brow furrowed in concentration. Pretty soon they're in a stockyard -- this turns out to be Fort Worth -- then a rodeo. We're all over Texas in this hourlong drama from NBC, and by show's end we'll be everywhere from Houston's skyline to a cowboy bar in San Antonio to a border crossing into Mexico.


In short, Chase seemed to me formulaic, but it has potential and the lead is quite good. Hawaii Five-0 -- which has some serious talent behind it -- only shines during the action scenes. The original is much smarter and cooler. Maybe they'll both get better. 


I'm sure some people will like both shows, and many critics like Five-0 quite a bit. But here's the thing: We are supposedly in a golden age of television, and shows like Deadwood, The Wire, Sopranos, The Office, etc., have shown how good TV can be. Does every new show have to be as good as those? Of course now. But they've gotta be better than this. 

Remembering the Civil Rights Years

LIKE a lot of people, I knew the reputation of Eyes on the Prize, the famous documentary about the civil rights movement in the Deep South in the '50s and '60s. But watching all six hours of it was simultaneously spirit-rousing and soul-crushing as I watched the movement beaten back time and time again.

The documentary, which originally broadcast in 1987, has been out of circulation for decades, but is back on PBS and now available on DVD for the first time.

HERE is my LA Times piece on the program, which included interviews with some of the show's creators as well as a UCLA professor to put it in perspective.

I must say, as a white person, even one raised by anti-racist parents far enough after the events in the program, I found some of the "resistance" by segregationists almost painful to watch. I've never understood the impetus for black militancy so clearly as I do after seeing what well-armed white folk -- both police and "volunteer" racists -- did to non-violent marchers, many of them women and children.


Amazing to be reminded that Emmett Till's killers were never brought to justice despite admitting to having killed a 14-year-old boy and dumping his body in the river. Some of the politicians are incredible, when you compare the interviews they give years later to the footage of the '50s and '60s.

Sometimes the old and new footage comments on each other, as when Selma, Alabama mayor Joseph Smitherman, mocks the protesters as media-savvy phonies in a contemporary interview before a flashback to 1965 footage in which he refers to “Martin Luther Coon,” before apologizing.


My piece closes by wondering about the connection between the movement and the election of Barack Obama. New Yorker editor David Remnick has made that link quite explicit, apparently, in his new book, The Bridge.


The Southern resistance to "government meddling" and crowing about "state's rights" sure takes on a new context after you've reflected on the events of this period. 


Photos show Emmett Till and Rosa Parks with Martin Luther King.

Alan Alda vs. Science

AMONG the very few things yours truly has in common with Alan Alda is a love of science. (Though my wife tells me he was her first crush, so there may be a joke in here somewhere.)

In any case, it was as pleasure to have a beer with the star of the most successful tv show of all time and discuss the new three-part special he's hosting on PBS, "The Human Spark." The show tries to get at what makes us different from the other animals, and what made us that way. HERE is my piece from today's LATimes.  (The show, which I keep trying not to call "The Human Stain," starts tonight.)

Alda, who is tall, almost awkwardly lanky and far sharper than I expect to be at 73, was quite amiable and un-actorly, radiating a powerful curiosity even as we pursued little tangents. We discussed the show, of course, his scientist hero Richard Feynman ("a completely human person... he was a very deliberate communicator about his work, it wasn't an accident"), the workshops he runs for scientists to help describe their work more clearly, and the importance of bringing science to a general audience. "I think their lives will be enriched by it, and science will be enriched by it."

He also discussed -- or chose not to discuss -- his politics: After his work trying to help pass the ERA, he said, "I came to feel that I'd talked enough about my political views -- for about 25 years I haven't said anything in public about them. I have plenty of opinions, but I keep them to myself."

My interest in science has been somewhat subdued by my fascination for the arts and culture, but science (esp. physics and astronomy) was my first intellectual love. Needless to say, television shows like "Cosmos" -- and "The Human Spark" -- are an important way to keep curiosity and knowledge alive in the popular culture. Check it out.

John Updike vs. Witches of Eastwick

FOR a not terribly good book, "the witches of eastwick" has had quite an afterlife. not only did it become a popular, if faintly cheesy, movie involving cher, and a briefly lived stage show, but it's now set to become a television series. no, not a miniseries -- but a show that could run for years and years.

why? i'm still a bit confused about the whole thing. but HERE is my new piece on the book's unlikely journey.

for the story, i spoke to a producer on the show named maggie friedman, who pointed out that "men and women and sex" are important ingredients to making the book -- and her show -- work.

and i discussed the original novel's impact and sexual politics -- is it feminist? misogynist? an indictment of the counterculture -- with scholars quentin miller and sam cohen. the latter has a new book coming soon called "after the end of history: american fiction in the 1990s."

what do people make of the program of "eastwick?" i'm eager to hear from viewers. the show kicks of wednesday.

Ken Burns vs. His Critics

AS a former (and very minor) member of the nation's conspiracy of jazz critics, i remember quite well the vitriol hurled at ken burns for his "Jazz" documentary. the UK's guardian, for instance, called the series, for its treating jazz like an art form that died with ellington, "a jam session in a mausoleum."

in some cases the charges were fair, in other cases not.

in any case it struck me that burns was experiencing a critical backlash, an exhaustion of the good will that had built up with "the civil war" in the early '90s. compared to hipper/angrier figures like errol morris and michael moore, the earnest burns was deemed as cool as his famous bowl haircut.

HERE is my piece on what may greet his new "the national parks: america's best idea."

i met burns not long ago to discuss his new project, his early work, and his critical reception. i like him a lot, a very intense guy who's willing to get swept away in a story, its characters and conflicts. anyone who helps bring more attention to john muir cant be all bad.