Movie break: A Scout’s resourcefulness in a claustro-thriller: Panic Room (2002)

A catcall movie: One I make fun of, because either it is eminently mockable or I am out of step with its conventions and pretensions

(One of this derivative klunker’s few items of wisdom is how duct tape is our friend; and its depiction of handling type 1 diabetes is bad news—on which see End note 2.)

[Slight edits were done 8/31/12 and on 9/20/12.]

I believe I first saw Panic Room when it was released in theaters about 10 years ago. In a way, it strikes me the same now as then: sleek, well-engineered, but with rather implausible/extreme violence/action at the end.

After my mini doctoral dissertation on American Gangster, both you and I would like to loosen up and have a little fun. But with Panic Room, I realize there’s also room to call a movie down when it seems over the top with its pretensions, excesses (that it seems not aware of), etc. And we can find these lie in more than just the violent denouement, but in a host of other aspects. I realize this film has its fans; its Wikipedia article seems to handle it all respectfully, solemnly…maybe in view of its main stars, not least Kristen Stewart, who was all of about 11 when this film was made.

Also, David Fincher, its director, seems a hot property; he made The Social Network (2010), the esteemed film on the founding of Facebook from two years ago, which I did not see. His experience has been in commercials and music videos, and he seems to wear his cinematic influences on his sleeve (more on this soon); but I found on watching Panic Room twice this week that, even on the first viewing, I became jaundiced enough pretty quickly to have a few “catcall” remarks—mocking little lines you could call out watching certain shots or scenes (examples will come below), as was done with programmed brio in Mystery Science Theater 3000 or in the old days by the audience with The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975).

Of course, Panic Room wasn’t made for this sort of mockery, and for me to want to mock it this way may show how out-of-step I am with certain modern film conventions. This one indeed seems to fit in with a certain current youth esthetic, and I don’t mean to seem like an old fogey as far as this is concerned; plenty of now-long-esteemed directors and their typical work were derided when they were current (e.g., Hitchcock). But I will try to explain my alienation from this film in stages.

Setup, plot elements, amid heavy style influences

A mother and daughter move into a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in a building that the plummy-voiced property manager/whatever refers to as a townhouse/brownstone, or a “townstone,” I think he playfully calls it once. The first night the duo are moved in, three thieves break in, and the movie generally follows a busy carnival ride of real-time mayhem, not least involving a sort of high-tech safe room that the mother and daughter hole up in for much of the time, the “panic room”—which is also the location of the treasure, bearer bonds left by the house’s previous owner, that one of the thieves was supposed to inherit and now, never mind why, wants to steal.

The plot and setup are fairly simple; the goings-on are rendered very carefully, with attention to detail, a fancy set-derived interior (no way could a big New York townhouse be as cavernous as this one seems), and both atmospheric tracking, hovering, etc. shots and CGI-finessed tricks such as the camera going through a coffee-pot handle, etc. The movie strikes me as rather pleased with itself with all the fancy visual stunts it can pull off, while it also clearly imitates Hitchcock with the roving camera, Kubrick with the Shining-like tracking shots and general empty-house ambience, and even Roman Polansky with some visual resonance, and a slight plot resonance, with Rosemary’s Baby. (The title sequence even readily invokes Rosemary’s Baby, with New York skyline, and Hitchcock with North by Northwest–style titles angled in line with the lines of buildings. The “underscore” music, which won an ASCAP award according to the Wikipedia article, seems fairly in line with the style of Bernard Herrmann and with the needle-drop atmospheric stuff Kubrick used in a sort of mash-up in The Shining.)

To me Panic Room is both smugly technical and so derivative of its influences that you seem almost distracted by these facts; meanwhile, the writing of the script—which could be taken to allude “edifyingly” to a certain soulless materialism of upscale Americans, though how pointed this is on the writer’s part is unclear—seems to leave very little room for any sort of “philosophical” or broadly social comments. Even in Hitchcock we could get this nod to the audience’s having a brain. Panic Room doesn’t even deign to explain some of the details of the daughter’s type 1 diabetes (e.g., why not respect our intelligence enough to explain that the shot she needs is of insulin?), on which topic I’ll say more below.

The net result is a carnival ride of a movie, with seemingly every moment crammed with excitement and little invitation to really think about how silly some of this is. What humor there is seems to reside mostly with the thieves, and there it seems to arise from their being types, and largely clownish or mean ones at that (Junior and Raoul, respectively).

Foster and Stewart in their burden to bring female spirit to a muddy setting

Jodie Foster stars as the mother, Meg Altman, looking early on like a dweebish yuppie in ugly eyeglasses as she is ferried to this house by a real estate agent, with her scooter-riding daughter in tow. Daughter Sarah is played by Kristen Stewart, with rather-boyishly cut hair here, and who has her characteristic smart eyes and that certain slight moodiness that seems (limitedly) to be at the center of Stewart’s charisma and appeal as an actress. Stewart is a young actress whose current fame makes her the subject of a sort of personality cult, not unlike Jennifer Lawrence, and also she is the subject of tabloid coverage, lately concerning the breakdown of her relationship with British actor Robert Pattinson. I’d rather not venture too far into discussion of her beyond the specific purview of how she fills out a film role (and in the future I hope to examine an example of her more mature work).

But it’s interesting how, today, Stewart’s appeal has a certain je ne sais quoi, maybe with a certain emphasis on our “I know not what” about the root of her appeal. Not quite so much in evidence in Panic Room, but I think incipiently there, she doesn’t have a smiley appeal, or a clear sex appeal, or a heavy cuteness element. She is attractive but has a sort of sullen air, not so much a bratty type as of a certain nascent emotional expressiveness that seems stuck in an adolescent shorts-in-a-twist emotional awry-ness. This reading is to judge from critics’ fairly unanimous discussion of her, and from the few times I have seen her act. Perhaps it is her “developing adolescent” emotional quality that has made her so central to the Twilight franchise which now seems so much to define her career; but of course, every young star—a great example is Jodie Foster—develops her chops as an actor of adult roles too, so Stewart has some work cut out for her if she’s to have a stellar future.

Meanwhile, this is all neither here nor there as in Panic Room she seems quite suited to the quality of an 11-year-old where she has a certain somber quality and a manner in which she is apt to push back at will in discussions with her parent, yet has the pre-sexy plainness of a potato lacking any condiments. Also, not quite beautiful yet, Stewart seems to have a bit of a pig nose here.

Foster, for her part, seems tapped to bring a certain feminist bravado to her role, an earnestness and ability to present some appropriate emotional heft. Yet her character ability seems not so much used to her credit here as is her simply being implicated in a plot and environmental morass-of-sorts. I found myself noting that, in this very visually oriented film—with well-framed shots, tight editing, high stylization—her rather sleek, neat-bird, statuesque features, including a rather beaky nose, seemed to fit in with the townhouse architecture so lovingly composed-around in the shots.

Amusingly, her husband, from whom she is recently separated, is described early on—in an almost hackneyed movie-script way of indicating character with a one-liner—via his career; he’s in pharmaceuticals. This is the general sort of lazy social indicator that, as to specific semantics, in 2002 would have connoted to the great unwashed that he is something special and respectable—nay, an almost Henry Jamesian character, ready for a novel within the realm of The Ambassadors, perhaps (but with the film-watching American peasant all agog: “Shet mah math! They said you wuz high-class, but ah didn’t think you wuz that high-class!”)—and no wonder his family has lived upscale, with two people ready to live in a massive townhouse. Today, having been involved in an outlying part of that business culture, I would say the Big Pharma exec connotes he is an uncultured dork.

(Later, when daughter Sarah is talking with nicest-crook Burnham and the issue of her father and/or family comes up, as to socioeconomic background, Burnham asks/suggests her father, or family, is rich; daughter says “My dad’s rich; Mom’s just mad,” or such. Whatever the line [I wasn’t going to watch this movie more than twice], it’s glib enough. The script is by David Koepp; I don’t know anything about him. Well, I just checked his Wikipedia page; fourth most-successful screenwriter of all time, it says. Let’s not go there, right now.)

Once the plot gets going, the unintended occasional comedy starts. We know this from one summarizing sentence in the film’s Wikipedia article: “On the night the two move into the home, it is broken into by Junior ([Jared] Leto), the grandson of the previous owner; Burnham ([Forest] Whitaker), an employee of the residence’s security company; and Raoul ([Dwight] Yoak[u]m), a ski mask-wearing gunman recruited by Junior.” This is not exactly high-concept, is it.

If you want empty entertainment, go ahead and watch this film; it’s over in about one and a half hours, and you will go for a ride. Don’t let my spoilers stop you. But if you have much intelligence, it’ll seem about as unredeeming to older viewers as that big bag of chips you spy on the supermarket shelf before the holiday weekend, and which jumps into your carriage unbidden, because one weekend of going to hell with them surely won’t throw your body for a loop forever.

The three baddies, some comedy-ready

Burnham fairly soon is clear as the crook who is most ambiguous, most relatable to us unpretentious folk, in terms of being in on a bad-intentioned heist, but also having a good side; and by the end he is the most helpful crook, putting a bullet-aided end to the mayhem that threatens to go on much too long (both for the characters before us and for us the audience). He is played level-headedly enough by Forest Whitaker, a rather stocky Black actor, whose two differently sized eyes make him, per snap-judgment idiocy, “ripe to be an untrustworthy sort” (Whitaker’s roles in his long career have included a depiction of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland, for which he won an Oscar and many other awards). Movies have a way of using an actor’s physical quirks to mark him or her as the “eminent baddie,” even while some movies will play somewhat intelligently with our expectations, so that sometimes the different-eyed baddie turns out to have a heart of gold.

Burnham is also the big techno guy here, with a couple sizable bags of tools, since he is from the security company who had originally installed the house’s panic room. It’s interesting that, as the film heats up, his character—as is Stewart’s—is the only one of the main players whose behavior doesn’t cross over into histrionics. And it’s also their direct interaction, when he gives her an injection tied to her diabetic crisis, that we see one of the few truly human (non-cartoonish) exchanges in the film.

It’s a measure of how shallow this film consciously shapes itself that Burnham, one of the few not-entirely-two-dimensional characters here, makes a stab at self-reflection, and instead of the screenwriter giving him something quotable that people could mull over after viewing the movie, Burnham says something (to Stewart’s Sarah) banal like, “Sometimes things don’t work out as you want them to…”—and that seems about it. Yeah, like this movie.

Jared Leto, who seems the heist’s leader as “Junior,” partly because he was to inherit part of the treasure they’re after, is the mouthy asshole of the three baddies. He is a key spouter of the rapid, demanding comments as the crooks deal with thorny new challenges at various turns. In fact, the early scene in which all three crooks are on the ground floor talking among themselves, not least about the unexpected condition of there being people moved into this house already, seems a little too rapidly and toughly spoken to be followed in every detail (and I watched it, trying to listen carefully, twice). In general, this movie is tightly acted, but here things seem overdone in terms of tension and “snappishness”—an example of the movie trying to be hip about American hyper-action-readiness (which seems more a movie distillation that an echo of real-life virtuosity) but actually going too far in this regard.

Raoul, played by Yoakum, is the real evil one. First, the name: “Raoul”—no surname—sounds like a suspicious sort, no? And he always wears a ski mask. Plus, he’s packing heat, as we see early on. So, expect tough business from him.

He ends up usually being the one to talk most ruthlessly, and sometimes with a coolness or a hip humor that the truly sociopathic can have (at least in movies). We also find he’s a hideous coward, in that following his florid displays of ruthlessness toward others, when he gets his hand caught in the super-duper mechanized panic room door, he carries on in pain something awful, as if no one suffers like he does.

But what really ices the cake with him is near the end of the movie, when the over-the-top violence pours on: he’s been hit full-on with a sledgehammer, has fallen down a stairwell—and he keeps on coming, unstoppable like Jason from Friday the 13^th. He’s not just evil, he’s Austin Powers’ Dr. Evil–type evil, pronounced “ay-vul.” (Actually, his type of Big Nasty is so 2002; a modern ay-vul thug would never do anything so gauche as to stump around with a sledgehammer when on his last legs. Instead, he would be an online-reputation manager for a large company, gaming Internet search results. He would trade in Raoul’s head lacerations and crazed eyes for designer clothes and a calm air of entitlement.)

Some catcalls, and more sober notes

So this movie sounds like a self-parody to an extent—if it isn’t a cold manipulator of a movie—but is it aware of this? No. So we are left with a few notes I jotted during my viewings, some added to “with afterthought”—some were original “catcall” material—on specific little points of interest:

* Duct tape, here as in real life, seems Americans’ only true friend (along with dogs) (see End note 1)

* Slow motion is used to draw out suspense at one point (not bad)

* No screw-top wine for Meg as she self-medicates in an indulgent soak in a tub

* Burnham’s heart as well as attention to detail is shown in his first being clued to the presence of a family—seeing a night light in a bathroom

* When Stewart’s Sarah goes into diabetic shock, she seems cadaverous and, in her casual clothes, looks like a reject from Woodstock. Or, for comedy: “I haven’t felt this way since the Justin Bieber concert.” (See End note 2.)

* For that matter, when Dad, Stephen Altman, has arrived (not the most generous personality for a Big Pharma grandee), and he is bloodied following a brutal once-over at the hands of ay-vul Raoul, he looks like, if he worked in medical media, he could say, “I haven’t felt this way since I lost the Topamax account”

* Morse code with a flashlight outside the air-vent hole: a smart detail I remembered from my first viewing of the film in 2002

* Both the bad guys and, later, Meg make a major fixer-upper of this tony brownstone with all the smashing around

* Stewart, despite a slug in the face from Raoul near the end, looks surprisingly OK in the immediate aftermath

* In the coda scene, with mother and daughter checking house ads on a park bench, even as they show bruises from their harrowing night—haven’t they learned anything?

End notes

1. Groucho Marx is alleged to have said, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” Another famous quote that came to mind as I reviewed this film is something by Dr. Samuel Johnson, to the effect of, “He who makes a beast of himself with drink is thereby seeking to avoid the pain of being a man.” I tried to adapt this to a reading of Kristen Stewart, who acts with the neat modesty of a kid: “He who makes a beast of himself [like all the adult actors] with histrionic acting in genre pap is avoiding the pain of being an ever-hopeful youth [like Stewart].” Something along those lines….

2. As with any script that plays fast and loose with important details, this one muddies the waters about type 1 diabetes. We know Sarah has that, from the hanging on a thread, and the need for a “shot,” as she does/has. But other details? When Meg is with her in the panic room and hastily looks for “something sweet” for Sarah to eat in the rations there, this suggests her trying to treat Sarah’s hypoglycemia (abnormally low blood-sugar level). Later, Sarah needs a shot, which suggests she needs a quick dose of insulin, meaning she is at that point hyperglymic, i.e., has too much blood sugar in her system (due to insufficient insulin). For Meg to be bumbling around looking for a sweetie at one point, and for Sarah to be later in an emergency state requiring insulin, suggests a little ignorance (on Mother’s part only?) in keeping Sarah on balance as you would expect such educated people to exercise, leaving aside all aggravating factors like the crooks’ causing trouble. (I’m fussing a little over this partly because my father had type 1 diabetes and died indirectly in connection with it in 1970. He effectively enough handled his diabetes, including insulin shots, from 1956 to 1970. I was also afraid of coming down with type 1 diabetes in my late teens, and in an intriguing nexus of circumstances I can’t describe now, I took a glucose tolerance test in early 1984 when I was 22. I came out OK--I don't have diabetes, type 1 or 2.)

But also, consider the convulsiveness Sarah shows: not to fault Stewart so much (but more the director), this dramatization seems overwrought—one could almost joke she has “the mother of all episodes of constipation”—but I think her convulsiveness, for a diabetic, puts her a little beyond what a timely insulin shot might reverse. A booklet, Learning to Live with Diabetes, revised edition (Boston: Medicine In the Public Interest, Inc., 1988), notes that with symptoms of hyperglycemia including “…drowsiness[,] nausea and vomiting[,] headache…rapid breathing…loss of consciousness,” and convulsions aren’t mentioned (presumably because that would be even further into crisis territory, with the ones mentioned red flags enough), the treatment should be “Call your doctor or go to a hospital emergency room as soon as you notice symptoms” (p. 62) 

For another source, the 17^th edition of the Merck Manual (Whitehouse Station, N.J.: Merck Research Laboratories, 1999) remarks on the condition, arising from a state of type 1 diabetes not being fully under control, of diabetic ketoacidosis, which means “[m]etabolic acidosis [resulting] from the accumulation of ketones due to severely depressed insulin levels” (p. 177), symptoms for which include “polyuria, nausea, vomiting, and, particularly in children, abdominal pain” (p. 178). Convulsions aren’t mentioned, though what is mentioned is the possibility in untreated patients to “progress to coma” (p. 178)—which, in the movie, Sarah mentions as a possibility. Treatment includes, among other things, an italicized “Close physician supervision is required…” (p. 178).

Without delving into this area any further, consider Panic Room near the bottom of your list of sources on which to have realistic discussion of symptoms and proper treatment for an acute episode of hyperglycemia in a person with type 1 diabetes. And certainly don’t consider me the last authority on this; look here for information from the American Diabetes Association.

Movie break: A business addict gets into the addict business: American Gangster (2007), Part 1 of 2

A promising story on a novel twist on the Mafia tale, in a particular ferment of American Black subculture, leaves unanswered questions

[I’m trying my best to straddle a “white” sort of mode of discussion with “hipness” to the kind of culture partly reflected in this movie. If I seem like a “white man who can’t dance,” go check out Mitt Romney. A slight edit was done on 9/7/12, between asterisks. Part 2 appears on September 24.]

Main sections of this entry (so you may skip parts as desired):

I. A cop’s focus on a crook: A Martin Buber-type “I in the Thou”?

II. Technical aspects: How this feast was built

III. Frank Lucas: The heart of the matter

IV. Richie Roberts as a hero, and remaining questions

This movie is interesting for a number of reasons, which have to do with its elaborate plot, its production complexity, and a certain atypical quality it has with respect to the work of the director who made it.

Ridley Scott directed this, and it stars as the main character—a Black mafioso-of-sorts named Frank Lucas, in a screenplay based on a true story—Denzel Washington, who—as I only appreciated recently—was a main actor for Scott’s brother Tony, who died on August 19. I did not start this review in light of Tony’s death in any way, but it’s ironic that Tony Scott’s death happens when I was in the midst of preparing this review, because this movie, in a way, embodies an example—a couple, in fact—of how “Life is what happens when you make other plans.” This film’s rather seamy and dense story was shepherded in the preproduction phase by Brian Grazer, head of Imagine Entertainment (the same producer behind Blue Crush [see my August 21 review], A Beautiful Mind [2001], and plenty of other movies that typically aren’t in the dark veins of Mafia or heroin-trade stories). A different director was originally to helm the project, then the studio pulled the project. This almost was a disaster for Grazer. More of the production history will be described below.

I had originally wanted to preface this film with a brief comparison to two other films by esteemed directors, one of which may seem to be odd to compare it to: one was Topaz (1969) by Alfred Hitchcock, his biggest-budget film that is flawed in numerous ways (while he worked on it when old and rather sick), but is still interesting in part because of what the old master could still muster in his later life. Another comparison would have been to The Cotton Club (1984), whose direction started with someone else before being given to Francis Ford Coppola by producer Robert Evans. The Cotton Club also is interesting to consider as a busy film, with a few plot threads, late in a storied director’s career, which has some success despite its unwieldiness—which could roughly be a way to describe American Gangster. But due to constraints, let us go right to the film at hand.

I. A cop’s focus on a crook: A Martin Buber-type “I in the Thou”?

American Gangster is interesting and complicated to discuss, because (1) it is a complexly plotted gangster or Mafia movie one of whose sources of interest is how it was assembled on a photographic and editorial level, while it boasts entrancingly atmospheric production design; and (2) its development was complex, regarding its source story and its start-and-stop production history. The final script that was shot was apparently written with a heavy amount of fictional elements, despite the interesting quality (in broad outline) of the real-life story that inspired it; in fact, the movie has been the subject of strong controversy, including a lawsuit for defamation of Drug Enforcement agents (see the Wikipedia article on the movie, specifically the “Accuracy…” section late in the entry; see also my End note 1).

Yet, as one of its central points of interest, it is about the novel situation of a Black family functioning as a sort of Mafia family running an especially effective heroin smuggling and sales/distribution ring in the New York metropolitan area from about 1969 through about late 1974. (Note: Throughout this entry, as I do elsewhere in my blog, I use the term Black to refer to the race also commonly called African American today. I am not being racist or retrograde; the lower-cased “black” is still widely used today, including by Blacks; and I initial-capitalize the term to distinguish the race from a description. I also use the term echoing the historical fact that “Black” was the preferred term by the early 1970s, when Blacks had an especially accommodated self-respecting perspective in the U.S., as suggested in popular culture and in various political venues.)

As the film suggests, the Lucas family not only muscled in on heroin territory that had been the province of the Italian Mafia, but the film suggests it eventually dominated the Mafia’s business in this—though this latter point is subject to controversy (as suggested in the “Accuracy…” section of the Wikipedia article on the film). Incidentally, while this film has several stylistic echoes of and outright allusions to the film The French Connection (1971; see my May 24 entry), and while FC’s production style suggests that its time period was about 1970, when it was made, that film’s real-life source was in about 1961, when indeed organized crime seems to have been involved in heroin trade in New York, though the film doesn’t name the Mafia explicitly. Meanwhile, American Gangster is predominantly about the period 1969-75, which it is also meticulous in depicting in a surface way.

It is worth adding that, with all the signs of hipness the film goes to lengths to depict, the changes (during the later 1960s through the 1970s) in style, slang, tastes, and so on, as I recall from my own experience, happened fairly rapidly; it was almost as if broad tastes—a sense of “edge”—changed with just about every one or a few years. When films try to be historically accurate, it isn’t hard to err within this two-decade period. For instance, in Apocalypse Now, whose story from hints in the film takes place in about 1970, characters sometimes use slang terms that were from 1976-77, which always strike me as an anachronism—such as Chef saying to Clean, “Get down…!,” which was very much a 1976 term, and associated with the urban/disco scene, initially. In fact, as I’ll return to, American Gangster reflects a culture that was pretty solidly pre-disco (disco being a more synthetic, highly marketed “esthetic” by the later 1970s, and in a way being very much post–Vietnam War). Maybe people today wouldn’t be so concerned to have this sort of thing historically “in place,” but it does help to be historically precise when rooting the particularly febrile and edgy time in which this film’s story took place.

The “patriarch,” so to speak, of the Lucas family was a strong-willed, intelligent, quite ruthless man named Frank Lucas. If you didn’t know how to read this film, you would think he was being held up as a sort of ambiguous Black “Great Man,” on a par with Malcolm X, or some other colorful figures from Black American history. But make no mistake, this man is a cold criminal, and the film makes a conscientious effort to use him as a sort of “clinical case”—putting it in the “mythological” present tense—of a man who moves up in the Harlem gangster culture to develop a heroin smuggling and selling ring that not only in fact rivals the Italian Mafia but embodies the qualities of a disciplined, efficient, successful business.

Lucas—his heroin ring essentially rising and falling his own personal fate, as any “personality-driven” enterprise would—eventually meets his downfall at the hands of Richie Roberts, a dogged, self-driven New Jersey detective (and later lawyer and prosecutor) who is talented and tenacious in his own right. After he has helped bring down Lucas, Roberts eventually befriends Lucas, after the latter has been released from jail, and even serves as his defense attorney at one point. (This is the film’s story in the “pitch-style present tense.” The facts, in the past tense, as we will later see, seem to dictate that the Richie Roberts of the film is a fictional composite of several real-life professionals, at least in the investigation phase of the story. Roberts’ later involvement with Lucas when he was an attorney seems to have been more just himself, alone, conforming with the character-driven heroics of the story.)

This story ends up as the interesting study of certain types of male personalities that embody extreme concentration in their work and embraced idealisms—though one idealism is a sort of “crime ethos” shaped by business sense—in which an ultra-criminal is “matched” with a resourceful, savvy law-enforcement type who, with his honesty amid an environment of many cops on the take, becomes key to breaking the Lucas case. Further, after about early 1975, according to the film’s story, Lucas has evidently found he has nothing more to gain from being a criminal, and something to gain from being state’s evidence, and thus helps provide information to aid in the prosecution of cops on the take and/or such, according to the real-life Roberts on the DVD, and to a very recent article related to Lucas. Also, later Roberts befriends Lucas as if (I interpret) Lucas has no one else in the world, in power, to stand up for the somehow respectable sort he is than the cop who was so determined to break Lucas’ poisonous crime organization.

You could say, without too much of a stretch, that in opting to stand up for Lucas, Roberts, who is Jewish, applied a sort of ethical approach to Lucas, based on philosopher Martin Buber, “seeing the ‘I’ in the ‘Thou,’”—not that Roberts would have felt there was a criminal element in himself, but that he could see the identifiable man within Lucas—who needed his legal rights defended, at the very least.

The main problem we are left with, in this dense, fancily crafted, provocative movie, is to understand to what extent it is flawed, particularly in its containing fictional elements, which lead us to ask, If the original story was so interesting, and instructive about the wonder of human nature, why was it necessary to add so many fictional elements? (Even in the broad description I just made, I took pains to indicate fiction/myth as opposed to documented fact, and along these lines, I still find the movie a tough puzzle to “crack,” though as a story just to take in with “suspension of disbelief,” it is impressive enough.)

II. Technical aspects: How this feast was built

Elaborate development and preproduction

Let me start with technical discussion, which you can skip over if you feel it would be tedious, but which I think is important for understanding a possible reason (or potentiating conditions) for this film becoming flawed in some key ways.

There were a few principal stewards present early on who stuck with the film later. Primary was Brian Grazer, of Imagine Entertainment, who had passion for the project, as shown in DVD commentary. (References for some claims here will be made with abbrevations within the text; see at the end of this entry for fuller information.) According to the Wikipedia article on the film, his firm and Universal Pictures bought the film rights, in 2000, to “The Return of Superfly,” an article by Mark Jacobson in New York magazine about the rise and fall of Lucas. (I don’t know how factually accurate the article was, but one presumes it didn’t have much incentive to stray far from the truth, aside from technical errors by the journalist; one would think there was no interest in it being made into a movie when it was first prepared. End note 2.)

By 2002 (Wiki), screenwriter Steven Zaillian, who wrote screenplays of such esteemed movies as Schindler’s List (1993; see my July 20 entry) and Gangs of New York (2002), had a 170-page script (originally titled Tru Blu and first drafted in 2000 [DVD]). He showed this in 2002 to director Ridley Scott, who wanted to make two films of it (Wiki). But by 2004, the director attached to the project was Antoine Fuqua, with Denzel Washington attached to play Frank Lucas (Wiki). Benicio del Toro was negotiated with to play Richie Roberts (Wiki).

(How much Nicholas Pileggi, a producer on this film and previously responsible for scripts for Goodfellas [1990] and Casino [1995], was involved in this movie’s script development, I don’t know, but from DVD commentary, he seems to have had strong interest in Lucas since at least the 1990s.)

Fuqua was fired by the studio in October 2004 on the basis of “creative differences” (Wiki), and a new director was looked at; but then the project was canceled in view of time constraints and creative issues (Wiki). The cancellation cost the studio $30 million (Wiki); meanwhile, Grazer was devastated for a while (DVD). Then he sought to revive the project (DVD), by March 2005 (Wiki). Long story short, Ridley Scott was enlisted to direct, by February 2006 (Wiki); his being involved led to Washington signing on again (DVD). For Richie Roberts, Russell Crowe was approached, and was interested when he heard Scott was directing (DVD); when Russell asked Scott if it was OK that they be paired again on a project (following their A Good Year [2006]), an apparently marketing-related concern of Crowe’s, Scott said why not, and Crowe was in (DVD). Scott was also going to stick with Zaillian’s earlier script (Wiki), which had been reworked in intervening years between 2002 and 2006 (Wiki).

Principal photography started in July 2006 (Wiki); the production schedule, despite the envisioned number of locations, seems to have been truncated overall, one would guess because the studio had spent a lot of money on preproduction already and didn’t want any more time or money wasting. Meanwhile, Scott found the production parameters a little daunting; with 180 locations (DVD, Wiki) and an average of 40-50 setups a day (DVD), he wondered, how do this? (DVD). “Basically, you just get going,” he answered his own question (DVD). He had methods for making his work more efficient (see following subsection).

The Wikipedia article has a good deal more details on the labyrinthine preparation of this film; I tried to stick within an account where the Wikipedia article and DVD making-of material meshed.

The involvement of Grazer, Pileggi, and Scott also would imply artistic and story strength to this film, but how and why a host of fictional elements got incorporated, to the extent they would become apt to stir controversy, is hard to determine. That is, filmmakers will incorporate fictional details to a story “based on a true story” quite often, but in this case, especially when you craft a story with such remarkable elements as an American Black seeking out pure heroin from the source in Indochina, and his having heroin shipped within false bottoms in coffins on Army planes, it would seem to make more sense that this was true rather than fictional. This isn’t simply a matter of avoiding liability to lawsuits for defamation or the like, but of having a story that is “marketable” in good part on the basis of its being “true.” On the other hand, it’s true that in inserting fictional elements, the film’s makers didn’t think about how much would be too much. And meanwhile, what is puzzling to us is, how much really is fictional?

But let’s move on, as Scott would say.

Scott’s efficient method in assembling scenes, explaining how a complex, busy movie was packaged into “edible form” yet still puts us viewers on our mettle

To understand an important role Ridley Scott played in this film, as a sort of director who, here, was more of a cinematographer and storyboarding/editing “engineer,” let me explain my understanding of the different ways, generally, in which multi-shot scenes can be filmed and then edited into a whole. In this area, Scott deviates (though I would think he’s hardly alone in this among modern directors) from what was once a highly craftmanly way to make mainstream movies, which partly may reflect how he fits in with changing times.

Say you have a scene with actor Tom Cruise talking to actor Alan Cumming at a hotel check-in desk. (I am thinking of a scene relatively late in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut [1999].) Make it, for illustration purposes, really simple: you have (A) a frontal shot of Cumming, then (B) a side shot of the two men, then (C) a frontal shot of Cumming, then (D) a frontal shot of Cruise, then (E) a side shot of the two men, then, lastly, (F) a frontal shot of Cumming. The way that Stanley Kubrick filmed, representing his craftsmanly nature (and the way some directors still film, though this probably varies with budget for an individual director), he would do multiple takes of each of (A), (B), and so on to (F), each one filmed separately with one camera. (In the real making of the scene, Cumming said that what should have been a simple enough scene with its simple enough shots took an awfully long time with the many takes Kubrick had done. This comment was included in an interview available on YouTube a couple years ago or so.) Now, the editor (and director, if they work together; some directors seem to leave their editors alone with this) assembles what will show up in the film (maybe with specific direction from the director on which takes to use): (A) take 6, (B) take 4, (C) take 9, (D) take 7…and so on. There may be tweaking with a take (for shot (A) or such) replaced by another take at a later editing stage, but this is how a series of takes are selected and edited together to make up a scene.

As an example of how fussy Kubrick could be, in what was apparently the most notorious film he made for this type of practice, The Shining (1980), the scene in which Scatman Crothers (as the hotel cook Dick Hallorann [sp?]) and Danny Lloyd (as Danny Torrance) are talking over ice cream in the kitchen was filmed in the one-shot-setup method, and one particular shot of Crothers—as you can hear from Steadicam inventor/operator Garrett Brown commenting on a recent DVD issue of the film—went to 170+ takes.

Now what Ridley Scott has done with filming is quite different. As he has done for multiple movies, he will have more than one camera set up to capture the different “sides” of a scene. So, for the shots (A) through (F) noted above, he might have three cameras, each capturing the frontal-Cummings, frontal-Cruise, and side-view-of-both shots (of course, the cameras would have to be placed so they don’t film each other). There would also be just a very few takes. So the scene would be assembled from a relatively small number of takes, which had all been filmed within a short timeframe with respect to each other.

As Scott remarks in one of his DVD during-the-movie commentaries (I think for Thelma & Louise), the advantage of this is that it keeps the performances fresher. One would say they would be more spontaneous, looser. Also, if the cameras are hand-held, this would give the whole scene a certain cinema verité quality—not only “fresher” acting but a feel as if you are in on something happening in real life.

For a story like that of American Gangster, with all the street busy-ness and so on, this approach is apropos. Also, it would have been a practical necessity, because, as Scott says during the making-of doc with that film, when there were originally 180 locations, and an expected multiple sides to a scene, in order to fit all the shots/scenes into the production schedule, one had to be efficient. So, as he says at one point, he tries to utilize different angles in certain specific locations to fit “new scenes” into the same general location, to save on expense and eating up time with moving around. And in filming exchanges between people, it also saves on time, money, etc., by having multiple cameras going at once to capture all sides of a scene in minimal time, again with few takes per shot. This helps explain how the film can seem so spontaneous—and how, even with some exchanges, you feel as if two shots—one of one man, another of another—can actually seem from the same take (which they may well have been), since the personal interaction seems so realistically hooked up from either side.

This explains how the busy script could be articulated into filming that captured what precision in the acting it could, and include a certain spontaneity. Then the main challenge, or hope, was that the acting, speaking, was effective enough, and the plot was clearly enough conveyed, that the rapidly moving through scenes and situations that the movie does could be “apprehended” well enough by the viewer that his attention could be kept on the story. I have to say that it took multiple viewings for me to really appreciate a fair amount of what was going on.

Grazer’s praise for Scott, indirectly explaining the visual brio employed to convey the dense story

Brian Grazer was impressed with Scott’s ability to translate into visual form the complex script, with its production challenges. “Ridley captures dimensionality,” Grazer notes (DVD); presumably this means a sense of spatial relations (to flesh out a location) as well as the interrelations of characters (for their dramatic purposes) in their moving in space. This sort of thing is certainly to be noted intuitively in the film by viewers; perhaps it represents a triumph of getting the dense material on the script into more accessible form, in Grazer’s view.

Scott, for his part, sums up that on a given production day, “[We have] 45 minutes to set up, [we] use several cameras, [do] two to three takes, and move on” (DVD).

Scott “has a large ability to graph large chunks” of the material and “get us in that world. I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Grazer (DVD).

Josh Brolin, who plays the seamy, payoff-prone New York Detective Trupo, says that Scott “is manic in a way that’s not destructive,” and he’s very collaborative (DVD).

Grazer: Scott “gave propulsion, force to a narrative that is spread out…[with] multiple viewpoints” (DVD).

In short, Scott’s being workmanlike (and being creative secondary to this) helped get the fancy script into a coherent enough—if still complex—visually mediated story, and this shows how the film is visually sumptuous—with the intricate atmosphere suiting the sense of “old infrastructure infected by seedy goings-on,” which is something seen in the more Spartan French Connection.

There were 47 days of shooting (DVD) before the production crew went to Thailand to film allegedly historically important scenes in November (DVD, Wiki). This would suggest 47 shooting days were spread from July through October.

Music/“color” puts us into a time

A few notes on style and cultural bearings. The costumes, art direction, and much of the music are evocative of the early 1970s. I think this provides an esthetic patina to the film that helps convey the story: even while the Vietnam War still raged and provided attention-snaring news on TV, the Harlem streets could have the humid, seedy texture that seem a perfect fog to shroud nefarious goings-on like a concerted drug trade and cops doing shakedowns.

I remember a lot of the Black music of that time, and in a way I am fond of it in retrospect—some was prominent enough on the old WABC radio, with its high wattage (50,000 watts?) making it heard over several states, and its “canned” mono/reverbed sound and gimmicks and the edgy wit of its DJs, especially Dan Ingram. It may seem a little hard for young readers to understand now, but in the early 1970s, while average people’s tastes did diverge between categories (still fairly recognizable today) like pop, “album-oriented rock” (which became a radio format by about 1975), soul and funk, country and western, and so on, the mainstream media still channeled the bulk of different styles of music along a relatively small number of “conduits.” And because the New York culture had a large minority presence anyway, it wasn’t uncommon to hear on the likes of WABC soul and funk-type things (though they were more “mainstream-oriented”) along with more white-audience–aimed fare. Granted, American Gangster focuses on dance music and the like that may have been more typical of clubs and certain urban venues, but in its early-1970s style, it is hardly foreign to me. Meanwhile, in part because the pop-music market has become so very fragmented since the 1980s, I am quite unfamiliar with a lot of rap and hip hop (group names are familiar to me, but particular music is not)—and anyway, these Black genres seem to have been long relegated to certain cultural venues anyway, as a recent Sunday (August 26) article in New Jersey’s Star-Ledger well described.

Various Black groups in the early ’70s became familiar on the radio. A select few include the musical group the Isley Brothers (which had started by the early 1960s, and which early on included Jimi Hendrix), which had hits in the early 1970s, and Isaac Hayes (e.g., “Shaft”). Stevie Wonder with his concept albums including such “dramatizing” songs like “Living for the City” were almost classic soundtracks of the cultural time. A little later, the Ohio Players, a funk group that had started by the early 1960s, had a couple hits by 1975 (which is slightly after this film’s period), “Fire” and “Love Rollercoaster,” the latter of which was a funk vamp (it sounds good in stereo, I think) that hinted at the disco to come very shortly.

Not only does this film include Sam & Dave’s relatively innocuous “Hold On! I’m Coming,” but it offers momentary fun with stuff that seems more attuned primarily to Black tastes: the more funk-like stuff seems reminiscent of James Brown and, perhaps, the more arty jazz of Miles Davis, as in his Bitches Brew. (A later piece of club music in the film sounds a bit like Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” which didn’t come out until 1977.)

If I sound a little naïve here, I don’t know all this music as well as others would; but the fact I know it as much as I do at all shows how Black culture suffused a wider “popular” consciousness in the early ’70s more than it, arguably, has done since. Suffice it to say that the music roots the film in a historical period that today’s racists might find a “suitably ugly hallmark,” but to me the music takes us back, with a sense of some fond reminiscence, to a milieu, in all its purple glory, that had as much evocative color as it consorted with social turmoil and occasional disreputable matters (e.g., crime on the streets).

From a purer standpoint, it could be said that the period represented the height of the jazz influence on the wider arrays of pop music—jazz being a root of both the most edgy rock of the time and of the Black genres. That is, not only was specifically Black music enjoy a certain ferment and popularity in those days, but even rock music arguably had its most floridly visceral and artistic developments—such as, for one measure, the most energetic jazz-like drumming among—just in Englishmen—Keith Moon, Ginger Baker, John Bonham, and Mitch Mitchell.

Note: Jay-Z, the rap artist, wrote a concept album based on this film, according to the Wikipedia article on the film. He seems to have been so entranced by it that he felt moved to make a set of musical “back stories” for different scenes. That’s interesting, because I felt challenged to come “esthetically to terms with” the film in what seems generally the same way, and I don’t think I would if I didn’t remember the urban-arising culture from the early ’70s reflected in the music I could hear on WABC; and I and Jay-Z share about as much in common, culturally, as Donny Osmond and Al Sharpton. On the other hand, I think it’s imperative, or at least enlightening, for whites in this country to know how to enjoy Black music.

Now to the source of more ambiguity and controversy surrounding the film.

III. Frank Lucas: The heart of the matter

[This section isn't meant to sound as self-righteous as it might seem at times.]

All this technical discussion reflects this it is interesting to see how a movie of such scope, complexity, achievement, and flaws came into being, especially with the big names involved. A key reason for its being thrust into production was the money already spent on preproduction under its first envisioned director; the studio understandably could have felt that with as much preparation and expense as had been incurred, why not move ahead, even though the shooting schedule would be a bit rushed.

What makes the flaws a big problem primarily lies with the character and history of Frank Lucas. First, on his character.

The story the film lays out is interesting enough: amid a sprawling, grim situation, there is some unexpected admirable character traits at work in the muck—though the positive character efforts lie with Richie Roberts (while we remember the fictional elements to his character, as I noted earlier) for the vast bulk of the film, and appear in Lucas only late. But let’s be clear what Lucas’ story is: he is not of the more modern gang type of the Crips and the Bloods, or the more style-oriented rap/gangsta subculture in the U.S. today. Neither is he a sort of Malcolm X, though apparently New York Times critic Manohla Dargis felt that he was positioned as a sort of “[B]lack resistance” figure (Wiki). He is, as various commentators on the DVD say (and as the Roberts character spells out in the film), a sort of mob boss with his mob family working under him—like (I interpret) the fictional Corleone family, or the real-life Gambino family. But Lucas and his family are Black, working in Harlem and elsewhere in the New York metro area—and not of least significance, they are preying on addicts within their own racial group.

So while Frank Lucas, especially as portrayed in the self-possessed, classy performance by Denzel Washington, seems a magnetic, capable leader, he is a crime leader. The stark paradox of his “business” is conveyed in standard mob-film ways—such as in cross-cutting of the type we see in all three of the Godfather films between some solemn middle-class activity like a baby’s christening and some obviously appalling mob rubouts and such. Frank can charm his fiancee yet in an interposed shot we can glimpse his (memory of a) coldhearted killing of a competitor.

Now we know (not to trivialize the matter) that in more normal psychological contexts, men can have a way of “compartmentalizing” their areas of life in order to keep competent amid dissonant demands on them (Robert S. Weiss, Staying the Course: The Emotional and Social Lives of Men Who Do Well at Work [New York: The Free Press, 1990]). But in a Mafia leader’s case, this “compartmentalization” is taken to an extreme; his murderous behavior in some settings is walled off from his being a gentlemanly paterfamilias at home. We can’t help but regard such a character in awe, while not in admiration. We may ask, can he be redeemed? This is one challenge posed by Frank, very much similar to a (fictional) Vito or Michael Corleone, as would have been by a (real-life) John Gotti.

No doubt Frank Lucas, as Denzel Washington reflects on him, had—and still has, as he is alive—an unusual strength of personality. Washington says he is a “force of nature” and can have you working for him by the end of the day. The real Richie Roberts says Lucas was “tough and smart,” making him an especially formidable criminal to bring to justice. But as ends up happening in the rushed final scenes of the movie, Lucas is not only brought to justice, but turns state’s evidence, and (we are fully told in a DVD extra) even later is defended in court by the same Roberts who helped bring his crime empire down, once Roberts had become a defense attorney.

When, on the DVD, we hear the real Lucas speak, we have cause to ask a central question about him. He (wheelchair bound, and seeming in his seventies) has a Southern Black accent, and shows no advanced education; he elides his words, with a little dose of Black idiom and pacing, cramming his words together. He requires you to listen hard to get what’s he saying, though it turns out to be a compact amalgam of fairly regular-guy conceptualization and business-smarts analysis. The central question is, how did a man this smart get to be so bad? If he was going to lead his plentiful brothers and cousins, all of more average intelligence, into a sort of family business, why not into a legitimate business? Were social and economic conditions in the late 1960s so bad for Blacks that he felt he had no other choice?

It’s remarkable that, for a business model (according to the film), he set something up that was more efficient for cutting out middlemen, which both ensured him more profit and ensured—as would be peculiar to the heroin trade—a purer product (with fewer middle-men meaning fewer chances to cut the product down). One net result, that addicts who bought his product were all the more likely to be hooked, had a twofold consequence: (1) assuring him steady (and an increasing number of) customers and (2) wreaking havoc through the damage and occasional death-dealing of addiction. This was like a nightmare version of a sort of business linking entrepreneurial zeal (even the near-foolhardy courage to [allegedly] travel to *the Golden Triangle [historically straddling Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam]* during the Vietnam War to track down a supply of heroin from the source) to a distribution system that was all the more effective for working in the front-ready infrastructure and “center of the world” cache of New York City and its nearby urban areas. A similar business today that could “hide in near-plain sight” and have such panache might be a Ponzi scheme being operated under the color of a portentous association with New York, or some other New York–oriented scam.

Lucas’ rise—and paying periodic tribute to his mentor, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, a sort of debonair Harlem gangster who was (arguably) less lethal than Lucas would turn out to be—seems like a somewhat banal version of how other notorious leaders arise, like Stalin rising on the back of the legacy of Lenin. It almost seems a self-parody that Johnson, in an opening scene, muses on the increasing soullessness of U.S. business, which Lucas presumably “imbibes at his knee”—when we later see what kind of business Lucas starts up.

That Lucas had a sense of destiny, and a way of marshalling his personal resources—though also a potential for sociopathy—is seen in an interesting personal-history fact mentioned in the DVD commentary, and not in the film, which latter tends not to look too much at Lucas’ “inner” personality other than in his operating as a businessman and discreet family man. Lucas had a point at which he engaged in a sort of mental exercise (whether once or more often, is not said)—which Washington calls “backtracking”—where he removed distractions from his life, apparently holed up in a dark, empty room, and arrived at appreciating what was essential to him, including the teachings of Bumpy Johnson. It sounds, if I may invoke musty philosophy, like a exercise of “Cartesian reductionism”—that if, following Rene Descartes, putting doubt in everything you had understood or put faith in as true, arrived at what you could understand as irreducibly, self-evidently true (“I think, therefore I am”) and building up on that footing to a true understanding of aspects of the world and man’s place in it. (You’d have to take a philosophy course to understand what this is, if you don’t.) As Lucas himself says, after you have removed the distractions, “if you really, really think about” what is important, you can do anything.

This sounds like a mystical episode for a man who had felt bereft of any source of value in his life after Bumpy died—rather like a cultist whose leader is suddenly gone. What Lucas arrived at resolving to do with his life (with his heroin business) seems like a sociopath’s choice, of course. But we end up seeing a portrait of a man, through the film’s labyrinthine intrigue and evocative sultry environs in the societally-stressed early 1970s, about whom we again must ask, If he could end up being great, why not doing something healthy and supportive of his community? The fact that, as Pileggi notes in DVD commentary, Lucas ends up being an adherent of American business ideals in a certain purist way, and we can add that this is something of an ironic comment on American society, similar to The Godfather, when Michael and Kay are talking in a coming-to-terms manner, and she says that senators and the like don’t have people killed as Michael’s father does, and Michael says, “Now who’s being naïve?” If American business practice is so holy, can’t a hardened crook “redeem” himself by embracing it too? No, we say; American business practice is a tool, and any tool can be used to bad ends. We must ask, What value does it serve to enable a good life?

IV. Richie Roberts as a hero, and remaining questions

It is in the form of Richie Roberts that the redemptive character-element of the movie (or the angel aiming toward resolution, so to speak) slowly drills its way along. In his story braided with Lucas’, this cop whose ostracism from corrupt law enforcement organizations—peers being on the take and thus seeming like an analogue of the crooked Mafia that Lucas sets up—leaves Roberts (with his honorable interest in serving the law, complete with sneaked-in law school on his off-hours) to be the cop in one of the best positions, and most motivated, to track down whoever is at the heart of the lethal heroin ring he has been tasked with investigating, that heart turning out to be Lucas. Roberts’ former police partner has been killed after becoming addicted to “Blue Magic,” Lucas’ brand-named potent heroin; this presumably further steels Roberts’ resolve to get to the bottom of the havoc Lucas is wreaking.

Though Roberts has family life that is messy, with a bitter child-custody battle, and suggests him to be a sort of Popeye Doyle, far and away married to his work (the Wikipedia article suggests that the real Roberts objected to this fictionalized element, because he never had children; see also End note 2), Roberts’ seriousness makes him the key “Lucas-seeking missile” that brings Lucas to account. (The amount of private-life foibles and messing around attributed to Roberts in the film seems a little overdone. Once, there is a even chance for unexpected comedy: when he appears to be having sex with his female attorney in a kitchen, she says, “F**k me like a lawyer, not a cop”—and we viewers can ask, Is that the only choice she has?)

The larger story is a parable of sorts about two (arguable) geniuses whose roles in life potentiate their eventually becoming entwined: a genius of a ruthless Black mafioso and a cop with messy personal life whose tough adherence to his honest professional perspective makes him the hero of this story.

This film became quite complex for me to discuss; I don’t quite know why, other than it turned out to be seductive esthetically, promising and admirable thematically, and with potential for some allusions to real-life issues. But the last qualm we have—and it’s big—is how far this film strays from reality, and whether it was necessary for the story to contain so much fiction. And on that, I don’t have a good answer.

Here is where the history of Frank Lucas, not his character alone, raises controversy, and that is outside the film’s story and its integrity and value as a genre work of art. It could be said that the real Lucas provides some solid enough footing for a story of the somewhat embellished type that was made; but when the story makes some allegations about some serious matters concerning law-enforcement entities or the Army, we are in a more “political” area in which fact-finding becomes important, but (to me, so far) is a hard area to work with.

The Wikipedia articles on the film and on Frank Lucas seem to contain identical material on the controversy surrounding this film’s story, as if some Wikipedia contributor(s) made a thorough effort to try to set the record straight. Despite the staunch comments in the lawsuit-related and controversy-reflective material, I am left with a question about so broad an issue as what percentage of the film is fiction? Fifty percent? More? If so much, why make the film? Or, at least, why market it originally—as apparently was done—as if it was based (not just “loosely based on” or “inspired by”) on a true story?

The original Lucas story might have been interesting simply for its not only being novel but true, offering lessons about human nature to that extent. But why tart it up so much? OK, the Richie Roberts family stuff might have made for a more crowd-pleasing movie. But why fabricate a lot of Lucas’ life? Indeed, how much of this part of the film’s story is untrue?

With The Godfather, we know we are dealing with fiction, but we can relate the fiction to real life judiciously. With The French Connection, especially if we listen to director William Friedkin’s during-the-movie comments, we see how real life had to be boiled down to make an accessible film story, where the amount of fictionalization doesn’t matter so much. But the story of Frank Lucas, as described in an “elevator pitch,” is more edifying for being true to life. What use do we have for a largely fictionalized Lucas story (aside from it being a kind of Scarface, which incidentally I never saw)?

We have an entertaining movie, but if the film is mostly fiction, the semi-tragedy of a capable Black man becoming a master criminal via American business ideals may seem something of a lark, or a cheeky exercise of grandstanding—somewhat similar to the film’s minor contention of Lucas’ heroin being shipped via Army planes—if we don’t know, as we do more with the story of a Malcolm X, to what extent the spectacular tale we see actually had its seeds in the real life of our troubled nation’s growth.

More on this issue later, in a shorter Part 2.

End notes

1. In the area of credibility of the film’s story, I will prepare a Part 2 to this entry’s Part 1 (Part 2 will be much shorter!). A title card near the end of the film, according to a couple sources, refers to (as what would apparently later be the aggrieved parties) “New York City’s Drug Enforcement Agency” (see this ABC News piece), but the plaintiffs in the lawsuit (which was filed in U.S. District Court) were apparently from the U.S. (?) Drug Enforcement Administration (see ABC News reference just cited). This is a temporarily tricky area to get clear on, and this isn’t my final word on who the aggrieved parties who sued were.

2. An article that took this film to task, in The Toronto Star, in January 2008 has Jacobson quoted as saying, “The magazine piece is a presentation of this guy’s story and that’s what he had to say”—i.e., it echoed Lucas’ story and didn’t opt to verify his claims. The same article also describes Richie Roberts’ character as an amalgam of different detectives and prosecutors.

References

Wiki = Wikipedia article for American Gangster.

DVD = 2008 DVD of the film.

Getting bearings: My time with CommonHealth, 2004-06, Part 1 of 2: When the Ferguson division was still exemplary

[See my June 28 blog entry on my concerns about confidentiality. “Confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred to are numbered per the criteria listed in that June 28 entry. Also, as noted in my July 3 blog entry, where appropriate, I can refer to “data on file” (or “DOF”; this term usually, in typical industry parlance, refers to information that is in the possession of the Big Pharma company; but I make adapted use of the term here), which will usually signify documents I have copies of; some may be drawn from the Internet, and others not. This entry was edited slightly on August 27, with the edit noted between asterisks. Also note (added 12/18/12): The term "medical media" refers to medical advertising/promotions, not to genuine medical academic publishing.]

I. Preface—2001 through 2004

The period from May 2001 through July 2003 could be considered a honeymoon time I had with CommonHealth, and it included the longest continuous stretch of time (about eight months) that I had there, from November 2002 through July 2003. (See my blog entries of July 5 and 16 on a prelude to, and the latter part of, this period.) If I were to get a taste of the best, and most substantial, of this company, this would have been the period in which to do it.

Except for stints at Quantum in later 2003 and Xchange in early 2004, my next significant length of time at CommonHealth was in the Adient division, for about two months in 2004 (April-June). This stint was through the placement agency “The Gary Laverne Group,” which I had signed on with in April; Adient was its first work of note—or of any kind, I think—for me.

Whatever else you want to say about the period I had with CommonHealth that ultimately comprised 2001-04 (and of course I worked, through placement agencies, for numerous other medical-media firms in this time, such as Torre Lazur), I wouldn’t have said it represented a downward trend to hell, either in terms of how one company operated or how the industry as a whole was getting to be. And as a practical matter, you always took what opportunities you could, and CommonHealth usually fit the bill well in meeting my needs in this regard. Also, in terms of quality and in general, as I’ve said in my entry “Sudden end of an idyll…” (July 16), CommonHealth seemed, or I hypothesized it was, the best place to get into, especially as to how professional it usually was. The main negative of any sort that I began to encounter, after about summer 2003, is that it seemed harder to get in to CommonHealth for any significant length of time (such as two or three months that could represent a real shot in the arm financially).

Why I changed agencies, and how my freedom to work at CommonHealth improved. By late winter 2004, I stopped working through Horizon Graphics. The reason was simply that “The Gary Laverne Group” came through with more regular work. (I was tipped off to the existence of GLG by Jen C., when I happened to stop by the Wayne CommonHealth office building in early 2004.) What did this mean in terms of CommonHealth? As it happened, by late winter 2004, my involvement with Horizon Graphics represented my near-inability to get work at CommonHealth, since Horizon went virtually dormant after three of us temps (and Horizon) were no longer used by MBS/Vox in summer 2003, and other work that I got through Horizon at CommonHealth was so sparse. But once I began to work through GLG, my freelance work via a placement agency began to become more regular again, and I would have sizable chunks of time at CommonHealth through GLG.

Any stigma attached to me? How did lengths of time working improve? Did anyone at CommonHealth think my association with GLG reflected positively on me? Hard to say, but it would have been silly for them to think so. Contrarily, if anyone there dismissed Horizon as “no good anymore,” then would this person have thought that for a former Horizon employee like me to come back to CommonHealth as a GLG worker meant I was a tainted wolf coming in through sheep’s clothing? That would have been silly, too. Of course, these placement agencies did nothing for you in terms of training; how you were as a worker was due to your own skills and long-term experience.

As it happened, GLG was a better placement firm for me than Horizon, for about three years (2004-06), and it did get me into CommonHealth again; but I would never have a long spell at CommonHealth (like that of 2002-03) through GLG, and my work at CommonHealth through GLG in some years could become surprisingly slight and scattered, such as tiny stints in 2005 and a several-week stint in 2006. I think this just reflected the luck of the draw, not any value judgments that were made about me at CommonHealth that led to my being kept on a short leash of small stints, or such.

How did the pay situation change? Was I entering a risky zone with this? Further, over the longer term, I think I made more money per year through GLG than through Horizon. GLG’s hourly fees (at least my pay rates) were generally higher than Horizon’s. How anyone at CommonHealth looked at this fact, or GLG’s fees in general, I’m not sure; but as what looks initially like a sui generis situation, the situation in late 2006 where GLG was being delayed payment for my work at MBS/Vox (see my first July 9 and August 1 entries) clearly is telling in terms of what CommonHealth was willing to do with a contractor firm like GLG, and I think reflected a more strategic way of doing things than any particular opinion about me as a worker.

Story about Adient deferred. I am not posting a blog entry (though it is drafted) on my experience at the CommonHealth division of Adient in 2004. (Adient was the successor name for what was called Ferguson 2000 and had been located in Little Falls, N.J., when I was interviewed there in 1995, and later was moved to the CommonHealth complex in Wayne Township, N.J., which is where I worked at it in 2004; see my June 22 blog entry.) This story is illustrative in one unusual way, which I defer comment on; but in another way my Adient stint was notable as the longest continuous stint I had at CommonHealth until 2010, except perhaps for my stint at Ferguson in late 2004.  

II. My first time at Ferguson: Set up in an unusual way

In late 2004, I had my first stint at Ferguson, or what might still have been called at the time Thomas Ferguson Associates. Of course, I got this through GLG. In recent times I tried to recall whether I had worked there earlier, say in 2003, but I don’t think I did. And how this 2004 stint started is interesting.

For some time, even while I was with placement agencies (I know I did this when with GLG), I sent tickler resumes to one or two people at CommonHealth. This may seem odd, but the reason was to facilitate my getting work through the placement agency when I felt it wasn’t doing enough for me, or, probably the more relevant impetus, I was in strong need of income and the work wasn’t there when needed. Though some may say it was GLG’s role to be sending “ticklers” or otherwise trying to get me work and therefore it was falling down on its job, I would say, That’s up to someone else to have that opinion; all I know is that, while I more or less assumed GLG was in a general way scouting for work for me, it still made sense for me to trigger getting it my own way, due to how catch-as-catch-can work in the media industry was, as I’d got it through GLG and as I’d found over my long experience anyway. And the bottom line is, this technique did work, to both GLG’s and my benefit, I believe with more than one client.

In any event, I know I sent a tickler resume or two to Karen Smaldone, the head editor at Ferguson. How I found out her name, I’m not sure, or maybe I just sent them to “Editorial Department” or such at Ferguson. (Whether I sent another tickler to another division of CommonHealth in 2003-04, I’m not sure; I know that by 2006, I was sending such to Mark K., a vice president or the like from whom I got numerous responses, who was at the Xchange division where I’d worked in sporadically in 2001-04.)

Anyway, GLG got me in to work at Ferguson, and Karen Smaldone had asked for me specifically, I found. When I spoke to her, she mentioned having received my resume, and noted that I’d worked at AB Bookman, where she also had worked years in the past (I had never overlapped with her; if she had worked there, it was probably before I was there, which would have been before February 1992).

Karen’s valuing me for having worked at AB Bookman was heartening and unusual: this evidently meant she saw me as able to do solid hands-on editing, and it was very rare in my overall experience that anyone in the medical-media realm actually reached out to me so consciously on the basis of my solidly traditional 1990s editorial work.

(By the way, at least one other person who had worked at AB Bookman later worked for CommonHealth: Libby L., an art/production person, who was at AB in 1992 when I came on board—I was actually hired to replace him at AB, which was all the odder for my positioning myself as an editor, not as an “art” worker—actually, a paste-up artist was what AB wanted. AB’s owner Jacob Chernofsky replaced Libby, who had been a full-timer, with me as a part-timer doing paste-up in Libby’s old position, and proofreading, which was my forte then. Libby turned out to be an art/production person at Xchange and/or Quantum for about a decade or so—and when I saw him when I was first at CommonHealth, in a situation in which we could cross paths in 2001 and/or 2002, he didn’t recognize me. This was just as well, because he was bitter when he was let go from AB, and maybe he wouldn’t have had the fondest memory of me, not that I was responsible for his losing his AB job.)

I was at Ferguson in 2004 for several weeks, starting before and ending after the 2004 presidential election. I’m not sure if it was for as long as two months; it may have been more like six weeks.

            General characteristics of Ferguson

Ferguson was an unusual division, which is worth noting at this point. An originally separate medical-ad agency, it was the flagship division of CommonHealth, a fact the company still noted in some fashion in press releases at least as late as 2007. (The wording in a press release of October 28, 2007, which I retrieved online October 27, 2010 [DOF], describes Ferguson as “the founding professional advertising and promotion agency of CommonHealth.”) The building it was in, in Lanidex Plaza, Parsippany, also housed the CommonHealth administrative offices through 2006. [CC #3]

I think it seemed a bit odd (when I got there) that it had taken me about three years, from the time I started working at divisions of CommonHealth through placement agencies, to finally get to Ferguson; but I think by 2004, I found that this wasn’t a great loss, or anything I could easily find an explanation for.

But Ferguson had a culture all its own. It seemed to have its own character and sense of cohesiveness among its rather large staff. It seemed a more solid animal in some sense than Quantum, Xchange, or Adient (a division that had seemed to me rather ungainly in 2004). Carbon, a division that would later be much bigger, was still small in 2004; certainly it was tiny, about three people, in summer 2003. [CC #3]

Also interesting to note is that the main trafficking manager at Ferguson, Kerrin R., seemed to exemplify the type of trafficker you seemed only to see at CommonHealth and no other medical media firm I’d been at. This was unlike at smaller agencies (like Torre Lazur or Pace) where there could be a bank of several traffickers (even if they were called something different, like “project managers”), all seeming on about the same level of authority and seeming like a group of approachable “college kids.” In contrast, at CommonHealth you seemed to get the big-personality female who seemed apt to be facilitative in proportion to being (more or less) a sort of “life of the party” or “gregarious barmaid” or such. [CC #3]

It wasn’t as if the job description, when a trafficker was hired, had to meet this requirement; but her personality could well flourish into some version of this once she was under the press of work in this job. I should note that the more general feature of this job as CommonHealth seemed to cultivate it is that it was “corporately managerial”—in a way that agencies with banks of “project managers” simply, structurally didn’t cultivate; but in the ferment that was peculiarly CommonHealth’s, the usually-female trafficker in this role developed in some version of the personal ways I am describing here. [CC #3]

The more personal side here involves a rather slippery way to try to describe the phenomenon, and in the appropriate context I would more fully explain the nature and implications of what I’ve observed as the two general subtypes of CommonHealth trafficker: the “cheerleader” and the “horse.” The rather playfully facilitative, maybe somewhat flirtatious, and somewhat overworked “cheerleader” may have been such because she was new to the work and had some of the youthful edge she had because she was still mastering the job (or maybe was apt to have that kind of personality in the work over the relatively long term). Meanwhile, the “horse” was more acclimatized to the work, more rigorous and somewhat dully professional, and maybe valued by the company because she could keep a big volume of stuff moving. Kerrin R., as I recall, seemed like (without my having these concepts fully in place yet at the time) a cross between the “cheerleader” and the “horse.” [CC #3]

(Other traffickers that seemed to define the CommonHealth styles of the role were Katie van H. at Quantum [I saw her there sporadically between 2002 and 2004], who seemed the “cheerleader” type—and she had earlier worked at Torre Lazur; a Fawn D’A. at Carbon, I think it was, who was a quiet version of the “cheerleader”; a young woman at Adient whose name escapes me—I think she had an Irish name—who seemed a bit overly taxed but still capable, more of a “horse” than a “cheerleader”; and a woman who worked for Carbon and one or two other divisions, whose face I can picture but whose name escapes me, who was definitely more of a “horse” but who was very much, and laudably, oriented to details of the work items she handled. In short, unlike the “bank of college kids” you saw at other agencies, at CommonHealth you could peg the traffickers in terms of where they stood on the spectrum of being a “cheerleader” or a “horse.”) [CC #3]

Ferguson, as I said, seemed to have its own character and sense of cohesiveness. It was like a separate ship that (if this doesn’t over-draw it) had a burgeoning bunch of spirits with a sense of some kind of high purpose and fellow-feeling—in a general way making it similar to other divisions of CommonHealth—but yet seeming to have its own self-contained culture. I am speaking from memories almost eight years old, and based on evanescent things you could observe. I think this is fair enough, though. [CC #3]

There were characters among the staffers, of course. There was the Paranoid Guy, a sort in his late twenties or so (with relatively low responsibilities) who came around and started giving a spiel on his latest conspiracy theory to the art-related young woman (a freelancer, I believe) who worked near me when I was editing. He was tolerated by coworkers at large, one would presume, because he apparently did his work well enough and, as a general personality, was “cool.” (A Paranoid Guy who was dour, inscrutable, and forever uninvitingly aloof would be shown the door.) [CC #3]

There was also the sort of peasant that, regardless of the specific ignorant remarks he or she might make, every medically related establishment in this country of a certain size seemingly can’t do without: this one was a woman who apparently was a back-office paper-shuffling type who I remember opining—who knows apropos of what—that bipolar disorder was “split personality.” Obviously (and thankfully) she had no direct effect on copy written for promotional materials. [CC #3]

Aside from Paranoid Guy and the likes of her, there was nothing that showed that Ferguson was anything less than the respectable enough place that, as chance would have it for me, it had seemed hard to get into—for me, for roughly nine years, both before and after I worked for a placement agency that was the sine qua non for me to work there. I believe that, probably as a matter of sheer luck, other freelance editors I was apt to encounter in my travels among different firms rarely, or never, got into Ferguson either.

            Karen’s tight ship

Karen Smaldone, the editorial director at Ferguson in late 2004, was good to work with. She was a capable hands-on editor, and she was sensible and fair as a supervisor. She was the type—which used to be expected of an “editorial director” that I believe was her title then—that CommonHealth expected her to be: she had the last look at things that you (and one or more other editors) may have worked on several times before they went out the door. [CC #3]

And in doing this, she never came up with any snide, insinuating, or pettifogging comments about whether errors had crept through when the things were in your hands. She must have known that it took several editors to get an item up to snuff—the type of sensible lesson that not only could be eminent common sense but you learned as a practical matter at many, more traditional media firms. She believed in me enough that I was back to Ferguson a few times to work under her—in 2005, I believe, and maybe in 2006; and definitely in later summer 2007, which was the last time I worked for her. [CC #3]

I think it was some other freelance editor who once worked with her who referred to her as an “earth mother” type; I didn’t know if this was meant as a compliment, backhanded or otherwise. I didn’t get this impression from her. (She didn’t try to sing Carole King songs.)

I still have a little gift of a pen (with a ribbon with the not-quite-company-echoing “Commonwealth”) she gave me one Christmas, probably of 2004.

III. Sea changes in 2007, when the confederation moves to one new building

By early 2007, CommonHealth had moved to, and been consolidated in, its new location in Parsippany. In at least the physical sense, Ferguson was no longer a flagship division in its own building; it occupied a region of cubicles in a large corporate beehive. The fact that it would lose the culture it had at Lanidex Plaza would become evident by bits. Meanwhile, by spring 2007, I was actually employed (as a freelancer, or an “in-house temporary”—whatever ad hoc category you can apply) by CommonHealth directly, since “Gary Laverne” had broken down earlier in the year. And in this capacity I worked at another division of CommonHealth before I worked this way at Ferguson in later summer 2007. [CC #3]

            A new editor under Karen

Another development: When I finally worked at Ferguson again, starting *on August 1,* 2007, whatever array of staff or long-term-freelance editors I had seen, or would see, Karen have—either at the Lanidex Plaza location or at the new 2007 location—she now had a new permanent assistant. He was a man who in 2007 seemed significantly enough younger than I, who nevertheless acted as if he was firmly in the pocket of this place, as if he had been there for years, and mildly acted as if he was thick as thieves with Karen. I had never seen him before. As far as I know, he had never put in “apprentice” freelance-editor time with CommonHealth. [CC #3] (A press release I later discovered [DOF] said he had started in 2006, but I had never seen him in 2006 at the location in the Lanidex Plaza area where several CommonHealth divisions were housed temporarily. This doesn’t mean he wasn’t in some other location where Ferguson was then.)

This pattern of new employees, who as it happened often supervised me, being placed as permanent staffers at CommonHealth who had not worked there in a more temporary or testing-out capacity—at least in the editorial realm—was becoming more common in 2007, I think. (In fact, in retrospect, and with my doing research in more recent years, it would seem as if the desideratum in hiring such new staffers—sometimes almost comically so—was in their being amenable to a very corporate way of operating; and certainly, the backgrounds of some would indicate no, or almost no, familiarity with the conventions of editing such as I’d learned in the 1990s.) [CC #3; looking toward CC #4] This pattern parallels the overall more corporate quality that was obtaining in CommonHealth at its new location.

This new editor was the one to whom I refer (or will refer) elsewhere as “Tweedle Dee.”

[The section on developments in 2007-08 is just previewed here; it will be much fleshed out in a later entry. The 2007-08 entry will be my last single entry directly on my CommonHealth story before I deal in any direct way with the 2010 matters, which, despite all I've said so far, would still surprise you.]